Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Damaging My Calm

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers is pulling out all the stops on the assholes who are threatening his life over this whole communion wafer flap. He's taken to posting particularly inane or idiotic emails, along with people's names and IP addresses.

An excerpt from one posted earlier today:

Here are some men and women

who mocked God :

[J]ohn Lennon (Singer):

Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said:

'Christianity will end, it will disappear.

I do not have to argue about that. I am certain.


Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him' (1966).

Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.


Really? That's all you've got? Lennon didn't say anything more damning than that in over twenty years as a celebrity? Okay, we'll go with that, then.

First off, here's what (Wikipedia says) John Lennon really said:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I do not know what will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. We're more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.


So there's inexact quoting to be getting on with.

And secondly, John Lennon said that thing he said in 1966, prompting a whole heck of a lot of album burnings here in the buckle of the Bible Belt. He was shot four times by Chapman in early December, 1980. (I was almost two.) More than fourteen years passed between his comments and his shooting, and this bozo wants to cast it as an immediate and awesome sign of divine vengeance.

Yeah, real convincing argument you've got going there, buddy.

Who was it said we don't get out of life alive? Morrison?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Besides which, wasn't the guy who shot Lennon rather delusional? I think I remember hearing somewhere that he though he was John Lennon, instead. Or is that just an urban legend?

Either way, it doesn't sound a lot like divine vengeance to me, either. It sounds like a nutcase who shot a celebrity, mixed in with the violent fantasies of people who probably get off on thoughts of End Times and the punishment of everyone they think is evil. Really convincing argument, right there.