#21671: — 04/12  at  12:12 PM

Revelations is a mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations

See? It makes perfect sense if you just remove the quote marks.

#21673: — 04/12  at  12:23 PM
heh

hehe

MWAHAHAHAHAAAA!

Thank you, that just made my day.

#21675: — 04/12  at  12:34 PM
"a mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations of Scripture."

Giggle. That's precisely how a conservative evangelical friend of mine describes Left Behind...

#21677: — 04/12  at  12:48 PM
My knowledge of German extends only to beer. Does anybody have a translation of The Joke? Is it real German??

#21678: Hank Fox — 04/12  at  12:52 PM
Occasionally I worry about all the mystical and religious shows on TV, thinking they lead ever more of the audience into religiosity or mysticism.

And that's probably one effect. On the other hand, considering what TV and movies do to EVERYTHING they touch, there's this competing effect: that everything gets dumbed down, hollywoodized, and eventually turned into mere entertainment -- ever dumber, ever more titillating, ever more ephemeral.

So in a way, I think this show is a good thing. If Bible stories turn into the same kind of mass-market least-common-denominator mush as everything else on TV, can that be bad?

The Book of Revelations becomes a mere fad, with a limited shelf life. Three months down the road, the people whose lives were "changed forever" return blank-eyed to their yo-yos and banjos.

Heh. If I was writing the screenplay for this, I'd make one of the Bad Guys be a major figure in an established church. I wonder ...?

I'll bet the REAL bitch the "Left Behind" authors have is that their god-and-pony show, which had the field all to itself, is having to compete for market share. They feel the stirrings of that inevitable slide to the dusty back shelves of the used book stores, alongside the distantly stinky turds dropped by Velikovsky, Von Daniken, Hubbard, Casteneda and Streiber.

#21679: ajmilne — 04/12  at  01:05 PM
Hee hee hee hee hee ow ow ow ow ow ow hee hee hee hee hee hee ow ow ow ow ow...

PZ!!! I'm sprainin' ribs out here. Stop that!

#21681: norbizness — 04/12  at  01:21 PM
He must have gotten cognitive dissonance pointers from the Vatican's PR Department when they were denouncing The Da Vinci Code.

And I recognize no other representative of the Sky Fairy but Kirk Cameron, star of Left Behind II: Tribulation Force.

#21682: PZ Myers — 04/12  at  01:25 PM
"The Joke" is not real German, sorry. Or rather, bits of it are, but it really doesn't make sense.

Fortunately, I'm not very fluent in German, or I'd be dead now.

#21686: — 04/12  at  01:59 PM
Thanks. I thought it was fake, but with Python you can never take that for granted.

#21687: — 04/12  at  02:04 PM
Courtesy of appliedlanguage.com:

If the Nunstruck is git and Slotermeyer? !...
Beiherhund the or the Flipperwaldt gersput.

1. I don't know what PZ's problem is...makes good sense to me. (Maybe when it comes to free translation, you get what you pay for.Didn't even get the 'Ja'!)Ohh, but...

2. Must...call...911...now... Where's that Kindertotenlieder when I need it?

#21688: — 04/12  at  02:12 PM
I think they are jealous because NBC didn't use their script for a miniseries (it got left behind).

#21691: — 04/12  at  02:33 PM
Omigawd! This is lack of self-knowledge on a heroic scale. A "mishmash" based on "some writer's imagination." Wow, the TV series is completely unlike the Left Behind series, which we all know is a scholarly work. (I mean the books, of course. The movie with Kirk Cameron is of a different genre, naturally, and must therefore be respectfully described as a work of filmic art, soon to be celebrated by Cahiers du Cinema.)

#21696: — 04/12  at  03:23 PM
Who is the more ignorant: the TV production people, or the Left Behinders (and just how many behinds do they have anyway?), for not knowing that the name of the book in the bible is Revelation (singular)?

#21700: alphabitch — 04/12  at  03:44 PM
Try superglue. I don't think a bandaid will hold.

#21709: — 04/12  at  04:32 PM
Well, it's obvious what the problem is, isn't it? NBC has the <em>wrong</em> "mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations of scripture", and "Left Behind" has the <em>right</em> one!

We all know that to a fundie, a heretic is worse than an infidel...

#21711: — 04/12  at  04:56 PM
Jenkins latest book is number one on the NYT
*fiction* list, and he's upset about NBC's
fictional depiction???

When the hell did I land in the twilight zone?

#21714: decrepitoldfool — 04/12  at  05:49 PM
Going to be chuckling about this one for DAYS...

Does irony have mass? Because if it does, there could be a singularity a' makin'

#21716: — 04/12  at  05:54 PM

Jenkins latest book is number one on the NYT
*fiction* list, and he's upset about NBC's
fictional depiction???

Yeah, well maybe he believes that the fictional portrayal of fiction represents fact...

...which would (somehow) render his imaginative apocolyptic reports more fictional than even fiction, itself?

Work with me here - I'm trying to get inside this guy's head!

Alas, I am finding it reassuringly difficult.

#21719: donna — 04/12  at  07:43 PM
And they wonder why television viewing is
down 30% and book sales are lagging the economy...

http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/04/media_meltdown.html

Trackback: Myth Match Tracked on: PhaWRONGula (72.9.234.70) at 2005 04 12 20:50:50
When Jerry Jenkins, author of Apocalyptic pulp, Keeps pimping eschatology For the gullible to gulp...

#21740: — 04/13  at  01:42 AM
Ah, the sweet smell of irony in the morning. For a couple of noxious, heretic hacks, Jenkins and LaHaye have a lot of cheek. (Though I don't doubt that this "Revelations" thingy is probably a mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations of Scripture..)

#21742: — 04/13  at  03:31 AM
Python used "Jabberwock-German" for the joke; just as they used "Jabberwock-French" to describe how a sheep would be turned into an airplane.

"Jabberwock" languages are where you just take the basic sounds, throw in a few real words, and babble them fast enough with an accent it *looks* real.

#21750: Mutant Cat — 04/13  at  06:52 AM
The joke is definately not real German, or at least not that funny. I actually sent it in a message the other night to a German friend and I saw him a few hours later and he was fine.

#21752: — 04/13  at  07:07 AM
Mutant Cat: Maybe your friend read your message in English, and is just playing things cool now he knows you tried to kill him.

#21763: — 04/13  at  10:22 AM
Regardless of where people stand on the interpretation of biblical prophecy, no one believes Jesus will return again as a baby," Jenkins explained.

What does that mean? Is it more ridiculous that the second coming of Christ would be born as a biological human being, and grow up like one, and THAT's more ridiculous than Jesus coming again as a fully grown man?