tv preacher jerry falwell died earlier this week and boingboing used strong words to condemn this man’s legacy:
Bigoted religious phony Jerry Falwell went to hell today. Voices of American Sexuality collected some of the stupidest things he said while he was befouling the living world:
but check out the google ads boingboing had today. only online can such a huge discrepancy between editorial and advertising content coexist on the same page.
clck it bigger
bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!
Is this what it was like when Zwingli died?
when zwingli died i blogged it and made sure no ads for his website appeared on my blog … but as an aside, it seems farfetched to compare zwingli with falwell, from what i read.
also: Zwingli is regarded as the most “liberal” of all the Reformers, and was less a dogmatist than Calvin.
well!
see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli
so zwingli was one of the “good” guys, even if the zwinglian mentality, work work work and don’t brag with your wealth and merits, are a bit too – erm- swiss? for me. or was that calvin. oh frack me.
He tried to be good, he really did.
Reformers too often are radical reactionaries, and go too far. Cultural Revolution and all that. The history of religious revolution in Europe alone is sad and sordid, but endlessly fascinating.
Religious revolution in the US is comparatively boring. There’s the murder of Joseph Smith, Ghost Dancing, speaking in tongues (my favorite) and snake handling, Quakers quaking (thanks for the oats) and Shakers shaking (thanks for the furniture), last bastion of Puritans (and they got their own national holiday!), Christian Science, Scientology, crystals and imported chakras and the whole New-Age nine-yards*, Aryan Christian Identity Supremacists, David Koresh and Heaven’s Gate.
Okay, maybe not so completely devoid of interest, but not nearly as crazed as John of Leyden and the Anabaptist madness and all the wars of reformation.
Check out Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Milennium. I first heard it referenced in Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: a secret history of the 20th century where he morphs from Johnny Lydon to John of Leyden; and draws lines from Norman Cohn to his son’s authorship of the first history of punk [I can’t find a citation for this online, & my own copy of Lipstick Traces is long-lost to an ex].
Anyway. Falwell is gone, the ads on BB were weird, oh yes indeedy!