The Lord is Linda's shepherd

Nothing can wind me up quite like other Christians.

• I went to church with my parents over the break and was forced to listen to soft rock, not live soft rock but recorded on a CD, when the vicar invited us to pray -- or rather, to "go quiet for a bit".
  
• Then just to show the other side of the spectrum, older unmarried Anglican priests in Jerusalem were constantly winking at me as if to say "No really, it's OK that you're a woman".
  
• If you are finding the eucharist rather dull why not have a U2charist? Except that I beg of you, do not.
• This is highly disturbing, a webcam of the reserved sacrament. I've only recently become acquainted with the idea that having consecrated the bread at communion you might then not actually eat it but put it in some sort of container, possibly a monstrance, using some complex apparatus (humeral veil, anyone?) and then adore or possibly worship it. (Apparently you must eat it eventually, and the use-by date of the body of God is about a week.) As with most things that I find initially disturbing and possibly offensive I have been suspending judgement until another time. Now I have to get used to the idea of having it in a little pop-up window on a computer screen. There has been some debate about whether you can adore it properly over the interweb, with the Vatican saying No and others being a bit more flexible; and these people at least find it as confusing as I do.
• In its way the Personal Promise Bible is rather sweet but also disturbing. You can have the name of your spouse too, and be reassured that "Gina's two breasts are like two fauns". (I don't know how it works if your spouse is male, perhaps then it's your own breasts that are like fauns, which would be wierd to read.) Also, the place where you live: "May the Lord bless Nancy out of Zion, And may she see the prosperity of Minnesota all the days of her life."
• It's certainly less troubling than Biblezines though. These teenage girls like it but my inner youth is saying "euugh!" The New Yorker seems to have reservations too.

The problem is that these are my people, especially the evangelical ones; reading this mystery worshipper report of a festival gave me a real access of nostalgia. And at least there is still the Ship of Fools: read here about their experiment to find the ten funniest and ten most offensive religious jokes. The second funniest is just brilliant. This young man thinks it's wrong for Christians to laugh at Christians, but I think it might be better to laugh at them and by implication myself rather than to erupt into their midst with a blazing machine gun one day, which seems like the other option.

PS click here for the self-styled "Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity". Current chance of rapture is a disappointing 68.8%.