Crazy church signs are a genre unto itself. This one graces (pardon the pun) the Calvary Baptist Temple in Fort Collins, Colorado, whose motto is below:
They’re worried!
And here are two of their signs posted on the reddit atheism site, with the caption, “At the end of June I was driving by this church and saw their sign so I decided to pull over and take a picture. Then two and a half months later… “:
Oh, the irony!
And they have videos on YouTube, too. Here’s their exciting preview of last year’s activities, accompanied by a wonderfully inane song:
There’s nothing like the Baptists! (Thank God!)
h/t: Amy
At the end of June I was driving by this church and saw their sign so I decided to pull over and take a picture. Then two and a half months later… from atheism
I watched the whole video… they could afford to send people to Fiji but couldn’t afford restroom signs? *sigh*
They certainly try to keep everybody busy. I wonder what the militaristic women’s weekend was like.
The truth is… if you keep them busy and make it a social club, your congregation won’t notice how messed up your holy book is
Sign suggestion:
As evolution is true, let’s move on and learn the meaning of non sequitur so our future signs seem less imbecilic 😀
If they accept my suggestion I’m happy to contribute $300 to their “Roll in the Fiji sand with Jesus campaign”, as long as no Fijians are harmed in the process.
I’d be willing to pony up, too… as long as they stay away.
Amen!!(sarcasm). I watched the entire video also and I’ve seen many many like them
what insults me the most about the whole thing is that for all these thousands of little churches nestled in small towns all over the country they all have one thing in common
they all need money
God is broke
you would think the Lord (The entity that created the universe and all the molecules and atoms in it and knows ahead of time everything as everything happens for reason and everything is known to this being) this all knowing being would tell somebody in the congregation the next six lottery numbers so that all of his followers could be millionaires…. Has anyone else noticed that this never happens have you ever seen a lottery winner from one of these institutions???
“mysterious ways indeed”
He loves you and he needs money!
And the song is so self-pitying. To hear the words of the song you’d think there were only 100 Christians left in the world, living underground, in hiding from the forces of unbelievers.
Yes. To hear the words of this song, you’d think unbelievers were the new red scare. Or the real life invasion of the body snatchers. Or Tolkien’s orcs. Whichever makes us sound the most evil to Baptist Americans, I guess.
But you got to admire their brave Christian hearts in paving that parking lot.
0:25 “They (unbelievers) attempt to destroy everything that’s holy [skiing?] and control what preachers say.”
I guess this is about asking them nicely to stop hating LGBTI people, to let us marry, and stop trying to “cure” us?
I think I’ll just put “Still relevant” down for the self-assessment part of my next performance review, and see what sort of reaction that gets.
++++
Oh hell, take the whole phrase and provide examples based on it. Call it the 3 Rs. You’ll probably be an HR big hit.
Let me know how that works out. I’m always looking for new material on those things.
This church is one mile from my house. In the nearby town of Loveland there is God’s Country Cowboy Church: http://godscountrycowboychurch-loveland.com
Yee ha and amen!
Yee ha! Indeed!
Sorry Eric but I’ve just found this so punny,(I’ll just put it down to old age & poverty!).
Presumably the congregation are steered towards the place, corralled inside, spurred on to sing the hymns then saddled with putting a hefty steak (sic) on the plate?
Once more, sorry – I couldn’t resist!
I have a relative who goes to a “Cowboy Church” in Texas. It’s hard not to stifle a laugh when she describes it. The cowboy shtick is just a kind of cosplay, since these people aren’t cowboys they are people dressing up and pretending to be cowboys. I’m not sure if they realize this, though, given their general confusion about the difference between pretending and reality.
Perhaps cosplay churches will catch on and we’ll have other kinds of cosplay churches: Renaissance fair, steampunk, vampire, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Let’s hope so, because they could use some new themes.
One has to wonder (well one doesn’t, but my brain is idle and delinquent) whether cowboys were ever as religious as portrayed here. Or whether they were more preoccupied with hitting the local saloon or the cathouse as soon as they got to town, than church.
I had never heard the exp’n cosplay. Now I know.
Welcome to the geek community. 🙂
“The promise of eternal life for ALL who accept Chris Jesus as their Lord and Saviour”
Sounds friendlier that way, doesn’t he?
The HTML suggests that site hasn’t been touched for a long time.
As a kid, I always wondered what soldiers on horseback had to do with Jesus.
My dad, who went to a Baptist Sunday school, thought that the Romans, who I suppose were in pictures with Jesus in kids books etc., were the Christian soldiers & wanted to be those guys.
Brings back memories of those cringeful days being brought up as a Baptist. How embarrassing it all was.
Nope. Made it one minute into the video and couldn’t take it anymore. Absolutely unbearable…
I lasted a little over 30 seconds. I trust it does not get better.
It doesn’t. I lasted 57 seconds. Took me five minutes of Betty Bowers to recover my composure.
Really? I kind of enjoyed it. Take out the obvious infidel-bashing, their self-victimization, the naive “we’re good, they’re bad” ethical outlook, and pretty much any real life “context”, and it’s just another generic inspirational song about remaining hopeful in the face of adversity. That’s pretty much most fictional quest stories in a nutshell, and just another facet of romantic thinking.
I ain’t apologizing for my taste, either. I can like a song even if its lyrics contain nonsense. Change the subject matter and I’d probably be joining in with this one. 🙂
That’s OK, currently my favourite listening is Neil Diamond singing ‘Hallelujah’. Mind you, being written by Leonard Cohen, its lyrics are just as likely to be profane as sacred, if in fact anyone could understand them 🙂
Rufus Wainwright’s version is pretty obviously sexual (somewhat ironically, this was the version they chose for the movie Shrek, but they cut several of the verses).
Don’t know if this verse is Rufus or original to Cohen, but there’s not a lot of doubt about what it refers to:
‘There was a time you let me know
What’s real and going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you?
The holy dark was moving too
And every breath we drew was hallelujah’
According to Wikipedia Cohen wrote ~80 verses for it, so obviously many versions exist. The one you quote isn’t in Neil Dianmond’s version, btw.
I find Cohen songs (‘Suzanne’ is another) intriguing for their use of a very small range of notes, presumably to suit Leonard Cohen’s vocal range which seems to be even more limited than Bob Dylan or Mark Knopfler’s… the result is a subtle interplay between the song and the backing band.
Oh, I’ve heard songs with wholly disagreeable themes and I enjoy listening to them. This song was just all wrong in my book; the tempo, the lyrics, the twang in the voice, and of course the content.
I’m not sure I could make the leap to this type of song even if were enjoyable outside the lyrics. The theme reminds me too much of the pious, holier-than-thou, condescension-cloaked-in-humility crap you hear from the most religious of the religious.
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Q: If is evolution is true, can anything be wrong?
A: Creationism.
Beat me to it. I was going to say “anti-evolutionism”, which would be logically unassailable.
I think they meant “wrong” as in “morally wrong”.
Which is still a whopping non-sequitur, and a demonstration of how atrocious their ethical understanding is. It’s like asking: “If evolution is true, can anything be funny?”
Same answer here – “yes, creationism” 😀
+1
I knew exactly what they meant? It was much funnier, as yo say, this way.
Their enemies are “the world and the flesh and the devil”.
If they weren’t doing so much to spread this hideous and miserable world view, I’d feel sorry for them.
And how can they preach God’s word “unchanged”? The only parts of the Bible I can think of which are suitable for taking literally are the bits about how to deal with it if your ox falls into a hole.
The Old Testament doesn’t apply because God changed his mind after he became a parent. … except when it does apply
“how to deal with it if your ox falls into a hole.”
We have the answer to that here in NZ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbBx4Ql6Umo
The relevant bit is at 44 seconds in.
(Background: Toyota ran an ad in which the word ‘bugger’ appeared just once and someone complained to the Broadcasting Commission. Toyota’s response was the ad seen above).
Love the bugger ad – ( poor hound splat in the mud doesn’t get to say bugger all:-)
The result is that “Bugger!” is now quite a mild and unexceptionable oath in New Zealand. Someone said it’s almost a greeting.
My favourite part of that commercial is when the entire fence falls down.
A quite surprising tone of imminent defeat in that song. I had no idea that the churches of the USA were so close to wipe-out. I suppose it happens when their youngsters go to college and never return to the church. Compare to my experience in the UK and France where I have never met anyone who goes to church.
I went to a gorgeous fete in the French village of Biches, Burgundy, last weekend. The beautiful church was open, and to my surprise the Romanesque columns were full of fossils, and there were large ammonites embedded in the main threshold slab you cross to enter. It would take a slippery pastor to lie his way out of that!
A week before I visited an eleventh century church in Toulon, Burgundy. It was an astonishing stone cavern, but having no pews and never a congregation. It had been turned into a museum of the Great War. As religion dies so the USA will follow the European experience.
Just this week the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria announced the beginning of faith-based ‘science’ – banning chemistry, physics and biology and so forth. It specifically rules-out Darwin whom it mentions by name. The Baptist Church of Fort Collins should get in touch with the Islamic State since they have so much in common.
Well put, and something that we need to remember, and repeat often.
The only reason christians aren’t behaving as badly as muslims is because they’ve lost the political and social power to do so. But they sure would like to.