ARE YOU SAVED, MY FRIEND?!?
I'd just come out of a two-day company meeting at the Lenox Hotel and was wandering over to Quincy Market, both to stretch my legs and to get Greta a t-shirt (since I always get her something on business trips - even if, yes, this was only 20 minutes from home). On the Common, near Tremont, I saw:
I'd never actually been to a revival meeting (not something you tend to see growing up in Brooklyn, NY) and there were plenty of empty seats, so I sat down to listen to the preacher man from Tennessee scream about how hell is a real place and we'd better accept Jesus now, my friend or otherwise we'd wind up like the rich man who went to hell and asked for a drop of water but didn't get it because that's what hell is like and ARE YOU READY TO BE SAVED, MY FRIEND?!?
He had a microphone and a loudspeaker, but he didn't really need them, he was yelling so loud, as he alternated between demanding we accept Jesus and describing the horrors of hell.
A woman got up and walked out. He pointed at her and yelled/asked if she was ready to be saved. She just kept going. He kept pointing at her until she was gone from sight. Then he asked everybody who was saved to please stand and those of us who were lost to come forward to be saved, because if you're not saved, you're lost and hell is for all eternity and real and you will suffer, oh, how you will suffer. And then, as he prayed for each person in the audience who had stood up (at this point, I'm still sitting, ooh, I'm such a rebel; that, and not Christian), a young woman came up to the "alter" and started singing a gospel song.
They are saved:
Below: Savior Beer: Tastes great, no calories. The guy in the photo didn't want salvation - he wanted a cigarette. He kept wandering around the tent asking all the two or three of us non-believers for one. Finally, some college-type jerkoff who'd stopped by with his friends to see what was going on gave him an empty pack. I gave him a couple of dollars.
Bonus: Click below for a Quicktime movie on the tautology of hell (1.1 Megabytes):
Comments
Common Salvation
You know, those people usually drive me crazy but "free speech on the Common" is a grand old tradition in New England. So I welcome them.
I'm all in favor or every nutcase, radical, delusional, paranoid man or woman with an opinion staking his/her claim to a small little piece of the local green or common.
Brimstone Corner baby. The
Brimstone Corner baby. The best way to defeat these nutjobs is to let them speak and prove how unthreatened we are by their particular brand of insanity and self-righteousness.
I couldn't see a video here,
I couldn't see a video here, the link went to a blank page.
I Really wanted to see it too!
These people are like living dinosaurs.
Science and reason have made them obsolete, and it's neat that we get to see them in their natural habitat before they're gone forever.
Oops, am I going to hell for saying that?
Should work now
It's possible a ton of people were hitting the site at once, in which case it pulls into its protective shell and stops showing some things until everybody goes away (or something like that; I should look at the "throttle" module more carefully).
Just in case you still get a blank screen, though, it's also up here.