Outreach

“Evandalism”

164 Comments

What’s this stuck to the top of the paper towel dispenser in a store bathroom?

Oh, it’s a sticker with Bible verses on it used to deface somebody else’s property.

And it’s KJV. Naturally.

164 thoughts on ““Evandalism””

    1. You have to use rubbing alcohol and then scrape with the back of a knife. Leaning over those rubbing alcohol fumes made me dizzy. I was warned against doing so while pregnant.

      So thanks a bunch, dump’n’dash tract-giver. I’m sure the staffperson responsible for cleaning this restroom remembers you fondly.

  3. I’m sure that a poll of “saved” people would return a high percentage who made a life-changing decision while drying their hands. Something about that warm air…

    1. Cue spooky Unshackled! organ music and voiceover trying to sound like Danny from grease: “and as I ‘tood dere washin’ the blood and drugs and vomit offa my hands, God spoke to me!!”

    1. No no no no no no no NO! Because you. Do Not. Lie, EVER. Not even to a Nazi!

      1. Yes, I sometimes picture Nollie Ten Boom sitting primly up in heaven congratulating herself that she earned eternal paradise on the strength of her integrity and she is approached by the Jews that she almost got sent to an extermination camp and they look at her and just say: “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?”

  6. Regarding those who practice vandalism , Sally Brown of “Peanuts” figured it out first: “They are encouraged by Evandalists!”

  7. Reminds me of an old friend who did time in Otwell’s boys home who once cut down a billboard for Jesus which was advertising an adult store.

    1. I’m not sure I understand what you meant about the billboard, was it for a Christian Porno shop? 😯 😳 😈

      1. I believe he is saying the person cut down the billboard advertising a porno shop because he is a Christian, and therefore did the vandalism on behalf of Jesus.

        1. Okay that makes sense.
          The wording”Billboard for Jesus” just had put me in mind that Christ was endorsing whatever product was on the sign, if you can imagine the Sallman Head Of Christ next to some grinning bunny-eared pin-up… maybe I better not say any more. 😳

        2. Panda Rosa, I was imagining sort of the same concept – blasphemous adult bookstore owner decides to advertise using the standard image of Christ gesturing toward all the wares.

        3. Or the time Larry Flynt got “born again” and decided to make Hustler into a Christian magazine.

    2. Given the crap that is purveyed by most “Christian bookstores” I would just as soon see them be designated as adults-only as well.

      2. ‘And Espo scores on the rebound’ , not Orr. Orr probably gets the assist on his shot from the point.

        2. Obama has actually reduced the budget deficit by more than any other administration in history has done.

          http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-track-narrowest-budget-gap-2008

          http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/budget-deficit-track-six-year-low

          Unemployment has also gone down steadily:
          http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jobless-claims-fall-to-lowest-level-since-2007-2014-05-15?link=MW_pulse

          Obama is the most fiscally conservative president since Carter (Reagan and W were the greatest spendthrifts).

          There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of Obama. Not spending enough is one that many progressives have made.
          But the criticisms based on falsehoods are making me tired.

        5. LOL…Big Gary is funny….With that comment he just proved to us that he is a paid poster whose job is to make silly, inane, nonsensical comments that are nothing but tripe that only a poorly educated person would be gullible enough to believe. (He did lace the comment with just a hint of truth, and that’s the schtick to reel us in. Throw in just a hint of truth to make the useful idiots believe all the other stuff. Reagan and Bush did a great deal of spending, that is true.)

          Big Gary, now that you have totally exposed yourself and we all know that you are a paid poster, we can now take the blog more seriously: We know that no one in his or her right mind would be gullible enough to believe your posts, and you’re just hoping to reach the dreadfully ignorant with your posts. We know we can have fun with you and not have to worry that you actually believe the stuff you write! You’re just doing your duty for George Soros or whoever is funding you. Thanks for the clarification.

        6. Big Gary,

          Please send me information on how I can become a paid commenter for George Soros. My family could really use the money.

          Sincerely,

          Darrell

    5. Under graffiti that says “Jesus Saves,” people always used to write “Green Stamps.”

      You have to be almost as old as I am to remember Green Stamps, though.

  10. Some fundies apparently have a special exemption from the 8th Commandment as long as the theft/vandalism is for evangelistic or separation purposes. For example, taking magazines from a doctor’s office waiting room or bathroom and throwing them away because they are “inappropriate” (as defined by fundy teaching).

    There are also evangelistic exceptions to littering (for “gospel tracts”) and vandalism (as Darrel notes).

    2. Yeah, I’ve been known to hide the Book of Mormon in libraries. All for The Cause.

  11. This past weekend we took the family to our local museum. While using the restroom, my son pointed out tracts from a local fundie church on the sinks.

    A short distance later we saw another one. At that point my kids turned it into a scavenger hunt to see who can find the most fundie tracts.

    The score:
    Me – 6
    Wife – 1
    Kids – 5

    I took some pictures too. Added a little extra fun to our museum trip.

    We had a run-in with security, thinking we were the ones placing them there. I told them what we were doing, he laughed, and told them the family should be easy to spot, the man will have a button down shirt with a stack of tracts in his front pocket, and the women will look like the women in their early 1900’s display case.

    1. Let me guess . . . they were of the Big Daddy Jack Chick anti-intellectual/anti-evolution variety?

      1. No they were actual custom printed tri-fold church tracts actually identifying the church.

      3. It was Astronomy day – big event. Because everyone who studies the heavens is a secular hell-bound sinner, what better place to go spray the gospel.

  12. There is absolutely zero call for vandalism for the purpose of evangelism at any time. It makes me sick that so many “Christians” think they can do anything they want in the name of evangelism. It is that sort of pragmatism that is one major reason that fundamentalism is what it is today: a farce in the name of Jesus.

    I just preached yesterday that God demands to be worshipped in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:23-24). If He is not worshipped in this way, then He does not accept it, because it is not worship. How on Earth can this be justified as worship? It cannot.

    If someone is filled with the Spirit, their zeal is balanced by self-control and respect for others. If someone is following the Truth of God’s Word, their witnessing is balanced with their love for their neighbor. This goes too far.

    1. I agree. I’m not so much against leaving a tract, but this kind of stick-on is just making extra work for the one cleaning the bathroom.

        1. And here I thought I had a good name for my Norwegian death metal band…

        2. StayAway, don’t you need to use “ludefisk” in a Norwegian death metal band name? Why not “Ludefisk Farce for Jesus”?

  13. If the sticker had ended with the phrase “Wipe hands on pants” and a supporting KJV text, I would heartily approve of its use.

  14. About the sticker, whatever can be said probably has been said. Does anyone else find the business’ pride in its restroom just a teensy bit overstated?

    1. No.

      They are inviting construction criticism. More business should probably do so, or spend more time inspecting their areas of potential unfriendlies like streptococcus, staphylococcus, E. coli and shigella bacteria, hepatitis A virus, the common cold virus, and various sexually transmitted organisms.

      1. P.S.

        Dear George,

        Construction Criticism has to do with potential problems with, say, your house when the framers don’t use the proper materials.

        Constructive criticism is what I meant. I don’t appreciate your trolling ways on this site and therefore ban you from ever messing with my posts. It’s simply inappropriate.

      2. You can’t actually see any of those organisms, but you can see whether the restroom is clean or not. I do wish more businesses would pay attention to that.

      3. What about AIDS? Oops, wait. that’s the only disease that has its own civil rights.

        1. Do you ever read a comment, and you’re not really sure what it’s saying or why, and yet you still instinctively know that the commenter is a huge douchebag? Just curious.

        2. Hth – stacy is our latest poe. But she is a good one.
          I have a crush on her. But she never talks to me. You have any tips on how I can get her to like me? 😉

        4. Ok, I’m offended. I’ve been flirting with Scorpio for months now, and he still doesn’t seem interested in my advances. Stacy shows up – what, two weeks ago? And he falls all over her. Would it help if i said I had absinthe?

        5. Well, it does make the heart grow fonder, so the old saying (almost) says… 🙂

        7. Dr. – I thought you were just joking when you told me to turn my head and cough.

  16. Tracts, stickers, stuff left in secret to “evangelize” on the cheap.

    After all, you don’t really want to have to talk to other people, much less actually get to know an unsaved person. You certainly wouldn’t want to be friends with the unwashed! So you blitz them with a Bible verse and you have done your duty to reach out to the lost.

    That was how you “got saved,” after all.

    It wasn’t? Oh dear. Next excuse, please!

    1. To be fair, you wouldn’t be likely to find the great unwashed at the paper towel dispenser.

      1. True. That’s where you find the lesser washed (I assume the great washed have personal valets to hand them fresh linen towels).

        2. Oh. My. GOSH. I am going to be a MILLIONAIRE!!!
          Imagine – toilet paper printed with KJV BIBLE VERSES! Gosh, now I my mind is on a marketing blitz…let’s see “Holy Roller”? Too corny. Hm..maybe “SOS (save your sh*t)? Nah, too vulgar. I know – Authorized Bathroom Tissue! The acronym (ABT) even sounds like a Bible version! No…it sounds like a perversion. Help here?

    3. I would guess for some it’s what you say–for some reason they don’t want to do it personally. Too shy, too afraid, too proud. Can’t talk to sinners, Amen!

      For others, though, I wonder if it isn’t actual fear. I heard enough goofball sermons at BJU soulwinning conferences to know that if I’m not spending 24/7 evangelizing, people are literally dropping into hell while I sit on the toilet. How many are screaming and burning right now, JUST WHILE I TYPED THIS SENTENCE? I knew plenty of people who really got themselves worked up by that. They could barely do their homework thinking of all the sinners condemned to hell because they wasting time on math problems.

      They would preach nonsense like that at the school and then the leaders would be all mystified that “Preacherboys” would drop out because they just “had to preach.”

      1. One of these days I’ll finish a comment’s thought in one.

        What I meant was that this kind of thing is way for them to evangelize 24/7 through obnoxiousness.

  17. That sort of sign is common in most restaurants and stores…around here anyway.

    Does anyone remember a story that was passed around by evangelists (or maybe it was a chapel message-don’t remember) about someone burning down either a bar or an ‘adult’ business?

    1. I meant the restaurant sign….not the tract. 😉

      Another one that I just thought off…people moving books around in the bookstore. Christian books in the New Age section….or in the books on Islam or Judaism…sometimes in the Catholic section which I find amusing. It annoys the people who work there to no end!

      1. Hadn’t heard of that one before. Bookstore hijinks – not cool. Not cool at all, fundies. 🙁

        1. People stuff tracts into books at the local public library, but the staff pulls them out again. It’s annoying because shelving a book with something inside it strains the binding.

          People also protest evil and antisocial and so forth books, but the book removal request form begins like this: “1. Have you read this book?” Nobody seems to want to answer that.

          People also outright steal books they don’t like. But it’s a funny thing about library books: nobody ever prints just one copy . . .

        2. According to Book People, the biggest independent bookstore in Austin, and probably all of Texas, the most frequently stolen book title, by far, is the Bible.

      2. I have a more fanciful theory which is that people who are dissatisfied with the empty drivel that passes as “Christian literature” these days go off in search of something more substantive and, when they have found it, drop the Christian books on the spot.

        1. There’s a reason I started spiraling down the deep dark path to fantasy and science fiction, and this is it: because I was so bored of reading Mandie books. No offense to Mandie, she seemed nice enough, but eighty books later or however many there were, I was kind of done.

          I also started reading Louis L’Amour at a very young age, which rather permanently ruined the vast majority of Christian Western romance novels for me, as they feature far too few epic gun battles and poker games and desert survival.

          And let’s be real, if you don’t read Mandie books and you don’t read those awful Western romances, there really isn’t a whole lot left in Christian literature. Did boys have better books than we poor girls?

        2. Oh dear, I see that you were not exposed to the abomination that is Elsie Dinsmore!

        3. I read all the Grace Livingston Hill books at our school library. They’re the complete opposite of a bodice ripper. After a while I got so sick of all those perfect, simpering heroines who’d curl up if a guy even looked at them the wrong way.

        5. I call those “bonnet rippers”

          The boys got to read the Hardy Boys, so we were a little better off.

        6. Panda, I had the great opportunity to spend time at the HAC infirmary and I was appalled that they had some Oke romances there. Those books are offensive on so many levels, I can’t count that high (but English majors can’t count anyway).

  18. The pertinent verse here is Mark 12:17 (and Matt. 22:12 and Luke 20:25). “Caesar” has laws against vandalism. Christians should follow them. >:-(

  19. I have always associated bathroom messages with prostitution….. Must be the same thing

    1. Yes, I was expecting the sticker to include a number to call “for a good time.”

        4. This was actually my friend’s phone number growing up. No lie. The first three digits are a north Georgia code.

    2. I supposed it’s perfectly fine with the whole blog to vandalize a business by bringing a drill into a bathroom and making a glory hole. After all, we would be homophobes if we were to advocate against the making of glory holes without the owner’s permission.

      1. stacy – I like you. Will you make a gloryhole with me?

        BTW – We would need something bigger than a drill.

      2. A glory hole? Is that what we stand under to watch Jeezus come down from sky and take us away from these wretched heathen?

      4. Why would Stacy know what a glory hole is? I only know it because I heard the term – and it’s definition – only once!

        1. I didn’t know what it was at all until she mentioned it here. Leave it to fundies to know all the dirty words.

  20. A few weeks ago I used the restroom at a local grocery store. Someone had left a tract on the hand dryer: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

    Not cool, unknown local fundy. Not cool at all.

    1. Cue the music sting. 😈
      I wonder if there’s a market for Fundy Horror Movies?

    2. Was it one of those single toilet restrooms? If so, saying you are not alone in that context is a little, well, creepy.

    3. Last winter, at a college basketball game -my son found a tract in the bathroom. He showed it to me with this grin. It looked like your typical IFB crap. Then I flipped it over and saw our church name, address, and website. “First United Methodist Church”. I was horrified. I think someone made them, as I have never seen them at church.

  21. But … but … but … public restrooms are public property, held in common by all. And fundies have the same First Amendment rights as everyone else to use that public property as they see fit.

    If I had a dollar for every time I heard some permutation of THAT argument. As if the public-access-but-privately-owned restroom has become some sort of modern day Speaker’s Corner. (No comments from the peanut gallery, please.)

    1. A restroom in a business is private property, although the public is allowed in if it behaves itself.

      But if you think you have a “right” to vandalize public property, you don’t understand the meaning of the phrase “public property.” The city park is public property, but I don’t have the right to cut down the trees for firewood or to set the picnic pavillion on fire.
      I only wish someone had told me that a year ago. I feel like such a fool now …

    2. And yet I’m pretty sure if their tax money was used to snake the pipes in said public bathrooms within private businesses, those same people would be objecting.

  22. Ironically, I remember fundy friends complaining the Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons would leave their propaganda in waiting rooms and display cases. Fundies make a stink that truth is not relative but I guess the practice of truth is relative.

    On a different note, at my church a large manilla envelope was left with a 20 page thesis on the Kingdom of God from Genesis to Revelation and how one enters the Kingdom of God. It was a restroom but it was “dumped” at our front doors. Still littering. The arrogance and ignorance to litter in the name of Christ is beyond my understanding.

    1. Was it dumped at your church’s front doors, or your church’s restrooms’ front doors? Or was the 20 page thesis so off the mark that it could be considered a restroom in that it was full of s**t? 😉

  23. I wonder how many people have actually gotten saved by reading a sticker in a public bathroom! The numbers must be staggering! ” Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”

  24. I had my car evandelized. Twice. My first darwinfish someone broke off the feet. Then I replaced it with a bumper sticker and someone gouged it up. I wonder if they really thinkGod is pleased with them for doing that? The catalog I got it from actually offers darwinfish insurance; for an extra five bucks they’ll replace it every time a believer defaces it. Great testimony, that.

    I put the fish right under my Philadelphia Biblical University license plate frame. I like giving my fellow travellers something to ponder on the road.

    1. I have a bumper sticker of a Darwin fish and Jesus fish kissing each other. Always fun to throw other drivers for a loop.

      1. I always wanted to do that!
        Have you ever seen one of those fat fish labeled Buddha? 😀

        1. The funniest I ever saw was a red pickup truck with one of those white calvin decals, but he was fishing while wearing a newspaper hat. Underneath was an assortment of jesus and darwin fish, but they were grouped “mouth up” to look like they were nibbling at the line.

  25. There were white slips of paper trodden into the mud all over the place at the state fair last year. A local Baptist pastor had forbidden(!) the youth of his(!!) church to go to the state fair unless they agreed to each take fistfuls of tracts and pass them out. Of course they were promptly dropped. I would worry about the kids having been coached to view this as persecution, except that the two I talked to seemed embarrassed to be seen holding the dumb things and when I said, “Well, I hope you have fun anyway,” brightened up immediately. I also saw some church kids with bundles of sopping wet tracts crammed into their pockets when it started to rain. They really didn’t give a darn.

    But that pastor. And the parents who listened to him. Some people!

      1. Garbage cans at fair grounds are usually not as full as the ground is with litter.
        But would these kids even consider throwing away “holy literature?”

        And I think it speaks volumes at the poor theology of Creation fundies have–they are willing to litter. And their pastors and churches have not taught them to care for the earth.

        1. Sorry, I wasn’t clear: I never saw the kids themselves dropping tracts in the mud; if anybody from their church had seen them, ouch! But most people who were handed tracts didn’t even bother to find a trash can.

    2. I new a man once (who turned out to be a con man, long story) who volunteered to take a box of tracts for evangelism. Later on the pastor got a call from the police – the box was found floating in the river. Turns out our little con man didn’t realize that the tracts all had the name/address of the church printed on them.

      1. Gosh, you mean he didn’t read one of the tracts himself, become convicted (sic!), and turn right around from that river bridge to spread tracts all over the city after turning his life over to the pastor–I mean Jesus?

    3. Ah, evengelittering!

      I distinctly remember an evangelist’s wife proudly telling a story about how she was soooo excited for gid and how she wanted to spread the Good News (and processed wood pulp) far and wide. One day while driving in a car with a sunroof (or perhaps convertible) she repeatedly honked the horn to gather the attention of pedestrian crowds and threw handfuls of tracts out into the wind through the open roof in the hopes that one of the pedestrians would venture into the street to pick one of them up and get saved.

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