Ron Weasley Died For Your Sins

Fair warning: Lots of tl;dr gabbing ahead.

Now this one might be interesting since I have actually had actual run ins with these actual guys actually. Destiny Church is just down the road from my old school. They would do services for Christmas and Easter and a whole bunch of us would go. I think we were about 60/40 between people who were there to skip class, and people who were there out of actual religious conviction......actually, the class that was on at the same time was Accounting and Finance. Make that 80/20.

You know what, I'm going to put the jump here.



Most of the time the Christmas and Easter services were held by a more traditional church. They came complete with choirs and organ music. They were cool. Destiny had plastic chairs and Christian Rock. They were really trying to be cool and generally not doing a great job. At one point, they showed the clip from the finale of the first Harry Potter movie where Ron sacrifices himself in the chess game. They basically used that to make their point about laying down one's life for people, and how YOU IN THE THIRD ROW are a JERK for not believing in Jesus after he DIED FOR YOU you JERK YOU!

Then they played a shitty Christian Rock cover of Amazing Grace.

Blatant emotional manipulation is blatant, but also super-effective on an impressionable teenage audience, like say, the kind you find in a school. In retrospect I'm amazed I got out of that one unscathed, although it did stick with me for a while. It was pretty much the first time religion had taken a pop at me outside of a purely academic context, and while it never got to the point where I was taking it seriously (at the time, you could probably have described my religious outlook as a weird kind of agnostic deism) it took a while to shake that one off.

With age comes experience.

SO YEAH this particular leaflet is from last year. It was kicking about on the corner of Argyle Street.

Nice try. Passion of the Christ does not depict "the days leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus." It's an extended 2 hour torture porn extravaganza. It's technically sound and beautifully filmed torture porn with a great soundtrack, but at the end of the day it's a movie about a guy being executed in realtime, with bugger all space left for any actual message beyond basic guilt tripping.

God heals today. FACT. David still has cerebral palsy. God's TOTALLY getting round to dealing with that I'm sure...em....FACT!

Recently I had another encounter with the guys from Destiny. They attempted to sneak The Good Test on me (Basically, if you've ever told a white lie or turned up to work late, you're going to hell unless you convert to Christianity on the spot. Ray Comfort likes using it) with a great deal of unsuccess. I've seen that particular brand of fear-induced guilt tripping enough times to be able to instantly call it out when it pops up.

With age comes experience.