Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
A Criticism of the Words: Improvement, Perfecting, Elevation§391 The standard according to which the value of moral valuations is to be determined. The fundamental fact that has been overlooked: the contradiction between “becoming more moral” and the elevation and the strengthening of the type man. Homo natura: The “will to power”.
Spiritual Sounding Board takes off from the Josh Duggar scandal to point toward the ways that fundamentalist loopiness injures even blameless bystanders; well worth a read.
This teaching infiltrated my family, too. Some in my family have difficulty expressing themselves because they weren’t allowed to express negativity. All because of these teachings.
I’m angry that we isolated our children from “outside” family members for fear of their worldly influence. They lost precious relationships with cousins, aunts, uncles that they can never get back.
Slow News Day? WDIV’s Top Story of The
Night: Detroit Cabbie Takes a Dump in Public
There’s video, too, if you go for that sort of thing.
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities§390 My final conclusion is, that the real man represents a much higher value than the “desirable” man of any ideal that has ever existed hitherto; that all “desiderata” in regard to mankind have been absurd and dangerous dissipations by means of which a particular kind of man has sought to establish his measures of preservation and of growth as a law for all; that every “desideratum” of this kind which has been made to dominate has reduced man’s worth, his strength and his trust in the future; that the indigence and mediocre intellectuality of man becomes most apparent, even today, when he reveals a desire that man’s ability to fix values has hitherto been developed too inadequately to do justice to the actual, not merely to the “desirable”, worth of man that, up to the present, ideals have really been the power which has most slandered man and the world, the poisonous fumes which have hung over reality and which have seduced men to yearn for nonentity —
First Baptist Church of Greenville, South Carolina, a founding member of the Southern Baptist Convention, announced this week that, following a congregational vote, “In all facets of the life and ministry of our church, including but not limited to membership, baptism, ordination, marriage, teaching and committee/organizational leadership, First Baptist Greenville will not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Good for them. There is no moral duty to be stupid or to visit pointless degradations upon your neighbors, even if the Inerrant Bible does say they ought to be stoned.
Y’all will not be surprised to learn that Albert the Pious is having a regular conniption fit.
There are big lessons here for every church, every denomination, and every Christian institution. Once biblical inerrancy is abandoned, there is no brake on theological and moral revisionism. The Bible’s authority becomes relative, and there is no anchor to hold the church to the words of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian witness.
The discernment process at First Baptist Church in Greenville offers us all ample lessons that should lead to a more fundamental discernment: Without the affirmation that the Bible is inerrant, “discernment” leads to disaster.
Yeah, yeah — ho-hum. Biblical inerrancy is a claim so intellectually corrupt, so egregiously nonsensical, that it bespeaks a genuine-article character flaw. Case in point: The canonical gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Nobody knows who was the author of any single one of those texts; or who made the attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; or why; or when; or anything about the authors except what they themselves tell us. And the texts themselves are so full of improbable claims that, if someone were to advance the hypothesis that they were written by the first century analog of a bunch of drunk college boys who just wanted to see what they could get away with, neither Mohler nor his entire faculty could adduce a single objective fact that would overturn the hypothesis.
And we are still not done with inerrancy’s crimes against ordinary intelligence, for it is not the versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John which are found bound inside books which are labeled Holy Bible — in any translation — which are supposed to be inerrant. N-o-o-o. The inerrant versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (and of every other book in the Bible) are the ones produced by the authors’ own hands.
The SBC’s Holy Men were driven to that position because they got tired of being laughed at as the long and well-documented list of changes and contradictions in successive versions of the sacred texts just kept getting longer.
I kid you not: The official position of the Southern Baptist Convention is that the never-seen and long-gone original texts produced by Bronze Age anonymities are “totally true and trustworthy.” To make such a claim requires a very high order of intellectual dishonesty, and to condemn your neighbors on such grounds evidences a very grave character failure.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such
canaille; if it fails they will devour it. — H.L. Mencken
