RIP Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell has died at the age of 73. Some of you will be family with him and his work. Here is a retrospective of his life as a hugely influential preacher man. Any comments to stay in this thread.
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Recent entries
May 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
The JesusLand factory has no problems churning out many more fundie preachers in the years to come. For every death of a prominent fundie preacher, 10 more are groomed to prominence.
Considering the phenomenal growth of fundie churches in Australia (with considerable help from JesusLand fundies), we might as well declare ourselves the 52nd state of JesusLand….CanuckLand being the 51st).
May 16th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Not so fast their. We don’t have room on our flag for 52 stars. would you consider becoming part of Wyoming???? I htnk Canadia is being loaned to Maine.
May 16th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
“Westboro Baptist Church…
….Tuesday, May 15,2007
NEWS RELEASE
WBC to picket the funeral of Rev. Jerry Falwell - at
Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg, Virginia -
in religious protest and warning: “God is not
mocked!,, Gal. 6:7. God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers!
Ergo, God hates Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, Pat
Robertson, and all such Arminian heretic preachers -
from fundamentalist evangelicals to openly gay
Episcopalians and pedophile Catholics - all of whom
have created the Satanic Sodomite Zeitgeist wherein
America has irreversibly gone the way of Sodom.
There is little doubt that Falwell split Hell wide open
the instant he died. The evidence is compelling,
overwhelming, and irrefragable. To wit:
1 Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist when he
was a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri; and
sold his soul to Free-Willism (Arminianism) for lucre.
2. Falwell bitterly and viciously attacked WBC
because of WBC’s faithful Bible preaching - thereby
committing the unpardonable sin - otherwise known
as the sin gainst the Holy Ghost.
3. Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews,
pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing
compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and
backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler,
Etc. All for lucre - making him guilty of their sins.”
From http://www.godhatesfags.com/fliers/may2007/20070515_jerry-falwell-funeral.pdf
May 17th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Bene has found the best Jerry Falwell eulogy.
May 17th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
‘RIP Jerry Falwell”
I think I will rip Jerry Falwell. Thanks for the opportunity.
I’ve been monitoring the blog reactions to Jerry Falwell’s passing and it’s safe to say that the unrestrained glee over his passing is near universal.
The joy has even surpassed that which followed the execution of Saddam Hussein.
Also noteworthy about Falwell’s death is how it differs from the public’s response to the downfall of Ted Haggard.
With Haggard the reaction was generally a restrained ’serves you right’ mixed with a bit of sympathy from some unexpected quarters.
Not so with Falwell.
I’ve been seeing a lot of ‘burn in hell, bigot’ over the past 24 hours. One blogger is even posting regularly every few hours, celebrating the fact that Falwell is STILL dead.
For those unfamiliar with Falwell’s work, as a Christian leader he had an uncanny knack of backing the wrong horse in the ideas stakes, and then having to back-track later.
He supported segregation and later recanted. He said AIDS was God’s punishment of homosexuals and that the gays, feminists and abortionists were to blame for the September 11 attacks of 2001.
And this month he again refuted the concept of global warming in the face of growing consensus among scientists of its existence.
His faith and his beliefs were viewed through the prism of conservative political ideals, thus he was barely tolerated by many fellow Christian leaders and was despised by political opponents.
But the reality was that Jerry Falwell could not exert any influence without a support base.
His death reveals why he enjoyed that support.
“To the Liberty University family, Dr. Falwell was and still is a legend. Yes, he was the chancellor, but only to the administration. To the students he was something much different. He was Liberty University’s cupid. He was the driver in the suburban that could be spotted chasing any student down the sidewalk. He was the fist that would frequently, without excuse knock the wind out of any male on campus. He was grandfather to everyone. He was the loud laugh across the room. He was and is the one and only “Jerry” who’s name would be chanted upon walking in vine’s center before convo. He was the bear hug that could not be escaped.
To me… Dr. Falwell was so much more. I had the distinct privilege of knowing him personally. I have received many headaches from his monstrous Bible that was pounded on my head on several occasions. I have been left in several awkward positions when I was playing the drums in front of thousands, only to have Dr. Falwell grab one of my drumsticks in the middle of the song and carry it off, laughing all the way. I could see him smile from across the room as he walked toward me, knowing that a prank toward me, or funny story about me had just popped into his mind. He was the ultimate prankster.”
Others close to him tell a similar story. He even became good friends with Larry Flynt, the pornographer whom Falwell had earlier unsuccessfully sued.
That Falwell desired to follow Jesus is unquestionable. Many testify that he would give a hand up to the downtrodden, but there was one place where Jesus went that Falwell and other fundamentalists could not follow.
Jesus would initiate grace where there was none. Falwell could only respond with grace, but not initiate it.
A fundamentalist must always be prompted or reminded by a person or a situation to offer grace. For some reason, whether because of a cognitive dissonance with their own internal beliefs, or a fear of retribution from those who support them, they cannot take the first step in offering grace and hope.
And so Falwell in his decades of ministry failed to proclaim the gospel of Jesus’ forgiveness of sinners, and instead whether intended or unintended, preached a false gospel of salvation by the law.
But it was a law that he didn’t keep. He died a glutton, killed by his love for food and his refusal to diet that left him substantially overweight.
His legacy is an American church divided by politics and largely unable to comprehend and articulate the gospel of justification by faith in Christ’s atoning blood sacrifice.
What will the passing of Jerry Falwell mean to the Body of Christ?
One blogger sums it up.
“With Jerry gone, maybe now it’ll be easier to be a love-thy-neighbour Christian.”
May 17th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
And another view, can’t help but love her style
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55732
May 17th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
she gives me the heebi-jeebies
May 17th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Love her or hate her, she has a brilliant sense of humour though not everyone’s taste. Worth checking some of her archives.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:27 am
She’s scary, but it just goes to show there will be plenty of people rushing to jump into the throne.
I was surprised to find that Jerry Falwell was involved in spreading the “Clinton bodycount” conspiracy theory. This stated that more and more people were dying the closer they got to the truth of Clinton’s horrible crimes. Falwell appeared on a video interviewing an anonymous journalist who’s identity couldnt be revealed because he feared for his life - of course the journalist turned out to be one of Falwell’s cronies. When I was working in the US in 1998, a lot of people that I worked with believed this theory and were passing it on.
This kind of misinformation and manipulation by religious figures seems to be much more common in the US - mainly I think because it is much more important for US citizens to vote in the correct ways and support the right causes. Over here on our little pacific islands it dosent matter much what we think - we just have to follow the big leader.
May 18th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Ah, Jerry. So often he personified everything that was wrong about right wing Christian conservative politics (”You’re anti-abortion and anti-gay? Then you must be able to lead the free world!”). His narrowing of politics down to those two factors will take years to overcome. That being said, it’s hardly a good thing for some bloggers to gloat over his death. As to Lance’s reference to a blogger making reference to Falwell still being dead…the thought makes me shudder…does that mean there is the possibility of a zombie Falwell?
Would that be like the zombie Flanders from the classic Simpsons episode????
May 18th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
you’re right bluth people shouldn’t gloat
but it’s worth asking…would a zombie falwell be so very different to the real one??
May 18th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Hitler or Falwell!
Anyone want to play a little game called Hitler or Falwell, a simple game of Godwinism, in which you guess who said…
1. My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter.
2. This ‘turn the other cheek’ business is all well and good but it’s not what Jesus fought and died for.
3. Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith…. We need believing people.
4. I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
5. Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
6. We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
7. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press. . .we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.
8. This the national government will regard its first and foremost duty to restore the unity of spirit and purpose of our people. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our people and state, under its firm protection….May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight, and endow us with the trust of our people.
9. Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.
10. We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism … we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today .
Post your best guesses and tomorrow I shall provide a link to the site where I found this (and where the answers are)
May 18th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
It took 12 comments for a thread about the death of a television minister to break Godwin’s Law.
May 18th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Ah, but if you note the introduction to that post,
it is aware of its own Goodwinism, so I posted it as a tongue in cheek ‘postmodern’ intertextual, self-referential comment on the thing of the stuff
May 18th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
ahh, one of those.
May 19th, 2007 at 11:40 am
OK i’m going out on a limb here and guessing….both???
May 19th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
It seems like no one cares about the answers to my Goodin’s law breaking post. But I promised answers none the less. So letting my yes be ys,
here they are
1. Hitler
2. Falwell
3. Hitler
4. Falwell
5. Hitler
6. Hitler
7. Hitler
8. Hitler
9. Hitler
10. Falwell
and I stole the post from
http://nom-de-grr.livejournal.com/51142.html
May 20th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I didn’t post because, sadly, I knew I couldn’t tell the difference.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:49 am
Now that is a sotry I’d like to hear more about. I of course am aware of the falwell/flynt law suit - but that they bevame friends? That I did not know - what has been larry’s take on the death of his adversary?
May 21st, 2007 at 10:07 am
For you Greg, Flynt’s statement on the death of Falwell
“The Reverend Jerry Falwell and I were arch enemies for fifteen years. We became involved in a lawsuit concerning First Amendment rights and Hustler magazine. Without question, this was my most important battle – the l988 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Jerry Falwell case, where after millions of dollars and much deliberation, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in my favor.
My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in
California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.
The most important result of our relationship was the landmark decision from the Supreme Court that made parody protected speech, and the fact that much of what we see on television and hear on the radio today is a direct result of my having won that now famous case which Falwell played such an important role in.”
May 21st, 2007 at 10:23 am
from http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah5356.shtml
and from http://newsbusters.org/node/12807
May 21st, 2007 at 10:28 am
it seems I post too late
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Flynt and Falwell…now there’s a conversation worth eavesdropping on! What on earth did these two talk about?
Flynt: So, how was your weekend?
Falwell: I preached. And yours?
Flynt: Oh, just the usual. Porn.
Falwell: OK…(tumbleweed blows by. If at Flynt’s house, followed by a scantily clad nurse chased by a pool boy). How about that weather?
Flynt: Don’t start moralising!
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I actually saw Larry Flynt on Larry King in the days after Falwell’s death and he really did seem genuine in his admiration and in his friendship for Falwell
May 25th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
“A Liberty University student, arrested for allegedly planning to attend the funeral of Reverend Jerry Falwell with bombs, says he was upset about [Fred Phelps’] Westboro Baptist Church.
The Topeka-based group protested the conservative evangelical leader’s funeral.
19-year-old Mark Uhl was arrested on Monday after police found several homemade bombs in the trunk of his car.
Uhl told police he made the bombs to stop the Phelps’ from disrupting Falwell’s funeral.
Police say Uhl gave no indication of intent to cause harm.”
From http://www.49abcnews.com/news/2007/may/23/liberty_university_student_upset_about_westboro_ba/