Civil Commotion

• Teen charged with decapitating mother in North Carolina

  Deputies in Franklin County, North Carolina have charged a teen with murder after his mother was decapitated Monday in what the sheriff described as a “gruesome scene.”

• Registered sex offender charged with infant’s murder in Boone

  A registered sex offender is behind bars on more than a million dollar bond after police charged him with the murder of a 10-month-old boy in Boone.

• Broken faith: Ex-sect members say prosecutors obstructed abuse cases

  At least a half-dozen times during two decades, authorities investigated reports that members of a secretive evangelical church were being beaten. And every time, according to former congregants, the orders came down from church leaders: They must lie to protect the sect.

  Among the members of the Word of Faith Fellowship who coached congregants and their children on what to say to investigators were two assistant district attorneys and a veteran social worker, the ex-followers told The Associated Press.

But there is only a modest danger of encountering a transgender in a public restroom so, overall I guess, it all balances out.

You don’t often see a Holy Man tweet something that exhibits with such clarity the emptiness of Christian theology. After all, Our Invisible Friend is omnipotent, or all-powerful — he could make all suffering go away in an instant. He could create in a twinkling the pets he desires for companionship. Instead, he chooses to afflict humanity with this convoluted scheme where you gamely endure suffering in this life, in hope of a better next life, and if you don’t you are tortured for eternity.

Seriously: What sort of dysfunctional mind accepts such things as true?

Bruce Gerencser reproduces a recent post from Bart Ehrman’s blog, Why I Am Not a Christian.

I told my students that the apocalyptic Jesus realized that ultimate reality and true meaning do not reside in this world. Following Jesus means to realize that ultimate reality resides outside this world, in a higher world, above this mundane existence that we live in the here and now. I stated this as emphatically as I could. Students surely thought I was preaching, that I was affirming this message. I made the statement as rhetorically effective as I could.

And I’m not sure I’ve ever said it this way before in my 32 years of teaching. When I said it I had two immediate mental reactions to what I had just said: (a) I realized that I really do think this is Jesus’ ultimate (apocalyptic point) and, even more graphically, (b) I don’t agree with that view at all.

My personal view is just the opposite. My view is that there *is* no realm above or outside of this one that provides meaning to life in our world. In my view this world is all there is.

I reproduce the image above from Gerencser’s posting because it makes a point that the average man or woman out in the pews doesn’t know — and the average pastor never admits. There is a legitimate, serious question about who the man Jesus was. There is no — NO — contemporaneous historical evidence that he ever even existed; whomever he was, he certainly was not the 1^st-century hippie-celebrity of Sunday school.

The Evangelical Right is organizing an all-out defense of The Donald.

The religious right is steeling itself for a Biblical battle on Trump’s behalf

[ … ]

His religious-right defenders see themselves as warriors in an epic battle for Christian America, not unlike the one underlying the agenda envisioned by top Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon — and as Trump hunkers down, they are invested in the narrative that Trump’s critics are satanic enemies bent on destroying him.

Well. Since I’m not a Christian, and can’t wait for America to come to its senses and get rid of The Donald, I guess that means me.

The larger context here is that the religious right is girding for a much longer fight alongside Trump. His signing of his new travel ban today will signal to the religious right that he remains a strong defender of their Christian nation. A Pew poll in February found that 76 percent of white evangelicals supported his original executive order, and a Public Religion Research Institute poll found that white evangelicals are the only constituency whose support for a Muslim ban has grown since last year.

This makes a demented sort of sense, though it is self-evidently bad for the country. For better or worse, it was the Evangelical Right that put Trump in office — and they own the disgrace of him. If Trump goes over a cliff — and he doubtless will — they and their supposed moral authority go with him.

And I don’t intend to let anybody in my orbit forget who gave us the national disgrace of Donald Trump.

Really, you’ve got to love it: Now, a prominent black pastor has weighed-in on Southern Baptist unhappiness with ERLC head Russell Moore to say … Not so fast.

If Russell Moore is reprimanded or rejected, it would be difficult for me to be able to continue to say, I’m proud and grateful to be a Southern Baptist. I am not sure how a reprimand will affect many like-minded Black Baptists who are members of the SBC. For sure, it would be disheartening and disappointing. Therefore, this question must be raised: Should minority churches in SBC life financially increase or maintain their level of giving to a Convention that appears poised to respond punitively to an entity head, who would dare speak honestly and ethically—regarding a Republican Presidential candidate and race matters?

As a purely business consideration, the SBC needs to pay close attention to pastor McKissic. The denomination is clearly in decline, and doomed if it can’t make inroads with the second largest demographic in the south — its area of greatest influence.

It must be well-known by now that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump; the question is … Why? To answer that, you need to understand that all the talk-talk-talk about love-love-love is a marketing lie. Christianity is sustained by the bottled-up resentments and malice of a defeated underclass, and they were enchanted by Trump’s overt hostility toward the educated and accomplished. He was sticking a finger in the eye of their betters. The Christianity of the Southern Baptists has more to do with cultural– and economic-affinity than theology, and they interpret Moore’s rejection of Trump as a rejection of them.

But blacks don’t see it that way at all. They rightly see Trump as a racist bully and don’t care for the sight of their Brothers And Sisters In Christ undertaking to punish a man who opposed a racist con artist who has been fined repeatedly for keeping them out of his rental properties.

With the confidence of the resolutely ignorant, Moore’s critics aren’t going to stand down; neither will blacks. Expect further decline of the Southern Baptist Convention.