Good Old Jack Chick

I read with delight the account of one of the Catholic Answers fellows meeting Jack Chick (I do not have the specific URL now, but I am sure you have read it). I like Chick's style and have often thought that we need a Catholic version of the Chick comic books: showing smug Protestant preachers being tossed into the pits of hell, homosexuals converting in tears on their death beds, etc. Then it dawned on me: that is where a revival of baroque painting could come in handy. Just think of Joseph Smith being dragged to Hell as painted in heavily dramatic chiaroscuro.

Of course that would take a lot of time and effort, and the advantage of doing little nasty jabs in comic book form is that you can crank them out in reams. So, those of you who like the comic book form: please heed my call for some good vitriol and lively depictions of the pains and sufferings of those outside the Church.

Of course this post will offend everyone from Protestants to hard-core ecumenical types. Sorry.

I actually have no issue with the rank and file Protestant or Mormon. It is their heresiarchs that I believe in being rather harsh with. Too often I deal with the casualties of an upbringing founded on wretched theology. I have a good friend who is struggling to find truth, coming from the Mormon Church. The shocking stuff that she was taught (and she went to BYO or whatever it is called) makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She is, in fact, so philosophically messed up that sometimes I wonder if she would not be better off back in the Mormon fold. I just see so much risk in her landing in with even more dangerous goofballs. I don't always know what to tell her. Preaching will not work. Burning someone at the stake who is genuinely trying to discern Truth is wrong. I tend towards encouraging her to keep looking for Truth and to avoid easy traps. I don't know how successful that advice is, but it is the best I can offer. So I pray.

I know another fellow who came to the Church with a background (even theological training) of some Calvinist stripe. He is tormented with Jansenist ideas and strange dualisms that continually creep into his mind. These people are victims of tragic errors. When we speak of the freedom of man's conscience, we cannot mean it to include the license to propogate these wretched errors. Remember: Error has no rights! Repeat this nightly. It gets you in the correct frame of mind for daily reading of the Syllabus of Errors with your morning espresso.

Last night on the bloated pig of a radio station/hungry leftist media empire there was a lecture by one of these "historical critical" method folks. He delivered the usual twaddle about the lack of archaeological evidence being the equivalent to proof that something did not happen. It dawned on me: this fellow probably believes in theories of the origin of man that are built on scanty fossil evidence, no directly observable phenomena, and incredible conjecture, not to mention outlandishly improbable events. Does he think that the lack of a fossil for a missing link is proof that the whole system is a house of cards?

Probably not, and he shouldn't. Well, maybe he should, but I am not going to tackle the errors of natural selection's basic assumption right now. But why does he make radically different assumptions when evaluating Sacred Scripture?

The answer came in the conclusion. I paraphrase, but basically he was saying, "don't let anyone tell you how to interpret the Bible. These people all have power agendas and are simply trying to justify their power grabs with concocted mythologies." The talk was sponsored by the Unitarians, those radical Protestants who have protested even the divinity of Christ.

Did I mention that I heard this driving back from The Passion of the Christ?

Anyway, here is a great example of the evil of Sola Scriptura. Don't let those power mad folks tell you what to believe. You have to be the brave pioneer, to think for yourself and then come up, all on your own, the pathetic and anemic approach to scripture that we are pushing. Otherwise you are nothing but a slave to Rome. He did not actually mention Rome by name, but his basic framework was so painfully Protestant that he may as well have.

I have to ask my Protestant readers (I think there are two of you - masochists or something): how do you reconcile sola scriptura with refuting the claptrap found in The Da Vinci Code or the complete denial of the miraculous (and the divinity of Christ) spewed by Unitarian Universalists? By what authority do you base your defenses of the basics of Christian faith against these folks? They claim the bible just as strongly as you do.

And, my dear Protestant readers, rest assured that I do not have a hardwood spit with your names on it. I save that for the Scientologists. I do pray that you find your way out of the dark wood and into the embrace of Holy Mother Church (so much for not preaching - can't help it, sorry). I would certainly rather someone be Protestant than Mormon, Mormon than Unitarian, Unitarian than Mohammedan, Mohammedan than Sikh, Sikh than Hindoo, Hindoo than animist, animist than neo-Celto-Germanic pagan, and, well, at that point it is a draw with dogmatic atheism, Scientologists, Satanists, Jim Jonesites, Moonies, Nazis and Mansonites. There is a hierarchy of truth, and it is better to be closer to the top than to the bottom.

Mansonite. Sounds like luggage or a building material. Yes, we are doing the walls in mansonite veneer with sgraffito swastikas. They say it is all the rage among the hip, post-modern set.

Speaking of the hip, post-modern set...naw. That can wait. In the words of the immortal Ian Shoales, I gotta go.