what the Bible says about ants
Tuesday, 1 June 2010 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtGod, it's June, how did that happen? Lost, half a year, left lying around somewhere, owner distressed by absence of anything to show for it.
My recent scanner acquisition means it's now possible to scan various weird bits and bobs I've been meaning to inflict on my readership for a while. This one is a leaflet thingy that ended up in my postbox, and I've kept it because it's such a beautiful example of complete, obsessive, off-the-wall fruitloopishness. It merits a scan just to document the particular weirdnesses of the writer's more obscure religious tenets, which apparently hold actual layout, differentiated headings and paragraph breaks to be the work of the Divvil. The obsessive attempt to pack in information (no paragraph breaks, tiny font, headings indicated only by capitals or underlining) is actually weirder than the content, which is pretty good going because the content is weird.
The first page is some kind of oddball attempt to construct a tongue-in-cheek alien-eye view of humanity, in the form of an "ALIEN SPACE DOCUMENT" from "the Commander of the prison planet Alcatrash", which reports on the strange and erroneous beliefs of humanity (evolution, primarily), sprinkled with random unpunctuated Bible references and a sort of chorus refrain of "Makes you think, doesn't it?" This segues into extremely bad doggerel poetry, and then an alien newsflash calling off their invasion at the alarming discovery that the Earth has already been invaded by the Prince of Darkness, whose disembodied demons are the size of mosquitoes and "seek to possess every person on earth", 6 000 to a person. The last two pages are an increasingly incoherent rant about modern society and the manifest ways in which it's entirely given over to Lucifer; the writer inserts occasional Bible references randomly into the flow without integrating them into the sentence, which feels bizarrely like some kind of broken footnote system.
My subject line comes from the insert to the flyer, at half size, offering you a lot of extremely literal readings of Biblical verses under the headings "What the Bible says about ants" (apparently it's terribly significant that they're female), "What the Bible says about Tight Reverends", "What the Bible says about Global Warming" (it's caused by too much blasphemy), and a final rant on how you can't prove the existence of God and shouldn't try.
The whole thing reads like a particularly low-intellect fundamentalist bigot on Tik: intensity, energy, a desperate sense of importance, and a sort of cockroach-skittering failure of focus which makes me imagine the poor writer frothing at the mouth impatiently as s/he tries to cram ABSOLUTELY ALL the VITALLY IMPORTANT RANTINGS! into a very small space. Hence, I suppose, the lack of paragraphing. White space could be filled with divinely-inspired wisdom, and is therefore an Abomination Unto Nuggan if it remains empty.
I find it profoundly scary not only that there are people out there who actually think like that, but that they are so convinced of the burning relevance of their ideas that they have to disseminate them, however amateurishly, through the medium of print. I can't read something like this without involuntarily occupying, even momentarily, the headspace of the writer, and it's a scary, overcrowded, nightmarishly unreal place.
My recent scanner acquisition means it's now possible to scan various weird bits and bobs I've been meaning to inflict on my readership for a while. This one is a leaflet thingy that ended up in my postbox, and I've kept it because it's such a beautiful example of complete, obsessive, off-the-wall fruitloopishness. It merits a scan just to document the particular weirdnesses of the writer's more obscure religious tenets, which apparently hold actual layout, differentiated headings and paragraph breaks to be the work of the Divvil. The obsessive attempt to pack in information (no paragraph breaks, tiny font, headings indicated only by capitals or underlining) is actually weirder than the content, which is pretty good going because the content is weird.
The first page is some kind of oddball attempt to construct a tongue-in-cheek alien-eye view of humanity, in the form of an "ALIEN SPACE DOCUMENT" from "the Commander of the prison planet Alcatrash", which reports on the strange and erroneous beliefs of humanity (evolution, primarily), sprinkled with random unpunctuated Bible references and a sort of chorus refrain of "Makes you think, doesn't it?" This segues into extremely bad doggerel poetry, and then an alien newsflash calling off their invasion at the alarming discovery that the Earth has already been invaded by the Prince of Darkness, whose disembodied demons are the size of mosquitoes and "seek to possess every person on earth", 6 000 to a person. The last two pages are an increasingly incoherent rant about modern society and the manifest ways in which it's entirely given over to Lucifer; the writer inserts occasional Bible references randomly into the flow without integrating them into the sentence, which feels bizarrely like some kind of broken footnote system.
My subject line comes from the insert to the flyer, at half size, offering you a lot of extremely literal readings of Biblical verses under the headings "What the Bible says about ants" (apparently it's terribly significant that they're female), "What the Bible says about Tight Reverends", "What the Bible says about Global Warming" (it's caused by too much blasphemy), and a final rant on how you can't prove the existence of God and shouldn't try.
The whole thing reads like a particularly low-intellect fundamentalist bigot on Tik: intensity, energy, a desperate sense of importance, and a sort of cockroach-skittering failure of focus which makes me imagine the poor writer frothing at the mouth impatiently as s/he tries to cram ABSOLUTELY ALL the VITALLY IMPORTANT RANTINGS! into a very small space. Hence, I suppose, the lack of paragraphing. White space could be filled with divinely-inspired wisdom, and is therefore an Abomination Unto Nuggan if it remains empty.
I find it profoundly scary not only that there are people out there who actually think like that, but that they are so convinced of the burning relevance of their ideas that they have to disseminate them, however amateurishly, through the medium of print. I can't read something like this without involuntarily occupying, even momentarily, the headspace of the writer, and it's a scary, overcrowded, nightmarishly unreal place.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Tuesday, 1 June 2010 07:54 pm (UTC)You#re sparing us the full horror, right?
no subject
Date: Tuesday, 1 June 2010 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 2 June 2010 07:07 am (UTC)Re:
Date: Wednesday, 2 June 2010 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 2 June 2010 08:42 am (UTC)Raised eyebrows at Tight Reverends. What does the Bible say? Liberal use of olive oil?
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 2 June 2010 08:57 am (UTC)I very much prefer your interpretation, possibly because it's as dodgy as all get-out.
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 2 June 2010 12:50 pm (UTC)