"True Stories that Live", Violent & Deadly Religious Tales by Arthur H. Townsend

[Ed Augusts]

True Stories That Live by Arthur H. Townsend. Advocate Press,
Franklin Springs, Ga., 1972. This book was no doubt a well-meaning
'soul-winning ministry'. There are 40 little stories, each of which
makes a 2, 3 or 4 page chapter. The author-evangelist's purpose is
to scare the pants off his readers, hoping that when someone is good
n' scared enough, they will become devout Christians. This volume has
a folksy feel to it, as we can see in a list of the author's other
books. Townsend is also known for being the author of:

* Tall Tales That Are True,
* Cariboo Country Saints and Shenanigans,
* Adventures of the Meadow Place Gang,
* Dew from Heaven,
* Advenures of the Meadow Place Gang, a juvenile novel of growing up,
* Morning Worship in the Cariboo,
and, last but not least,
* Sod-Busters, a book about evangelizing folks in the gloomy and
dangerous 'back woods' of British Columbia.

To evangelize people who live in remote places in the North Woods, a
man of God needs powerful examples in favor of what you're preaching.

Strange and surprising ways in which people die are lovingly described
in this book. In the chapter titled "Men Die in Strange Ways",
Harold Lee Duncan was mowing the lawn with his power mower, as his
wife and children watched. Suddenly he staggered, grabbed his side,
walked a few steps, fell and died. A half-inch piece of wire, "no
bigger than a pencil lead" had been hurled into his heart by the power
mower. His death was sudden and no doubt very startling to his wife
and children.

A 24-year old newspaper reporter, Jost Lemann, put a bottle on his
head and asked his friend to shoot it off with his .38 calibre
pistol. Smart guy, Jost Lemnn! The man carefully pulled the trigger,
but the shot missed, and Lemann died of the head wound.

A little girl, Theresa Conn, was playing 'hide and seek' with her
dog. She hid a ball on a table and hid under the table. The large
collie jumped on top of the table to get the ball, crashing the heavy
steel table down in such a way that little Theresa's head was
crushed.

Carlos Umbos was fishing in the Philippines. Police reported that he
opened his mouth to yawn, and a fish jumped in and became stuck in his
throat. The fish in his throat choked him to death before it could be
pulled out.

Mario Cianca entered a funeral parlor, and was very surprised to see a
man rise from a coffin with a satisfied smile on his face. Mario was
so shocked, he keeled over and died. In fact, it was only Pedro
Fernandez, the owner of the parlor, who had been measuring a coffin
out for size.

In one of the longer pieces, 'Death of an Atheist', the author
mentions a no-count "Christ-rejecting, godless man who held the Bible
in scorn." He lived in Elco Harbor. The evil Curly Tway "cursed God
and mocked the Christian way of life." When an evangelist, quite
possibly the author of this book, brought tracts of the New Testament
to his lumber camp, and gave copies to each of the workers, Curly
laughed and scornfully nailed his copy up to the door of the
bunkhouse. This structure had been improvidently built on a kind of
ledge between a mountain top and the waters far below. Overnight,
after this act of sacrilege, the earth shook, and most of the mountain
top fell down on top of the bunkhouse, smashing it to bits and sending
it and everyone inside, down the cliff into the sea.

Tales are here that link this work with the vast natural world of the
Northwest. There is a tale that involves the Good Friday earthquake
which was felt from Anchorage, down deep into British Columbia. There
are anecdotes about hunters attacked by crazed grizzly bears, as well
as small planes flown by drunken pilots, and adventurers wandering
for weeks in the wilderness without a compass. Chapters like "Frozen
Feet and Frozen Souls" that let you feel the expanse of the icy
wilderness.

Nevertheless, many of these stories are extremely sad! In "The
Unexpected Does Come", a little boy named Basil Lewis was very sick,
and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police boat, the Nanaimo, plunged through
rough seas to pick him up in the village of Kitkatla, and carry him
back to a hospital on the mainland, in Prince Rupert. It was a
dangerous voyage. An RCMP corporal on board the rocking vessel lost
the tip of a finger when a door slammed as the ship heaved up and down
in the storm. But, to the relief of everyone, the boy arrived safe
and sound. He was placed in an ambulance for a short drive from the
boat to the hospital. Alas, the ambulance, a very short distance from
the hospital, got stuck in the snow and by the time they could dig out
and get rolling again, the boy had died. "The long trip was
successful, the short one was not."

In another case in the same chapter, a veteran pilot, who had flown
hundreds of successful missions, was walking down the street, slipped
on a banana peel, and hit his head on the pavement, thus killing him.
Finally, a jet airliner crashed. It wasn't towering mountains that
brought down the plane, a flight of starlings that got into the jet
engines killed the people on board. In (1 Samuel, 20:3), David says:
"truly as the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, there is but a step
between me and death."

This book is a curiosity and unintentionally funny, as well as cruel.
Just like many other such works of evangelism, it knowingly or
unwittingly portrays God as a monster, but this seems to be a good
method of winning souls, by reminding people how weak and worthless
they are, and how all-powerful Go is. Of course, this kind of God
gets lips service but no true worshipers. I'm not convinced that God
is powerful and cruel. Sudden fatal accidents show how powerful and
cruel 'fate' can be, and how dangerous life on earth can be, but not
necessarily that a vengeful God, worthy of all our contempt and hatred
for putting us in such a situation, is to blame. This is the same
Puritan preaching we heard about in our history class as kids: the
sermons about man being suspended over a fire like a spider on a
thread, and that God's mercy is what prevents us all being thrown into
the flames.

The book is persistent in showing us how we'd better accept God and
Jesus his son, not to prevent some awful thing from happening to us,
but to have a hope to cling to because it seems everybody and anybody
is dealt a bad hand by a capricious, angry God. Sooner or later,
everyone get thrashed, clobbered, screwed --one way or the other! If
we grovel at the feet of the throne, maybe it will go better for us in
the end.

After all: In "He Willingly Died", Tony Allden, a young football
player, was struck dead by lightning.

Catherine Lowndes, 7 years old, was walking down the beach with her
mom and 9-year old sister when a 20 foot wall of water came ashore and
"snatched her from her mother's grasp. A twelve-hour search revealed
no trace of the little girl."

Another playful 7-year old girl, shouted "Shoot me, daddy!" as her
father held a gun that was filled with blanks. He pulled the
trigger, a bullet hit little Denice Sanders in the chest and she was
dead. The gun wasn't loaded with blanks after all.

Some religious book! The believer can't blame the human condition,
nature, accidents, planetary aspects and positions, etc., because he
believes in God and therefore has to inevitably blame God for all the
bad things that happen. So the believer becomes a fearful hater of
the very God he claims to love. God, of course, is not portrayed as
specifically cruel and vengeful, he just comes off that way, again and
again, when we see, in story after story, all the bad things that can
happen to both 'sinners' as well as perfectly good and seemingly
innocent people.

Proof that this author and his opus and the philosophy espoused by the
author ought to be thrown out as useless is easy with a perusal of
this book, and the careful reader might even come to believe Townsend
might have had a screw loose when you look at the chapter titled
'Judgment - Laughter of God, in which it says: God is not known to
have ever laughed. But the Bible says God WILL laugh -- at the Last
Judgment, when God says he will: "laugh at your calamity; I will mock
when your fear cometh." (Proverbs, 1:26) Well, why not? This God
that can hit people with unexpected lightning and look aside as steel
tables come down on the heads of toddlers. "In the day of Judgment
God will give vent to the most destructive, soul-shaking ever heard.
The foam-flecked lips of a madman, spouting forth an uncontrollable
laughter, are as nothing in comparison to the coming judgment-day that
is coming when God laughs." Of course, the Christian avoids having
God laugh at him on the day of judgment by being "washed in the blood
of the lamb."

I don't buy into this idea that God will laugh at us in the end, no
more than I even really believe in the repressive idea of "sin" and
"Judgment". The image of a God who laughs while humans suffer from the
world which God created, and the consequences of choices which nobody
asked to have to make, is detestable to my soul. This litany of
disasters and unexpected tragedies does not turn my heart or mind
toward the idea of worshiping the kind of 'God' who not only allows
all this evil to take place, but will "laugh" uproariously at the time
of the "Last Judgment". What it does do, is make me study astrology
all the more, and thereby find the transits going over people's natal
charts that coincide with unexpected events. I can see these in the
Moon, Sun and Planets, but that is a whirling mechanism, the Solar
System itself, I cannot absolutely link it to one of the monotheistic
gods, -- God, Allah, or YVHV. Of course there is something sadly
disconcerting and irreverent about all this death and disaster,
especially to innocents. The outer planets, in various changing
aspects with each other and the inner planets, are the obvious cause
of various personal and group disasters... The stock market meltdown
and the election of Barack Obama can be laid directly upon the
doorstep of an exact Saturn-Uranus opposition that occurred on
November 5, 2008. The battle between the old (Saturn) and young
(Uranus), between tradition (Saturn) and innovation (Uranus),
Republican and Democrat, wealth and poverty, is clearly highlighted in
the foreground of the astrological charts of the day. Too bad more
authors can't take these 'human interest' tales of disaster, the kind
Townsend uses, mix in some of hope and success, (which Townsend
doesn't), and look at them in astrological terms instead of this
antiquated, anthropomorphic, hateful view of God as the author of all
our individual and collective woe. Astrology is all about change and
evolution and learning. It is NOT about original sin, or the sacrifice
of his son by God Almighty to save those who believe in him, or other
such nonsense.

Is "True Stories that Live" really any way to promote a religion?
Does Christian worship hinge on the fear of God? If so, let's look
at some religions which are more satisfying, that give us a good
feeling about God and about ourselves, that don't make people cringe,
whine, and obey the rules because they are "sinners" and have been
since the Garden of Eden, and richly deserve everything bad they get
-- that is the thesis of "True Stories That Live", and I gratefully
close this book and look for a happier, brighter philosophy of life.
In fact, I know I have it already: The Hand of God as seen in the
cycles and constant evolving changes as seen in the orbits of the
heavenly bodies, but not as we see in the destructive
monotheisms. Best, ----------Ed