Eat A Dick, Joel: The Blog: This Week In Informative Religious Subway Tracts

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

This Week In Informative Religious Subway Tracts

The New York subway system offers plenty of opportunities to both urinate and read. Religious-types know this latter fact well and use the new-fangled practice of "printing" to urge random strangers to change their personal religious beliefs to match their own. Here are two that we recently came across:

1) Mrs. Taylor's Big Bag of Hybrid Voodoo/Jesus Crotchcrockery

(Click to enlarge and read)

"Mrs. Taylor and she says..." begins this flyer. Apparently we've walked in on someone in the middle of the sentence. How rude of us.

Mrs. Taylor has somehow mixed in greed, religiosity and belief in the occult to a cheesy flyer for her psychic services. So I guess this doesn't really qualify as a religious tract, per se.

2) The Anti-UPC Scanner Urgency Manifesto

(Click to enlarge and read)

As many conspiracy theories go, this flyer goes on and on. Basically, it warns you to resist barcodes of any kind, because the number 666 will be on a bar code, and Satan will come get you, etc. etc.

The fact is, Satan WILL get you. But why single out barcode technology as the gateway to his dark reign? Because it's new and scary? Well, the fact is barcodes have been in common use since the 1960s.

No, the reason why this flyer says it's evil is because it's so universal. "Today, leading-edge biometric technologies include fingerprint readers, hand-geometry machines, retinal readers, voice recognition systems, signature dynamics, and a myriad of others." Universal systems of identification are inherently EVIL because their existence sort of kind of matches up with a Bible verse:

"And he causeth all, both great and small, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads...Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man: and his number is Six hundred three-score and six." (Revelations 13:16-18)

So, anything universal that helps organize or catalog people, like say a ZIP code, or social security number is laying the groundwork for the Devil's hoary kingdom. And any system that marks your head or right hand is also suspect. So another reason to avoid dance clubs than just the ridiculous cover.