I really want to know – and I am being completely serious here, this is not a rhetorical question – do you know anyone whose faith was changed or otherwise influenced by unsolicited religious cartoons? Because it’s hard for me to fill in the dots between this interesting piece of mail we got during the summer and sincere religious awakening.

Behold these offerings from gospelpostcards.com, sent so that they might give us “the courage to trust in Jesus” (and click on each image to see the larger version): An arrogant man smoking a cigar is smugly expecting to get into heaven because his sins were fairly venal. God choinks that notion right out of his head because he hasn’t been saved but drops him back on Earth so he can try again because God’s cool like that. He reads the bible and is now ready to die and go to Heaven.

And that this lunatic piece of mail is laminated better than a Denny’s menu just makes sense. This won’t be biodegrading any time soon, which is a blessing in surprise.  Truth like this needs to be preserved at least long enough after the eco-collapse so that the aliens tracking our progress as a species will understand what exactly went wrong.

As I considered these bizarrely flippant cartoons, I was reminded of a piece of my childhood. When I was a little girl, there was a woman on my street who gave out homemade treats for Halloween, like popcorn balls wrapped in wax paper. Because the whole “razors in apples” canard was getting its legs, of course no parent would let their kids eat those treats so eventually very few kids went to her house on Halloween. However, even though she tossed any treats I received from the neighbor, my mother always made me go trick or treat at her house, because in addition to the homemade treats the neighbor also gave out Jack Chick tracts, as well as a nickel or a dime, which I think was meant for kids to give to UNICEF.

If you are unfamiliar with Jack Chick and his tracts, they were small cartoon ‘zines with horribly exaggerated ideas about how evil society is and how doing any small thing – like participating in role playing games, smoking a cigarette, or watching horror movies – can lead directly to a life of absolute depravity and ensure permanent residence in Hell. The official Chick tract site still has tracts you can order to include with candy when innocent children come to your door on Halloween. Even the watered down tracts meant for children are terrifying, so really they are appropriate to give out on Halloween, the scariest of the scary days.

My mother loved those Chick tracts. She was a Christian, with a reasonable level of respect for Christian sects, but she found Chick tracts so hilarious that she made me go to that house even though I felt weird doing it. I was pretty much the only kid on the street who went. In retrospect, I bet it made the lady happy that at least one kid came to her door, and even though she was the sort of woman who gave Chick tracts to children, she still went through the motions of making nice treats. She was just stuck in the 1950s when giving out homemade fudge was acceptable and was blinded to the horror of those tracts because they were cartoons, like that lovable Charlie Brown and his well behaved coterie of friends.

My mother cackled over those stupid tracts, absolutely grooving on how lunatic they were. Jenny took a toke and ended up strung out on heroine and a prostitute in under a week, or Johnny smiled too long at the quarterback during homeroom and found himself on the wrong end of a glory hole in a truck stop in Peoria. Of course that’s just an exaggerated paraphrase of the content in such tracts, because I can’t recall exactly what they all said, but I do recall one of the tracts’ content fairly clearly because it just added to my fear of being watched. “This Was Your Life” features a sinner getting mowed down by Death (complete with a scythe) and being taken to heaven where he was forced to watch as his entire life was played out, projected on a wall like a home movie. God had scenes from his life to show him the extraordinary amount of sin he had engaged in since birth. He played with a dragon plush rather than a sweet little doll. He told a dirty story in junior high. He glanced at a pretty woman once. He wondered who was winning the football game while he was supposed to be contemplating the sermon in church. He was summarily cast into Hell, and the tract helpfully gave humans a better path to follow to avoid eternal damnation.

So I got to marry God’s continual home movie camera poised over me to record every time I told a fib with my fear of some lunatic living in the walls of the house, watching my every move. I tend to think I would have had an easier childhood had I just worried about nuclear war, the boogeyman, and random perverts.

And all of this reminds me of the infamous “Lisa” Chick tract. If you’ve managed to make it this far in life without knowing about “Lisa,” you’re truly blessed. It’s sickeningly awful, but I’ll paraphrase it for you anyway. You see, a little girl named Lisa had the misfortune of belonging to a working mother and alcoholic unemployed child molester father. Because his wife has to work to support the family, Dad feels emasculated and drinks even more and begins to have sex with his very young daughter, Lisa. His neighbor can hear him molesting Lisa through the shared wall of their townhouse and says he won’t tell if he gets a shot at Lisa, too. Then dad has to take Lisa to the doctor, where he learns she has a sexually transmitted disease. The doctor knows the dad is raping Lisa, but instead of calling the police or beating Dad to death with his bare hands, he preaches about Jesus and BOOM! Dad and Mom embrace the word of the Lord and promise Lisa she will no longer be forced to sexually service adults, hurray!

I share all of this because it means I can also share Alice Donut’s take on the Lisa tract in their video, “Lisa’s Father.”

If you need me, I’ll be playing Dungeons and Dragons and smoking a cigarette while watching The Craft.