Civil Commotion

And, besides, y’all are no damn good. What business could you have making decisions about your life?

Never forget this: 1^st-century Christianity was a cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult.

Bishop Eddie Long, the acclaimed Pastor of Atlanta’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and a noted pederast, has died. He was 63.

Ho-hum. He was just another con artist, though more successful than most, and his passing is noteworthy for only what it tells us about religion.

Long went to New Birth when the church had just 300-some members; today, it has more than 25,000 members, with campuses throughout the United States. In 2010 he was enveloped by allegations of sexual relations with several young men from his church, and the scandal followed a course long-familiar to connoisseurs of pious flim-flammery: Denial, denial, denial, acknowledgement of ‘misunderstandings,’ a settlement using the money given to the church by deluded believers.

All accompanied, of course, by swaddling Bishop Long in the loving bosom of his church family and condemnation of the young men he groomed and victimized.

Tom Rich, I think, gets it exactly right:

Long was a despicable human being for sure. He used a perversion of Christianity to get his hands on people’s wallets and their genitals. But those who supported Long with their money and love and adoration also share in the blame – they helped form this man into who he became and granted him the power and provided the venue for his abuses.

Ask any police officer, journalist, lawyer, social worker, doctor — anybody with first-hand professional experience of abuse of any kind in the church environment — and every last one of them, no exceptions, will tell you the exact same thing: Congregations all-but-invariably rally to the pastor, even when he admits wrongdoing, and victimize his victims a second time.

There is a reason why this is so, and it tells you something about who is sitting in church. Healthy adults simply do not sit still for the cult-like degradation embedded in Christian ethical teaching — and, yes, I am saying what I seem to be saying: However they wear it or hide it, there are mostly damaged, screwed-up, insecure people with grave character problems sitting in church. And that’s before you get to the part about the second-rate minds that accept those crazy stories about talking snakes, an Invisible Friend who deeds-over property in the Middle East, and a global flood.

Bruce Gerencser points toward a piece written by a pastor’s daughter that is well-written but painfully oblivious. It ends with this arresting declaration:

The narrative of self-fulfillment is an enemy of the gospel. [ … ] Parents, teach your children life really isn’t about them; it is about Jesus.

That’s not bad, and analogous to my frequent criticism that the aim of Christian teaching is self-annihilation — the eradication of self-interest and self-direction because the self is evil.

So, to all of you who think I read things into sermons that aren’t actually there, I haven’t misunderstood Christian teaching; I have rejected it as untrue and affirmatively degrading.

As the loony right makes haste to dismiss any news report it doesn’t like as ‘fake news’, am I the only person who finds himself snickering at the similarity between the alt-right’s faux indignation at fake news and certain prominent evangelicals’ horror at gay sex? We have here, ladies and gentlemen, yet another case of the lady protesting w-a-a-a-y too much.

The Trump campaign directly benefited from fake news. Everybody knows that. It is news accounts of fake news attacking Hillary Clinton that made it a subject.

In the matter of that opposition-research dossier, the New York Times says knowledge of it, and its contents, were commonplace throughout D.C. in the last months of the campaign.

Its existence and contents became known by some Washington leaders last fall, while the presidential campaign was still going on.

CNN and other news organizations had been investigating the claims about Trump for several weeks but the report did not become public knowledge because those details could not be confirmed. Intelligence officials had presented the claims in a report to Trump but said that they, too, had not determined whether or not they were true.

CNN would not have done a story about the dossier’s existence if it hadn’t learned that intelligence officials had considered it so important that it told Trump about it, the network’s Wolf Blitzer said on Thursday. The CNN story was posted shortly after 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday.

Note that: The very news media which are now accused of fake news passed-up publishing accounts of it because, unlike Trump, they have ethical standards.

But, then, the question arises: Once CNN moved the story, didn’t they know that publication of the dossier, including the creepy undocumented story about the two hookers, became more or less inevitable? After all — every journo in D.C. had a copy.

I don’t know what was in Jake Tapper’s head when he published but … I think so. Yeah — he probably knew that somebody would go with it.

I don’t have a problem with that. We’re talking about the president, after all. Nobody is going to hold the secret of that funny little hobby over his head.