The guy who makes duplicate keys for me has Chick tracts all over his shop and a lot of proselytizing stuff on his window. I just ignore it all and let him make the keys.
Sometimes I wonder if Chick is pulling everyone’s leg. When he dies, his will states that his prepared video be released on YouTube, wherein he says, “I can’t believe you guys fell for it all! HAW HAW! I’m giving my entire estate to ACT UP!”
Captain Socks, I’m Catholic, myself. I first starting hearing the idea that “Catholics aren’t Christians” back in college in 1986, when I fell in with a bible fellowship group that included a number of charismatic tradition calvinists. (FTR, the ones in the fellowship I was with didn’t espouse that view, but several of the “allied” groups did have that attitude.) I find the view asinine and annoying.
But Jack Chick’s tracts are so far over the top I just can’t take them as anything but cringe-worthy idiocy. If I were going to be offended by them I’d be offended by the things that are common to more than just his attacks on Catholicism: basically his presentation of Christianity through what seems to me to be a warped lens, even accepting that he’s supposed to be a YEC, and a literal fundamentalist.
Having said that, I’ve never, ever met anyone who uses them for evangelism - so honestly I have difficulty making my intellectual recognition that people do use them to spread their view of Christ generate an emotional recognition of the same thing, that would actually do more than exasperate me.
The first time I saw a Chick tract was online. I was reading some comic strip/ cartooning thing and they had parody.
How do you parody Jack Chick? But it was funny, and I thought it was some faked up thing.
Until I found one at work. I don’t have the issue of peeing if you laugh too hard, but thank the lord for being on the pot when I read it. B/c omg. And I’m not naive, I STILL thought it was a joke.
Then looked and was all “oh”.
I’m a bit of heathen, but have my friends that aren’t. I think they’d just hurl if they saw his stuff.
I’ve accumulated a large collection of Chick tracts over 15 years here in the South, mostly at truckstops. I never have considered them offensive in particular, mostly just jaw-dropping simplistic, cartoonish and frothy-mouthed. Who would take that seriously??? That’s why I started collecting them on the Interstate byways,seemed pretty crazy whoo-hoo then. Ha Ha!
Now, they don’t offend me, but do scare me, because I see people really taking that kind of bilious stuff to heart. Perhaps it was my youthful blinders that didn’t see that then, or maybe the times are more precarious now, and the cartoony hate sells more. When I see a Chicktract at a truckstop now, I just leave it, don’t want to see the bile, not funny anymore. Maybe it’s an overload of crap lately, on the political spectrum.
RachelChristine: I very much appreciated your post above for a different perspective. Thanks.
I’m a liberal Christian and they don’t offend me. Why, because they’re so over the top that I’m not concerned about anyone of reasonable sanity believing them. They kind of remind me of sitting right next to that really drunk guy at bar who rambles on and on about how Clinton had sex with space aliens who were watching him murder Vince Foster.
Someone that far out on the fringe would simply believe a Larouche writing if they weren’t reading Chick Tracts.
Never heard of this fellow before, nor has anyone I know, but I checked out the link to the Death Cookie. Read it about halfway through. It was hilarious, and any good ol’ pot-smoking hippie type of the '60’s or '70’s could have written that first part, giggling hysterically.
Maybe Sturmhauke is right about the leg-pulling.
Death cookies. Which makes me wonder, where do communion wafers come from? Do Lutheran churches get them from the same sources as Catholic churches?
I’m not offended by them, even the anti-Catholic ones.
I get irritated, sometimes, when I encounter someone spouting his rhetoric on the SDMB or at a party, but it is more the irritation of “Can you really be that stupid? Who breathes for you?” rather than taking offense that someone would deliberately lie about other people’s (or my) beliefs.
No guarantees my memory is perfect, but I asked my priest this once. IIRC there are bakeries that will make them to order. I don’t know how many there are, or whether they’re a monopoly, but it’s not something done internal to the Catholic Church. I don’t know about Lutheran wafers, but I have seen Episcopalian churches that use wafers that seemed identical to those I was familiar with from Catholic services in the same geographic area. Since the blessing which makes the wafer into a part of a sacrement comes at the service, I don’t believe that there is any requirement for any specific creed for the workers making them. (Much like anyone can make Kosher foods, if they get the certification of a Rabbi, no matter their own religious beliefs.)
Google “Church Supply Stores” and you’ll find plenty of places which sell communion wafers.
While they make me laugh myself sick, at the same time I’m spooked that there’s more people out there who think as he does.
His anti-evolution screeds annoy the heck out of me, but only in a general “if I ever ran into a real person who spouted the crap from those tracts, I’d be at a loss how to respond as such individuals would be completely impervious to reason or rational discussion” kind of way.
The latest dinosaur tract was kind of fun, actually. We got to see that God liked to waste Noah’s time by rounding up all the dinosaurs, then killed them all anyway because of the new atmosphere! That Noah…what a sucker. HAW! HAW!
Chick’s version of Christianity is just so insane that it’s diffcult to believe that more than a handful of psychotic individuals actually believe as he does, so I’m not too worried about him.
I probably WOULD be offended if I’d ever actually seen one.
I’ve seen hundreds of posts about Jack Chick on the SDMB, but I’ve still never come across an actual Chick tract.
Nah. An impotent moron screaming at the entire world doesn’t offend me. If someone in a position of any authority were saying the same thing, or if anyone were saying it directly to me or my family, I’d be offended.
They’re also tedious.
Mod note: Captain Socks, your sig is too much of a good thing. Please keep your sig down to four lines total (including blank lines), and only use it once per page. Also, please write only in English, as our mods do speak and read English, and there’s no guarantee that they can read any other language. We can’t moderate what we can’t understand.
Lynn
For the Straight Dope
I’m no devotee of Chick Tracts, but has he tackled Islam lately? Or doesn’t he dare?
My God! The Irony! It Burns!
Offended? It’s hard to feel offended by lunacy.
(FTR: Atheist.)
I don’t get offended by the tracts, it’s just one lone crazy person howling at the moon. I do get offended, however, when I find them out in the wild. One of my favorite cafes has a customer who will scatter them about the place and pin them to the community board. He also “tips” the staff with tracts (!?!?!?!) When I find them there or anywhere else I’ll gather them for disposal, and sometimes compensate the staff for their “tip.” It’s not the tracts that offend me, it’s the assholes who spread them.
If anyone wants to have some actual CT’s I have a collection another Doper passed on to me to peruse. I’ll send them on to anyone who wants to see what a hardcopy CT looks like.
Most are totally ridiculous of course. It’s hard to believe that anyone in our Western culture has never heard of Jesus(even when they aren’t Christian, but the characters in the tracts stumble over them all the time.
You want one with anti-Catholic ranting? Try “The Only Hope” You want one with nonsense about the Flood? Try “It’s Coming” Want an anti-evolution tract? Read “Big Daddy”
I’ve got about twenty, if anyone wants them passed on. Just don’t let anyone with brains see you reading them unless you can explain it’s for research purposes. I’d rather be seen reading a copy of The Weekly World News.