“We will love God to the degree that we recognize the magnitude of our sins and the immensity of God’s grace to forgive them.”
— Desiring God (@desiringGod) September 30, 2019
Remember: Y’all are no damn good, a putrid blot on the cosmos. Y’all were born no damn good, y’all can never be any damn good, and the only way to avoid the eternity of torture that y’all deserve is by joining the correct club.
That is all. Have a Blessed Day.
contraception turned procreative sex into recreational sex that fractured the relationship between men and women that led to promiscuity that led to no fault divorce that led to abortion that led to the destruction of the family that led to societal chaos and our current moment.
— Rae (@FiatLuxGenesis) September 28, 2019
Clearly, Rae was never taken to the monkey exhibit at the zoo as a child.
“People don’t choose what arouses them — they discover it,” said Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic. “No one grows up wanting to be a pedophile.”
[ … ]
“The biological clues attached to pedophilia demonstrate that its roots are prenatal,” said James Cantor, director of the Toronto Sexuality Center. “These are not genetic; they can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb.”
Psychological and environmental factors may also contribute, though it is not yet clear what those are or how they interact with developmental conditions.
By contrast, the common presumption that pedophiles were themselves abused as children now has less support.
This jibes with the recently released gay genes study, and upholds something I speculated here:
Some sexual abuse of minors is genuine-article pedophilia or pederasty, which probably is an operating-system switch, and I’m inclined to go along with public identification of them (a Scarlet P, so to speak). But some sexual abuse of minors appears to be a crime of opportunity …
I’m about ready to begin summarizing the recent study and attempting to translate it into accessible English, so I’ll be discussing these things a lot over the next few days. But the data point toward these big takeaways:
What turns you on was settled in the womb, before you were born.
Pedophilia and homosexuality are different things, pre-natal in origin, and unrelated. That is, homosexuality does not imply pedophilia.
We have a lot less free will than we like to flatter ourselves by imagining. I’m not ready to accept that we — me, specifically — are merely meat machines, or Jerry Coyne’s insistence that there is no such thing as free will, but the data seems to tilt in that direction.
Run out of Southern Seminary during the so-called Conservative Resurgence, a former seminary teacher visits her old stomping grounds.
Over the past year I have been working on a podcast series produced by the Baptist Center for Ethics that will narrate portions of my life as a minister, scholar, theologian, seminary president and troubler of Israel – at least the Israel that Southern Seminary became as it lurched to the right over the issue of biblical inerrancy.
I taught at Southern from January 1984 until December 1994, and then I helped several Ph.D. students finish their work after I moved to Kansas and Central Baptist Theological Seminary in August 1995. Part of the deal I struck upon departing was that I might continue their supervision. After all, if one is not in teaching for the sake of the students, one does not belong. Nevertheless, I was soon barred from using the library even though I was doing work for the school.
[ … ]
Entry to the library now required a driver’s license, and I had left mine in the car. I handed my business card to the young man protecting entrance and remarked that I used to teach here. He allowed me to enter, but soon the archivist was hot on our tail, helpful but perhaps a bit suspicious.
Read the entire thing; it’s worth your time.
I was struck by the fact that you can’t get into the library at Southern without a drivers license, and that the author’s borrowing privileges were revoked. I suppose it was just a petty harassment of somebody on the wrong side of the so-called Resurgence, but it’s a striking indicator of the smallness of the Patterson/Pressler crowd (the Resurgence’s leaders). There is a mean-spiritedness, a smallness, an abiding malice, in the Evangelical Right.
During our recent trips to the Upper Peninsula, Dawn and I walked around the Michigan Tech campus (yes, one of those creaky old-timers dragging his bored wife around). On two occasions we entered the library and some of the other public spaces. Nobody barred our way, or showed the slightest interest in us. Granted, it’s a public university and not a private school, but why should the purveyors of Eternal Truth want to keep people out rather than to make their resources available to all? There ought to be some sort of exhibit that welcomes the stranger, No? For tax purposes, by the way, Southern Seminary is organized as a church.
I have, I think, every book published about the turmoil in the Southern Baptist Convention during those years; it comprises about 1.5-dozen books. It was a mean and ugly time, and it still shapes the Southern Baptists.
Fairfax County police are investigating an alleged attack on a sixth-grade girl by three boys Monday at the private Christian school they attend in Springfield, Va.
The 12-year-old girl, who is African American, told police that three white sixth-grade classmates held her down, covered her mouth, called her insulting names and used scissors to cut several of her dreadlocks from her head during recess in the playground at Immanuel Christian School.
