Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.
Are you one of those folks who loves God? I mean really loves God? As in enough to make the visual association between your Lord and a noted package delivery company?
Because, friend, that's what it takes to wear this garment. If you're just one of those fly-by-night, loves-God-only-enough-to-associate-Him-with-a-soft-drink types, then keep walking.
(Thanks, Galen!)
Let Go, Let Brown
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This should be popular with the crowd that worships God-as-cartoon-superhero-fetish-object.
ditto
Whatever happened to "Thou shalt not steal"?
I'm betting this isn't licensed.
Won't many who really love God actually see this shirt as a kind of blasphemy? An unacceptable mixing of sacred & profane.
OK, I'm used to copyfight threads devolving into theology threads, but this is the first time I've seen it go the other way.
You'd think they would have used the logo for Guaranteed Overnight Delivery.
No, I'm not kidding.
http://www.hankstruckpictures.com/pix/trucks/paul_kane/pk_volvo_god.jpg
This T-shirt asserts (without proof, obviously) that the big sky-daddy exists, and the best they can come up with is an appeal to sad, lonely people.
I guess this is why I'm an atheist ...
God is brown!
Jesus loves you.
As a Christian this is one of those things that makes me feel pretty bad for whoever buys this sort of crap, but I can understand why. The target audience is "Average America" who've been indoctrinated into the mindset that everything needs a logo and a t-shirt to be viable.
Not unexpected, really, considering the state this country is in.
Initiate metaphysical flame war sequence....now!
This is my biggest pet peeve both as a designer and a Christian. Pepsi doesn't knock off Coca-Cola's Advertising. You don's see Jamba Juice Ripping.... oh wait. Why should christians piggyback on other organizations hard branding efforts?
My favorite hobby that I came up with last year is sending fake DMCA takedown notices to the companies that produce these.
Plenty of American subcultures (mostly teenagers or folks who think they're still teenagers) co-opt corporate logos and other familiar imagery for pseudo-ironic purposes. Why should Christians be left out?
Go to a Phish show some time and you'll see dozens of folks wearing t-shirts that adapt corporate logos to make reference to Phish or Dead song titles or lyrics, like this one or this one or this entire site that was previously dedicated to the genre.
My high school Jewish youth group used Looney Tunes characters as chapter/regional mascots and occasionally made t-shirts. My all-time favorite (in terms of sheer teenage awesomeness/stupidity) combined the Looney Tunes mascot with certain members' jamband obsessions--it had a Grateful Dead skull logo with a Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil in place of the lighting bolt.
So if some evangelical Christians want to take a little stab at pseudo-ironic corporate subversion by inserting a little God or Jesus into some logos, I say go for it!
there's also a flickr pool of Xian t-shirt knock-offs.
Ghede @5, I'll vouch for the existence of those Guaranteed Overnight Delivery trucks.
RWMJ @6, how often do you see t-shirts that include a full proof of their slogans?
Theist/atheist is orthogonal to thoughtful/not.
Surely I'm not the only person ever to notice that the top of the UPS logo looks like Hitler's haircut. The brown color helps, too
Further evidence that people don't actually believe in god. If I knew an all powerful cloud dweller I would not make him into a plastic figurine or a rip off t-shirt, or a car decal.
It's all just a club/frat.
Redshirt77, that's seriously dumb.
Nothing beats Praying-Calvin...nothing:
http://www.stickergirl.com/images/BadBoyPrayingAtCross.jpg
^m^
#12 @Micah WHAT? How dare you desecrate the sacred Phish (going to see them in August! EXCITED EXCITED EXCITED!).
Redshirt77, may I recommend an '03 Saint Estephe to accompany your troll?
I'm not sure I even see where they're trying to go with this. Wouldn't, "What can God do for you?" make more sense, to riff on UPS's current slogan/ad copy? Or is "Always There" an older UPS tag line I'm not remembering?
http://www.boingboing.net/images/bigfooooot.jpg
WEEN>PHISH
Doesn't Christianity already have a pretty widely recognized logo? It took like 300 years just to get everybody to agree on the cross instead of the fish or the peacock or the sacrificial lamb. Do they really want to start over with some appropriated artwork?
Well this certainly explains some things... I'll bet God left my salvation on the porch and the damn neighbor kids stole it.
I guess I'm going to have to file another claim.
-- MrJM
@Theresa:
Think about it. This shirt violates at least 2 of the commandments. You really think God would be all happy about that?
Here are a few more of those t-shirts, snapped with my camera phone at an Iowa truck stop:
Starbucks - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3187/2566182042_7431081da4.jpg
Mountain Dew - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3001/2566182950_499ff726d8.jpg
John Deere - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3086/2565354199_c51882ac7e.jpg
There are kiosks in the mall around here with Christian t-shirts that riff on every and any logo you can think of.
Sprite, Hershey's, John Deere - I forget the puns being used, but any of these logos are fair game and fair use. Unless it's not fair use. Heck if I know what the laws are...
@#14
"My favorite hobby that I came up with last year is sending fake DMCA takedown notices to the companies that produce these."
You realize you just confessed to perjury, right?
Filing a fraudulent DMCA notice is a punishable offense, dude.
Filing a fraudulent DMCA notice is a punishable offense, dude.
i wish illiteracy were too. re-read his comment. Contrast 'sending...to companies' with 'filing' (with the government). Note that one is free speech, and the other is what you're talking about. Carry on.
"Theist/atheist is orthogonal to thoughtful/not."
Yeaaahh... right... funny t-shirts.
Rob @28: It's not theft; parody is covered under fair use. And designs based on simple geometrical forms and decorative typography don't qualify as graven images, which is why non-image-graving cultures tend to make so much use of them.
So: which two commandments did you have in mind?
@26: And they appropriated that logo, too.
http://members.cox.net/srice1/books/parsons/parsons.htm
Granted, it could be considered "public domain" by that time...
It could be seen as taking the lord's name in vain by some - sure it is not technically 'the name' but some folks use g*d instead of god because 'god' might be pushing the line too much. So that would be #3 and while not theft it might be able to see it as coveting (#10) - the devil as always is in the details of the interpretation of the rules and there is some pretty large and weird variances on that account
@Teresa
How do we know that god's idea of theft allows for fair use pardoy? - that is man's law
Now Guaranteed Overnight Delivery is something I could learn to worship if only I had proof of it's existence.
As for the nebulous concept of "God" I've decided to wait until someone can explain to me what it means in unambiguous terms before I move on to the matter of considering it's existence. My level of affection for said concept or for the entity or phenomenon described by said concept are matters of secondary importance.
Would that fit on a T-shirt?
Anonymous @36, you can't tell whether that shirt's motivated by slight preference, genuine covetousness, or insane obsessive desire. Neither can anyone else. Absent other indicators, we can only estimate that our old friend the Reasonable Man would take the design as an attempt at a mild joke.
As for it being a blasphemy, neither the people who manufactured it nor their hoped-for customers believe that spelling out "God" is blasphemous, and you certainly don't, so you're splitting hairs to no end. You might as well say it's an abomination because it mixes polyester and cotton.
Anonymous @37, if you'd ever thought about the question before, which I sincerely doubt you have, you'd know that theft has always been interpreted according to local law.
Stop trying. Rob's joke is dead in the water, and none of these salvage attempts are going to make it funny.
That was a joke? Looked more like an observation that some believers would find this expression of belief to be blasphemous - an observation that seems pretty likely true (given the extremes of fundamentalism and odd turns of some interpretations) and leads to an insider's debate over the technical statutes of the commandments.
TNH @34, well, the logo may have been produced through offset lithography, which violates the ban on graven images.
Also, the diagonal across the top of the shield is a shallow bend sinister, commonly a symbol of bastardy. Now I'll grant that, according to the Christian tradition (as well as some Jewish traditions), Jesus's biological mother and father weren't married, but it still seems like the sort of thing that one isn't supposed to go about reminding people of.
Anonymous @40: Excuse me for suggesting that it's a dumb observation. Do you actually know anyone who's offended by seeing "God" spelled out?
That shirt is a mall-grade lifestyle Christian tchotchke. Your theoretical person who's offended by the undisemvowelled word "God" would burn out all their circuits long before they got close enough to see the shirt in its natural environment.
Pepsi God? What ever happened to "King of Jews, King of Beers?"
I think the reference is to Neal Stephenson's book "Interface." Ask Cory...
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/10/interface-neal-steph.html
@42 Teresa
Do I know any - no, not on a personal level.
Have I encountered them - yes. I have no idea how close they get to malls or what happens if they do but they most certainly walk among us. My suspicion is that most of them realize fighting it in the real world is a lost cause so they just frown upon it and avoid it in their own usage.
If this is outside your real world experience - use this internet thing and you will find more than ample evidence of all sorts extreme positions. Often provided by those espousing it. There are real world snake handlers and you find the idea of prejudiced 'g*d' users difficult to swallow?
Sure, that sort of view (the shirt is blasphemous) may not be mainstream but it is hardly beyond the pale and those who would take it have numbers that are, if anything, far too great. I'll go along with your interpretations on the commandments as preferable here but that doesn't negate the fact that there are those who take other positions on them. So why is it a dumb observation? Just because it appeals to views other than yours?
Or perhaps the theoretical person is a Jew, who would also likely take insult at the name being printed on a t-shirt that would almost certainly be 'defaced' and ultimately discarded:
http://www.wisegeek.com/why-do-jews-write-g-d-instead-of-god.htm
Jesus Caves
http://shop.cafepress.com/design/34972310
These sorts of shirts were around long before my un-conversion from Xianity 2 decades ago but even then as a young bernagin, I felt they were embarrassingly cheesy at best and shamefully exploitative at worst.
I sincerely doubt the entity pocketing the dough from most of this Jesus paraphernalia is any kind of believer in anything but mammon...
sweet... delicious... mammon...
Why stop with delivery companies/Christianity?
Cthulu: the fresh maker.
Ganesh: Put an elephant in your tank.
With a name like Scientology, it has to be good.
and so on...