Everybody loves the Miami Boys Choir
Also, Gladiator 2: Christ Killer, written by Nick Cave
I’m a bit sick this week, so I’m sorry if this edition is a little shorter than normal. Before we get started, if you didn’t have time to listen to two hours of audio features last week, I wrote up episode one of my two-part series about religion and pop-culture into an article. Have a read!
Last week I added a bunch of songs to the Modern Relics Spotify playlist. These are all from during the first twelve months of publishing this newsletter. It now contains even more bad-but-iconic CCM but also some good country music, Lil Nas X, Janet Jackson and MEGALOVANIA from the Undertale soundtrack. Have a look.
If for whatever reason you aren’t subscribed to Modern Relics yet, please do so! It’s free, and it makes me feel nice :)
MBC stans rise up
I included *the* Miami Boys Choir video in a previous edition, but since then it’s gone super viral, with people making reaction videos and fancams of the kids on TikTok and Twitter. There’s also an MBC Stans of TikTok account on Twitter that collates all the videos. So handy.
The original video is from 2007 and those kids are all grown up now, so NBC News has published an article including an interview with one of the singers. Time and Rolling Stone also covered the trend. Iconic.
Three of the four singers from the original video have joined TikTok and are making content. I think David Herskowitz might be launching a music career?
Yes, I have added the song to the Spotify playlist too you should follow, or like, or whatever is it you do to Spotify playlists.
Here’s someone singing it in Japanese.
The $13,333.33 occult artefact on eBay
Max Read published a post this week about something called a Vessel of Ritual Damnation being sold on eBay by a nonprofit that provides education about computers by repurposing e-waste.
It seems like the organization, which Moriyama says has 14 members, gets old laptops, installs Linux on them, gives them to students, and then teaches them some combination of IT and occult skills.
This post generated a lot of interest and I saw it tweeted in a lot of places. It is extremely, extremely weird. Also from what I can tell, the vessel appears to have now sold. Give it a read!
A good tweet
They reckon Pope Francis is going to retire soon
Gladiator 2 by Nick Cave
We all know Nick Cave has a complex relationship to religion, but is a big reader of the Christian Bible and writes about it a lot.
Well, I recently learned he wrote a sequel to Gladiator for Ridley Scott where,
Russell Crowe wakes up in Purgatory, and all the gods are dying because there’s this new man called Jesus Christ who is starting this new religion. … So they send Russell back down to Earth to kill Jesus and all of his followers. It was called Gladiator 2: Christ Killer.
Frankly, this sounds fake and insane, but is apparently real and you can read it online. Scott Wampler wrote a breakdown of it, in case you don’t want to read all of the primary source.
If Jesus had…
It’s surprisingly common to see New Atheist accounts post about what Christians would be using instead of crosses if Jesus had been beheaded (I don’t understand what the gotcha is here). Instead I prefer these posts about what it would be like if Jesus had been exploded.
Cat jokes
But wait there is more.