Saturday, January 17, 2015

I'm Sure, Somehow

MARION3

Boy Says He Didn't Go To Heaven; Publisher Says It Will Pull Book

Nearly five years after it hit best-seller lists, a book that purported to be a 6-year-old boy's story of visiting angels and heaven after being injured in a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up.
The book's publisher, Tyndale House, had promoted it as "a supernatural encounter that will give you new insights on Heaven, angels, and hearing the voice of God."
But Thursday, Tyndale House confirmed to NPR that it is taking "the book and all ancillary products out of print."
The decision to pull the book comes after Alex Malarkey wrote an open letter to retailer LifeWay and others who sell Christian books and religious materials. It was published this week on the Pulpit and Pen website.
"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," Alex wrote. He continued, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."
...
Last spring, Beth Malarkey wrote a blog post stating, "Alex's name and identity are being used against his wishes (I have spoken before and posted about it that Alex has tried to publicly speak out against the book), on something that he is opposed to and knows to be in error according to the Bible."
She added, "I am fully aware of what it feels like to be pulled in. There are many who are scamming and using the Word of God to do it. They are good, especially if you are not digging into your Bible and truly studying it. They study their audience and even read 'success' books to try to build better and bigger ... 'ministries/businesses.' "
If only there were some kind of...lesson...one could take from this.

Something about... never trusting hucksters who use religion to scam the stupids out of their money and votes and loyalty.


But in the end, the Roger Ailes' of this world just reach into their heads, flip the RESET button, order them to unremember what -- just moment ago -- they had sworn they believed with all their soul, and send them once again out into the world to charge into yet another suicidal battle against their own best interests.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

Which is why we dirty hippie are stuck with the unhappy job of beating them to their knees.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

6 comments:

2xFooled said...

Sounds like a bunch of Malarkey to me, Alex.

Kevin Holsinger said...

Good morning, 2xFooled.

I love this story solely because of that surname.

"Wait, you mean a guy named Victor Von Doom became a supervillain called Doctor Doom? Nobody could have seen that coming."

Enjoy your day.

---Kevin Holsinger

Unknown said...

For some reason this story does not surprise me in the least.

Also, thanks for the Face In The Crowd clip. That movie was brilliant and prescient and should be mandatory viewing in college "media" classes.

Neo Tuxedo said...

"But in the end, the Roger Ailes[es] of this world just reach into their heads, flip the RESET button, order them to unremember what -- just moment ago -- they had sworn they believed with all their soul, and send them once again out into the world to charge into yet another suicidal battle against their own best interests."

*nods sadly* The best metaphor I can think of, apart from the "Coordinate" in the popular manga Attack on Titan, is the Grebulon ship from Mostly Harmless, and the meteorite that hit it in exactly the right way to knock out the sensors and processors that would have enabled it to detect the damage caused by the meteorite. (Thinking about that whole incident, I only just now figured out that it must have been temporally reverse-engineered by the Guide Bird.)

Mister Roboto said...

Which is why we dirty hippie are stuck with the unhappy job of beating them to their knees.

And in which endeavor we seem to almost always lose. I'm not sure why that is, but there are likely many reasons. The biggest one probably is that there just way too many st00pids here on account of Europe dumping so much of its flotsam, be it genetic or cultural, on the good ol' US of A.

Anonymous said...

"Liars for Jesus". People who believe it's okay to make shit up out of whole cloth because it's a pious lie, because it's spreading "TEH TRUUUUTH!!!", because the Magic Sky-Daddy will forgive them.

Not one thought spared for all the people suckered into wasting time and money on this. Not one - because they don't matter.