If You Have To Say It's Not A Golden Calf, It's A Golden Calf
ALTERNATE TITLE: Mark Burns's 'It's Not A Golden Calf!' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt.
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There was this thing that happened in Exodus 32 that really pissed God off. Among the early Bible sins, it was way up there.
“Don’t look back or I will turn you into a pillar of salt!” She looked back. “Eat all the fruit except this one!” She ate that one. (God’s early habit of testing people by giving them one thing not to do and then waiting for them to roll their eyes and do exactly that thing is a whole other subject.)
And then there was Exodus 32. The Golden Calf.
So the story, if you remember, is like this:
Back in Exodus 20 the Ten Commandments had been laid down, and the first of them were “You shall have no other gods before me,” and then “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Right there at the beginning, it’s “Don’t worship other gods” — which seems to suggest that there were other gods and Yahweh knew it, an interesting thing to explore in Gnostic tradition — AND THEN it’s “don’t make graven images and worship them, I will fuck your grandchildren’s grandchildren up, for I am very sensitive and fly off the handle easily.”
Point is, it’s really really really clear what God thinks about idolatry, especially really extremely on-the-nose idolatry.
So in Exodus 32, Moses is up on the mountaintop with God getting the law written down in tablet form, and all the people were like WHERE IS HE? So they went to Aaron, Moses’s brother, the high priest, and said “We need some weird statue gods to worship. Can you make that happen?” And Aaron was like “OK sure, everybody in the whole town, take off your jewels!” and they did, and he melted them down and turned them into a golden cow so they could all worship it, like totally normal people.
And they made a festival for the very next day, with food and drink and metallic cow worships. Like totally normal people.
And God saw it and looked at Moses like OMG what the fuck are they doing? And Moses really had to talk God off the ledge, because God was talking shit like “Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.” (He still ended up striking them with a plague.)
There’s more to it than that, but point is, making golden calves and other similar idols is kiiiiiiiind of a “Did I stutter?” situation in the Bible.
So of course here is super-Trumpy MAGA pastor Mark Burns this weekend consecrating a golden calf of Donald Trump at Trump’s Doral resort in South Florida, so that Trump’s followers can worship it.
Burns tweeted that picture, accompanied by a long, defensive explanation that can be boiled simply down to “Shut up, stop saying it’s a golden calf of Trump!”
(It is a golden calf.)
Some text from that tweet:
One of the greatest honors of my life was leading the dedication of President Donald J. Trump’s statue to the world.
Aim higher in life?
What amazes me is how quickly some people have compared this beautiful statue, created and made possible by more than 6,000 patriots, to a golden calf or idol worship.
Well, if it moos like a golden calf …
Let me be very clear.
We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.
Objection, facts not in evidence that you hateful perverts and creeps have ever so much as met Jesus Christ, give the Lord’s people a fucking break.
The Word of God says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3.
It does say that.
It also says, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.” Matthew 4:10.
Does he know that he should be arguing his side, not ours?
That is the line.
Honor is not worship.
Respect is not idolatry.Celebration is not bowing down to a false god.
Ohhhhhh, so that’s how we’re gonna split hairs. “I was only HONORING and RESPECTING Trump with my tongue up his ass. Honest, Jesus!”
Romans 13:7 says, “Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”
Lord, Lord, I swear, I was just rendering!
Giving honor where honor is due is biblical.
Bowing down and worshipping an idol is sinful.
There is a major difference.
And Trump-fellating MAGA cultists are the only ones who can see it.
This statue was not created for worship. It was created as a symbol of resilience, patriotism, courage, and gratitude. It was created to honor a man whom many may disagree with, but millions of Americans believe has done extraordinary things to make this nation stronger.
If he renders Trump any harder Trump’s dick is gonna fall off.
People celebrate athletes, musicians, entertainers, and cultural icons while they are still alive. Michael Jordan has a statue in Chicago. Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, Shakira, Ed Sheeran, and many others have been honored publicly in different ways. Yet Christians were not screaming “golden calf” over those moments.
It is true, nobody has ever accused anyone of golden calfing Ed Sheeran.
Of course, nobody much believes Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, Shakira, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Michael Jordan is a pagan king being guided by the hand of God for the glory of His kingdom, to take dominion over the Earth.
Which is a common strain of belief about Trump in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, with which holy nutfuck Pastor Mark Burns is affiliated. As is the belief that Trump has been “saved” from one or more assassination attempts, by God, for special God-ordained purposes. (Which Burns alluded to in his first tweet about the golden calf, where he also felt the need in the fifth sentence to protest that it’s not a golden calf.)
It feels like those details matter.
You may dislike President Trump. That is your choice.
But you are in gross error if you think for one second that I worship this magnificent statue or anything made by human hands.
Oh no, he worships Donald Trump, and fuck off if he says differently. He might not literally pray to Trump, but Burns’s subservience fetish for Trump is absolutely a form of particularly pathetic worship.
(Fun fact: I met this dude on the street in Cleveland at Trump’s first convention, watched him arguing with people on behalf of his conman lord and savior. He’s a weapons-grade loser of a MAGA cultist, it’s really sad to watch up close.)
Anyway, the rest of that tweet is just babbling about how he worships Jesus not Trump, not sure who he’s really trying to convince. He comically suggests, as if he’s earned our respect, that we should use spiritual discernment. As if Matthew 7:21-23 — really the entire book of Matthew, and the rest of the Gospels — isn’t quite clear about how we should go about discerning actions like those of Pastor Burns.
And he’s been babbling about it ever since. It’s not a golden calf! It’s not a golden calf! It’s not a golden calf! (It’s a golden calf.)
And now here come more Trump-worshipping cultists to babble about if you refuse to suck their golden calf’s weird Mario-Kart-mushroom-shaped dickhead, you must have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Say it some more!
As the Christian Post explains, the golden calf is 22 feet tall, including its platform, it’s called “Don Colossus” (LOL), and it is supposed to look like Trump when he got shot, shoving his fist in the air, we guess before his ear miraculously closed back up. It doesn’t really look like Trump, but don’t assume it’s because the sculptor sucks or is too blinded by their own Trump worship to provide an accurate rendering.
It’s stupider and Trumpier than that.
The sculptor, Alan Cottrill of Ohio, tells the Miami New Times that this crypto-bro-funded golden calf was a “clusterfuck” to create. It doesn’t look like Trump because Cottrill was asked to remove Trump’s signature ugly gross turkey vagina neck, and to shave off a few (bunch) of pounds. Also it was reportedly a gigantic pain in the ass to get the weirdos who commissioned the statue to actually pay the final payment for the statue. Just a great experience all around.
When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”
“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”
Trump, bless his heart, appears to think the statue is solid gold.
Trump also thinks all the tacky dementia decorations he’s put all over the White House are solid gold.
So that’s sad.
In conclusion, what have we learned today? We have learned that the new golden calf statue of Donald Trump at Doral is actually not a golden calf, but a gold-leafed calf.
We have learned that his pathetic worshippers — especially the ones who are such losers that they think the God of the entire universe would choose somebody as inferior and worthless to the human race as Donald Trump as his emissary on Earth — are going to split hairs over whether they are literally worshipping Trump or whether waking up with his ass hairs between their teeth is just something that happens after a hot hard night of rendering unto Caesar.
And finally, we learned that if you think any of this is weird, you are the one with something called Trump Derangement Syndrome, which sure does sound like an accurate description of whatever is afflicting Mark Burns.
Now hit that collection plate for more spiritually nourishing lessons!
Here’s a fucking Veggie Tales episode about idolatry.
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-Evan
These other statues Burns refers to, the Michael Jordan etc. Were they given a religious dedication? There seems to be a big difference between a statue put up on someone’s honour - most statuary, everywhere - and a religious installation. Don’t want people to think it’s an object of worship? Don’t give it a religious service
"Any man who must say I am the king is no true king."
Lord Tywin pretty much nails this one.