Scarier than clowns: Chick tracts

[galateus]

And now, a holiday classic, showing the true face of that eeevil heathen holiday called Halloween, or as Chick tracts call it...

Satan's birthday!

Comments

[silverzeo]

.... WHAT ARE TALKING ABOUT!?!?!?! Not one thing makes sense. Is he saying there are actual sacrifices happen around on Halloween? And in fact in believe "witchcraft" as an actual WORKING medium agianist God to you too, Chick?

[pyrotwilight]

...But Jesus couldn't cast the Devil out of Heaven, he didn't exist until well, Jesus was born, well after creation. And the Devil was cast out at essentially the beginning on time.

And I'm now arguing the historical correctness of Jesus and the Devil. Yahoo!

[galateus]

Yeah, Trinitiarianism had retcons before retcons were cool.

[arilou_skiff]

Jesus is the Word and the Word was with God....

[thanekos]

" May the saints preserve 'em. "

well, that guy's going to hell too.

[galateus]

He's probably Catholic too, which is Satanism in disguise.

[freezer]

That is a high degree of Did Not Do The Research, even for a Chick Tract.

[merseybeatler]

What is WRONG with that Pastor? What kind of sedatives is he on?

[sinisterlink]

Accept Jesus as your Savior and you too can be insanely mellow.

[dr_zeus]

Pretty scary. I bet it's not very fun to be Jack Chick.

[stig]

I constantly comfort myself with that when I feel I'm not achieving anything. "Ah well...my life's not that bad...I could be Robert Mugabe...or Tim Buckley...or Jack Chick."

[proteus_lives]

Such glorious nonsense.

It still amazes that churchs still hand this shit out like it's serious.

[dorksidefiker]

There's a client where I work who used to leave them scattered around the sitting area and would stick them on the beds every chance she got. Then I printed out Lisa and gave it to her, and that was the end of that.

Still, it always amazed me that this woman, who for the most part comes off as sane, rational, and reasonable, would buy in to this kind of thing.

[sinisterlink]

Oh hey, at work today one of the servers met a little girl who is probably a huge Chick fan. My server friend was telling me how she hadn't been saying "Happy Halloween" to anyone, just to avoid any sort of weirdness about it. But she decided to say it to one little girl who looked about ten and she said that after she said "Happy Halloween" the little girl just kind of stared at her and was like, "I DO NOT celebrate Halloween. It is of the Devil." Yep.

As a Christian myself, I love it when other Christians (or those who claim to be Christian) go on and on about how Pagan and horrible Halloween is because of its origins all while ignoring the fact that the majority of holidays (including Christmas and Easter) have Pagan origins. Silly people.

Anyhoo, as for the strip itself, boy, I sure remember all of those times when I went to Halloween parties and we sacrificed things to Satan. Oh wait, that never happened. I kind of love the panels with Satan bothering the kid who is praying. Like how hilarious would that be, everytime you start praying, he just pops up all, "Ooga Booga!" and then you just throw a Bible verse at him and he runs off like, "Curses, foiled again!" On a final note, someone totally needs to icon that, "@!!!**! I forgot my chain saw" line.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Oh, that is SAD. It reminds me of one time at my elementary school where they had a book fair that partially involved students displaying 'books' they'd made and written themselves. Among the entries from kindergarten and first grade was one talking about how Easter was NOT about the Easter Bunny and eggs and having a good time, Easter was about Jesus dying and how we should all feel bad about thinking otherwise. I swear, I almost wept. Just what kind of life is that kid going to have?

[sallymustard]

Remember, kids: Evangelism makes you more attractive!

The more you know:

[nefrekeptah]

So you remember kids; sacrificing a kitten may seem like harmless Halloween fun, but the hard truth is that it leads to the Dark Lord Satan barging in while disguised as a pumpkin and killing you with his chainsaw!

...what?!

[psychopathicus_rex]

You know, I can sort of understand Jack Chick getting the druids and so forth wrong - he is, after all, a know-nothing nitwit who believes D&D and Harry Potter to be direct links to Satanism, so one can't really expect him to do the basic research - but I have to raise my eyebrows JUST a little when he starts getting HIS OWN DAMN RELIGION WRONG. No, Jack Chick, the druids did NOT go from house to house seeking human sacrifice, and neither was Satan created by friggin' Jesus. GOD was the guy who did that. I'm quite enthusiastically NOT a Christian, and even I know that.

[nezchan]

As I recall, a lot of the "druids practiced human sacrifice" comes from Roman propaganda when that part of Europe was being invaded. Propaganda from wars being later taken as truth isn't exactly a rare thing.

[sir_mikael]

The moral of the story? Shoot anyone dressed up on Halloween. It's probably the Devil "in disguise".

Also what's with everyone, including the freakin Devil, saying it's his birthday (gonna party like it's his birthday), when they make clear it's not?

[psychopathicus_rex]

Maybe he doesn't HAVE a real birthday, so he figures Halloween is as good a substitute as any, what with all the cat-sacrificin' and such.

[ninjapeps]

Church officials over here in the Philippines obviously read this and agree 100%.

[stig]

There's a very very good 'dissection' of this and many other Tracts at Enter The Jabberwock.

http://www.enterthejabberwock.com/?p=582

[sistermagpie]

Of all the things wrong here it's silly to focus on this, but I love the way that when the Druids go house to house collecting human sacrifices (wtf?) they leave a jack o'lantern in return...and it's a pumpkin.

Pretty sure the pumpkin is an American twist.

[icon_uk]

Indeed, swede or turnip lanterns were what we used to carve when I were a lad in Scotland.

They showed a Poirot set during Halloween last week, and the fact that the upper-middle class lady hosting a party in England during the late 1920's or early 1930's had the kids carving pumpkins screamed out at me as being unlikely. Unless anyone prove me wrong on that one.

[halialkers]

This is why I'm always WTF at some of the craziest shit the Protestant side of Christianity comes up with. Proto-Catholico-Orthodoxy created All Saint's Day to remember the dead. It certainly had nothing to do with the remnants of pre-Christian Celtic practices, as the Roman nobles that formed the Christian calendar inherited pre-Christian Rome's denunciations of the pre-Christian celts as trouser-wearing barbarians.

As far as I remember, human sacrifice was also a practice of Germanic and not Celtic religion and pretty much was dead (hurr hurr) by the time the Christian Roman Empire was converting the Germanic tribes by the sword. For that matter, the whole concept of the Christian Satan is to me a cheap rip-off of the creature Angra Mainyu of Zoroastrian mythology.

[psychopathicus_rex]

And the imagery came from Pan, and the name, if I recall correctly, comes from a Babylonian demon... Basically, Christianity never had an original idea in its life; virtually everything in it is cobbled together from other religions, and they snitched all the holy days, too.

[kumu_cyne]

While this whole thing makes me sort of weirded out the panel with "I forgot my chainsaw!" makes me laugh hysterically for no good reason.
Also Chick tracts used to scare the hell out of me when I was a little kid. There was a neighbor who handed those out while projecting a movie on his garage door about how Halloween was evil. And not like a nice "kid-friendly" one. The sounds from it could probably be described as a cat being skinned alive with freaky visuals. Needless to say we skipped that house in later years. :/
But yeah, I've just learned to ignore stuff like this for my own sanity. Learned that lesson when I spent a whole day in middle school arguing the age of earth with a friend who deflected any argument I made with "The bible doesn't say that.".

[chaobell]

Clearly, Satan has no power without a chainsaw.

[daggerpen]

So. Much. Facepalm.

[punishermax]

I thought Satan was just sort of a dickhead who made people do bad, he never really straight up kills people.

[karunya]

Cuz according to the story, he knows that if he kills them before they accept Christ, they go to Hell. And if he kills them AFTER they accept Christ, it just ticks God off soooo much. (I'm actually halfway serious about this one.)

[combatsoup]

ugh, Jack Chick. We used to have this group that would hang outside my church after certain masses and give out copies of "Are Roman Catholics Christians?"

I had NO idea we weren't considered christians.

[liara_shadowsong]

Take anything and everything Jack Chick says with enough grains of salt to season an entire bucket of fast food fries. In fact, if these sorts say anything at all, assume it is false. At least if it has anything to do with religion; I'm still up in the air whether driving directions from the Jack Chick sorts can be trusted (I'm leaning toward "no", mostly because they make me angry).

Also, hello fellow Roman Catholic! *hugs*

[cypherfdp]

Cough cough, All Saints Day.

[hurricane-jam.livejournal.com]

Ah, the day that Satan recovers from his birthday hangover!

[liara_shadowsong]

I have never seen these things at any church I've ever been to, only on the internet. I guess that's one definite good thing that comes of being Catholic? (That the extremist so-called-Christians apparently think we're too beyond saving to inundate us with shit, I mean.) Yay? Also, these sorts of tracts are made primarily of research fail, in addition to art that ranges from blah to eye-searing. May I just say: WTF?!

[blackruzsa]

This is pretty terrible. How stupid can people be, wasting ink on something like this? Halloween was a pagan ritual, simple as that, and it never had anything to do with Satan. You could say exactly the same thing for Christmas.