Civil Commotion

Ten more women have stepped forward to allege sexual abuse by Bill Gothard.

Ten women on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bill Gothard, who for decades was a major force in the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, charging him and leaders in his ministry with sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up.

Gothard, who urged Christians to shun things like short skirts and rock music, is accused of raping a woman. The same woman says she was raped by one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”

It will all be sorted-out at the courthouse, I suppose, but the sheer number of women alleging mistreatment is arresting; Gothard is on his way to becoming the Bill Cosby of the evangelical right.

As Jeri Massi remarks on her Facebook page: “I hope these courageous women can withstand the firestorm that is going to hit them.”

Yup. It is a fact that you can ask any journalist, any social worker, any police officer, any doctor, any lawyer — anybody with first-hand professional knowledge of sexual abuse in the church environment — and every last one of them will tell you the exact same thing: Congregations all-but-invariably rally to the defense of the pastor, and drive-off his victims; you won’t see so many as half-a-dozen exceptions to that rule in an entire lifetime. We are not talking about freak events; we are talking about the ontology of Christianity, about what the Christian church … is.

Which is a predatory cult that exploits the weak and insecure.

Jesus has returned after all — as Donald Trump!!

In the New Testament, we find Jesus was constantly and viciously attacked in the Bible narrative. Every day of Jesus’ three and a half year ministry on earth a gang of religious spies watched his every move, listened to his every word – not out of love of the Son of God who came to earth to take away the sins of the world, but out of a demonic bloodlust founded in petty jealously and envy to kill Jesus at any cost, for any reason, as soon as possible. Why the hatred of Christ? Because Jesus had real power and adoration of the people which the false Jewish and pagan leaders of the day – the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, the Scribes, the Lawyers, the Publicans (tax collectors), the kings and the Caesars, etc. did not have Christ’s love and admiration of the people.

Just like The Donald!!

Trump always thinks big; Trump always thinks without slave chains on his mind and further declared, “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely.” These “controversial” statements would have been said by many U.S. presidents of the past including Reagan, Nixon, JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, and FDR. What makes Trump a singular transcendent political figure in 2016 is that he has an unmatched gift to say what the majority of Americans think and to hell with political correctness which the Democrat Socialist Party invented to keep U.S. all slaves to a Socialist State and to deconstruct the U.S. Constitution into a deadletter, irrelevant to controlling and conducting our lives any longer in this country.

What can I say? Once it is pointed-out, the parallels are, like, GOBSMACKING!!

Every word of it is risible nonsense; if I respected the author, I suppose I’d feel embarrassed for him. But a very great many uneducated, straitened, angry people do read this nonsense, and respect it, and haven’t the slightest idea how badly the author has embarrassed himself. And they get to vote, too.

I’ve begun to wonder whether democracy and the Internet can co-exist successfully, if the tools of mass-communication and mass-manipulation, in the hands of amoral cynics like Trump, will (or have already) make governance impossible? Certainly, they have made governance more difficult.

An Australian commission will soon release its report of a years-long investigation into sexual abuse of children in Catholic churches, and the results are expected to be devastating.

It not only let them keep ticking away but also covered up the pedophiles’ evil deeds to protect its reputation.

The extent of the cover-up is still being dissected by the child abuse royal commission but victims advocacy group Broken Rites spokesman Dr Wayne Chamley expects its report will be absolutely scathing of the Catholic Church.

[ … ]

“Everybody knew about it and they decided they were going to try and battle it out and just keep it under wraps so you have all those cover-ups and moving people around,” he said.

“What confounds me was not one of them was prepared to break ranks.”

Yeah, well … welcome to the club. I’ve gasped more than once at the cynicism of the godly.

But, then, most of us are reared with the ambient idea that the godly folk are somehow better, uniquely good, more … trustworthy, more … honorable. That’s a marketing lie, probably the most successful in history. Christianity is just a cult that made it to the Big Time; once you understand that, everything else falls right into place.

Wheaton College has begun the process of firing a tenured professor who believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same god.

Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois, had placed associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins on administrative leave after she made a controversial theological statement on Facebook that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. The school has now begun the process to fire her due to an “impasse,” it said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Ho-hum. I feel badly for the poor woman — but not too badly; she should have known better than to hang-out with that crowd in the first place.

Some thoughts, in no particular order.

• Christians and Muslims are both monotheists; that is, they both believe there is only one god. They believe different things about that one god, but they believe there is only one god out there. There is only one Donald Trump, for example. What I believe about Donald Trump is that he’s a demagogic asshole, and what some neighbor believes about Donald Trump is that he is exactly the strong man the country needs.

  That doesn’t mean we’re talking about different Donald Trumps.

• Evangelicals point to the Doctrine of the Trinity, which Muslims reject, as proof that they worship some other god. Some history is in order.

  The first generation of Christians believed all sorts of incompatible things; some of the people going around calling themselves Christians weren’t even monotheists. When Constantine accepted Christianity ~ 315 A.D., it was a political gesture intended to buy internal peace with the growing Christian movement; he continued to worship the Hellene gods. In 325 he figured-out that it wasn’t working because Christians were themselves divided about the nature of the man Jesus, and so he did what any good manager does today: He summoned the bishops and told them to go down to the conference room and hash it out — and that he didn’t want to hear from them again until it was settled.

  The First Council of Nicaea was convened by Emperor Constantine the Great upon the recommendations of a synod led by Hosius of Córdoba in the Eastertide of 325. This synod had been charged with investigation of the trouble brought about by the Arian controversy in the Greek-speaking east. To most bishops, the teachings of Arius were heretical and dangerous to the salvation of souls. In the summer of 325, the bishops of all provinces were summoned to Nicaea, a place reasonably accessible to many delegates, particularly those of Asia Minor, Georgia, Armenia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Thrace.

  This was the first general council in the history of the Church since the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the Apostolic council having established the conditions upon which Gentiles could join the Church. In the Council of Nicaea, “The Church had taken her first great step to define revealed doctrine more precisely in response to a challenge from a heretical theology.

  They couldn’t reach agreement, and eventually gave-up and declared that everybody was right: Jesus was Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  The Doctrine of the Trinity was a political compromise; it makes no sense whatever but enabled the bishops to hit the buffet-line one last time and go home. The first 10-generations of Christians never heard of the Doctrine of the Trinity so, really, I don’t think it should be a Big Deal that Muslims pay it no attention.

• This is probably politically necessary for evangelicals as a matter of affirming to the laity that they possess Eternal Truth and are special, but it is very harmful to the country. Muslims very certainly do believe — and rightly — that they worship the same god as Christians, and they will probably interpret firing the professor as yet more evidence that they aren’t welcome and that striving to assimilate into American life is wasted effort — that Christians regard them with hostility.

• If the average evangelical actually knew anything about his religion and its history, he’d be asking himself whether the man Jesus ever actually existed at all, not waxing indignant that Muslims believe something different.

Religion causes humanity so much grief precisely because its truth-claims are not susceptible of objective resolution, and this unhappy drama is a good example of the reason that we should all wish to be done with “faith.” It is not a virtue, but an engine of human misery.

There is something repellent to me about the thought of the United States Government being obliged to lay siege to its own property — but so, too, is the thought of another Branch Davidian-like debacle. Jerry Coyne expresses my thinking precisely:

My solution: starve ’em out. Cut off the roads, cut off the water and electricity, and surround the compound. Eventually they’ll either capitulate or, if they’re stupid enough, come out firing.

Just so. Stringently quarantine the property and permit only outbound traffic — with empty hands in the air. If they’d rather die of hunger, or dehydration, or some sickness, let ’em.