Religious Crackpot Of The Month, October 2008

First of all, I realise that technically it is November.

I had vaguely intended to give October’s award to this guy, a crazy US evangelical type who calls himself “The Hon. James David Manning, PhD” as if that’s a remotely plausible title and operates under the impressively crap slogan “All Jesus, All the Time”. I was shown the site by Friz, who linked me to a delightfully silly video of Manning explaining that the best way to defeat Obama was to refuse to refer to him by his real name, and instead to call him “TAAARZAAAN!” every time as if anyone at all would know who or what you were on about if you did. My second favourite part of the clip was his utter failure to follow his own rule even for the few minutes of video. My favourite part was the way he kept repeating the phrase “half-black, half-white, raised by an ape” as if people were going to believe that Barack Obama was raised by an ape if he did. (Strictly, of course, Obama was raised by a human, and a human is a type of ape, but Manning doesn’t strike me as someone who will accept either of those things.)

Sadly, the video has been taken down. So I thought maybe I’d give it to Tim Hastie-Smith, who thinks that we need faith schools to defeat the X-Factor, because of course policy that makes a modicum sense is so 80s.

But then, Hastie-Smith seems (other than his name) to be a rather dull man, whereas Manning is relentlessly mad. For one thing, he’s written a pamphlet called “Focus On Purgatory”, which is the same pamphlet as “Focus On Heaven” but it takes ages to download.

Actually, I can’t read Focus On Purgatory, because it costs $12 and there’s no amount of dollar devaluation that could make that sound like a good deal. Presumably, charging $12 for a shitty pamphlet is one of the tips in his other book, “God’s Business Plan”. Which is a shame, because apparently the pamphlet “offers concrete proof to the validity and purpose of purgatory”.

He also seems to have a hand in schooling. (“All Excellence, All the Time”. Honestly, it’s only slightly less stupid than Mr Burns starting a religion.) Here is the timetable (PDF):

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet I’m not going to use it as an argument against faith schools, because what we really have here is an argument against idiot schools. There does seem to be one advantage for the students, though.

The line between parody and reality is thin and it’s caught me out before (although I would argue that once something is indistinguishable from that which it aims to lampoon, that makes it a bad parody), but this would seem to be real even if lesson three is a rickroll. So I’m giving him the award anyway, hilarious Tarzan video or no.