"Father's Love Letter"

I used to collect religious tracts; they fascinate me. The message in a typical religious tract comes in one of two flavours:

• God loves you. Join our church, and feel God's love.
• You are a sinner. Join our church, or you will rot in Hell for all of eternity. (Jack Chick Publications specializes in tracts of this type.)
  

A tract I got the other day belongs in the first group: It's called "Father's Love Letter", and consists of alleged quotes from the Bible, arranged as if they were a letter from a loving father to a beloved child, and finishing with "Love, Your Dad, Almighty God."

The reason I noticed this tract was the following, which claimed to be from Luke 15.7:

Come home and I'll throw the biggest party heaven has ever seen...

That's the first time I've ever heard of parties mentioned in the Bible. So I looked it up in the King James version I happen to have. (I'm a third-generation agnostic - I actually bought my Bible as a prop for a performance piece. My own belief is that I am not smart enough to know whether there is a God or not.) In this version, Luke 15.7 reads:

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

Okay, there is joy involved, but this doesn't sound like they're getting down up there in the sky.

Of course, there are as many interpretations of the Bible as there are people who care about it. The classic example is homophobes using Leviticus (18.22, to be exact) as alleged proof that God abhors gayness. But I just took a quick look at the whole chapter, and I found the following rules, which fundamentalists tend not to mention:

• If a snail falls in your earthenware, you have to break the vessel, as it is unclean
• You can't eat hare, swine, or anything in the water that doesn't have fins or scales
• You can, however, eat locusts, bald locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers - yum!
  
• A woman is unclean for seven days after giving birth to a male child, and two weeks after giving birth to a female

And this one (Leviticus 21.5), which seems to condemn tattooed skinheads:

They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.

Apparently, there is also a passage that condemns people who wear clothes that are a mixed blend of cotton and polyester, but I couldn't find it.

If you're curious about any of this, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance have a page which collects interpretations of the infamous Leviticus passage. And, while I'm getting all religious on you all: here's a page on Genesis 38.8-10, in which Onan is put to death by the Lord because he refuses to sleep with his brother's widow.


Another new plague of spam touting a (different) penny stock: today's senders are Bessie, Israel, Mitchell, Susie, Katina, Dixie, Merlin, Dionne, Jake, Luann, Roosevelt, Deandre, Robyn, Thanh, Myrtle, Wilmer, Randolph, Quincy, Ellen, Eliza, Lewis, Tia, Milo, Vern, Andrew, Roslyn, Joshua and Aurelia. And, once again, all of the spoofed email addresses start with "debora" or "deborah". Hell hath no fury like a spammer scorned, I suppose.