Ironwolf

Number 11 in a series.

The Christian life is not rocket science, it’s obedience.

Translation: Bash science. Stop thinking. OBEY.

Number 9 in a series.

Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

Translation: You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

Since this week’s sign is a quote from the gospel hymn Leave it There, I thought I would provide a musical response in the form of labor activist Joe Hill’s The Preacher and the Slave, which is a famous parody of another hymn, In the Sweet Bye and Bye. It is interesting to note that The Preacher and the Slave is the origin of the phrase “pie in the sky.” (See the Wikipedia article for the lyrics.)

Performed by Jcronk.

Number 8 in a series.

Those who seldom think of heaven are not likely to get there.

This is a masterful example of the “Veiled Threat.”

Translation: If you don’t accept our brainwashing, you are likely to be tortured for all eternity.

“I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” — Isaac Asimov

“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.” — Thomas Edison

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are many millions of people who believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God… They forget its ignorance and savagery, its hatred of liberty, its religious persecution; they remember heaven, but they forget the dungeon of eternal pain. They forget that it imprisons the brain and corrupts the heart. They forget that it is the enemy of intellectual freedom.” — Robert Green Ingersoll

“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” — Mark Twain

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.” — George Bernard Shaw

“I was driving alone one day and I saw a hitchhiker with a sign saying ‘Heaven.’ So I hit him.” — Steven Wright

“My intensive study of the subject has led to the following conclusion: there cannot be more than one Christian. Everybody else will go to hell, and when that Christian dies he will go to heaven and his first duty will be to have a long talk with God. There is some very slight possibility that he will let God stay.” — Michael Painter, on alt.atheism.

“Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky…” — John Lennon

Number 7 in a series.

Real love puts actions to good intentions.

Translation: Real love puts actions to good intentions.

Now here’s an example of what I’ve mentioned before: on the odd occasions when these church signs do dispense real wisdom (or at least a truism) they also dispense with the religion. This statement is not dogmatic, not superstitious, not prejudiced, and frankly, not objectionable in the least. It is simply a statement of how good people should treat each other: we should act on our good intentions.

This bit of wisdom is not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. In fact it is something far greater: it is human.

Number 6 in a series.

God’s mercy is no excuse for careless living.

Translation: God’s mercy is no excuse to do things we disapprove of.

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.” — John Calvin

“The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say ‘charge it.’ ‘Put it on the slate.’ The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance.” — Robert G. Ingersoll

“Strange…a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!” — Mark Twain

“Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?” — Jules Feiffer

“Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful—just stupid.)” — Robert A. Heinlein

“Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners… But for that very reason, I was shown mercy so that in me… Jesus Christ might display His unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. Now to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.” — Jeffrey Dahmer

Number 5 in a series.

You can’t walk with God and hold hands with Satan.

Translation: Having trouble snuffing out your last spark of self-determination? Let us help!

“The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.” — Saint Augustine

“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom… Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.” — Martin Luther

“We found a great number of books…and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil we burned them all.” — Bishop Diego de Landa after burning priceless books of Mayan history and science, July 1562

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.” — Bertrand Russell

“The devil and God are components of a Siamese twin. Neither has any existence apart from the other. In denying the existence of the one, Christians have helped to kill the other. If there need to be no fear of hell, people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven? Gods and devils were born together. Gods and devils will die together.” — Chapman Cohen

“They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn’t agree with.” — Gene Roddenberry

“The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? O.K., it was the Tree of Knowledge. You eat this apple, you’re going to be as smart as God. We can’t have that.” — Frank Zappa

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… logic can be happily tossed out the window.” — Stephen King

“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, it’s just god when he’s drunk.” — Tom Waits

Number 4 in a series.

Conscience is God’s natural warning system.

Translation: Guilt is God’s way of telling you you’re going to hell.

“But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews’ synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God’s name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.” — Martin Luther, “On the Jews and their Lies”

“I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.” — Abraham Lincoln

“So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.” — Walter Bagehot

“If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.” — Robert Green Ingersoll

“To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.” — H.L. Mencken

“If there is a god who is threatening me with damnation because I don’t believe in him, so be it! I’ve lived my life in conscience and I will suffer damnation willingly in conscience against a tyrannical god who would damn me because, on the basis of intelligence he gave me, I have come to a conclusion doubting his existence.” — Alan Dershowitz

Number 3 in a series.

Faith is a journey, not a destination.

Translation: Please nod your head at our profundity.

According to Google, lots of things are “journeys, not destinations” including:

• success
• happiness
• life
• education
• security
• innovation
• medicine
• yoga
• interoperability
• usability testing
• customer relations management (CRM)
• real estate weblogging

So before we think something especially insightful is being offered here, let us meditate on this equally profound thought: Stupidity is a journey, not a destination.

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” — Euripides

“With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.” — Friedrich von Schiller

“If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” — Will Rogers

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” — Albert Einstein

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” — Aldous Huxley

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Number 2 in a series.

Do you cling to your Bible as closely as your cell phone?

When I read that sign, I thought for a minute about carrying my bible around next to my face like a cell phone for a few days, but decided against it as I thought it might give me brain cancer.

But seriously…

Translation: You are not reading your Bible enough.

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize [hu]mankind.” — Thomas Paine

“[The Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.” — Mark Twain

“Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an echo. Something is for rent.” — Robert G. Ingersoll

“The Bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn’t just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that — No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins.” — Isaac Asimov

“The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.” — Steve Allen

“I read the Bible all the time. I have never read a stranger book in my life. I mean it is too weird!” — Anne Rice

“Whatever you do, don’t read the Bible for a moral code. It advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition and murder. Read it because we need more atheists— and nothing will get you there faster than reading the damn Bible.” — Penn Jillette