Jack T. Chick
Dean
Have you ever read any Chick tracts? Man I can't get enough of this wingnut's work.
Here he is on how the Catholic Church invented Islam.
Here's an article on his site on Dungeons & Dragons, Satan's creation.
Here he is on disproving the theory of evolution (my personal favorite).
Here he is on the subject of Hell. It was material exactly like this that eventually led me to decide "okay, I'll choose Hell then."
Of course no wingnuttery would be complete without Freemason involvement.
Then there's one of his truly great work, the story of Alberto, supposedly a Catholic Bishop who befriended Chick and told him "the truth" about the Catholic Church's plans for world domination. Written in the 1970s, my favorite part is where the Vatican has a giant computer hidden away with the names of every Protestant on the planet. I imagine they called it the PONTIFVAC or something....
For a Catholic takedown on Chick's madness, you can just read Catholic Answers Special Report: Chick Tracts. You can also read a pretty good Protestant expose on some of the same materials.
You know the thing about Jack Chick is that his art work really is at times impressively good, with a fine sense of form and composition, and at times impressive layouts. Yet as it turns out, most of it wasn't drawn by him, but instead is done by obscure, usually uncredited artists he hires, some of whom could have made impressive careers working among the great comic artists of the 1960s or 1970s. Some of it's at least as good as that of artists like Steve Ditko were in their heyday. I'm especially impressed with the bizarre 1979 version of the tale of "Bishop" Alberto, since it shows a particularly subtle grasp of the 4-color comics process.
I find all of his work strangely compelling in its madness. I find his movie looks particularly compellingly odd, since it's mostly camera stills of often quite gorgeous art work with narration dubbed over it. My guess is that it's mostly acrylics, but isn't some of it impressively well drawn?
But I'll always think of Jack Chick first and foremost for his comics. Remember, kids: NO ONE can resist a Chick tract!
Related Posts (on one page):
- Modified Chick Track
- A Jack Chick Interview
- Jack T. Chick
*The Gay Blade* is a personal favorite. I don't remember the particulars, but the gist of it was that gay people were coming to get us. (I always think of it when the wingnuts start on the "homosexual agenda," though that may not be 100% fair.)
I liked the little devils sticking out of the people too. And love the bedside manner of the vistor from hell..oops, he
is suppose to be Heaven sent, in the hell tract, but who would want that person to show up for a hospital visit.
Your comment reminded me about Tom Sawyer's comment in regards to heaven and hell. Heaven sounded pretty boring and hell at least had all his friends.
THIS is the kind of nonsense that makes my job so hard.
Let's say that Jack Chick represents a lunatic fringe of evangelical Christianity. He's not the worst of the worst, obviously, as the tiny Fred Phelps constituency, the occasional "christian" terrorist bomber, and so on will attest. Now I don't want to get into a ridiculous comparison of extremists, because certainly there are radical anarchist and Marxist atheists who are violent and intolerant, we all know what violent Islam can do, and so on.
BUT, if the Chick side of the equation is represented by an absolutely unyielding, unbreakable, "everyone who deviates from what we believe is condemned to eternal and righteous torment" side of the equation, what about the other side? What about namby-pamby, wishy-washy ecumenicism, the type that takes you to the level of "well you know we really don't know anything so aren't religions all the same really when you get right down to it?" side of things?
And isn't that sort of ultra-tolerant "anything goes" spirituality rather cheap and meaningless? I think I had this conversation with Rev. Burgess once: I mean if it's really just all about holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" together, well, you know, why don't I just stay at home and watch Football on Sunday?
Doesn't that make your job tougher too?
My question is not mischievous in nature, but Socratic. I don't pretend to have an answer.
As I recall from the ending, some unbeliever, having rejected Jesus, found himself locked in a box six feet under the sod, doomed to damnation forever, and was — alas, too late — praying for redemption. (Which did him no good, because he already was dead, buried and beyond the concern or hearing range of the big fella up on high.)
Actually, I'm sort of surprised the chickbooks aren't hitting on papists on the topic of the pervert priests, which, with the resultant lawsuits from angered and horrified catholic families victimzed by them, is rapidly bankrupting the RC church in some locales.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Hit the nail on the head.
By believing something, you automatically disqualify other things for belief, yes? So if I claim to believe something about a notion such as "God" or "Religion" then by definition I leave others out in the cold. How cold (or eternally flaming, icky and burny) depends on what you choose to believe.
Both extremes ("believe like me or burn in hell" and "believe whatever the hell you want") are negative examples of how to think religiously (as Kelly McGillis said in "Top Gun": This is an example of what not to do). One is based on a God who is just plain mean or just plain uninterested (Ever meet a "Loving Father" who punishes ANY mistake by his children, no matter how small, with eternal torture? Ever meet a "Loving Father" who says: Sure son, if you want to stick those keys in the socket, that's fine.. who am I to tell you what to do or believe).
I can only speak for myself. I start with the love of God.
Fundamentalism starts with the power of God. Fundie thinking: an all-powerful God has certain ideas in mind (ideas She has presumably communicated to the fundamentalist group) and therefore, since the ideas are God's and not ours, ANY means necessary are justified (taking over congress, beheading Americans, threatening folks with Hell, on and on).
I start with the love of God. This allows us free-will, for what is love but a willing gift to one another? Enforced love is not love. In order to love we must limit our own power over the lover in order to allow them the FREE WILL to choose to love us or reject us in return. That's the God I worship. That kind of love also is definable and doesn't allow any old theology that happens to blow up your skirt at the moment, so anything that works against that love can be identified and argued against. It all depends on where you start: a vengeful God, an all-powerful God, a loving God. I believe God can be vengeful and all-powerful, but I START at love. God is love, yes?
To answer your question, then: yes.
Need more clarification? I do ramble.
You just haven't read enough. Of course they did. If you read the Alberto series, you'll see that one of the things that Alberto was pushed away by was being encouraged to sleep with older priests.
I suspect that the Chickians just saw the catholic scandals as "yeah, we already knew that".
I mean, they believe that catholics are in league with Satan and that Jesuits use Satans power to fly and cast magic spells and such (I forget the particulars).
I've got one about the Titanic and another one about a foul-mouthed Sergeant in the Marines. They were actually given to me on the street by evangelizing individuals. I tried not making eye-contact, but go figure.
I'm glad I got the tracts. I prize them along with my collection of Zap Comix.
Well, Dean, if there's no hell, you really don't need to worry about it.
And if there is a hell, God most likely has a perfectly good reason to allow people to go there. [If he doesn't have a good reason, then we're stuck either way, aren't we?]
When you're dealing with eternal life situations, you want to pick your roommates carefully. Certainly it would make sense that if God were choosing his roommates for a forever lease, he might want to vet them carefully. Who wants to get tied into a longterm deal with a schmuck?
Not to be too flip about it, but if you're God, you'd probably find yourself surrounded by toadies and sycophants and other people of questionable motives pretty quickly. Think rock star, times a trillion. It may be difficult to determine the schmucks from the non-schmucks. And the schmucks are unlikely to admit they are schmucks because they haven't done anything yet.
So as God you might start to wonder, how would these folks handle life if I were not around, how would they handle a little freedom and a little responsibility?
Maybe you know the answers to these questions [with the omniscience thing] but your creations don't know the answer. So you create time and space, and allow your creatures a life in which they can choose, once and for all, for God or against God, or merely for themselves. At the end of time, you know and they know where everyone stands.
So the good roommates get to stay with God, and the bad roommates have to go elsewhere. Obviously, since they have chosen against God, it must be a place where God isn't. And since they're a bunch of schmucks, they proceed to make a horrible mess of things. Imagine yourself placed forever on a beautiful tropical paradise with a bunch of felons, none of whom possess even the slightest grace of God.
God's grace is one thing that helps us moderate our appetites ... you're suddenly talking about a lot of folks with nothing to restrain their appetites. You'd imagine that pretty soon, they use up all the resources on that island and start to play power games with each other, increasingly vicious and ruthless power games until everyone was pretty much enslaved. a Hobbesian war of "all against all". That would be hell, wouldn't it?
If the whole burning furnace thing bothers you so much, use a little cognitive therapy and don't think of hell as a burning furnace. It's obviously unproductive for you, so don't waste time with it.
For starters, there is biblical and empirical evidence that hell-as-fire is an analogy ... hell is like an eternal burning fire.
Then look at our own existence. Who hasn't burned with desire? Isn't that like a burning flame? Hell could merely be unfulfillable desire...have you ever missed someone so much, and you know there is no hope that you'll ever see them again? Isn't that pain like a burning fire?
[Why do I feel a Johnny Cash song coming on? "... I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher. And it burns,burns, burns the ring of fire..."]
Now, the Eastern Orthodox [correct me anyone if I'm wrong] believe something fascinating about hell. They believe the flames of Hell is merely the experience of the damned in the presence of God ... that is, God's love shines equally on the damned and the saved alike in the afterlife, but the damned experience it differently. In that paradigm, Hell is more akin to the shame we feel at our own failings when in the presence of love, or akin to how the dirty would feel in the presence of the clean.
There, I've given you several alternative ways to look at it to avoid a cognitive brainfart with the hell-as-oven thing [which does seem cruel and unjustifiable ... which means that's not what it is.] It doesn't make it any less real. The flames don't have to be temperature, just desire. The torments could be the acts of the unredeemed man upon each other "hell is other people" see Sartre, No Exit :) Or the frustration at eternally unfulfilled desire.
Or the flames could be the eternal love of God eternally lighting up our pride, rebellion, stubbornness, foolishness, lust, etc. That's why the humble can be saved ... when the humble's sins are "lit up" by the light of God, they repent and turn toward God. Only the proud fight it, deny it ... and attempted to deny what cannot be denied would be a kind of hell.
None of these answers are perfectly satisfactory, of course. Perhaps they'll be helpful.
Titanic
Holy Joe
I might have one or two others, but I recently moved and I'm not sure where they'd be right now.
Here's the thing: the Chick tracts aren't graphic novels; more like graphic novellas. That said, they are some of the most compelling works of their kind I've ever read.
Thanks, Dean.
Wow.
Ohhhh, yes, I have a whole collection of his tracts and comic books. He has long fascinated me. I think about him all the time, as does my friend Robin Georg Olsen.
"BOB", Jack T. Chick, and Jim Goad...
"BUT, if the Chick side of the equation is represented by an absolutely unyielding, unbreakable, "everyone who deviates from what we believe is condemned to eternal and righteous torment" side of the equation, what about the other side? What about namby-pamby, wishy-washy ecumenicism, the type that takes you to the level of "well you know we really don't know anything so aren't religions all the same really when you get right down to it?" side of things?"
I'll take Jack T. Chick!
I must say that Jack T. Chick is one of my favorite people of all time. I continually strive to emulate his _STYLE_!
Big Dan: Excellent reply to Dean's question.
IB Bill: Excellent reply to Dean's other question.
My 2 favorite Christian writers: Jack T. Chick and G. K. Chesterton.
Hmmm.... Also Robert Farrar Capon. In some way, he seems to be a synthesis of Chick and Chesterton.
This was a public school in Florida.
This same teacher once said in class that girls should not get too excited about how they look. Girls only start to get uglier after seventh grade. Girls are at their most attractive at 13. Um, yeah. Creepy.
This made me think twice about the Chick tracks.
Of course, now I am am Baptist minister, engaged in eccumenism and education...So, it goes...
Back in the Rod Serling era (as I recall), I saw what I suppose was one of his Twilight Zone television plays. About a small time crook and general wise guy who got sent to a special kind of hell that he could never escape from.
Hell was a place that looked like his everyday surroundings in the big city, but in which he could have everything he ever wanted, or had dreamed of having.
When he walked over to the pool table, picked up a cue-stick, took aim and ran the cue-ball, all the other balls shot straight into the nearest pocket.
When he wanted a woman, multiples of them showed up, each impossibly beautiful, all of them presumably willing to give him the blow job of a lifetime (this was in the pre-sexually explicit entertainment era, so a lot was left to your imagination).
If he wanted money, piles of it appeared on his table. All his. As much as he wanted.
But he quickly grew bored by all this. The rush that wise guys get from beating the odds, pulling a fast one and getting away with, etc, were all gone.
From that, I sometimes think that everybody who ponders this question of heaven and hell, that is, everybody who thinks a heaven or a hell are likely or even possible, defines their characteristics according to his or her own personal mental state, culture, or other social determinants.
By the way. I notice that Chick finds great fault with Jehova's Witnesses, the Latter Day Saints, and probably any version of christianity other than the one he puts into Chick Comics. But, why not? After all, they're his comics, so he can use them for whatever he likes.
And you can't say he didn't get our attention, can you?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Somebody goofed! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
That particular comic WAS pretty awesome, no?
(1) What BigDan said.
(2) Extremes— whether Jack Chick or "anything-goes Kumbaya"— seldom make a good foundation for serious conversation, unless one is interested in discussing only the extremes while at the same time overlooking most or all of what stands in between the extremes.
(3) Yes, I do run into people of one extreme or the other sometimes, and yes, it does make my job tougher. Providentially for me, however, most of the people I deal with day-to-day are enamored neither of Jack Chick nor of loosey-goosey Kumbaya. YMMV
(4) Somehow I've let the lunch hour slide by, on this, my weekly day off. I've got to go eat. Parting observation: I myself find "Bob" and The Church of the SubGenius at least as hilarious (and ludicrous) as I do the comics of Jack Chick. :)
If there is a God, I don't think he/she/it would be so creepy. Human beings, well, that's another story. :)
I used to dislike the term "Chick" to refer to a sexy young woman, until I began to ironically associate that word with good old Jack T..
I remember a speaker at the Christian school I attended handing out a couple issues back in the early 80's (to their credit the school did not endorse Chick's material.) I think my favorite was the child abuse saga "Scarface", just because it was so darn morbid. Also memorable are the rapture story "Chaos" ("Doctor...the babies...they're all MISSING!") and the "Four Horsemen", which features a very smug and well-fed Pope riding with the more traditional apocalyptic equestrians. The man has serious issues with Catholics. And Mormons. And Eastern Orthodox. And...
However it then chilled me when I realised some people actually believe this stuff.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.