Ripped from the Headlines… (ok, it was actually probably buried on page J32 but still)
NIPOMO — A lawn display of a Jesus shooting Santa Claus has residents in one San Luis Obispo County city up in arms.
The controversial Christmas display shows a Jesus figure pointing a double-barrel shotgun at a dead Santa figure. Santa’s reindeer Rudolph lays sprawled across the hood of a pickup truck nearby.
Some neighbors have asked the display be removed, but its maker, Ron Lake, says it’s a work of art denouncing the commercialization of Christmas.
Police said that because Lake built the display on private property they cannot force him to take it down.
I have no idea what Mr. Lake’s religious beliefs are but a story with guns, dead Santa, a pickup truck and angry neighbors protesting sounds like a fundy’s Christmas dream come true.
This was submitted by a faithful SFL reader who snapped a picture with his cell phone while visiting a fundy church. He had to do it quickly because in his words “it’s pretty obvious when a guy is standing and pointing a phone at a picture that he’s not texting – I had to take a quick shot before someone walked around a corner and rightly assumed I shared no common belief with the picture.”
This week’s pick is the website of Heritage Baptist Church in Endicott, New York. In addition to having the normal fundy website features, this site contains one page of particular note — or many notes as the case may be.
Indeed this congregation has discovered music encoded in the Scriptures. This inspired music is “derived and played from a combination of the Hebrew words, verbal and musical syntax, syllables and accent marks found in the Masoretic text of the Old Testament.” And then it just gets weird. They claim “One should recognize that this music is not separate from God’s inspired and preserved words; thus, the music is God’s inspired and preserved music. ” From the music presented we’re left to believe that God writes music in Western style and 4/4 time. Oy vey.
