Civil Commotion

An Augusta, Georgia-area church has been vandalized because its pastor is a gay man who will soon marry another man.

Vandals have spray painted scripture on a church where the pastor and his partner were the first gay couple in Richmond County to secure a marriage license after Supreme Court ruled that same sex marriages must be recognized nationwide.

Sometime early Tuesday, the words “Burn Leviticus 18:22 Lies” were painted across the double front doors of the Metropolitan Community Church of Our Redeemer.

Because the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom was never meant by the Founders to cover people who aren’t fundamentalist yahoos.

Preachers who can’t find pulpits.

For someone seeking a full-time job as a church pastor, Justin Barringer would seem to have the perfect résumé. He’s a seminary grad, an author and book editor, and a former missionary to China and Greece. But despite applying to nearly a hundred jobs over the course of two years, Barringer, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, could not secure a full-time, salaried church position.

So he splits his time among three jobs, working as a freelance editor, an employee at a nonprofit for the homeless, and a part-time assistant pastor at a United Methodist Church. “I am not mad at the church,” Barringer says. “However, I wish someone had advised me against taking on so much debt in order to be trained for ministry.”

Who? The professors? They want to make it through retirement and the Pearly Gates before the denominational retirement funds dry up.

Another popular theologian is excommunicated and exiled for questioning the All-settled Eternal Truth.

Becker had raised questions about the denomination’s stance against the ordination of women, as well as its teaching of creationism, or the literal reading of the story of creation in the book of Genesis.

Becker’s insistence on talking about such issues has led certain members of the church to file charges against him, triggering several investigations.

Ho-hum. This is the future of all Christian denominations: Schism, with those who won’t abide any updates of Eternal Truth on one side, and those who won’t continue to humiliate themselves by professing garish ignorance on the other.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§369   There is no such thing as egoism which keeps within its bounds and does not exceed them — consequently, the “allowable,” the “morally indifferent” egoism of which some people speak, does not exist at all. “One is continually promoting the interests of one’s ego at the cost of others;” “Life always lives at the cost of other life” — he who has not grasped this fact, has not taken the first step towards honesty with himself.

An Indian woman was tortured and beheaded after a priest accused her of witchcraft.

An elderly Indian woman was stripped naked and beheaded by villagers after a local priest accused her of witchcraft.

Mother-of-five Purni Orang was dragged from her home in the northeastern state of Assam and was hacked to death by more than a dozen local people wielding machetes.

The villagers blamed the 63-year-old for an illness that was afflicting their community.