My favorite Christian

I found the below on Wiki and it is absolutely hilarious.
A bit of a read but well worth it.

I declare my favorite all-time Christian to be Alois Haynes.



Wilberforce Bartholomew Haynes was born in Missing Mile, Pennsylvania in 1834 as the only child of Leland and Martha Haynes, nee Gladstone.
Leland Haynes was a Calvinist minister who also worked as a blacksmith to supplement the family income.
Wilberforce was plagued by ill health for most of his life and had his first epileptic seizure at the age of 11.
Shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth Hearst in 1853 he suffered the first of several bouts of severe depression and made an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
Elizabeth and Wilberforce had five children, four of whom died before their second birthday.
Alois, the fifth child, and the only one to reach adulthood, was born in 1860.
Two years after the birth of Alois, Wilberforce published the pamphlet that would become the basis for the Calvinist sect he was later to found; The followers of Haynes.
The followers were referred to by almost everyone as either The Banshees, but more commonly as The Wailers.
In the pamphlet, Wilberforce, who was an avid amateur Bible scholar, proclaimed that he had proof that the events described in the last book of the Bible - The book of Revelations – (which most Christians believe have yet to unfold) had already occurred in the year 534 AD.
It is not clear what methodology Haynes applied to reach this conclusion, but he became convinced of the veracity of his discovery, only altering the year to 539 AD after many more months of strenuous lucubration.
As a result of his idea about the judgment of mankind, which takes place in the book of Revelation where Jesus returns to Earth to lift the righteous believers to heaven and condemn the unrepentant sinners to hell, Wilberforce concluded that since this event had already taken place he (and everyone else) must either be in heaven or in hell. He observed much suffering (there were several outbreaks of polio and yellow fever in Southern Pennsylvania in the 1850s) and concluded that since suffering in heaven would be impossible all people on Earth were living in hell.
At first he had great difficulty finding converts to his new religion as his message was perceived to be rather bleak, even by the standards of the Calvinist citizens of Missing Mile who believed in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.
However, Wilberforce proved himself to be a gifted and persuasive preacher and over the next fifteen years his congregation grew steadily, reaching its highest membership of around 150 people by 1882.
The Wailers believed, even though they found themselves born in hell, that there still existed a possibility (albeit a very small one) to escape hell and enter heaven if they showed enough repentance for their sinful life and that a sufficient display of contrition could bring about The Lifting.

The Lifting is the central tenet of the Wailers’ soteriology. Wilberforce taught that Jesus occasionally visited hell and that a sufficient loud collective moaning and wailing could persuade Christ to have mercy on the damned and lift them bodily to heaven. For this reason all of their services were held outdoors to ensure that the Lifting could proceed without being hindered by a roof.
Wilberforce had created his own version of the Bible by making a heavily abridged, hand-written copy of the King James Bible and omitting all the parts that he deemed to suggest the possibility of salvation through good works. Especially the four Gospels were greatly reduced and, for unknown reasons, he discarded the Gospel of Luke altogether. Finally, the book of Revelations received an entire new ending which was more in line with Wilberforce’s discovery about its occurrence in the year 539 AD.
The first religious services of the Wailers were held in a small park in the center of Missing Mile at 5 AM each Sunday morning. A typical service would commence with Wilberforce reading a passage from his own Bible, followed by a short sermon on a subject of contemporary interest while the most important part would be an hour long ( or sometimes much longer ) of sorrowful crying and sobbing in the hope of bringing about The Lifting.
Not all the citizens of Missing Mile were pleased by the considerable amount of decibels produced by the new denomination at that hour of the day and the Wailers were asked to hold their services elsewhere. Wilberforce refused and only after a special town ordinance was presented to him did his group move their place of worship to a hilltop outside of town.
One of the more peculiar features of the Wailers was a practice known as ‘shuddering before the Christ’.
Wilberforce’s epileptic seizures, which he had quite often, were interpreted by his followers as a sign that The Lifting was at hand. They assumed that if they imitated the spasms and contortions, and the high pitched shrieking sounds that were brought about in their leader by his seizures, they, too, would be included in The Lifting. This collective action was referred to as ‘shuddering’.
Shuddering made for some curious scenes and the inhabitants of Missing Mile were often treated to the spectacle of 50 or more Wailers, together with Wilberforce, flailing about in the mud of the unpaved streets, if Wilberforce happened to get a seizure there.
In 1880 a schism divided the Wailers after Alois became active in the church.
Alois, who shared his father’s morose and lugubrious temperament, initially agreed with him on all the articles of faith and they often held services together. Sometimes Alois led a service by himself, usually when Wilberforce was too ill to attend.
Then, Alois voiced a conviction which would create a permanent and widening rift in the sect.
He argued that since no member of the congregation had ever successfully been Lifted, despite many years of increasingly vociferous wailing and shuddering, the doctrine of the Lifting must be false and that no escape from hell was possible. He began to preach that people should just resign themselves to their fate. Wilberforce was furious and condemned his son as a heretic and expelled him from the church. Alois, however, determined to remain a leader in the church, began holding his own services in an abandoned barn less than 200 yards from the hilltop where the Wailers met.
He named his own sect ‘The followers of Alois’ but they would become known as ‘The Howlers’. The original congregation consisted of Alois, his fiancé Mathilda Bensworth and her two sisters. For two years Alois’ followers remained numbered in the single digits since his teachings proved even less appealing to the people than his father’s since he offered them no chance for salvation at all.
However, in 1883 Alois had a revelation that would radically change his church and would greatly enhance the popularity of the Howlers.
His followers, like the Wailers, were strict teetotalers who preached temperance in every aspect of a person’s life and especially in sexual matters. But Alois became convinced that since all the people on Earth were doomed for all eternity anyway that there were no good theological imperatives left for a life of sobriety and chastity.
He began by introducing the ceremonial drinking of wine during their gatherings, and within a few months his flock had grown to 30 people. All of these converts were former Wailers and Wilberforce’s disappointment in his son became an unconcealed hatred. The ceremonial wine drinking was soon supplemented with the far less ceremonial drinking of large quantities of gin and Alois’ services grew in obstreperousness and popularity. Since the Wailers held their services in earshot of Alois’ barn (and at exactly the same time) the merriment of the Howlers was a continuous source of irritation and distraction for Wilberforce and his followers who reacted to the competing noise by increasing the volume of their wailing. This combined cacophony reached far into Missing Mile proper where some complaining citizens suggested to force the feuding sects to relocate even farther away from the town.
Alois’ sect transformed itself into what few people in Pennsylvania considered to be a proper church.
The gatherings in the barn became more and more rowdy and rambunctious and Alois himself was arrested four times for drunkenness. Several of his adherents were convicted and jailed for public nudity and various charges of indecency. By 1885 the Wailers had lost so many members to the Howlers that Wilberforce, whose depression was getting worse, found himself preaching to a group of less than two dozen faithful, the majority of them septuagenarians, while almost all of his past flock could be heard carousing and laughing with Alois.
On December 2nd, 1885, Wilberforce stormed into Alois’ barn, interrupted his son’s service and hit him with an empty wine bottle on the side of the head. A shard of glass cut Alois' carotid artery and he bled to death in minutes.
Wilberforce was arrested, convicted of murder and sentenced to life-long imprisonment in Easter State Penitentiary where he died of pneumonia in 1889.
The leaderless Howlers and what was left of the Wailers ceased to exist as a coherent congregation almost immediately. The last known Howler was Catherine Higgins who died in upstate New York in 1912 of chronic sclerosis.
There is some debate among historians whether the Howlers can even be recognized as a religion, let alone a Calvinist sect, since they lacked most of the elements that constitute a Christian denomination.
Theodore Haldane, Prof. of American religious studies at Brown University said of the Howlers: “They didn’t have a well-defined liturgy, no foundational texts, or a central deity to whom prayers could be addressed. To an outsider living in Missing Mile at that time, they would have appeared like a bunch of drunks fornicating in an old barn.”
The Wilberforce Bible can still be seen and is currently on display in the Bible museum in St. Louis, Missouri.