Confession time: My guilty pleasure is Christmas music. I have over a day's worth of the stuff.

And, here's where it gets really disgusting: My other guilty pleasure is lead singers who have endeavored to copy the approximate vocalic tone of Darius Rucker. (Yep, that's Hootie if you were keeping track).

Finally, and bear with me here this is a dark, dark secret; I LOVE what happens when you cross the two: Christmas music sung by artists who sound like Darius Rucker. You may commence your chiding now.

Now, in fairness to myself I have been able to stave off buying 3rd Day Christmas albums, mostly because I find the 3rd Day clan (Klan?) and their ilk to be theologically questionable, at best--and downright heretical at worst. But this past weekend I picked up a new holiday album by Casting Crowns. I haven't been following CCM in quite some time, primarily because I find it to be tasteless and devoid of anything which might be considered, well, good, so I wasn't aware that this band was a CCM act. I started to get suspicious when during the fourth track (While You Were Sleeping) I started to hear about the rapture (or at least some theologically devious variant thereof.)

At this point I was curious so I checked out their website. And, lo and behold they decided to foist upon the world a "band blog". Great, I thought, let's take a trip inside the collective mind of a CCM band. One post in particular caught my attention. It seems that Casting Crowns website had a number of issues with hackers who somehow screwed with the content of the site. I don't know what it was, but it pissed the designated band blog-diety off something fierce.  Must've been really heretical.

Instead of taking the low road and, you know, updating security, Juan, the blogger in question, opted to take the Internet-high-road and started a flame-war with the hacker. Here's an excerpt of some Internet gold:

Now to the real issue.  I imagine that even though you're down in your mom's basement at 3 or 4 in the morning quietly giggling at the ever so clever time you're having invading other people's lives and sprinkling filth all over it, it doesn't seem to fill that hole you had when no one showed up to your 41st birthday party.  I'm sure it gives you goose pimples of excitement at the great adventure you're having...you know, doing things you're not supposed to do, but allow me to make a list of things that might fill your life with that sense of adventure that eludes you.

   1. Go outside - the big light might shock you, so bring protective eye gear

   2. Talk to a girl - might want to work up to this.  Try another human first

   3. Play a sport (hint: it won't involve pushing buttons)

   4. Plant a garden - that stuff under the grass is called "dirt", wait, do you know what grass is?

   5. Adopt a pet - No, dragons don't exist, try a puppy.

 Like I said, Internet gold.

Yes friends, these are the folks whose albums we want our kids to buy, the folks our youth groups idolize, the ones we trust to teach our children to follow Christ. Keep this in mind the next time you decide to toss your kid's U2 album in the oven.