Give me a bullhorn, I’ll help your kingdom come

Give me a bullhorn, I’ll help your kingdom come February 20, 2014

German doctors credit an episode of House, M.D. for helping them to save the life of a patient suffering from a mysterious illness. The TV show helped them realize the patient had cobalt poisoning from a hip replacement. But we know they’re not real fans of House, because they simply removed the toxic hip joint instead of first wasting 45 minutes tormenting Wilson and Cuddy while mistakenly treating the patient for Wegener’s.

• Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights offers one of the painter’s more vivid depictions of Hell — a “doctrine” based more on such paintings and works of literature than on anything in the actual Bible. Included in Bosch’s scene is a damned musician, being eternally crushed by a gigantic lute while a frog-tongued demon tattoos a musical score on his buttocks. Would you like to hear the song written there? Of course you would.

What does Botticelli have to do with camels and biblical scholarship?

Octopus goes all Sean Penn on the paparazzi.

Three Myths about the Book of Revelation.

The past is a foreign country.

• If you ever wondered what would happen if you crossed the paranoid delirium of Alex Jones with the illiterate ignorance of KJV-only white fundamentalism or if you ever wondered what happened to Michael W. Smith’s old argyle sweaters, then check out this video at Stuff Fundies Like.

Brent Bozell is probably shocked that this is happening to him. Yes, he’s made a nice living for many years as a “columnist” and “author” without ever writing a word on his own, but that’s standard operating procedure in his world. He’s no different from hundreds of others just like him — the “president and founder” of some lobby group or religious right non-profit. Very, very few of those “names” write their own columns or books and even fewer of them think there’s anything wrong with that.

This ought to be scandalous, but it hasn’t been up until now. If that changes, a lot of dominos could fall throughout the nonprofit, church and parachurch universe. Bozell’s long-time ghostwriter seems to have grown increasingly bitter over their arrangement — a 100/1 split on the workload, a 1/100 split on the credit, and something like a 20/80 split on the profits. I’ve met a bunch of folks in that line of work over the years and they’re all unhappy about that. If they start talking publicly, this could get interesting.


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