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Learning Day: Magic & The Bible 🌭

Some of you aren't old enough to remember this, but there was a time when Christians thought sorcery was real and they devoted their lives to destroying it at any cost to their dignity or their children's happiness. It seems embarrassing now, but things were different back in the year ... wha!? *RECORD SCRATCH* 2020!?

Published less than two years ago, Magic & THE BIBLE is hard to describe. It's sort of a comprehensive list of make believe things the Bible didn't mention but WOULD HAVE if they were real, but it's also a collection of flimsy excuses for why someone would write it and how what they're doing is, in fact, not crazy. I'm here to prove otherwise. Keep in mind I don't have any formal psychology training. I'm just a man from an Earth where magic isn't real with the research skills to know this book cover cost exactly $19.00 USD.

Magic & THE BIBLE was written by 70-year-old Becky Fischer, and if you've seen the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, she's the one who crawls out of the little girl's ear after laying her eggs. She's a giggle coming from a desiccated corpse. The thing all those clowns are running from. "Becky Fischer" will be the dying words of the last mountain gorilla. Here she is, bursting from a Happy Flesh Day musical greeting card:

To be clear, this is not a book about the dangers of secular influences. Well, I guess it is, but it's mostly about how magic powers are an actual part of life, and it's important to make sure the ones you use come from God. This is all probably a grift, sure, but Becky will certainly die before admitting it, so we are going to treat her as she presents herself: as a lunatic who has dedicated her entire fucking life to defeating the tooth fairy and can't.

This is a book meant to turn kids into dumber, more confused kids, but Becky starts by speaking directly to those poor children's parents and grandparents:

There's a weird self-awareness to Becky's writing. You'd think someone who was really concerned about sorcery destroying the One True Path would be more frustrated and terrified, but she comes off more smug than anything else. She has an "I told you so," attitude like someone who warned everyone about wizards and then sure enough, someone wrote popular books about them and killed God.

I feel bad pointing out the obvious ironic things like how this elderly woman hunting witches after Sunday School is making fun of people for thinking they know "the difference between make believe and reality." There's no sport in it. As a target of ridicule, Becky is a deer walking meekly into your sausage maker. She thinks "research" is quoting right wing news clickbait about the number of Millennial witches. And is that... is that sarcasm at the end there? Is that something you should risk in an actual kid's demon hunting handbook? Becky took a liar's word for it that they counted all the teen witches and she was like, "Oh, only six billion semen drinkers with Pokemon powers. I'm sure the white babies will be soooooo safe."

Becky does acknowledge all the times people have tried to harness impossible forces and it didn't work. Dark forces are quite mysterious. But the thing is, when you're operating under the strict but unclear rules of an invisible being who can't talk and maybe doesn't exist, there's no difference between sorcery and attempted sorcery. Becky puts it the only way kids will understand-- think of wishing you had magic is like how fucking your friend's wife is the same as wanting to fuck your friend's wife.

I find analogies a useful writing tool to help a reader understand your perspective. They can be evocative and persuasive, but there is a danger in using them wrong. For instance, if someone could find a difference between extramarital penetration and pretending to be a wizard, it might unravel your entire argument. Why, you might even look like a total goddamn idiot. That's not the case here, of course. Presto cadabra, ladies.

Becky is a master of comparisons. For example, if you're having trouble understanding how God can be a holy ghost and also His own son, think of Him like an egg. An egg has three parts too, and she can start again if you're confused, you dumb piece of shit. Her tone, not mine.

The book is 53 pages long, but every left one is taken up by a single piece of affordable clipart to help her illustrate a point. Like when she was trying to use eggs to explain just the very basic concept of God to her extremely Christian young readers, Becky chose a cute picture of Fӧnku Plūp Jesus with gushing crucifixion head wounds. It helps make it fun for the little ones.

And I'm not exaggerating when I say she is still going over the broadest possible Christian concepts well into the second half of the book. I don't know who the intended audience is exactly, but I know they're a working child necromancer who hasn't heard of Jesus Christ.

Here she is on page 11, still explaining "souls."

It's complicated, kids, but souls are like the inside of an astronaut suit. And outer space is an ordinary, liveable atmosphere. Think of it like this: you're a cosmic egg but ignore the yolk since you're not your own Son, and reading Harry Potter is condomless anal. I can't make it any clearer.

If you're not familiar with Satan or "The Devil," he's a super hot guy who could get it. "Fill me with thine gifted dick much in the same way a Dungeon Master might draw a maze," says Becky's subtext.

Another trait of Becky's writing, besides baking her head in coal gas until Jesus gives her a simile, is that she can work herself into a frenzy over the course of a single sentence. She starts by introducing you to the very concept of demons, who are out there and have powers, but their powers don't work on her! She'd like to see their bitch asses try! Magic? Weapons!? Try Jesus blood, fuckers! Hyarrgh! HARK FORSOOTH, DEVILS! FOR BECKY SHALL REMOVE ASUNDER YOUR SEXY, SEXY PENISES!

There are a few unexpected twists in the book. Like when I learned, yes, ghosts are real, but they're not exactly "ghosts." They are only demons (sometimes known as serpents or scorpions) pretending to be dead people to trick you into talking about them. So in her own way, I guess she's arrived at the reasonable conclusion "people who believe in ghosts are likely wrong." I'd call it a deranged, unforced self-humiliation, though. It's like saying we know eggs are real because astronauts are at war with breakfast, but we all need to take our own path to find truth. Speaking of truth, are witches real?

Like all supernatural things, Becky assures you witches are real, but you're wrong about them. They aren't green. But you're right about everything else. They cast spells, pierce the veils between worlds, all that. But you're wrong about that being a big deal. In fact, Becky wishes a witch would. STEP TO BECKY'S JESUS BLOOD, MAGIC COWARDS! YOUR WIZARDRY IS TRASH. JESUS WILL PICK A CARD ON YOUR FUCKING GRAVE.

Becky explains there are three kinds of magic. The first is "black magic," which is the kind you use to bend reality to your wicked will and perform the impossible. The second is fun, like finding a quarter behind someone's ear, and the third is "white magic" which is the same as the first kind of magic only used for heroism. However, there's also only one type of magic: demonic. It doesn't matter if you're using sorcery for good or not at all while delighting at a birthday party, magic is from demons. I have to say, even in Christian literature, it's rare to see an author so clearly lay out how poorly their brain works. Becky Fischer truly attacks a logic problem like a cat sneaking up on a ceiling fan for the third time.

After condemning all pagans and birthday magicians to an eternity of torment, Becky takes a breath and reminds her Christian readers they have no right to judge the demonic, weak, foul sorcerers who walk among us. And I know you're tempted to do this since all of the powers from fairy tales are real, but do not get in a curse battle with these disgusting, pathetic secular fucks who you would never judge.

"Necromancy," or as Mexicans call it, "DIA DE LOS MUERTOS," is when wrong and demonic people are tricked by identity thief spirits into having conversations. Their savage Spanish beliefs are wrong and ridiculous, says author Becky Fischer.

So far Becky has hit on some broad topics, but let's get into some specifics. What should you, as a Christian child, do about zombies?

Zombies aren't in the Bible, but God probably wouldn't like them, right? I'm saying if they were real, and you could ask Him, it's reasonable He'd say "was disappointed when they arrived and were flesh eating monsters, one star."

To her credit, Becky admits zombies don't exist, except when they do, in a thing called "Voodoo," which is "found in Africa and Haiti." Still, they don't seem to be much of a problem and it's not really clear why she brought them up. Vampires, on the other hand...

Vampires weren't a serious problem yet when they wrote the Bible, so Jesus didn't have a take on them. But Becky has deduced, more from gut feeling than citation, that drinking human blood to gain nocturnal bat powers has at least some elements which go against Christian tradition. In the end, it's your decision, kids. We can't decide for you whether you stay in your grave or rise again as a servant of the night.

Like most of these Christian authors who are against every single thing in a world of unlimited things, Becky often has to make wild guesses about why she's making her decisions. I'm going to go through Becky's line of thinking here with as much good faith as possible.

So she decides she's afraid of Pokémon Go, a thing without any clear indicators of witchcraft. Fine, but maybe it's the lack of witchcraft which is the problem! Maybe it's exactly this non-Satanism which "can innocently open up secret doors to the enemy." Why would it? Well, listen: the creatures have powers, which God didn't give them since they're fictional and He's not, and if they didn't get powers from God, there's only one other option: the Devil, who unlike God, is the kind of real that can give powers to the fictional. And that's how, with one gut feeling and at least three questionable leaps of logic, a very dumb lady has convinced herself everything that has ever been is her enemy. Which is disappointing, because I always pictured the helplessly stupid as happy.

I think at this point of the book Becky started proofreading and hearing how crazy she sounded, so she's now asking herself a lot of pedantic questions. Or "great questions," as she describes them. It leads her to accidentally sum up her entire doctrine with "it's virtuous to read about magic only if the magicians are evil because others are villainous even when they're not." I don't know if I have a joke for that. It's like something a below average pig brain would spit out if you stabbed an electrode into it.

This section, "IS IT WRONG TO WATCH MOVIES ABOUT MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT?" featuring seven dollars worth of Legally Distinct Wizard Boy clipart starts out almost beautiful.

Becky says there's no limit to our imagination and the change it can make on this world. But she doesn't mean any of that in the good way. She means you might accidentally imagine being Harry Potter so hard you betray God. She also tells you to follow your gut to see what God wants you to read, which is a lot of faith to put in us only 15 pages after she had to explain to us who that guy was.

Now that you know all imagination deviating from Jesus is a crime against Him, the book ends with Becky giving you conditioned permission to celebrate Halloween. So long as you do it in a way that ruins it for everyone in your neighborhood.

Becky doesn't suggest doing normal insufferable Christian things like handing out tiny Bibles instead of treats. She is a true maniac who has created her own anti-holiday from directions you can't have predicted. She suggests hanging confusing anti-monster signs like "EVEN ZOMBIES CAN HAVE LIFE IN JESUS' NAME!" or "SORRY, VAMPIRES! The REAL POWER is in the BLOOD OF JESUS! (A VAMPIRE'S POWER IS FAKE POWER!)" And as for treats, how about giving "a bowl of hot chili to your visitors to bless them!" Why? If the danger of Halloween is the actual, real vampires, how is chili the opposite of that!? Becky! How dare you, after all that madness, hand me a bowl of chili and tell me the devil is defeated! This is a bullshit ending! I'll never forgive you for this, Becky!!!!

...

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rev, who knows the real way to save against Hold Person is to always Hold Christ close to your heart.

If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.

Comments

Dracula is going to be heartbroken to discover he doesn't get a shoutout in The Bible. But at least he knows he's due free chili once a year by Christians who don't like him.

petertron

Please tell me you guys are going to have Pargin on the podcast to do an episode about this.

Zac Schwartz

Evangelicals and protestant on the whole do not believe in transubstantiation, so to them it was never literal body and blood the way it is for Catholics. This Becky creature is obviously batshit and evil but the *internal* logic actually holds up just fine.

Clementine Danger

Basically, God is a mind-reading Thermian from "Galaxy Quest".

Matt Pedone

To her, God is basically a Thermian who can read minds, and believe that everything He sees is 100% real. That "Gilligan's Island" episode you watched? 100% real. Your thoughts about how to get them back home? 100% real. Your fantasies about Maryanne, yourself, and the Professor? 100% real.

Matt Pedone

You know, there's something incredibly comforting about a crackpot book that manages to circle back around to being afraid of Pokemon, here in the Year of Our Lord 20-friggin'-22. It's like the '90s all over again. If there isn't a chapter in this book about why DnD is evil, I'll assume it's because the author was afraid such intense levels of unholy darkness would have cause the paper to spontaneously combust.

Clifford Tunnell

I mean, either 1 or 2 Samuel also has a whole story that explicitly says ghosts ARE real and you CAN talk to them (but shouldn't), so I guess that's par for the course for Beck's understanding of her own subject.

Clifford Tunnell

Today I learned: god hates thinking. He gave us brains to tempt us into sin because he loves us so much he wants us all to go to hell.

toasty god

“The Bible does say a lot about eating and drinking blood.” Yup, including the part where Jesus tells his apostles to eat his flesh and drink his blood (conveniently flavored like crackers and wine because Jesus wants a blood pact, but he doesn’t want to be icky about it). I know evangelicals are pretty anti-Catholic, but do they just skip that part of the Bible all together? Is it not included in their copies? Or is this lady just a nut job that did no research and little planning or thinking for this book and maybe has also never actually read the Bible?

toasty god

If God made a best friend that immediately betrayed Him, that sounds like it's on God. Also, I call BS the Holy Spirit uses masculine pronouns.

Brendan McGinley

AKA The Discordia Special.

Jeff Orasky

1900HOTDOG has been invaluable to me because so many of the problems of the world for the past five years or so is that so much ridiculous stuff has gone on with a straight face that it is easy for us to forget what is insane or not. 1900HOTDOG gives us a daily reminder that the crazy, stupid shit is indeed, stupid and crazy. I think it has improved my critical thinking skills when confronted with both the banal and the insane, and the combination of them both, the inbanal.

Matthew Harris

"a cross between a fire hose and a huge oversized novelty fire hose."

Matthew Harris

A lot about these people makes sense when you realise everything they attribute to 'God' is just themselves. They can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, and so obviously God can't either.

Swift Justice

Героям слава

Daphne Lawless

Oh noooooooo! I now nominate you for HotDog Sainthood. That was some succinct self-editing though, you've got to give me that. Or don't, it's fine really haha this has thoroughly cracked my shit up

LyraV

God is dead, and it was Psyduck who killed him.

Flippant Sausage

I maintain that the Becky Fishers of the world do us all a real service, by giving you solid markers to identify the real fucked up people who otherwise might have gone unnoticed. I was friends in high school with a pastor's son, and got roped into going to a church youth group, which I did to have something to do.......right up until the pastor did a 45 minute presentation with slides about how these are the end times and barcodes are the mark of the Beast and Y2K was going to be the first sign of the apocalypse. Without that I'd have taken way longer to clock that these people were weird in an unfun way.

Flippant Sausage

I wouldn't trust a dingbat grifter to understand anything, even their own religion.

Talking Alpaca

If I'm gonna quit Harry Potter it's gonna be because it was created by an idiotic and disgusting transphobe, not because you can't distinguish imagination from reality so you make up an imaginary friend that ALSO can't distinguish imagination from reality

Yeyo

Any Christian who thinks God and Jesus are the same people (and thinks a Holy Spirit is a person) learned Christianity from Saturday morning cartoons that mocked Christianity.

Talking Alpaca

I try to stay positive

Jeff Miller

At this point you gotta believe God simply believes Himself to be omnipotent and since according to Him believing makes it real, well...

Pablo Rodriguez

80%? Why such a conservative figure?

Pablo Rodriguez

Gotta love the insane leaps of logic, lack of self-awareness in front of ridiculous contradictions and preposterous misinterpretation of words at play throughout this whole book. If I didn't know any better I could have sworn I was reading publications made in a Marvel FB fan group.

Pablo Rodriguez

You know Revelation never mentions believers ascending into the sky on angel wings like crappy Christian cartoons imagine it. It does have a lot to say about the Dead Rising though. Like a LOT. https://www.openbible.info/topics/dead_will_rise_again

Clementine Danger

Me and every other trans man in existence can vouch for the fact that Becky is devastatingly wrong in several directions at once, but that one specifically.

Clementine Danger

Thanks! I did get your first message, it's in my inbox forever now. I thought it was fine!

Vooster

Sound like SOMEONE needs to see Creating Rem Lezar

Clementine Danger

Let me try this more coherently lol you're a first-rate Hot Dog. God beaten by Pokemon? What?!

LyraV

Anoint yourself liberally with blessings chili and no vampire will dare to bite you!

valis2

Wait, so Christians aren't supposed to participate in hurting, cursing, or doing bad things to anyone, even their enemies? But that's like 80% of Twitter at this point.

Jeff Miller

I wonder if anyone ever pointed out to Becky that she's basically just proven it's god who can't tell the difference between imagination and reality. Pretty sad for an omnipotent being.

Bonnybedlam

No zombies in the Bible? What about Matthew 27-52: "the tombs also were opened, and the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised." C'mon lady, read the Bible.

Bill Culbertson

God's an absolutist. If you Sin, you're going to Hell. If you don't Sin, but think about Sinning, you're going to hell. If you Sin but think about not Sinning, you're going to hell. If you don't sin, and think about not Sinning, but imagine yourself thinking about Sinning, you're going to hell. If you don't Sin, and don't think about sinning, but write a book about Sinning, you're going to hell. Therefore, If you don't Sin, and don't write a book about Sinning, but write an instructional book about not-Sinning which includes hypothetical cases of Sinning damning you, you're therefore imagining Sinning, and going to Hell.

The Parallel Viewmaster

How can Bon Jovi say "living on a prayer" only gets him half way there? Is he saying God is only half able to provide?

Matthew Harris

If what we imagined was real, then we'd all have enormous genitals.

Jeff Orasky

I know someone who is both a Presbyterian and a Witch, but I don't think there is stockphotos or clip art of that.

Matthew Harris

It's hard to read about books like these objectively; on one hand, the author is without a doubt insane, but on the other hand, as members of 1900HOTDOG, we're already firmly in the camp of the Damned, so we're biased against it.

The Parallel Viewmaster

This is such a weird portrayal of God. Anything we imagine to happen He sees as actually happening? So, He can see our fantasies, but to Him, they actually happen? Does He distinguish between what we're actually doing and what we're imagining? Does He just see it all at once? I'm sitting here typing, but I'm also skiing down my roof, but I'm also in bed with my partner and the cast of The Good Place, but also on tour for my best-selling series of novels? If we sin, but are thinking about not sinning, does it cancel out? Can we imagine doing TONS of good things with our life to offset the horrible things? Or, even drown them out?

Matt Pedone

Becky could have said so many fluffy platitudes about imagination but she went with how imagination can “make the unimaginable become a reality,” which is literally the one thing imagination can never do.

SpaceGhost

Casper's not real. He's only real in our imaginations. Which means that he IS real!

Matt Pedone

I love when fringe Christians tell you that you have nothing to fear because your faith shields you from danger, and then lists 53 things you should fear. "God's light and protection is infinite, unless you play Pokemon, God has no defenses against that."

Vooster

Stay strong, Miss Danger!

Vooster

“There are no friendly ghosts”? Um, excuse me BECKY, may I introduce my friend Casper? The FRIENDLY GHOST? Check and mate, you insufferable old hag.

Chris “Ace” Hendrix

Becky's version of Christianity means I did way more fucking in high school. Which is pretty cool, I guess. Where do I sign up?

Joshua Graves

Dammit, zoom feature. Becky seems like just an overly enthusiastic spinster at normal view. But I zoomed in to see what scared Sean. Those are not the eyes of anything born in our world.

FancyShark

Over the last decade or two there's only been one time where the source material made me laugh as hard as Seanbaby's commentary, and that was that book about how a cool youth pastor gets hyped for Jesus by getting sloshed on God Jizz. This is the second time.

Clementine Danger

Casually putting down a box of Nilla Wafers that’s filled with holy wafers and being dumbfounded that no one burst into flames throughout the day.

FancyShark

Now I'm picturing the GM making coffee every morning using holy water, just casually putting salt lines around, and trying to get customers and you to cross them or sit around trap sigils and see if they can leave. Just getting more and more scared that you aren't showing any changes of the daily holy coffee

DeltaFoxtrot

As a Presbyterian, I can definitely attest that there are WAY more witches out there. Even after twinning Protection From Evil with Sanctuary, two of our 14th-level Teaching Elders were taken out by a Prismatic Spray from a witch incursion. Our Limited Grace is just not holding up very well against their unlimited badassery. :(

sarcophski

I worked at a car dealership once where the GM said we had fewer customers one month because there were demons at the gate keeping them from driving up on the lot. I later found out, after his firing, that he thought I, too, was a demon, and I was also responsible. I've never felt radder.

CHAUGGLE

yes i came up where it was important to people for there children not to get enfected with witcheries from books or music i got my cd of Hysteria threw away because my mom heard the satan voice at the end of Love Bites

sissyneck

I can assure you, especially nowadays, the helplessly stupid don't even remember what happy is. Wait, does that mean I'm helplessly stupid? Curses!

Devon the Rogue Supreme

does anyone know what it feels like when a monster rehab shoots out of your nose? because I wasn't expecting the research to show there are more millennial witches than presbyterians. God, that sentence is gonna live in my head forever.

DeltaFoxtrot

Clementine Danger


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