Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
III: General Remarks on Morality§300 The suppressed and effaced heresy in morality. Concepts: pagan, master morality, virtue.
Jeb Bush will address Liberty University’s graduation today.
Jeb Bush, not yet an official candidate for president, will make what has become an essential campaign stop for Republicans seeking the White House when he speaks at Liberty University on Saturday.
The former Florida governor will deliver the commencement address at the booming evangelical university launched by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell.
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“Several of them are figuring out right now, when is their Liberty appearance?” said Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia.
Cobb is doubtless correct — and the candidates she is talking about are wildly misguided. It is indulgence of these ignorant, paranoid, uneducated loonies that is destroying the Republican Party, and the leadership they need is somebody willing to frankly put them out.
When a federal judge ordered Rowan County, North Carolina, to cease its exclusively Christian prayers before meetings, the response from Lincoln County was swift.
In response to a question concerning Rowan County, which was recently ordered by a federal court judge to cease its pre-meeting prayers, Lincoln County Board of Commissioners chairman Carrol Mitchem said that not only will invocations remain in Lincoln County, but that he would see to it that no non-Christian prayers are delivered on his watch.
“A Muslim? He comes in here to say a prayer, I’m going to tell him to leave,” Mitchem said. “I have no use for (those) people. They don’t need to be here praying to Allah or whoever the hell they pray to. I’m not going to listen to (a) Muslim pray.”
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“I don’t need no Arab or Muslim or whoever telling me what to do or us here in the county what to do about praying. If they don’t like it, stay the hell away.”
Because here in North Carolina, where all right-minded people are Southern Baptists, freedom of religion means only Christians — and only certain kinds of them.
I don’t believe baptism is anything but superstitious symbolism, so it’s no concern to me when or whether somebody gets baptized. You’d think that Baptists would care, though.
“Within Southern Baptist life, we have been on a steady march towards infant baptism, routinely baptizing children younger and younger in age,” [Midwestern Seminary President] Allen said.
A North American Mission Board task force on baptism and evangelism in 2014 found the only consistently growing age group in Southern Baptist Convention baptisms is 5 and under. Allen said the trend should prompt careful reflection and remind Southern Baptists of some of the dangers associated with baptizing young children.
“As a convictional Baptist, it is hard for me to admit this, but when we baptize children too young to grasp the gospel and, as a result, whose hearts haven’t been affected by it, it is more troubling than a sprinkling of an infant,” Allen said.
The Southern Baptists were once identified by three great distinctives:
The priesthood of the believer, which holds that the meaning of the Bible is accessible to all with prayer and diligent study, e.g., no Holy Man required to reach a correct understanding.
No baptism before the age of understanding.
Separation of Church and State.
What makes this interesting is that all three of these defining principles have been thrown out; practically, though the word is in their name, the Southern Baptists are not baptists at all.
The priesthood of the believer was thrown away with this resolution, in 1988.
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Be it further RESOLVED, That we affirm that this doctrine in no way gives license to misinterpret, explain away, demythologize, or extrapolate out elements of the supernatural from the Bible; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer in no way contradicts the biblical understanding of the role, responsibility, and authority of the pastor which is seen in the command to the local church in Hebrews 13:17, “Obey your leaders, and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account;” and …
In other words, don’t disagree with your pastor.
When the fastest-growing baptised faction is under-5s, it’s easy to know what’s going on: They have abandoned the historic requirement that only those who have reached the age of understanding be baptized in order to keep their numbers up.
The abandonment of separation of church and state is manifest in the denomination’s political activism.
It is their club, and they can have any rules or customs they like, but it does no harm to note that the so-called “Conservative Resurgence” has resulted in a radical denomination that is neither conservative nor Baptist.
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
III: General Remarks on Morality§299 Moralistic naturalism: The tracing back of apparently independent and supernatural values to their real “nature” — that is to say, to natural immorality, to natural “utility” etc.
Perhaps I may designate the tendency of these observations by the term moralistic naturalism: my object is to translate the moral values which have apparently become independent and unnatural back into their real nature — that is to say, into their natural “immorality”.
N.B. Compare to Jewish “holiness” and its natural basis. The case is the same in regard to the moral law which has been made sovereign emancipated from its real nature (until it is almost the opposite of Nature).
The steps in the denaturalisation of morality (or so-called “Idealisation”).
As a way to individual happiness.
As a consequence of knowledge.
As the Categorical Imperative.
As a way to Salvation.
As the denial of the will to live. (The gradual hostility of morality to Life).
