One of the anti-Chick tracts, or parodies, linked to in the GD discussion mentioned “carkey wielding Christians” as a threat to parodies of the Jesus-fish. It was such a casual remark I got the impression that it must be a common problem…
Four or five years ago, I owned a 87 Ford Escort wagon. I had a Darwin-turtle bumper sticker on the back. One evening I returned to my car from dining in a local restaurant, and discovered that a giant “X” had been keyed through my sticker, and of course through the paint beneath :mad:
I never really ranted about this, but it just festered. Yeah, it was a crappy car, but it was my first car, and it was my right to express myself on said car however I chose. And some jerk thought he’d come along and damage my car just because he didn’t like what I was expressing with it. Probably thought it was a great frickin’ idea, like he was personally thwarting Satan by scratching my paint in his anger at an endorsement of hated evolutionary theory. I’ve avoided putting any similiar sticker on my 2001 Dodge pickup, since it’s much more valuable and I just don’t want to run the risk of encountering “carkey wielding Christians.”
I figured this had to be a rare occurance. The number of people who were Christian enough to be offended, yet so un-Christian as to take such a malicious act of vandalism, surely that had to be very few people…right?
But seeing this random reference makes me wonder, has this sort of thing happened to other people, is it really more common than I thought? I’m suspecting it just may be.
A friend of mine who lives in a conservative neighborhood has had her “Every mother is a working mother” bumper stickers mutilated or removed. Other friends have had their gay-rights and rainbow stickers destroyed. Others have had “read the bible/pray the rosary” stickers defaced. Assholes are everywhere, and come in every persuasion.
I’m sorry your car was vandalized.
hm, I once had one of those parody fish. Except, mine said “Gefilte”, kind of a Jewish parody of the whole idea. :j
One day, it just went missing. Since it was only held on with a magnet, I was amazed it didn’t fall off sooner . . . it never occurred to me that it would have been kidnapped.
Oh, I agree with you. I’ve been to a Catholic mass recently and listened to the priest, I know several Christians, and I know alot about Christianity as a philosophy, and I even own a Bible and have read it. I don’t think willful vandalism is endorsed by that document, or by the Church. But modern “Christian culture” (evidenced by the boom in sales for Christian bookstores) evidences that Christianity is a point of pride for some people. It’s like rooting for your team against your big rival in the big basketball game. I think some people, Protestants mostly or entirely, take it like that and lash out thinking it’s just an act “in defense” of their god. What they don’t realize is that their actions served to even further distance me from their beliefs and harbor a grudge against them.
I understand your remarks and take them in the right vein. Anyways, Jesus himself wouldn’t have done this, as he quite clearly didn’t give a crap whether athiests like me believed him or not, he called us “dogs.” Even if he had cared, I feel confident he wouldn’t have stooped to vandalism, and the act of such is contrary to all I understand about contemporary Christian ethics. These were un-Christian people in their actions, but I suspect that modern protestant Christian culture will be breeding more of them.
I always feel prompted to come into these threads and smugly mention that I avoid this whole “bumpersticker war” thing by just sticking with nonsensical humor bumper stickers and my travel bumper stickers (especially, of course, Yosemite bumper stickers). Who needs this grief? Who needs to worry about the random strangers I may be pissing off on the street?
Because you know, this will never end. The “on-upsmanship” (with the obnoxious bumper sticker level escalating each time) will never end.
In the case of the Darwin fish, we all know that the Christians had the Christian fish way back when. Then the “other side” (whoever they are) decided to take a jab at the Christian fish by coming out with the Darwin fish. And now the Christians have some really irritating and sanctimonious stickers that make me cringe. And so on and so on. Blech.
In the case of the Darwin fish, I think a lot of Christians (including me) think that the Darwin fish is kind of snotty. It’s hard not to see it that way, because it’s a direct take-off of the Christian fish. Maybe that wasn’s your intention, Rex, but I daresay it often is with many people who display this fish. And we pick up on that. I know that one of my atheist friends who sports such a fish on her car is very snotty about it, along with her other atheist bumper stickers.
The difference with most of us is (I hope) that we can notice that something is snotty without succumbing to the desire to vandalize it. I’m very sorry that some of you have been unfortunate enough to encounter someone who was too childish to understand that basic thing.
As a vegetarian, I have access to TONS of very snotty vegetarian bumper stickers. I expect that if I plastered my car with these stickers, the meat eaters out there would notice it, and recognize that it was snotty. And I’d hope that they’d be able to resist the tempation to rip them off of my car, no matter how snotty the stickers were. But I’d still be running the risk of pissing off some really militant meat eater, and I don’t like taking that risk, personally.
But to me, it’s not worth it. I don’t want strangers on the road to think that I am being snotty to them. I want to let them know that I love Yosemite. That’s a positive message. And I don’t have to worry about pissing anyone off with my Yosemite stickers.
yosemitebabe, when it was still just the Jesus Fish vs. Darwin Turtle, I figured neither was meant to thumb a nose at anyone else. Bumperstickers traditionally are just a way of indicating “I like that” or “I’m part of this”, and some people may enjoy seeing one of those stickers in traffic so they can say to themselves “Hey, I like that too, I’m a part of that!” Pretty benign. Essentially, humans tend to want to belong to some grouping larger than themselves. So the Christians advertised their group affiliation, and athiests/scientists/“freethinkers”/skeptics/etc advertised theirs, and both were simply ways of indicating adherence to some nebulously defined set of ideas. All in good fun, IMHO.
Of course, then it got kicked up a notch, it got a lot more bitter. Eventually they’re going to have ones that just say “You’re going to hell, athiest, enjoy being anally raped by demons” vs. “Hey, last night I beat up Jesus and then locked him in a cage in my basement.”
Anyway, you’re right that it’s not worth the hassle, and I no longer feel the need to express myself that way. But when I was just arrived at college, smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, with evangelical groups all around me, Christian paraphrenalia everywhere, I guess I felt the need to stick out a bit. I just didn’t realize that sticking out would lead to being a target for vandals.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker they sell at a local steakhouse
Vegetarian: (n) - Indian word for ‘bad hunter’
About the defacing… I would be pissed too… but then I’ve always had this dream of producing “Jesus Fish Inserts” that would say random stupid things that you could put inside those iritating testaments of faith… I’m curious how long it would even take them to notice… so anyway I’m godless, what can you expect?
I would love to make a bumper sticker showing the Jesus fish hugging the Darwin fish and it would say, “These beliefs aren’t mutually exclusive.” Or something like that.
A few years ago, some asshole ripped the Darwin sticker off of my vehicle. The sticker was a present from my wife. To paraphrase from Pulp Fiction, it would have been worth it to have the sticker stolen if I would have been able to catch them and make them pay.
I have a small placard in my rear window that says, “We are at war with Eastasia. We are not at war with Oceania. We have never been at war with Oceania.” I get a lot of confused frowns, but so far nobody has taken it upon themselves to bust out my window. Good thing for me nobody reads any more.
