Civil Commotion

North Carolina AG won’t defend transgender law in court

North Carolina’s attorney general said Tuesday he won’t defend in court a new state law preventing Charlotte and other local governments from approving protections for LGBT people, calling it discriminatory and a “national embarrassment.”

Most Evangelicals-turned-atheists deconvert in their twenties and thirties. Ministers, in particular, tend to deconvert when they are younger. Rare is the pastor who waits until he is in his fifties or sixties before he abandons the ministry and Christianity. Part of the reason for this is because older ministers have economic incentives to keep believing, or at least to give the pretense of believing. I know of several pastors who no longer believe, yet they are still doing through the motions of leading churches, preaching sermons, and ministering to the needs of parishioners. Their reasons for doing so are economic. Quitting the ministry would cause catastrophic economic and marital damage, so these unbelieving pastors continue to play the game.

Bruce Gerencser

It’s difficult to know, but I suspect that the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman’s experience is typical. Raised in a fundamentalist family, Ehrman went to Wheaton, and then to Princeton Theological Seminary, and exposure to actual scholarship instead of the disorganized pastiche of maxims and feel-good tales that is the Sunday fare in most churches, caused him to realize that he’d been peddled a load of insane claptrap.

The Southern Baptists now strongly urge their seminarians toward young marriages and swift childbirth, and I’ve wondered often through the years if the reason is because those things help to lock young men into the system. After all, the scholarship is dispositive: the Christian narrative is false — and that is a settled fact. You will never hear an academic defense of it outside the sectarian academy, where the professors have a contractual obligation to uphold it.

By the time a kid gets through seminary he probably has realized there are problems with the story told him by Pastor Bubba, but he probably isn’t ready to throw it away, either. If he has a wife who grew-up dreaming of being married to a preacher — and young women are groomed for that, just as young men are groomed for a life in the clergy — it is profoundly difficult to walk away. And, of course, it is vastly more difficult when there are children who have to be fed. Game, set, match — and the poor kid never even knew what a rotten, cynical game he’d been steered into.

Is a sadder worldview even imaginable? We are all born no damn good, and only by Jesus’ crucifixion is it possible to avoid an eternity aflame? I don’t know Joy Kennelly, and am willing to assume a priori that she doesn’t live a life devoted to the degradation of others, as most evangelicals do — but what about the degradation she inflicts upon herself?

Original Sin is Christianity’s only truly indispensable metaphysical claim, and only a sick imagination could have dreamed it up. So, too, is sickness necessary to accept it.

There are hard tidings, y’all. That nigra moozlim’s gubmint is about to start using a machine gun to mow down people who pray at high school graduations!

Bakker said that he himself is a victim of anti-Christian oppression and that people should prepare for massive starvation and beheadings.

“We can’t preach the Bible anymore,” Bakker said, warning that violence against Christians is imminent due to “political correctness.”

Bakker said that such anti-Christian brutality is seen in the War on Christmas, praising Donald Trump for his pledge to save Christmas as president. “It’s almost illegal to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” he said.

After guest Rick Wiles, the host of the End Times radio program “Trunews,” urged people to commit civil disobedience in cases where the courts block school-organized prayer, Bakker predicted that Christians will soon be gunned down for praying.

“So what happens if in that graduation most of the parents stand up and recite the Lord’s Prayer?” Wiles asked. “What are they going to do? Is the judge going to come over and arrest you? Let’s get an uprising going.”

Bakker replied: “They would threaten to arrest you, they would threaten to mow you down with a machine gun.”

Jim Bakker’s ‘oppression’ consisted of being sent to prison for accounting fraud. Since he married Tammy Faye voluntarily, I’m not sure whether that counts as oppression or not. I suppose he might count the guilt pangs arising from that unseemly incident with Jessica Hahn, too, if he had any.

No matter. Now that he has been rehabilitated, I guess we can trust him.