I was on a walk with my better half on Saturday (trust me, she really is the better half) and we passed this sweet, cottage-style house. As we walked along, we saw they had painted a quote from the Bible (Psalms, to be exact) all along the length of the house’s side. I don’t remember the quote. Something like, “Fear not for in times of trouble the Lord will cup your balls,” or some shit like that. It seemed like such a blight on this picturesque dwelling in the middle of the perfect neighborhood. I thought, I would love to have the capital to buy that place just to paint over the quote. Or, even better, replace it with one of my favorite quotes:
“Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.”
Lucifer, Paradise Lost
The best part is that anyone who protests this as blasphemy shows their own ignorance. Paradise Lost is one of the most pro-Christian works you’ll ever read. Milton was blind and still managed to compose over ten thousand lines of verse to honor God. There was no braille back then, you know. You were blind and wanted to write ten thousand lines of verse about God, you had to love God way more than even those I Love You This Much statues can convey. Then, after he was done, the man wrote a sequel! Hollywood would have been all about this guy!
Studio Exec: We understand you just wrote an epic poem that will stand as the geatest achievement of your life, but . . . how would you feel about a Part II?
Milton: If the Lord guides my hand to such an undertaking, then undertake it I shall. I must also be an executive producer with a percentage of the gross.
Of course, religious or not, such a quote could ultimately inspire the neighbors to burn down my house and lynch me in the night. All the while I’d be screaming, “Don’t you see the irony? It’s a religious quote but you didn’t recognize it! HA HA!”
“Yeah, buddy. That really showed us. Now put this rope around your neck.”
Ah, well. My humor is often lost on the masses.
I guess I didn’t object to the religious nature of the quote on the house as much as that it was such a wimpy quote. If you’re going to vandalize your own property, do it with some flair. Here are a few other quotes that I would offer up as acceptable alternatives.
“I will sweep away everything in all your land,” says the Lord. “I will sweep away both people and animals alike. Even the birds of the air and the fish in the sea will die. I will reduce the wicked to heaps of rubble, along with the rest of humanity. I will crush Judah and Jerusalem with my fist and destroy every last trace of their Baal worship. I will put an end to all the idolatrous priests, so that even the memory of them will disappear. For they go up to their roofs and bow to the sun, moon, and stars. They claim to follow the Lord, but then they worship Molech, too. SO NOW I WILL DESTROY THEM!”
(Zephaniah 1:2-6 NLT)
“It’s clobberin’ time!”
Ben Grimm (The Thing), The Fantastic Four
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”
Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Inferno
“We belong dead.”
Frankenstein’s monster, The Bride of Frankenstein
“Woooooooooo, Baby! Woooooooo-wooooooooooo!”
Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, Gears of War and Gears of War 2
“Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and . . . hear the lamentation of their women.”
Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Barbarian
“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”
Raoul Duke, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“Story of my life. The nuts are always at the other end of the bar.”
Drunk guy, The Octagon
I had to look up the Zephaniah verse, because despite my Catholic upbringing I couldn’t remember if that was an actual book in the Bible.
Also, I first typed “upbrining” – mmmm, pickled Catholic!
You know, if we’re going to stay friends you’re going to have to watch that sacrilegious mouth of yours. I’m not easily offended, but I think your speculation about Christianity and narrow-mindedness is frankly offensive.
I’m kidding, of course. And to prove it –
“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways…There’s nothing mysterious about it, He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?”
Yossarian – Catch 22
Could you fit that on the side of the house?
I had a Catholic upbrining once – couldn’t get rid of the smell for weeks
What a great passage. I need to read Catch 22 again.
Kind of stuff I was reared on; that, Douglas Adams and Heinlein (I think I was disaffected before I reached my tenth birthday)
Don’t forget,
“DIVE! DIVE! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Prince Vultan, Flash Gordon
Flash Gordon might be a little gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. On second thought, in the case of Flash Gordon there might be something wrong with it.
GORDON’S ALIVE!
If I were gay, I can only hope I’d be “Flash Gordon Gay.”
Whatever that might mean.
Oh yeah? Well, if I were gay . . . whoa whoa. What am I doing? That’s a perfectly good topic for a blog post that I almost threw away right there.