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Post by homeschooldad on Dec 15, 2023 1:57:29 GMT
catholicexchange.com/jack-chick-ironically-brought-catholicism/That good old Streisand Effect strikes again. Hey, thanks, Jack Chick. I guess it is true after all what they say about bad publicity being better than no publicity at all. It's just like the measures ( Traditionis custodes et al) taken against the Traditional Latin Mass. You've got more people interested in it than ever. No putting that genie back in the bottle.
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Post by theguvnor on Dec 16, 2023 21:20:13 GMT
I encountered Jack's productions via a work colleague in the late 90s. He used to keep handing them out fellow members of staff. Despite him amazingly anti-Catholic outlooks he was a strangely likeable bloke and since he put his money where his mouth was and worked in soup kitchens on days of and helped homeless people out I had some regard for him. The owner and general manager of the company were Jewish and he used to hand them the tracts about Rabbi Waxman. However, both of these blokes had a fairly thick skin and David the general manager would just roll his eyes at them. David and I once ended up having a drink in the pub after a particularly long set of shifts and this bloke started handed them out so as a game David swapped them. So I read the one about Jews out and went, 'David is that really true that you blokes do that' and David read one about Catholics to me and asked the same. Mind you, there was a much less funny outcome as this employee kept handing these out to one young Muslim girl. At this point, I was dating one of her friends Rena. But Rena just laughed at these silly pamphlets and she was fairly streetwise and as she was caring for a disabled brother part of the time had bigger things on her mind. But her friend was much more easily wound up. Our friendly evangelist got a polite hint from yours truly, Rena and our boss to lay off it as he was upsetting the girl. He wouldn't stop it and got a written warning. He was about to get another but before that could happen he got a beating from the girl's boyfriend who turned up one day after work as we were all going home and asked was this the bloke insulting his faith. Mr Jack Chick Evangelist ended up getting battered with a flurry of punches before I could talk the guy into stopping that. He still tried to hand the bloke a tract after that beating. I admire the zeal, the common sense rather less so.
I certainly ended up looking up stuff to refute the nonsense in these tracts so they can have a reverse effect.
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Post by tisbearself on Dec 16, 2023 23:05:46 GMT
The best Chick tracts are the ones that don't get into criticizing other religions, but simply show some sinner who's rejected God entirely or is behaving in ways that pretty much every religion condemns, and then they either repent and find Jesus or they die and go to hell.
Simple, to the point, and likely effective in bringing a few folks to the Lord.
Edited to add, this is also the kind of evangelizing that the Catholic Church is pretty bad at because it would get all hung up on the theological ramifications, such as "we can't know for sure who God sends to Hell","surely God in his mercy would not cast souls into a Lake of Fire", "just accepting Jesus as your personal savior is not enough, you also need to be part of God's Church and follow rules a, b, and c" and all kinds of other advanced stuff that gets a person bogged down in the details.
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Post by theguvnor on Dec 16, 2023 23:17:59 GMT
The view I was brought up with is that God condemns no one to Hell, we do that by ourselves. Time for me to shove in a sequence of panels from a comic again:  |
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Post by theguvnor on Dec 16, 2023 23:57:20 GMT
This store below is the chief supplier of Jack Chick tracts in the UK:  I've been in there a few times. Once I went in with someone who wanted to buy books on theology and they do have a very good range of stuff. One of the staff said 'May the Lord bless you' when my friend was paying. I admit I couldn't help engaging in a bit of a wind-up and went, 'Pax Christi' in return. I got an odd look but that was all. I suspect they get a lot of smart arses like myself and I was a lot younger. Nowadays I would probably just reply, 'May he bless you also.' It's a veritable retail antique in there and stands out a mile from everything else on the street it is on. |
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Post by tisbearself on Dec 17, 2023 2:56:43 GMT
The view I was brought up with is that God condemns no one to Hell, we do that by ourselves. Scripture states that God judges us based on our actions in life. This is what Chick shows. It is made clear that the person's own choices to separate themselves from God by their acts, despite being told about God by one or more other people, is the reason for them being now condemned to punishment. This is essentially the same as what you posted. Many if not most people either don't believe in Hell, or else think it's only for people they personally consider monsters, which usually includes folks like Hitler and his goons, murderers, child and animal abusers, and whoever else the person doing the thinking has simply decided they don't much like. |
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