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You are here: Home / Open Threads / “I Have Never Made But One Prayer To God…

“I Have Never Made But One Prayer To God…

by | 97 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

…’Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’…”

And, for us as well as Voltaire, “God granted it”:

More than 20,000 Christians have signed a petition calling for the cancellation of Good Omens, the television series adapted from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel – unfortunately addressing their petition to Netflix when the series is made by Amazon Prime.

The six-part series was released last month, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, who collaborate to prevent the coming of the antichrist and an imminent apocalypse.

The petition is the work of Return to Order — a program of the American Society for the Tradition, Family* and Property, which is itself a project of the Foundation for A Christian Civilization — all of which is tied up in radical right anti-Vatican 2 revanchism in its modern guise.  The group(s) is/are deeply offended by contraception, all things to do with same-sex relationships, and the entire notion of a secular democratic state. to be replaced, according to the Brazilian founder of the movement, by a feudal form of governance in which the husband exercises authority over his family, more powerful family heads over their lessers, and kings over all.

There is, of course, a whiff of sexual scandal in and about these defenders of family, tradition and all that property — the speediest of google searches turned up an abuser at a school run by one tentacle of these folks.

They are, in other words, radical authoritarians who want to establish religious dictatorships in which women are subordinated and non-extremely-conservative Christians (perhaps all non-Catholic followers of Jesus) will have a very rough go of it indeed.

So, nasty bits of work, but, as it appears from their so-well-placed howls of rage about a satiric comedy in which neither Satan nor his counterpart come off that well, not the sharpest implements of torture available to the Inquisition.

TL:DR — you can’t fix stupid, which we knew. You can’t repair self-righteousness either, and the stew you get when both combine is…

Special.

Open thread.

*Approved traditions do not, it seems, include the Oxford comma.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, inner right wing (Hell) from The Garden of Earthly Delights, between 1480 and 1505.

 

Reader Interactions

97Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    For anyone who’s read the book, the TV version of Good Omens is quite faithful to the original. A few additions and subtractions, but not many and the overall tone is dead-on. I recommend it.

    And as for the Christian fanatics, well maybe they should all be forced to read Pratchett’s _Small Gods_ to get a healthier perspective on religion.

  2. 2.

    Roger Moore

    *Approved traditions do not, it seems, include the Oxford comma.

    Either that, or they believe that family and property are the tradition.

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    unfortunately addressing their petition to Netflix when the series is made by Amazon Prime.

    Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha. Whatta buncha maroons.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    Also, another anecdote along similar lines: During the 2008 Presidential campaign, many conservative activist types wrote angry letters to various people in the University of Chicago administration demanding that the University fire William Ayers (remember him?).

    At the time, Ayers was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

  6. 6.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Roger Moore:

    Reminds me of the infamous comma-deficient magazine cover blurb on a TV personality:

    RACHEL RAY LOVES COOKING
    HER FAMILY
    AND HER DOG

  7. 7.

    Origuy

    Approved traditions do not, it seems, include the Oxford comma.

    Well of course not, ever since Henry VIII took Oxford away from the Catholics. Those Anglicans are spawns of Satan.

  9. 9.

    M. Bouffant

    OT, from WaterGirl:

    I have been so busy I haven’t had time to put this on BJ. So if you are on the blog, if you could mention that I am still waiting to hear from these people who offered to test, that would be a big help. Would you be willing to do that?

    Original message:

    Hey everyone, WaterGirl here.

    You are receiving this message if you volunteered to test the new website and supplied information about your devices, but never followed up by sending email to [email protected]

    I am starting to get our ducks in a row for whenever testing will start.

    Please write back to [email protected] — one way or another — to say that you’re in for testing or that you don’t want to be contacted about testing again.

    Hope to hear from all of you one way or another, very soon!

    Thanks, WaterGirl

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    Prefered these people when they were too pure to besmirch themselves with politics, before they and the Republicans adopted one another. Now they have guns, a political party and a news network. Ugh.

  12. 12.

    Kenneth R Jurek

    During my custody battle for my two children, I had to remove the garden of worldly delights from the wall of my living room and hide it in the barn for the duration of the trial. The guardian ad litem didn’t like it and felt that it was deeply anti-religious. So, I almost lost my kids thanks to Hieronymus Bosch. This happened in Ohio, in case you’re wondering why we have a stupid state that continually votes for Trump.

  18. 18.

    TenguPhule

    @Keith P.:

    I didn’t think Amazon was going to do a season 2 so what would they cancel?

    They believe in retroactive abortion of a production.

  21. 21.

    Roger Moore

    @Keith P.:

    I didn’t think Amazon was going to do a season 2 so what would they cancel?

    This isn’t about getting Netflix (or Amazon, for that matter) to do anything about the show. It’s about getting media attention and harvesting the addresses of everyone who signs the petition. That’s what this kind of thing is always about.

  22. 22.

    Jay

    when u go around policing whether or not using the term "concentration camps" for a place where kids are in cages is accurate use of the term are u a grammar nazi or just a regular nazi?— m i t ɥ (@ManlnTheHoody) June 20, 2019

  24. 24.

    Roger Moore

    @Jay:

    when u go around policing whether or not using the term “concentration camps” for a place where kids are in cages is accurate use of the term are u a grammar nazi or just a regular nazi?

    Both.

  25. 25.

    Matt Smith

    Just finished watching it. Funny, absurdist romp about the friendship between an angel and a demon. What they have in common is, they like living on Earth, so they aren’t ready for Armageddon yet. And… it’s time for Armageddon.

  27. 27.

    TenguPhule

    @Matt Smith:

    What they have in common is, they like living on Earth, so they aren’t ready for Armageddon yet.

    Also, upper management are assholes. No exceptions.

  28. 28.

    sralloway

    @dmsilev: Good to know it’s true to the book. Every few years I take it down and reread it. It is always a great read.

  29. 29.

    Keith P.

    Btw I liked it except ironically, the leads. Tennant’s strut and Sheen’s….everything annoyed me to no end.

  31. 31.

    Jay

    Vice covers way more ground in their write-up about Ekberg’s past, and I definitely encourage you to give it a read at some point. However, the piece ends with an interesting question: “Did Ekberg use Ace of Base’s success as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and erase his neo-Nazi past?”

    I think I can answer that. Ekberg did not use Ace of Base to hide his Nazi past. Quite the contrary. Ace of Base was a Nazi band, too.

    https://www.cracked.com/blog/how-90s-pop-band-secretly-sold-nazism-to-america/

  32. 32.

    C Stars

    @Kenneth R Jurek: Yeeks. When I was a wee one I spent hours examining that painting. My mother had a book of Bruegel works and I was deeply fascinated by the strange creatures and naughty goings-on.

  34. 34.

    Catherine D.

    @divF: My favorite was a sign on the door of Harold’s Chicken Shack on 53rd St in Chicago:

    NO
    DOGS
    EATING
    BICYCLES

  35. 35.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Groups very, very much like this changed the face of the movie industry, with reverberations into television and comics, back into the 30s. They have lost a lot of power over the last century. Not enough, unfortunately.

  36. 36.

    Roger Moore

    @JPL:
    It would be great if the Trumps rot in Hell, or undergo every other punishment Bosch and Breugel could dream up, but it would be even better if we could stop them in this world in addition to punishing them in the next.

  37. 37.

    Chris T.

    @Kenneth R Jurek:

    The guardian ad litem didn’t like [the Bosch work] and felt that it was deeply anti-religious.

    Wow. What else did he consider anti-religious? Crosses, icons, Bibles, Korans?

  38. 38.

    Mike in NC

    It was an OK show, but we just started the new “Das Boot” miniseries on Hulu. The new season of “Big Little Lies” on HBO is also pretty good. Meryl Streep plays a nasty piece of work.

  39. 39.

    debbie

    *Approved traditions do not, it seems, include the Oxford comma.

    Then they are the true spawn of Satan.

  41. 41.

    geg6

    @Mike in NC:

    Please no spoilers for “Big Little Lies!”

    I had watched the first one myself and turned my sister into it. We both loved it so much that we got a bunch of girlfriends together and had a sleepover where we binged it over wine and pizza. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen her in where Nicole Kidman just blew me away with her acting. They were all very good, but she was the revelation for me. Never liked her before that.

  42. 42.

    FelonyGovt

    I love the book Good Omens, and I thought the show was a pretty good adaptation. I didn’t love it as much as the book- I think a lot of the craziness got a bit lost, and the show was more of a “buddy” flick- but it was good. And now that these lunatics are protesting it, I think I’ll watch it again.

  44. 44.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Roger Moore:

    @Matt Smith:
    Of course someone named Matt Smith would approve of a show staring David Tennant. You Doctors have to stick together!

    Take it from The Saint!

  45. 45.

    trollhattan

    @geg6:
    Season 2 is “off book” and has a distinctly different vibe. Will just say each lead character gets his/her Own Special Test a mere two episodes in, and that I do not want Merle Streep as my mother in law.

    Kidman’s really good and I chuckle every time her Aussie accent slips into the dialog. Clearly they’re on board with it, given they left it in.

  47. 47.

    geg6

    @trollhattan:

    What impressed me about Kidman was that her best acting in it was when she was silent and just reacting through her facial expressions. It was very subtle, but powerful. And I can’t wait to see her reactions to her mother-in-law from hell. Should be great fun.

  49. 49.

    geg6

    @rikyrah:

    Fuck Chuck Todd and the rest of the pearl clutchers. AOC is exactly right. Shit, I’ve been calling them that almost from the start. Sends the Trumper at the office into a frenzy every time. They all know and they hate when you notice.

  50. 50.

    Ruckus

    @Tom Levenson:
    Not sure it qualifies as stupidest. There have been any number of ages that surely qualify as at least equal if not higher in the level of stupid. Only thing is, we didn’t live during them.

  51. 51.

    clay

    I first read the book Good Omens when I was a senior in high school. In addition to finding it hilarious, I also found that it had some profound things to say about faith. It honestly made me a better Christian, because it actually made me think about things.

    Some Christians are scared of thinkin’, I guess.

  55. 55.

    Roger Moore

    @geg6:

    Fuck Chuck Todd and the rest of the pearl clutchers. AOC is exactly right.

    Her being right is precisely why they are so angry. If it were a truly ridiculous comparison, they would laugh it off. That they can’t laugh it off and have to go into a high dudgeon trying to refute it in detail says that they know she’s right and they just don’t want to admit it.

  57. 57.

    Belafon

    @clay: For a lot of people like the ones who signed the petition, their version of Christianity confirms their worldview. It doesn’t challenge them.

  58. 58.

    Another Scott

    @rikyrah: Also too, Nancy at WaMo:

    Back in 2013, Chuck Todd said that it wasn’t the media’s job to correct Republican lies—particularly when it came to the issue of Obamacare. Fast forward six years, and the same television news host is playing a completely different tune. He took it upon himself to lecture Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for referring to the migrant detention facilities being run by the Trump administration as “concentration camps.”

    Let’s first of all note that Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t lying about the detention facilities, Todd simply didn’t like the language she used to describe them. What this demonstrates is that, according to Todd, it is not the job of the media to call out Republican lies, but it is their job to police the civility of the language used by Democrats.

    In the process of this commentary, Todd once again demonstrates that he can’t let go of the “both sides do it” framework. He criticized Representative Jerrold Nadler for failing to call Ocasio-Cortez out on her comments and used that as a springboard to suggest that we are all so ensconced in our liberal vs. conservative bubbles that we can’t talk about right and wrong anymore.

    […]

    It is true that right-wing media outlets like Fox News are dangerous as propaganda arms of the Trump presidency. But mainstream journalists who distort reality by prioritizing balance over truth are also complicit.

    Yup.

    Like the UK poll that Tony Jay pointed us to, that said the Tories were more than happy to destroy just about anything as long as they get the Precious Brexites, Todd and too many of his colleagues will Both Sides and Not Our Jobs politics until the minute before Donnie and his minions drag them off to Guantanamo (if they get the chance)…

    Grrr…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  59. 59.

    The Pale scot

    have signed a petition in which they say that Good Omens is “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable

    And these goobers voted for the shitgibbon. Go figure..

  64. 64.

    geg6

    @Raven:

    Oh yes, I know. We’ll wait until it’s over and stream it. That should be just a few weeks because it’s only seven episodes. We both have HBO and, thus, HBOGo.

  67. 67.

    DaddyJ

    I do think the Golgotha scene in Ep. 3 is poorly handled. They overdub Jesus making pathetic yelps in the style of a Richard Lester/Terry Gilliam soundtrack. It’s impossible to make that event “funny”; it pissed me off that they tried in post. At least Life of Brian had the decency to make their crucifixion happening to some other Messiah on the other side of the hill.

    And like the American Gods adaptation, I think this Good Omens is excessively padded. The book is a lightweight satire about heavy issues, more Pratchett than Gaiman. The more you try to “flesh out the characters” the more you sink the satire.

    Still, David Tennant makes a fabulous Crawley/Crowley. And it’s clear that the main target of the work’s satire — the absurdity of fundamentalist notions about Revelations — has been hit.

  68. 68.

    geg6

    @Leto:

    Loved Linda Cardellini since the “Freaks and Geeks” days, but I really relate to the Christina Applegate character.

  70. 70.

    chris

    Will no one think of the remnants?!!!! (Est. 1973)

    The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) is an organization of lay Catholic Americans concerned about the moral crisis shaking the remnants of Christian civilization.

    ETA https://www.tfp.org/the-counter-revolution/

  71. 71.

    feebog

    Finished “Good Omens” last week. I thought it was well done. Been so long since I read the book I could not remember much about it. And Chuck Todd is a knucklehead. That is all, carry on.

  72. 72.

    MomSense

    @geg6:

    The sound of the waves is from the beach near his mom’s house. Last time I was there he FaceTimed so I got to tell him how much I like the show.

  75. 75.

    Steve in the ATL

    @chris: let’s be honest here-the Catholic Church has caused and continues to cause a great many of the problems facing the word today.

    It’s no accident that the time the Catholic Church ran Europe is know as the Dark Ages.

  76. 76.

    J R in WV

    @Mike in NC:

    Meryl Streep plays a nasty piece of work.

    It takes a great actor to properly play a truly evil character. I’m sure Streep can do that task justice, what a great performer.

  77. 77.

    sm*t cl*de

    @Another Scott:

    He took it upon himself to lecture Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for referring to the migrant detention facilities being run by the Trump administration as “concentration camps.”

    I am kind of stunned that so many of your journamalistic teledildos think that “concentration camp” is a WW2 term and therefore a Godwin violation, when both the term and the concept were introduced by the Brits, circa 1905, as part of their plan to win the Boer War by incarcerating all civlians.

  78. 78.

    geg6

    @sm*t cl*de:

    Chuckles’ excuse is that he’s a college drop out. Not that it’s actually a valid excuse, mind you. As for the rest of them, I have no idea why they’re so dumb.

  79. 79.

    Kattails

    OK slightly OT but fits the general mood: I saw a baseball cap today with “Make Orwell fiction again”. Took me a minute, then laughed– the guy forgot he was wearing it.
    Hope schrodingers cat is doing OK, I’ve been hearing flood warnings all day on the radio for parts of VT. We’re due for heavy rains tonight.

  81. 81.

    Jay

    @sm*t cl*de:

    Spain in Cuba,

    In 1896, General Weyler of Spain implemented the first wave of the Spanish “Reconcentracion Policy” that sent thousands of Cubans into concentration camps. Under Weyler’s policy, the rural population had eight days to move into designated camps located in fortified towns; any person who failed to obey was shot.

    https://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl4.html

  82. 82.

    Jay

    This makes no sense – in one breath, Chuck Todd concedes that @AOC herself says she wasn’t referring to Nazi death camps, but in the next breath he condemns her for invoking “Nazi concentration camps” – which she didn’t. As he himself conceded only seconds earlier. Sigh. https://t.co/fkuC9uuvsn— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 19, 2019

  83. 83.

    J R in WV

    @chris:

    …concerned about the moral crisis shaking the remnants of Christian civilization.

    The remnants of Christian civilization!!! There’s a sentence fragment for ya!!! Remember when the Catholics were in charge? No one expect the Spanish Inquisition!!! Torture until you confess to being a witch, worshiping Satan, whatever they want to accuse you of so the Archbishop can take your worldly belongings… Sounds Trumpian!!!

    The timing here is great. A Jesuit prep school in Indianapolis had a long-time highly regarded teacher who recently (2017) married their same-sex spouse. Archbishop threw a hissy, ordered the school to fire the teacher by declining to renew their contract.

    Jesuits told Archbishop to go pound sand, the teacher was a good teacher, so Archbishop threw them out of the Catholic school system. It is to laugh… Hard to say what Pope Frank will do, as a Jesuit himself…

    Much of organized religion today is a corrupt grift using the threat of hell to make more money. Much of the rest of it is a power trip on the part of people with no morals, like all the pedophiles in all the religions and the BSA. A tiny fraction is people trying hard to improve the lives of everyone and those folks I respect. The rest are doomed if there is a hell.

  84. 84.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jay:
    There’s this 2017 piece, that I think AOC linked (not sure, haven’t checked):
    Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz -From Cuba to South Africa, the advent of barbed wire and automatic weapons allowed the few to imprison the many (Andrea Pitzer, November 2, 2017)

    By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

    That is, “reconcentración” in Cuba was one of the stated reasons we started a war with Spain.

  85. 85.

    Kristine

    @Steve in the ATL: You don’t respond to bad reviews. They happen. And sometimes, they work better than glowing reviews to drive people to your book.

    I may have read the Hale story at the time–those sorts of tales tend to whip ’round pretty quickly. Every so often, a writer goes off half-cocked online (or offline), and it is always a bad look.

  87. 87.

    geg6

    @Kattails:

    We’re drowning here in Western PA, too. So much rain! Landslides and flash flooding and tornadoes and just regular flooding. It’s been nuts. Thankfully, our house sits high. I did have to dump some water out of the fountain on our deck. Never had to do that before.

  88. 88.

    chris

    @J R in WV: I had a Jesuit math teacher. I hated math but he made me sort of like it and he was the only priest I ever liked. Don’t get me started on nuns.

  89. 89.

    Kattails

    @geg6: So sorry to hear that, and–YIKES! tornadoes!! My local farm stand just opened the beginning of the week, some lettuce, chard, radishes, she said they’re two weeks behind on corn. We’re getting 4 days of damp/humid/rain, 2 of partly sunny, half of sun, rinse, repeat. It’s 80% humidity in the house and I should close the windows and crank up the dehumidifier but dammit, I want some fresh air & at least it’s still holding at 70º. I still don’t have potatoes in the ground. sigh.
    Take care of yourself!
    I just remembered an interesting bit of data about floods– someone asked an engineer how water could do so much damage, pick up cars, blow holes in metal and so on. The engineer said, son, do you know how much a cubic yard of water weighs? Three quarters of a ton. So don’t ever ever drive into even fairly shallow moving water, kids.

  90. 90.

    Jay

    On the bright side, the NRA purges continue:

    (Bloomberg) — The National Rifle Association suspended its top lobbyist and one of his deputies, adding further turmoil to the gun-rights group’s leadership ranks as it wages legal battles on multiple fronts and prepares for a bruising 2020 election cycle.

    The NRA confirmed Thursday that it had suspended Chris Cox, the lobbying chief who was viewed widely as a future leader of the group, and his deputy chief of staff, Scott Christman.

    https://news.yahoo.com/nra-suspends-chief-lobbyist-accused-173628312.html

  94. 94.

    J R in WV

    @Jay:

    That’s good news! Anything that upsets the NRA is a good thing. Martina whateverinka her last name is was also good for the NRA.

    @geg6:

    We’ve had a ton of rain, I watch some of it pass north of us, other storms right across us up into SW PA. 1.25 inches one night not long ago. We have friends a county west who have an annual summer solstice party. Next door close neighbors have already gone over there, I emailed to see how the creek it, you have to drive right up the creek to get to their big farm.

    That’s good for privacy, most folks from town are really reluctant to drive through any stream, can’t believe people live up there. But it’s a great annual party, and we haven’t been for several years now. It’s obviously a long drive both ways.

    I have had water slap into the windshield after washing across the hood of the pickup. Wife said “I hate the sound of the door handles going under the water!” and I said, “Yeah, and the sound of the water slapping the windshield!” it was Christmas Eve and we wanted to exchange presents with neighbors who lived up a creek. They’re next door now, much better!

  96. 96.

    Hob

    @DaddyJ: I don’t at all think they were trying to make that scene funny—at least, not the actual crucifixion part of it. Pathetic yes—the scene was played deliberately without heightened drama, no grandeur, no horrible screams, there’s just a frightened person trying to deal with something painful. The only humor there is of a very cringey kind as we see Aziraphale attempting to keep his cool and convince himself that this sordid bit of murder is all part of the great plan.

    I don’t know what your point is about Life of Brian, since Brian isn’t nailed to a cross at all.

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