Civil Commotion

By and large, the non-Islamic Abrahamic religions have been defanged by the Enlightenment.

Jerry Coyne

A point I’ve made, like, a bazillion times. While it is true that Islam is the great sickness today, it is equally true that Judaism and Christianity have horribly violent histories and didn’t reform themselves; they were reformed from the outside, and their violent predations ended, by the Enlightenment.

Naturally, Westboro Baptist intends to protest funerals in Orlando.

Oh, boy — I hope they don’t trigger a riot.

Nothing can excuse the gratuitous pain these vicious morons will cause to those left behind, and I wish they wouldn’t do it — but I’m obliged to admit that part of me is pleased that, once again, the malice at the bottom of Abrahamic thought will be on blinking-neon display. Maybe, just maybe, the grotesque excesses of the Pious will hasten American society’s walk out of decadence.

This is the strangest detail yet:

The gunman who committed the massacre at a popular gay nightclub in Orlando used multiple Facebook accounts to write posts and make searches about the Islamic State. “Now taste the Islamic state vengeance,” he declared, denouncing “the filthy ways of the west.” He even searched for references to the massacre while he was carrying it out, a United States senator said.

Seriously? There was a case several months ago of a guy posting to FB while he was holed-up in some sort of standoff with police. Has FB become the locus of a hive-mind?

The Southern Baptists elected Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist, to serve as its president. Gaines is the cartoon for every southern stereotype — heavyset, manipulative, heavy-handed, a shameless money-grubber.

He engineered a huge cover-up of child sex abuse in his church and barely managed to avoid prosecution himself. He has pre-emptively blocked advocates for victims of clergy sex abuse from following him on Twitter.

And his appeals for money would be comical if they weren’t so successful; Tom Rich has a clip of him telling his congregation that God might kill them if they failed to fork-over 10%.

And to think that I briefly felt good about the SBC when it managed to pass a resolution condemning the confederate flag.

How did somebody so garish get elected? I’m only thinking out loud but, between the dual affronts of Donald Trump and Orlando, I think something fundamental has changed in the zeitgeist over the past few months, that the collective ‘We, the People’ has finally had enough of the loony right. So maybe the selection of Gaines is a huge reactionary F-You from the retreating crazies?

If witless religious bigotry hadn’t just been a factor in the gratuitous slaughter of 49-people, the indignation within the SBC over passage of a resolution condemning display of the Confederate flag would be kind of funny.

Yup. Wearing Confederate iconography, like supporting Donald Trump, like the words “I am a Southern Baptist,” says something about you, something about your character and your intelligence. Specifically, it means you’re grievously lacking on both counts, that your life is guided by the primordial malice and ignorance that decent, educated adults have fought for uncountable millennia.

A few Southern Baptists, to their credit, might ‘get’ that.