Gee, thanks for the comforting words, asshole. This guy must be a source of endless consolation at funerals.
Ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000?
I think that’s sort of the point. Chick seems to be advancing the view that all that’s required for salvation is a personal commitment to Jesus. You don’t need to go to church to be a Christian.
Well naturally. Don’t you know that education is really big for…Catholics!?!?
He’s saying more than that. He’s saying that any attempt at ecuminicalism is evil and sinful. Chick is also showing an inferiority complex about ten miles wide when it comes to formal scholarship.
I dunno.
There really wasn’t much of a climax. It’s like Chick got stuck for an ending.
It’s more painful than any hack writer you’ve ever read.
I can just picture Chick thinking, “Well, Christ. I’ve got to get to them standing before God. But I’m out of ideas.”
"Got it! ‘They hit a land mine! There are no survivors!’
That saves me the trouble of having to think this one out."
Grandpa Simpson: And that’s how I won the Iron Cross!
Alright! Jack is Back! After some weak efforts this is classic Chick.
My guess is JC is annoyed at some of the other Christian leaders who refuse to buy into his particular brand of fanatic intolerance. The chaplain who has all kind of religious knowledge but doesn’t understand the plain truth like Jack does is probably his shot at them.
Don’t worry. God’s got your back. As soon as you convert, he arranges for you to be killed by a land mine so you don’t have to hang around with all the sinners.
Well, there’s ecumenicalism, and then there’s “Tash is Aslan, and Aslan is Tash”. Similarly, there’s formal scholarship, and then there’s educating yourself right out of believing a darn thing in Jesus - not necessarily in pursuit of wisdom but in pursuit of saying the kind of things that win approval in academic circles.
Please minute my vote for asking why there’s this raging hard-on for Jack. :dubious:
There isn’t a big tradition of chaplains being fragged by the US military but for this guy they could probably have made an exception if the IED hadn’t gotten him first. He arrived telling us “whatever your faith is men… I’m here for prayer or counsel,” but when Alvarez went to talk about his marriage problems the chaplain left the poor fucker near suicidal. It’s time to send this little prick to… I don’t know, Unitarian Valhalla?
Jack wants to have it both ways, implying here that too much education over faith is a bad thing but that nicely ignores his own logic in which everyone takes the literal, %100 inerrant truth of the KJV bible to be a given. In The Little Bride, L’il Suzie points out that a commentary on the Quaran says that Adam was 90 feet tall which her freind immediately says is a lie. Suzie neglects to point out that the bible says Adam lived to be 930 years. Apparently the predeluvian atmosphere allowed people to live a long, long time but 90 feet tall? That’s just crazy.
This is a valid argument if one agrees with Jack’s thesis - there is no salvation without an explicit commitment to the Christian faith, and the Roman Catholic church is not part of the Christian faith. It’s not a view that I share, but Jack is by no means alone in it.
The only place that his “theology” (as opposed to his representation of the real world) where he’s on completely unsupported ground, IMO, is that his characters are far too willing to say to the parents/friends/workmates of a recently-deceased sinner - “I’m sorry, but Bob is now, quite definitely, burning in Hell fire”. One may assume that Matthew 7:1-5 will feature quite prominently in the proceedings when Jack himself faces God.
Well, there are reasons for both liking and disliking his work. One the one hand, his strips are often very amusing - perhaps unintentionally, but even so. They also do work to initiate discussions about Christianity; explaining why and how Jack’s views differ from those of the more mainstream branches of the faith can be a useful way of promoting mutual understanding and respect between reasonable Christians (among whose number, I hope, I can be included) and those with other beliefs, and sharing our enjoyment and ridicule of some of the tracts may possibly help to convice people that not all Christians are the intolerant, sanctimonius ignoramuses that Jack would (apparently) want us to be. 
On the other, I can well understand someone who is offended by his bigoted and laughably inaccurate portrayals of Islam, Buddhism, Roman Catholicism, homosexuals, scientists, and anyone else who disagrees with him: and it may be argued that his presentation of Christianity is unlikely to win many converts, relying as it does entirely on generating a fear of damnation in the audience rather than saying anything about God’s love.
(Should this be in CS or GD, incidentally? Very little in the way of invective so far).
Well, antediluvian atmosphere or what not, ISTM that whatever it is that causes the progressive degeneration of the human frame could run fifteen times slower a sight easier than the human frame itself could stand to be fifteen times as tall. It’s the old square-cube law we’re falling afoul of, not to mention the hydrostatic pressure needed to pump blood forty-odd feet up to the brain. Ninety-foot mammals seem to prefer to be horizontal and live in the nearest thing we can get to a zero-gee environment. Call 'em both tall stories if you like, but it’s not self-evident that they’re equally tall.
I wonder how long a atheist red shirt would last in a Chick tract.
And was the ‘real’ Chaplin supposed to be Father Mulcahy?
Believe it or not, the principal of the Christian school I attended as a kid said something very similar to a widow at her husband’s funeral. And bragged about it to us kids.
“I just can’t help but think God has prepared a special place for Bob.”
“Yeah, in hell!”
You could really see the love of Christ in that lady, I tell ya. :rolleyes:
Missed your excellent answer, Tevildo. I have to say I can’t see myself ever using Chick as a witnessing tool, especially not after reading Dark Dungeons, which I heard about ages ago but caught up with only last year. FRPGs may be a tremendous waste of time better spent on learning to relate socially with people of the opposite sex (or, as the case may be…) but a recruiting tool for the forces of the occult, not so much.
My imaginary Chick tract:
“You’re going to go the Hell. But if you accept Jesus, you’ll be saved and go to Heaven.”
“So God sent Jesus to Earth because he loves us.”
“Absolutely.”
“And God created the Universe and everything in it?”
“Yes, God is the creator of everything.”
“So God created Hell?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, if God created everything, he must have created Hell, right?”
“I suppose…”
“So this whole thing about us dying and being damned to Hell was God’s idea in the first place?”
“Well, yes…”
“And God is all powerful, isn’t he?”
“Of course.”
“So if God decided one day that he loved us and no longer wanted to send us to Hell, why didn’t he just stop doing it? Why not just close Hell down?”
“You’re confusing the issue here…”
“And the whole crucifixion was kind of pointless.”
“WHAT?”
“Well, God’s all powerful. So he didn’t need to send Jesus here to be crucified in order to change anything.”
“I think we need to get back to the main point…”
“Isn’t the main point that God says he loves everyone but he’s willing to punish anyone who doesn’t love him back the way he wants? Sounds like an unhealthy relationship to me.”
“That’s it. I quit. I’m going to see if that job’s still open at Archie comics.”
This particular one really made me think.
Made me think, “They’re gonna LOVE watchin’ my movie up top…just before they send me packing.”
Even if Jack Chick was 100% theologically correct and had hit on the precise version of the one true religion, his tracts would still be excrucuiatingly hilarious little ham-handed black and white morality plays. The cast of characters for each one is nearly interchangeable; they’re like Chickian archetypes of anthropomorphized concepts, except they don’t actually correspond to anything in the real world at all.
There’s the patient, saintly spreader of the gospel and the cretinous buffon who never once in his life heard anything resembling the good news until this very minute:
“Whu-wha? You means I’m goin’ to hell, and dis guy Bezus, he died for me?”
“Why yes, yes he did, Porfirio, only he pronounces it “Jesus,” with a J.”
The guy with the vein bulging out who bafflingly beings pouring inconcievable derision on you the second he finds out you’ve become a Christian:
“You’ve done what? You’re worse than Hitler, you sick freak! You’re not fit to watch this primate house! Leave, and never darken this zoo with your presence again!”
Ad nauseaum, haw haw haw.
But the thing is, he DOES include, as part of his “bullet points” as to what to do upon conversion, to find yourself a church where they preach the “true Gospel” and attend it. I suppose that if you can’t, you should form an independent prayer group, but still…