Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Rubbery Tackiness

This week the attention-getting ELCA church sign proclaims:

GOD HAS A BIG ERASER

I feel a fit of the giggles coming on. Wait - I'm OK now.

My upbringing in Lutheran religious thought has trained me to grasp the context of this statement. I know it's talking about the forgiveness of sins. But will someone with no church background get this message? Will they be able to find, in any dark corner of their mind, a context in which the above message makes sense? Or will they simply be carried away by flights of the imagination - like the one that nearly triggered my giggle reflex?

It's a novel thought, I'll give you that. Never before has anyone suggested to me that a church's curbside sign should be used to swap obscure in-jokes among churchgoers. But there's nothing at all novel about the tackiness (or perhaps the scariness) of the images that may flood an irreligious imagination, once its floodgates are penetrated by God's Big Eraser.

By the way, the slogan of the week may need to be adjusted to local syntax before being used, say, in the British Commonwealth. I believe the word they use for "eraser" is rubber...

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