Friday Special feature: Fun With Jack Chick

For this weeks Friday Special feature I am going to feature the black hole of insanity that is Jack Chick. For those that don’t know, Jack Chick is a writer / illustrator of especially odious Christian Right Propaganda. (This is odious by standards of Christian Right propaganda) Much of the material is anti-Catholic, and anti-Islam (This means that it is bigoted against roughly 1/3 of the worlds population)

This link (WARNING: LINK TO A CHICK TRACT PROCEED WITH CAUTION) leads to a tract about the Catholic belief system. The main claim made by this tract is that Catholics are not Christians. This is of course absurd, but is a favorite of the American Protestant Right (Mostly of Baptists) (Protestant Right Leaders quickly forget about this when they need the Catholic’s numbers for one of their events. This tract claims that much of the Catholic belief system (the Eucharist, Penance, etc) come from the Babylonian and Egyptian religion. This tract also brings out a canard of nineteenth century American political discourse the good old fashioned Catholics have to be loyal to the Vatican over the US.

Our next target is also anti Catholic, and this one is nuttier. (From what I have seen, by Jack Chick standards, the last one is innocuous. This tract accuses the Jesuits of being an international conspiracy to eliminate the textus recptus (a version of the New Testament based on several incomplete Greek manuscripts, and the version of the New Testament used in most Protestant bibles.) Someone should introduce Chick to the Illuminati, I bet he’d he believe that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and assumed his identity. The tract then accuses the Jesuits of assinating the people who had translated the King James version.

Chick and his cohorts are belivers of the King James Version Only Movement. This movement is best summed up by this quote that I found on Fundies Say the Darnedest things:

I believe that the Authorized King James Bible of 1611 is the perfect, pure and inspired word of God. (Psalm 12:6-7). I believe that there was inspiration from God involved with the translation of the King James Version. (2 Timothy 3:16) Anything in the King James Version that may seem like it disagrees with the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts corrects the Greek and Hebrew. I do not believe in finding out the meanings of Greek or Hebrew words. The King James Bible is perfect in English, and to try to correct it with the Greek is adding our own private interpretations to Scripture.

Now, that quote is not associated with the Chick organization in any way, but, that shows the mindset that we are dealing with here. I don’t get King James Only people, or the people who believe that there was an unbroken line of Baptists / non demoninational Christians going back to the first century. I can see them making a claim that they are worshiping in the way that they think is most like the way that the original Christians worshiped, but to claim an unbroken line of succession is absurd.