Gently Hew Stone

Do you have your post up on facebook yet mocking R-day? I do. I wrote it last night. I have to admit, I stole it from another staff member and modified it, but I do think it’s rather clever:

Lesson plan for Monday (written on board): Mr. Hendricks was raptured. All students who were not and are not currently burning/suffering, please read pages…

Of course today there are about 100,000,000 status updates regarding the end of days, fire insurance, not being able to wait for all the looting, etc. As I perused many clever (and not so clever) updates, I couldn’t help but feel just a little bad for what I myself had written.

I don’t know much beyond a couple of media snippets about the groups that are trying to push today as the day that flaming Armageddon will rain down on sinners and apostates, but CNN’s coverage of them is beyond incredulous. The only thing they’re missing is a “Countdown to Nothing” widget on their homepage. The opinion of the general public ranges from ambivalence to extreme condescension. Do I believe that today is the day that all those guys with the “The End Is Nigh” and “John 3:16″ signs in Ghostbusters was talking about? No. But do we have to go out of our way to mock what seems like the outlandish beliefs of others?

I say this, because only a couple of weeks ago, Google was all a twitter with the news that “The Book of Mormon” was nominated for what could be a record number of Tonys should they take home every award. Trey Parker and Matt Stone (yup, the South Park guys) have put together this little ditty, and if their track record for sacred cow takedowns holds true, I’ll bet Mormons come out looking really, really stupid.

My only question is, will we be quite so glib if the day after the Tony awards, critics have things to say like “The Book of Mormon is hard to believe as a sacred text, but boy, does it make a GREAT musical!”