Eight people were stabbed at a Detroit hookah lounge early this morning. https://t.co/sar72fUApD
— Motor City Muckraker (@MCmuckraker) March 22, 2021
One more proof that smoking is bad for you, I guess.
We [transgenders] are considered a threat — a threat to what, I will never understand. Don’t tell me it’s about individual beliefs. When I worked as a health care provider, I never denied Christians care, even though their religion has been weaponized against me. How is a doctor refusing me care when I am sick square with Christian values? What ideology was protected during the nights I spent on the street, knowing that I would be denied shelter?
The religious liberty objection to the Equality Act should be dismissed — with contempt. The issue was litigated during the ’60s, during the Civil Rights movement, when southerners argued that their religious freedom entitled them to deny blacks access to restaurants and lodging because they bear the Mark of Cain (sometimes, Ham). The Supreme Court rejected the argument, and more than once.
Basically, you can discriminate in private spaces — your home, your church — but not in public spaces such as restaurants. You can keep blacks, gays, Scientologists our of your home if you wish, but not out of your restaurant; if you hang a sign offering hot dogs for sale, you’ve got to sell hot dogs to anybody willing and able to pay.
I occasionally wonder why this argument keeps going around? Nobody my age has any good excuse for falling for it, and so I wonder if the difficulty lies in some perceived difference between our race-struggles and sex-related struggles. Everybody agrees, for instance, that skin color is innate; you are however you are born. But sexual differences aren’t so obviously innate. Is that the difficulty, innate out-of-sight traits that are too-easily dismissed as sin or cussedness or perversity? That would explain the persistence of conversion therapy, I suppose.
Only in the Christian (and Islamic) world are people expected to die to self and give God the praise that should be theirs.
Is it any surprise, then, that many Christians have poor/no self-esteem? I know it has taken Polly and me many years to regain any sort of respect for self. Hammered by a lifetime of preaching meant to destroy self-worth, is it any wonder that, to this day, we have a hard time accepting praise from others?
Gerencser is pointing here toward one of the worst aspects of Christian thought — I mean, besides its falsity. It’s degrading. The essence of every sermon ever preached in the last two millennia is this: You’re no damn good. You were born no damn good, you can never be any damn good, and the only way you can avoid the eternity of torture you deserve is to join our club.
Honestly, I marvel at what preachers get away with.
What do you know? It turns out that the alleged killer in the Georgia spa shootings was raised as a devout Southern Baptist.
Long, 21, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the three shootings.
As a teenager, Long would stack chairs and clean floors at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., said Brett Cottrell, who led the youth ministry at Crabapple from 2008 to 2017. Long’s father was considered an important lay leader in the church, Cottrell said, and they would attend morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.
“There’s nothing that I’m aware of at Crabapple that would give approval to this” …
Yes, and No, on that last. I’ve discussed often through the years the degradation that inheres in Christian thought, and it was the Southern Baptists who brought it to my attention with their inexhaustible attention to it. And sexual desire is one of the most conspicuous expressions of our utter unfitness to exist. Sex is for procreation and growing the club, not pleasure; just ask Albert the Pious, the Mightiest Theologian of Them All.
If you start out with a kid who isn’t real clear-headed, and subject him to an endless drumbeat about his worthlessness, and there is no responsible adult nearby telling him to pay no attention to some of the crazy stuff that is said in church … oh, yeah, you can definitely end up with a seething nutjob who has an unwholesome attitude toward sex and women.
It’s w-a-a-a-y too soon to know what was going on in this kid’s head when he carried-out the killings, but there is nothing misguided about suspecting loopy, heavy-handed theology rather than, or in addition to, anti-Asian animus. I’ve said often through the years — and I am not wrong — that there are proportionately more screwed-up people inside church than outside church.
Christian leaders wrestle with Atlanta shooting suspect’s Southern Baptist ties
Years before being suspected of killing eight people in a suburb of Atlanta, including six Asian women, Robert Aaron Long was active in his Southern Baptist congregation, his youth pastor said Wednesday.
There is still a lot to learn about this terrible event, but I don’t have even the slightest difficulty imagining that whatever dysfunction troubled this kid was exacerbated by the drumbeat that he’s worthless sewage who deserves eternal torture.
