Civil Commotion

It seems that the wife and daughter of a pastor accused of sex-trafficking decided to shut-up one of his victims.

The wife and stepdaughter of a minister charged with child sex trafficking abducted one of his victims at gunpoint and warned her not to testify at his trial that’s scheduled to begin in two weeks, investigators said.

The pair forced the teen from her apartment early Saturday, choked her with a cord and told her to take back statements she made to investigators, according to court documents.

I pointed a few weeks ago toward a story from Missouri, where a Baptist university professor was fired for surveilling his colleagues’ orthodoxy. The authentically Godly, you will not be surprised to learn, are more than a little annoyed than a heresy hunter has been punished for wishing to cleanse the school that teaches their children.

A Baptist university in Missouri has invited independent review of teaching in its religion department after firing a professor who accused colleagues of doubting whether sinners who die without Christ must suffer eternally in hell.

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Specific questions include whether the university harbors [Harbor? As in, Anne Frank hiding behind the fake partition?] religion professors “who do not believe the traditional doctrine of everlasting punishment.”

These sorts of disputes are common amongst believers, but there are a couple of things worth noting.

First, this pack of morons think they’re having an intellectually serious conversation about a real thing that is important. Never mind that they can’t prove their god exists, and never mind that they can’t prove that the god they can’t prove exists somehow superintended the production of the ambiguous and contradictory Inerrant Bible.

Second, they worship, and hope to spend eternity with, a supernatural being who punishes people for eternity for not belonging to their club.

Theology should not be taken seriously, because theology is incapable of establishing its premises. And there is something misshapen and deformed in the character of people who lust after the eternal torment of others.

Bah.

Amid the cataracts of learned meditations upon Elizabeth Warren’s ‘likability,’ it’s nice to come across a piece that says what is needful: Warren is a quality individual whose bona fides as a champion of the middle class are in good order.

Like Moynihan, she’s a serious intellectual turned influential politician. Her scholarly work on bankruptcy and its relationship to rising inequality made her a major player in policy debate long before she entered politics herself. Like many others, I found one of her key insights — that rising bankruptcy rates weren’t caused by profligate consumerism, that they largely reflected the desperate attempts of middle-class families to buy homes in good school districts — revelatory.

She has also proved herself able to translate scholarly insights into practical policy. Full disclosure: I was skeptical about her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I didn’t think it was a bad idea, but I had doubts about how much difference a federal agency tasked with policing financial fraud would make. But I was wrong: Deceptive financial practices aimed at poorly informed consumers do a lot of harm, and until President Trump sabotaged it, the bureau was by all accounts having a hugely salutary effect on families’ finances.

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Again, I’m not arguing that Warren should necessarily become president. But she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019.

I’m aware that, in an increasingly anti-intellectual country, her Harvard affiliation will cause a lot of people to dismiss her out-of-hand as an elite; hell, I live in the blindingly ignorant Southern Baptist south and know a lot of those people.

But, please, let’s stop indulging the nonsense that smarts and education are a problem, an imponderable defect. We desperately need smart, well-educated people with middle-class instincts, and we need to put the failure where it rightly belongs — on the resolutely ignorant who resent the educated.

As we think about the worldview of those who are our elected leaders at the national level, Christians would understand that the most interesting first question would be religious identification. One way or another, the answer to that question is going to lead to just about everything else.

Albert Mohler

I wonder if Albert the Pious, and the fools who take him seriously, are aware that this is a secular country by design for the exact reason that the Founders wanted to protect their creation from those who want everything to be based on religious belief? There’s no evidence of it in his subsequent remarks, which is why the Christian Nationalists are so dangerous.