Civil Commotion

The Southern Baptists, as everybody knows, think highly of procreation but strenuously disapprove of attaching too much importance to your marriage and family. Just last week, for instance, John Piper thought it useful to remind his Twitter followers that a woman who thinks her children are more important than pleasing the Invisible Wizard is serving Satan.

What do you know? Now comes a Southern Baptist pastor who is feeling a mite peevish that fewer people want to get married in church.

Yeah. I get it. This is the age of weddings being a self-expression of the couple, mostly the bride, I’d guess. Thus, weddings in barns, farms, and pastures; on beaches, in the mountains, at museums, gardens, wineries; rodeos, ballgames, roller skating rinks. The possibilities are endless.

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So, exactly how do pastors think about handling this trend of boutique, unique weddings where the Reverend is considered something slightly more than a potted plant but infinitely less than the self-actualized and celebrated bride?

Please. Every man in the universe who has been through a wedding knows perfectly well that the groom himself is merely a needful accessary; the pastor hasn’t any business feeling sorry for himself.

Like the cult-like Christian teachings about marriage itself, it’s all about control — and the pastor’s peevishness is about the loss of control. I’m glad they’re losing control, and I look forward to the day when being married in church is unusual. The greatest of Christianity’s serial indecencies is its attempted displacement of marriage as the central relationship in life, and I think this is a trend that sane and decent-minded adults should welcome.

John McCain makes quick work of The Donald’s complaint that Congresss has injured the United States’ relationship with Russia.

Didn’t Trump say during the campaign that he had a beautiful plan that would lower everybody’s premiums and improve health care? And it was going to be implemented quickly and easily? I think so, though of course I’m only mortal and have difficulty keeping track of the lies.

I don’t think McCain will ever live down his appalling selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, but I sure like him a lot better since he has become one of the few Republicans willing to stick a finger in Trump’s eye.

Well.

Y’all may recall that I pointed a few days ago toward a news account of a Christian pastor and theologian who frankly acknowledges that the entire Original Sin schtick is nonsense. Albert Mohler, some of you will be comforted to know, is having none of that reprise of the Pelagian Heresy.

So far as he goes, Mohler is correct; what Chalke is arguing is a reprise of the Pelagian Heresy. Mohler is right about much else, too.

But there’s a bigger lesson here for all of us. And it comes down to this, we have to understand that our theological worldview is not made up of a basket of beliefs. It’s made up eventually of a rather consistent way of understanding the Bible and understanding the world. So it’s not as if you can just take a doctrine, such as the substitutionary atonement, take it out of the basket and set aside without there being effects on the doctrines that remain. We shouldn’t be at all surprised that two other doctrines are clearly implicated in this most recent announcement having to do with Steve Chalke. It’s not just about original sin. It’s about his previous denial of substitutionary atonement. Those two are very clearly linked.

Right. It all hangs together, and once you establish falsity in one part of the narrative, the rest falls apart.

That’s how we know that Christianity is not true. There was never an Adam and Eve, there never was a Fall, there is no such thing as Original Sin, and He didn’t sacrifice one-third of Himself (temporarily) to a different third of Himself in order to propitiate the wickedness of His other one-third’s creation.

Part of me feels kind of sorry for Mohler. He isn’t a stupid man, but a second-rate man unable to leave behind the nonsensical, fairy tale-premises he was steeped-in from infancy. He reasons from a starting point that is childish and unsustainable; his theology is an elaborate what-if game not grounded in reality — and he lacks the wherewithal to chuck it off and stop making a fool of himself. That would be fine if he lived on a desert island; unhappily, he doesn’t. Here in the real world his failure of either character or intellect, or both, comes with a cost to others.

Richard Land is a big-shot Baptist, so the odds are pretty good that he has a serious reality-problem, but the mere fact that he thinks this is worrisome.

Richard Land: Religious Right Has ‘Unprecedented Access’
And ‘Impact On Policy’ In Trump Administration

Richard Land, the controversial former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, joined the Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” program last night, where he marveled that the Religious Right has gained “unprecedented access” to the White House during the Trump administration, including having an “impact on policy.”

We need to be clearheaded about the danger that such as Land pose to the secular ideals of America’s founding.

The Washington Post is reporting that The Donald His Very Self drafted Trump Junior’s misleading accounts of the June, 2016, meeting with a Russian lawyer, Russian spy, and sundry others.

This, it seems to me, raises a couple of obvious questions:

• What really did happen that was worth, at best, dissembling about?

• Did Kushner lie in his testimony to Congress?

This presidency must end.