CHICKIE, BABY!

Blog number 325 **** 11 August 2009

When we lived in Sacramento, I used to find Chick Publications religious tracts lying on bus stop benches, in restaurants, Sac State, all over. Stamped on these tracts was usually the name and address of "Bethany Temple," "First Pentecostal," or some other evangelical Christian church.

These tracts are about five inches by three inches, 16 pages in length. I had a collection of them that I brought from Sacramento, and having mentioned them to my son Kavi, he sent me some more that he had found. I don't believe I have ever seen them here in Arizona.

A couple of days ago I saw a documentary on these tracts. I found that there are only two known photos of Mr. Chick - one from a High School yearbook, the other when he enlisted in the army shortly thereafter. He was born in 1924.

Nobody has ever interviewed him.

Seeing this documentary, I got interested in looking at them again, but I couldn't find them. I had misplaced my set and I couldn't find them. My wife, believing I had a great interest in seeing them again, bought a set for around $20. She likes to please me with purchases.

These tracts, although obviously meant to be always serious and important, inadvertently are often humorous and kinda weird. The weirdness comes mostly from Mr. Chick's belief that what you do in life has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you wind up in Heaven or Hell. What does matter is if you have taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior by the time you die. In other words, you can lie, cheat, steal and murder, as long as you take Jesus as your savior. On the other hand, if you live as a saint and do not take Him as your savior, it's down to the burning depths for you immediately upon your earthly death.

One tract I had never seen before is entitled, "Congratulations." The congratulations refers to whomever has been fortunate enough to have bought an assortment of Chick Publications tracts.

This Congratulations edition tells you how to feel when you get berated for passing out these things.On the next to the last page the caption reads, "When you get past the fear of simply laying down tracts, try HANDING one to the box boy at the store." Then there's a drawing of a box boy holding one, with a smiling excited look on his face, saying, "Wow! THANKS!." Hah!

Showing how the Egyptians drowned Jewish boys to keep down the population, two men are shown tossing something into the water that goes, "splash" and a crocodile is watching going, "Mmmm. Yum, yum."

In this same edition, this boy wants his father to put lamb's blood over the doorway because all the firstborn are going to be killed unless they have this sign over the door. He hassles his unwilling father until the father asks him, "Why should you care anyway?"

The kid answers, "Papa, I'm the first born!"

Today I was reading one of Chick's tracts about what happened to the dinosaurs. He says humans hunted them for their meat. Then Chick portrays all dinosaurs going onto the ark two by two. Then he says scientists claim that the dinosaurs disappeared because of a comet hitting the earth but, Chick says, it didn't happen that way. No, what happened was that the flood killed trillions and trillions of plants, which left earth with a scarcity of oxygen, which made the dinosaurs run slower, so humans were able to hunt them down until they were extinct.

It is never explained why humans were not affected by the lack of oxygen.

What really amazes me is though, is why Chick would engage in such a grasping of straws to explain why the dinosaurs disappeared. Boggles my mind, it does.