Christian glurge and adult jokes from the same person!

[Gr8Kat]

I have a friend whom I dread getting e-mail from. She rarely writes anything about herself, what she's been up to, whatever. All she does is forward, forward, forward the same jokes and glurge over and over. And it stuns me that she can send some of the raunchiest jokes, cartoons, and photos I've ever seen, then turn around and send some glurge about how the country has gone to hell since they took the Bible out of the classroom and started showing filth on TV. "Our children have no morals! Warning: ADULT!!" It just blows my mind that she doesn't seem to find this somehow incongruous or contradictory.

What's got me irked at the moment is this stupid joke that she's sent again. It's not exactly glurge, but it's just as annoying:

There's a little old Christian lady living next door to an atheist.
Every morning the lady comes out onto her front porch and shouts "Praise the Lord!".

The atheist yells back, "There is no God".

She does this every morning with the same result. As time goes on the lady runs into financial difficulties and has trouble buying food. She goes out onto the porch and asks God for help with groceries, then says "Praise the Lord".

The next morning she goes out onto the porch and there's the groceries she's asked for, of course she says "Praise the Lord".

The atheist jumps out from behind a bush and says, "Ha!, I bought those groceries! There is no God".

The lady looks at him and smiles, she shouts "Praise the Lord! Not only did you provide for me Lord, you made Satan pay for the groceries!!"

I have half a mind to send her my own version of this joke:

There's a little old Christian lady living next door to an atheist. Every morning the lady comes out onto her front porch and shouts "Praise the Lord!".

Sometimes the atheist smiles and waves to her, but mostly he minds his own business. He realizes this is a free country and doesn't want to start anything.

She does this every morning with the same result. As time goes on the lady runs into financial difficulties and has trouble buying food. She goes out onto the porch and asks God for help with groceries, then says "Praise the Lord". The atheist felt bad for the poor lady because he knew her no-good daughter and useless son-in-law wouldn't help her, so he went to the store and picked up a few staples.

The next morning she goes out onto the porch and there's the atheist with the groceries she's asked for, of course she says "Praise the Lord".

The atheist says, "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I heard you needed some help with groceries... I hope you don't think I'm being too forward."

The lady looks at him and smiles, she shouts "Praise the Lord! Would you come in and have a cup of tea with me?" Again, the atheist felt bad for the lonely old lady, so he had some tea and cookies with her, looked at photos of the grandchild she never gets to see, and helped her clean up. He was a little annoyed at first that she seemed to begin every sentence with "Praise the Lord!" but he realized that was just the way she was and ignored it. Before he left, he promised to check in on her again in a couple days. She gave him a hug and said, "Praise the Lord!! Thank you!" The end.

Ok, it's not as "funny" as the original, but it's truer to life, in my experience. But do you think I can convince my friend of that? Based on the kind of glurge she usually sends me, I doubt it. Should I send this to her?

And it seriously boggles my mind that, moments after sending the prior e-mail, I receive this little gem from the same person:

A woman went into a pet shop to buy her husband a pet. After looking around she realized that all the pets there were too expensive. She went to the counter and questioned the clerk. "I wanted to buy my husband a pet, but all of yours are so expensive," "Well," said the clerk, "I have a huge female bullfrog in the back for $50.00. Would you like to see it?" "50? For a frog?" asked the woman.

The clerk said, "It's a special frog. It gives BJ’s."

The woman did not particularly enjoy giving head, so she thought this was a heck of a deal. She'd get her husband a gift he'd surely enjoy, and she'd never have to do that again. The woman decided to buy the frog. She took it home to her husband and explained the strange gift. Of course, the husband was a bit skeptical, but said he'd try it out for sure that night.

The woman went to bed that night relieved knowing
she'd never have to give another BJ. Around two in
the morning, she woke up to hear pots and pans
banging around in the kitchen. She got up to go see what was going on. When she got to the kitchen, she saw her husband and the frog, sitting at the kitchen table looking through cookbooks. "What are you two doing at this hour?" asked the woman. The husband looks up at her and says, "If I can teach this frog to cook, your ass is outta here!"

Ha ha! I mean, huh? I mean... huh.

[Soup_du_jour]

Man! Not only are those jokes incongruous, they're both not funny! Ha!

Imagine that...

[Siege]

I had a friend who used to do that, and I'm afraid the operative word is "had". To make matters worse, half the time when I called her she'd be on line hanging out at message boards and websites dedicated to a rock group we loved when we were teenagers. This was before I discovered the SDMB, so I didn't understand how something like that could be so important to her, although I have a glimpse of it now. The other thing she'd do is send me virus warnings which inevitably proved to be hoaxes.

I sent her a few e-mails asking her to send me something personal, telling me what was going on in her life, but it didn't work. We were also moving in very different directions. She'd given birth to her third child and was settling nicely into the kind of small town American life which makes me nervous while my career as a programmer was going gangbusters and I'd just taken up with Mensa.

I'm deeply religious, and I love raunchy jokes. I've even been known to go for a quadruple entendre with a full twist. On the other hand, I don't believe morality in this country is going to pot because the Bible was taken out of schools. Corporate shenanigans are a different matter. I'd love to know how a person can do what Gr8tKat's friend did, though.

CJ

[Liberal]

Does your friend really decry the morality in schools and so forth, or is it maybe just a conflation of memory on your part? In other words, are you automatically associating her with religious moralists?

[LouisB]

My sister does exactly the same thing. She sends me anything she comes across that equates the "loss of moral values" to the absence of "christian values" in public education. She particularly delights in sending me stuff that "proves" Bill and/or Hillary Clinton are responsible for every evil the world has ever known.

Then she turns around and sends me every adult joke that arrives in her email.

My take on it is that she gets a lot of email and forwards every damn bit of it to everyone she knows. If she sees an incongruity in the content, it doesn't matter---her mission is to forward email.

[Liberal]

Why not bring this to their attention? Why not respond with something like, "I'm just curious about why you believe that moral decay is responsible for so many problems and yet you constantly send me material that is, at least by your own standards, morally suspect."

[LouisB]

Libertarian, I've done exactly this with my sister. Her response has always been: "I thought you would enjoy it."

The Clinton bashing stuff she sends mostly because she knows that it really yanks my chain.

The Christian related stuff is, I think, aimed at convincing me that the Republican Party (her true religion) will make everything right in the world.

[Mac Guffin]

Well, here's the Pubbies chance to prove her right. Let's see how they do.


*Not holding my breath.*

[Sublight]

Personally, LouisB, I'd save her most preachy glurges, alternate them with her filthiest jokes, then read them out for the family during Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe that's why I live 8,000 miles from my family.

[Duck Duck Goose]

The possibility occurs to me that she may simply not know what a "BJ" refers to. I didn't know what it meant until I was 18 (yes, I've led a sheltered life...) The punch line is still funny without it--"If I can teach this frog to cook, you're outta here..." Is she in the habit of forwarding dirty jokes, or was this the only one?

If she's in the habit of it, then...

Um, well, I've got a news flash for the OP, but...Christians enjoy dirty jokes, too, and if she's like me, then to her, dirty jokes don't count as "contributing to America's moral decay". If you mentioned it to her, she'd just be surprised. What she's referring to as "things that contribute to America's moral decay" is The President Of The United States getting blowjobs in the Oval Office, not jokes about blowjobs in general. The former sets a bad example for America's youth, being right out there in front of God and Peter Jennings and everybody; the latter is just part of the landscape, and moreover one that is normally reserved for "adults only". She would never in a million years forward that joke to anyone under 18.

It's the "public-ness" of the former that makes the difference. She's not the only one who had to explain what "oral sex" was to a school-age kid. Dirty jokes don't contribute to "moral decay" because they're told in private.

But you're right in that she shouldn't be forwarding dirty jokes in e-mail, because you can never tell who's going to be offended. And I personally certainly wouldn't tell a dirty joke to anyone I knew less intimately than my husband, let alone forward one.

[Duck Duck Goose]

...and, in simple kindness (and also an unparalleled opportunity to score off her), if this is the only dirty joke she's ever sent to you, you should probably e-mail her with the Straight Dope as to what a "BJ" is. Be exquisitely tactful.

[Hamlet]

Wait a minute.

The frog got groceries while the atheist said "Praise the Lord" when the wife and the pet shop owner gave him a BJ?

I gotta quit scanning OPs too quickly.

[Rilchiam]

Obligatory Onion link

[Gr8Kat]

Trust me, she knows what a BJ is.

This is just typical of her. She'll send me something like this piece of trash:

In light of the recent shooting in Massachusetts and California, let's see, I think it started when Madeline Murray O'Hare (her murdered body was found recently) complained she didn't want any prayer in our schools, and we said, OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school... the Bible that says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said, OK.

* * * * *

And the entertainment industry said, let's make TV shows and movies that promote profanity, violence, and illicit sex. And let's record music that encourages rape, drugs, murder, suicide, and satanic themes. And we said, it's just entertainment, it has no adverse effect, and nobody takes it seriously anyway, so go right ahead.

* * * * *

Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how everyone wants to go to heaven provided they do not have to believe, think, say, or do anything the Bible says. Funny how someone can say "I believe in God" but still follow Satan who, by the way, also "believes" in God. Funny how we are quick to judge but not to be judged. Funny how you can send a thousand 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how the lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but the public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace. Funny how someone can be so fired up for Christ on Sunday, but be an invisible Christian the rest of the week. Are you laughing? Funny how when you go to forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it to them. Funny how I can be more worried about what other people think of me than what God thinks of me. Are you thinking?(Emphasis added.)

Then she'll turn around and send me a joke that would make a sailor blush. (At least she's not a hypocrite, she has no qualms about sharing the God forwards anymore than the raunchy forwards.) What's more, she also sends me virus and Bill Gates money hoaxes. I didn't want to complain about that in this thread, this was meant to be a glurge v. smut thread, but since someone else brought it up I guess I'll throw it out there, too. I get five or six e-mail a day from this lady and my in-box looks something like this:

Fwd: A Prayer for You
Fwd: Two Nuns-WARNING!! ADULT!!!
Fwd: God Loves You
Fwd: Budweiser Frogs Virus!!!!
Fwd: The Pet Shop-ADULT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fwd: An Angel for you
Fwd: Fwd: MEN! ADULT!!!!!!!

And, finally, does not Ephesians 5:4 tell us, "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving"?

Can you now see why her forwards are, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, insulting? "Atheists are making the world impure and unlivable, did you hear the one about the parrot with no feet that held on to its perch with its dick?" But if I tried to explain this to her, she absolutely would not get it any more than she gets that snopes is the definitive debunker of all her freaking forward-this-email-to-twenty-people-and-you'll-get-$240-trust-me-I'm-a-lawyer messages!

It doesn't help that I have a cousin who's the same way, so I'm getting it from two sides. My cousin just limits herself to two or three e-mail every couple days instead of a half a dozen or more every single day.

[red_dragon60]

If you have any features in your email to delete email with certain words in the subject line, I would suggest you use it for "fwd". Hotmail, although pretty craptacular in most respects, does have such a feature. My list is around 20 filters long.

[Siege]

You could also do what I ultimately did to my friend. Tell your sister and your cousin that you won't deal with this any longer and, if they keep this up, you will delete any mail they send you unread. I took the liberty of looking at the e-mail address you gave to Straight Dope, and that ISP should be able to either delete messages automatically or at least move them to a separate folder.

CJ

[Washte]

You aren't getting mails from my mom are you Gr8Kat??

We constantly get spammed by my mom and her brother. We get a barrage of Christian glurge mails followed by dirty pictures and adult jokes. When we've mentioned anything it will usually end with neither hubby nor I getting email for a couple weeks... Then it starts again.

As CJ said, it is possible to be one and enjoy the other. Some Christian friends are the most devout yet tell the raunchiest jokes. Just find it rather interesting.

What really irks us is when they both send us this email. Erm.... Hubby is Romani/English and I emigrated to England... Neither of us is Christian either. What do you think this email said to us? We ignored them the first 3 or 4 times we received this email, but then got really PO'd with being told to bugger off. When we wrote to them and explained how inappropriate this email was it whooshed them beyond whoosh. About 6-8 months later we got the same email again!! Argh...

Now we just set up rules to delete from the server any message that has 'fwd' in the title from them. From experience we know there will not be any personal info in these messages, so...

[BoBettie]

My aunt does the same thing, and she really loves to forward, so I don't deny her that joy (she's old and it makes her feel good, and she's the ONLY person that I accept these messages from. She has her own mail address to send them to, also).

All other mail with "fwd:" in the subject gets filtered into trash, and I've never had anyone ask me "Did you get my mail about such and such?" It makes like so much nicer.

[Gr8Kat]

Originally posted by Zette
My aunt does the same thing, and she really loves to forward, so I don't deny her that joy (she's old and it makes her feel good, and she's the ONLY person that I accept these messages from. She has her own mail address to send them to, also).

All other mail with "fwd:" in the subject gets filtered into trash, and I've never had anyone ask me "Did you get my mail about such and such?" It makes like so much nicer.

That is exactly why I tolerate it! She is an older lady (older than me, anyway ), a recent widow, and rather lonely, I think. It makes her happy, and it doesn't make me that unhappy, I guess. I was just irked at having received that damn atheist and old Christian lady joke again and wanted to vent about the absurdity of it all.

And, because I live in a sitcom, I have had people ask about pictures, e-mails, etc., after I've deleted them. Like they didn't bother to save them, yet they expect me to. I hate e-mail.

[EchoKitty]

I have a friend that does the same thing (actually, I've received a couple of your example e-mails). It was driving me crazy. Finally, she sent one that went on and on about how I should forward her e-mail if I'm not ashamed to bring god back into the classroom or some such bullshit, and I e-mailed her back and told her I AM ashamed. She's since chilled on the obnoxious e-mails. Sheesh!

[kambuckta]

Well......I thought they were funny.

At least you are getting the jokes AND the evangelical crap as well. T'would be much more boring to just get the doomsday tidings, so praise the lord she doesn't see the incogruity of her messenging.

[Polycarp]

I'm sorry for saying this, but somehow this thread suggests to me a riddle of the sort:

"What do you get when you cross KayKay and His4Ever?"

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

After my uncle sent me and my dial-up account a 2MB .mpg file of a chimpanzee drinking his own urine, I put my foot down.

Now he doesn't write me any more at all. Oh well -- such is the price I pay for no more monkeypeeporn.

Daniel

[Podkayne]

Sublight, are you listening?

Originally posted by Gr8Kat
And, finally, does not Ephesians 5:4 tell us, "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving"?

[Sublight]

I just don't see why we can't have both. I mean, what's the football game for, if not that?

btw, I don't know why I addressed my earlier post to LouisB instead of Gr8Kat, but whoever wants it is welcome to it.