Civil Commotion

I pointed last week toward a piece at Baptist 21 which undertakes to give readers some needful instruction on the reality of Hell. Now Pastor Gore is back with installment 3 and, at last, in the guise of explaining the grotesque perversity of worshiping a Being who tortures his enemies for eternity, he gets down to explaining what hell is really all about:

And, lastly, not only is hell not a bad thing, hell is praiseworthy as the justice of God.

Here’s a reality we sometimes miss: God would have been praised by the heavenly host for all eternity if he would have damned every single member of the human race to hell, because, in so doing, he would be the God of justice, the One who punishes sin. If God had simply given us what we deserved, the angels would have glorified him forever and ever.

Note that: Pastor Gore believes that all human beings deserve eternal torment, that is a metaphysical ‘fact’ inhering in our very existence, in the bald fact that we live.

But now — Yay! — only the sumbidgs who laugh at yahoos like Pastor Gore will suffer eternal torture.

Seriously: Who but an enraged, half-mad child doesn’t recoil from such a sick vengeance fantasy?

Albert the Pious points, with no little irritation, toward a story I think is good news: Fewer and fewer young Americans want to get married in a church.

Mohler’s remarks comes during the course of his radio commentary, and haven’t been transcribed, so you’ll have to follow the link and listen.

To get the flavor of his views, recall these gems.

(1) In 2 Corinthians 6:14, the Apostle Paul commands that Christians must “not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” This command reaches far beyond marriage, but it certainly includes the covenant of marriage within its span. Paul’s principle is clear: The Christian’s commitment to Christ is determinative of his or her other commitments. A believer must not marry an unbeliever, for this violates the very logic of the Gospel and the believer’s union with Christ.

The believer in Christ acknowledges him as Savior and Lord, with an allegiance that exceeds any earthly commitment. When two believers are married, they share this mutual commitment and are commonly dedicated to the Lordship of Christ.

And:

(2) The third theological fact about the family is the continued affirmation of the family within the redeemed people of God – the church. As the Gospels make clear, loyalty to Christ exceeds that of any family commitment, even as the church becomes the family of faith, embracing within its life all who come to faith in Christ and into the life of the church. And yet, Christians are explicitly instructed to honor marriage, to raise their children in the faith, and to order their family according to the Scriptures.

Those are the teachings of the cult and, make no mistake, someone whose greatest priority is pleasing an Invisible Friend is not married at all.

With severity and pedantry, the priest formulated once and for all, down to the large and small taxes he was to be paid (not to forget the tastiest pieces of meat, for the priest is a steak eater), what he wants to have, “what the will of God is.” From now on all things in life are so ordered that the priest is indispensable—marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of “sacrifices” (meals), the holy parasite appears in order to denature them—in his language: to “consecrate.”

For one must understand this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, judicial order, marriage, care of the sick and the poor), every demand inspired by the instinct of life—in short, everything that contains its value in itself is made altogether valueless, anti-valuable by the parasitism of the priest (or the “moral world order”): now it requires a sanction after the event—a value-conferring power is needed to negate what is natural in it and to create a value by so doing. The priest devalues, desecrates nature: this is the price of his existence. Disobedience of God, that is, of the priest, of “the Law,” is now called “sin”; the means for “reconciliation with God” are, as is meet, means that merely guarantee still more thorough submission to the priest: the priest alone “redeems.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §26

Give ol’ Friedrich his due: He knew who and what the preachers are, he is still relevant, and he laughed in their faces.

It is not the preachers and their mumbles that make a marriage; it is mutual loyalty, striving together toward common ambitions, building satisfying lives together. That is the very reason the clergy oppose healthy marriages — they are not focused on the cult. So it’s wonderful news that church wedding are in precipitous decline; it means that smarmy, self-serving hot dogs like Mohler are tricking fewer people.

As everyone knows, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was jailed for contempt, and was eventually released on the condition that she not interfere with the issuance of licenses by others. She has apparently not done so, remains free, same-sex couples are now getting married in Rowan County, Kentucky, and presidential contestant Mike Huckabee self-destructed by gaudily associating himself with her.

The system worked, albeit clunkily, and all is well. Right?

Not according to Matt Barber, who apparently thinks there is still some money to be mulcted out of idiots.

“The beauty of this is that when people do stand up like Kim Davis did,” Miller added, “the feds almost always back down. That’s effectively what this judge did and it kind of reminded me of what happened at the Bundy ranch in Nevada. Cliven Bundy, he decided, right or wrong, he stood up to it with a lot of other people and the feds backed down.”

Barber likewise proclaimed that Davis had forced the government to back down, claiming that Judge David Bunning “didn’t just walk back his contempt of court ruling, he ran it back.”

“He let her out of jail because of the Martin Luther King, Jr. comparison,” Barber claimed, “because of the Rosa Parks comparison … As with Rosa Parks, she shook a nation; Kim Davis has shaken a nation and it’s amazing what one person again, who will stand firm on their principle and refuse to violate their conscience, what they can accomplish.”

Well … who knows? Americans in general, and evangelicals in particular, rarely pay much attention to public matters and have short memories, so maybe there is a large group of people out there who imagine Kim Davis triumphed. Or maybe the nutjob right is collapsing as Americans wake up to how dishonest and nihilistic they actually are, and Matt Barber is scratching in the spoil piles for the odd bit of overlooked pocket change.

Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in. — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §9

This latest craziness from David Kupelian, managing ‘editor’ of World Net Daily, put me in mind of that famous passage from Nietzsche.

“Utopia is what we had before they came along,” he [Kupelian] said of liberals. “America was the most wonderful, wealthy, there was more happiness per capita and more opportunity in America than any nation in history, they want to take that and fundamentally transform it. Those guys are the sick ones.”

Wiles had his own thoughts on the matter: “I believe, David, the reason they’re going insane is that God has turned them over to a reprobate mind.”

“I believe that too,” Kupelian said, before saying that he really just wants to bring Americans together.

But, of course, in Kupelian’s Utopia women had no rights, blacks were oppressed by the Jim Crow laws, and children raped by their pastors had even less recourse than today. Not that they are thinking of any of those things. No. What they are actually thinking about, and miss, is the union-wrought pseudo-industrial socialism that spread the wealth around and kept the economy energetic — the very economic policies that the Teavangelicals and other oddities of the Loony Right have worked for so long to upend. These ignoramuses are reacting against their own successes.

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. — Anonymous