Civil Commotion

Tom Rich has a good question for people who think like Albert the Pious.

I guess what I’d like to know is whether it’s allright to attend a wedding reception and chow-down on the free liquor if a gay florist supervised the table arrangements, or a gay hairdresser did the bride’s hair, or there is something ‘funny’ about one of the band members?

Yay! for the Courier-Journal. It’s time we all got over the idea that Holy Men and their bullshit are too special to be criticized.

Uh-huh.

Biblical scholars agree universally that about half of Paul’s epistles are forgeries, that there was little actual persecution of Christians, and that if Jesus existed at all he was a low-profile and insignificant unknown. Given all that, might it be the case that the first church fathers were analogous to the World Net Daily, Breitbart, Family Research Council crowd of today? Just a pack of manipulative, dishonest, self-aggrandizing hustlers exploiting the insecure and frightened?

Tom Rich takes-up Albert Mohler’s sad instruction that truly Godly folk will dismember their family by refusing to attend the same-sex wedding of a child. The responses are sad and too predictable.

The conversation starts thusly:

Notice the indignation: It’s a problem that Mohler says to dismember your family? And the smug preening: Of course blind obedience to the Bible is more important than the happiness of your family.

If you think you can stomach it, and have a Twitter account, click on Tom’s tweet above and then on “View summary” when you get to his Twitter page.

And notice this: I do not exaggerate when I tell you that “family values” is a marketing lie, or that the Southern Baptists regard family loyalties as a threat to pastoral authority and, accordingly, discourage and strive to undermine it. Since the so-called Conservative Resurgence — Fundamentalist Takeover, more precisely — the Southern Baptist Convention has devolved into just another decadent cult. And with sane people fleeing by the busload, it’s only going to get worse.

The Wartburg Watch has yet another sad story of an elderly woman shunned by her congregation for, possibly, asking some financial questions — though, thanks to confidentiality requirements, she can’t even learn what she is supposed to have said.

Since she was excommunicated from her Lutheran church four years ago, LaVonne Pfeil says that her life has been ruined.

“I lost my church, I lost my husband, lost my reputation, lost a lot of money,” said Pfeil, who’s 79 years old. “I can go to a grocery store. If people see me, they turn around with their cart. I used to know everybody. Now I have no friends.”

As Christianity declines, churches are returning to their authoritarian, cult-like roots, and they are finding justification for it in the Gospels because those are the texts of a first-century cult fighting for its life.

And, of course, it says something about who is sitting in church when they abandon decades-long friendships because the pastor tells them to.