For those who may not be aware of Jack Chick, he is a virulent anti Catholic who has produced millions of comic book tracts over the years. Many of these tracts contain some of the most outrageous anti Catholic lies and distortions. This brings me to the question I have asked myself recently... what if Jack Chick was Catholic??? This is kind of a scary concept. Over the next several weeks or months we will see that reality(sort of). We will see an example of what Chick tracts would  be like if Jack Chick was Catholic. This is purely meant to be a little comic relief from the normal content . Please do not get offended. If you do get offended, now you know how Catholics feel when they see this kind of material.

The name of the fictional tract is called THE MARK! It is the untold story of Martin Luther and the true Mark of the Beast... Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide! Here is the first page. I will post others as they are created.

To be continued...

This isn't the kind of little piddly doubt that I can just persevere through with my little light of faith. This is utter spiritual despair. The entire premise of Christianity seems ludicrous to me. It looks to me like a messianic cult that grew out of Judaism but then was appropriated by Europeans, add two thousand years, and season to taste. The Bible seems unclear at best, and at worst it seems very clear about things I simply cannot believe.

I dunno. Maybe I just need to lay off the Chick tracts.

The Second Coming of Jeebus can't come soon enough for these monkeys, can it? Via Dispatches From The Culture Wars.

UPDATE: I should emphasise that I'm not coming at this from a "Thou Shalt Not Offend Religious People" angle. I don't believe that Muslims, or anyone else for that matter, have a "right" not to be offended, whether in regard to the Danish cartoons or to the Chick tract above. But I do think a case can be made that when idiot Christian soldiers who are part of an occupying army in a Muslim country, a strife-torn, defeated and demoralised country in which the Crusader meme is particularly virulent, go around giving anti-Muslim comic strips to children, those idiot Christian soldiers ought to bear some responsibility for what happens to their fellow soldiers.

I mean, as long as you're going to lose hearts and minds with inflammatory literature, why not distribute something far more useful and educational than religious fundamentalist pap? How about this for starters? Any other suggestions?

1) Finding herself faced with the task of recounting experiences that, at best, only serve to illuminate the grinding tedium of everyday life (a task for which some writers [cf. Zola] have talent, but for which she has naught), the blogger has difficulties extracting the ore of true mineral writing from the slag of boring fights with friends, trips to drab chain coffee shops, predictable jobs in predictable dresses, and overpriced-drink nightclub conversations with tremendously silly people.

2) Finding herself blessed with too many sudden new friendships with interesting individuals, dramatic developments in old relationships, stunning coincidences of international travel, work-related excitements, and various museums and Cultural Experiences Worthy of Note, the blogger is similarly unable to process the hypersensory glut due to time constraints (and the fact that the many new friendships, etc, have left the blogger with a dire and urgent and total-Internet-attention-span-sucking need to Wiki herself up some information on Johannes Kepler, the viola da gamba, Henry E. Huntington, and the plants that support entire ecosystems in the rainwater pools they store in their centres, including fishes that never swim outside their leafy bounds).

The blogging paradox: Too little to do gives one too little to say. Too much going on at once removes all possibility of contemporary explanation.

Some scenes from the tail end of my Los Angeles trip:

This happened. (Photo by Bonnie Harrison.)

I ate Zankou Chicken with the man who made me first read Joan Didion.

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I saw Justice live one night at a club called Cinespace. My bruises came in very nicely.

I hiked. Several times. In borrowed shoes.

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The Griffith Observatory finds a very nice allegorical explanation of the universe's progression from the Big Bang in various pieces of celestial-themed costume jewelry, pinned to board in a long, meandering line.

Everyone got excellent massages that night.

Obviously furious at the late-afternoon unavailability of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, a Pasadenan peppered his local dispensory with Chick tracts. Said my companion: "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. Isn't that kinda the point?"

Who knew the Los Angeles subway could be so telegenic? (Photo by Leo Tolkin.)

Apparently, when the observatory was built, light pollution was a non-issue. Also: Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife.

She survived.

A Chick Tract. "Big Daddy?", to be exact.

I haven't seen one of these in years. Ah, brings back memories. Chick Tracts were the favorite proselytizing method for Christian groups at my college. You could find them everywhere, but they appeared most frequently in bathrooms and the cafeteria. I don't know how effective they actually were for converting people, but they provided me with much amusement.

It turns out that the bookstore has been having a problem with a local church group "tract bombing" their science section on a regular basis. The group is pretty sneaky about it - they send different people each time so that the employees won't recognize them. It seems a bit sad to me that people think littering in a private business is an acceptable way to spread their message.

Of course, Barbariccia and his cohorts know nothing of systems management, and since Hell outsourced its IT department to India there was no one to help. So they called me down, since I already know the terrain, to an extent.

It turned out, naturally enough, that those fools had crashed the entire system by storing nine terabytes of lawyer jokes and "funny vidz" on the central hard drive. There were also many viruses of questionable origin. I told them that there was nothing I could do--I know little enough about my job as it is--and that they should scrap the system for something newer, or at least perform a total overhaul.

They threatened me with hooks and fangs, of course, but did nothing. They remember our first meeting too well (Calcabrina, incidentally, has yet to fully recover feeling in his extremities). With little else to do until my return, I decided to visit some old friends in Limbo. On my way, I saw all the latest of the underworld.

Hell remains mostly unchanged, physically at least. You may ask whether my memories would have faded in 707 years and the answer is: you go to Hell and see if you'll forget it.

The most striking difference is certainly demographic. Limbo is packed to capacity with the souls of infants--there has been a boom in the last century, Lucretius informed me. Some ideas of expanding or even subdividing Limbo have been proposed, but even with the employment of Mr. Einstein, no one can reach a consensus on the best plan of action.

One greatly expanded circle of Hell proper is the ring of the heretics. I happened to see Farinata and Cavalcante again, and noted standing room only in their particular tomb. While they were little more intelligible than normal, I did ascertain that there are a lot more good Christians down here now than before. Turns out people are trusting all kinds of things for salvation, now, especially since this Protestant thing democracitized salvation. If one accepts no authority but one's own, there is no end to what horrors they'll thrust upon the Church! Among the soteriological totems they invoked, I heard of baptism, baptism by immersion, music, dresses, short hair cuts, that fellow John Calvin, and, most odd of all, the King James Bible. At least in my time we had only to deal with Albigensians.

One of the shades pressed in with Farinata called on this "Authorized" Bible most of all, and said that the misdeeds of his subordinates had placed him here by mistake. He said that his "bus ministry" was second to none and that Hammond was far better off after his death.

"Not only Hammond," I said, trying not to smirk, "but the whole world."

He was flattered and asked me to take some message on to God for him--he had defended the King James (how odd!) and done a great deal of good. "So now you send word by intercessors!" I said. I knew who he was by then, and told him roundly that he had bused himself straight to the place he belonged, though the lustful winds would have suited him, too.

He grew somewhat angry at that, and asked me whether I had ever read the works of the comic-strip theologian. I said, "I have, and you'll be sharing company soon, if you can all fit in there."

"Of course you would say that, you papist," the Pope of Hammond replied.

"There is no Catholic or Protestant--or IFB--beyond the grave," I said, "and you can tell the scribbler of 'This Was Your Life' that there is no Vatican conspiracy, either. Only his own--he distracted millions and will bring them all here with him."

Doodle a tract about that.

There is more to relate, but that must wait for a later time. Suffice it to say that Hell is nowhere near patching up their system, which barely worked in the first place, by all accounts. Ovid informed me that he can't wait for wireless--Starbucks is supposed to be opening a store in the circle of the greedy.

I'm not talking about the stereotype of the unbeliever who is unwilling to change his life, so he chooses atheism in order to live a life of immoral license. For me, the hard thing about being a Mormon was never the commandments. I'm not saying I never sinned, but I generally wanted to do the right thing, and I was generally successful in repenting of major wrongdoings and staying on the right track. The hard thing was never all of the rules. It was always intellectual.

What I'm trying to say is that Mormonism was so intellectually complete that it was stifling to me. There was no room for the unconventional, or the speculative. That may sound strange in light of rampant "Mormon folklore" and elders' quorum-style speculation about Kolob, but I assert that it was/is nevertheless so. Sure, there was "room for speculation" in one sense, but it was always limited to certain narrowly defined directions, and even then you're encouraged to focus on the essentials and warned of the consequences of straying too far out of bounds (just ask the September Six!).

I don't really feel like I'm articulating this very well, and I'm sure that be failing to articulate it well, I'm inviting well-meaning Mormons to completely disassemble what I'm trying to say.

I like the idea that anything can be true. I like being able to read science fiction and wonder if that kind of thing will really happen someday (whereas the Second Coming of Christ sort of puts a damper on the voyages of the Starship Enterprise). I like entertaining possibilities. As much as religion appeals to me, uncertainty also appeals to me. Freedom to be as heretical as I please is a precious freedom.

I want to be able to wonder if - or even wish that - maybe some crazy thing is true without worrying that it is somehow beyond the walls of my religious/belief system and I need to repent. I want to be able to entertain any idea without feeling like I have to dismiss it for being unbiblical or unbookofmormonical. Or whatever.

I don't like the idea of saying "I believe x is true" because it shuts down the possibility of a through w and y and z. To me, that is almost suffocating. I know I want spirituality, a spiritual path even, replete with practices and a way of life, but I don't know if I am even really interested in a worldview. I don't want to have to interpret everything I see through the lens of Mormonism, Christianity, or anything else for that matter. Maybe it's the postmodernist in me that wants to be able to hit the buffet instead of ordering just one thing off the menu. I don't know. Maybe this kind of thinking is intellectually dishonest of me, but if I am to be personally honest, I have to admit that it might be the biggest thing holding me back from belief of any kind.

Thinking about this, is sounds to me like I'm begging to be a Unitarian Universalist, but I have to admit that I'm not interested in the UU at all. I actually like traditional liturgical Christianity, and even Christian theology. And besides, like I said, I'm not reluctant about a spiritual path or well-defined spiritual practices, or even scriptures or many aspects of theology (by which I mean the philosophy of religion). It's a stifling worldview that I'm spiritually claustrophobic about. I know it has a lot to do with gorwing up Mormon, but I also know it's not an unjustified fear, because I see it in other belief systems, even more so than in Mormonism.

So one facet of my spiritual fear of commitment is this panicky spiritual claustrophobia that I don't know how to deal with, or indeed if I even want to deal with it, and certainly I don't want to have to deal with it.

1. The Jack Chick problem.  Encountering Fundamentalists and many Evangelicals and other Christian-Right-types and their viewpoints completely turns me off to Christianity in general.  Without going into too much detail, there are some popular and vocal approaches to Jesus out there that I find actually repulsive, not to mention preposterous.  When I read such a viewpoint, for example, it sours me on the whole of Christianity.  I do not want to have anything to do with a movement or a religion that spawns that kind of garbage.

Intellectually, I know that those apporaches to Jesus are not exhaustive, they do not by any means necessarily represent the  bulk of Christianity.  I also know that just because people do ugly things with Christianity, that does not mean that Jesus was wrong or a fake (in fact, there is plenty of scriptural evidence that just saying you're a Christian doesn't mean you know Jesus).  But those are intellectual qualifications, and my reaction to ugly Christianity is an emotional one, so the intellectual justifications don't dispel my reservations.

2. Exclusivity.  By most accounts, Christianity is exclusive.  Jesus is literally God, and he is literally the only way to return to the Father.  All other approaches (whether they be Christian heterodoxy or a completely different religion orspiritual path) are either lies or tragic mistakes.

I am of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I grew up Mormon, so a literal and exclusive approach to religion is a familiar one, sort of my default setting, and not easy to break out of.

On the other hand, it just doesn't feel right.  For one, the weight of opinion is against Christianity- far more people are and have been something else as opposed to Christians, both now and throughout history.  Now, if Christianity is True, then that theoretically shouldn't matter.  If there is such a thing as objective truth independent from peoples' minds, then that objective truth would probably not be subject to majority decisions.  However, it seems a little convenient that the One True Way just happens to be the majority view of the culture I grew up in. Especially when there is no real decisive objective evidence to commend Christianity over any other religion.  Maybe there is an objectively True Way, but who says Jesus is it?  I feel like claims of objective truth should be backed up by some kind of objective evidence, at least to differentiate them from competing claims of absolute truth.

I also have this sense that applying Christinity to the whole world is not just like trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, but it's like trying to make a multidimensional polyshape peg fit into a round hole.  It seems preposterous.  It imposes a simple worldview on an incredibly complex world.  I have a hard time swallowing it.

3. Personal Exclusivity.  This one is trickier to explain.  I want a religion or a faith system that fits all of me.  I don't mean that I am unwilling to change- I certainly would go to great lengths to change my behavior for what I believe.  However, like all humans, I am extrordinarily complex.  I feel like a religion should speak to every aspect of human existence in a fitting and compelling way, without oversimplifying that which is in no way simple.  What I am not willing to do is to abandon entire facets of existence that are irrelevant to a belief system.  I will change, but I will not amputate.

I don't necessarily feel like Christianity "explains it all."  I don't feel like it fits me like a puzzle piece.  Of course, I haven't found anything else that does, either.

4. Not feeling the Jesus.  Finally, I do not feel spiritually compelled to follow Jesus.  I find Christianity intellectuallyand even emotionally appealing, and I even find Christianity reasonable, but to me that is not enough.  I want to feel a spiritual pull, and I don't feel it.  Furthermore, I do not want to purposely cultivate a spiritual experience in the pursuit of Christianity, because that's what I did with Mormonism.  Having already decided that Mormonism was true, I then went about specifically seeking a spiritual confirmation of that truth.  They say "once burned, twice shy," and that is appropriate here.  In the end, I fell away from Mormonism.  The connection that I built was not a lasting one.  Honestly, I don't want the same thing to happen ever again.  I am not about to head in any direction that I will just abandon in eight months or eight years.  And so far, I have nothing to indicate that a decision on my part to commit to Christ and to Christianity will indeed be a lasting one.