Civil Commotion

Anne Graham Lotz, Billy’s daughter, says judgment is imminent and nothing can save us but loads and loads of prayer. From an e-mail sent out yesterday to her Web site subscribers:

This past spring, Joel Rosenberg and I taught through the book of Joel as we led a prophecy seminar at The Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove. It was my privilege to give the first two messages that covered Joel 1:1 through Joel 2:17. The impact on me was profound. Both times, when I stepped off of the platform, I knew God had spoken. The messages almost made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Why? Because God was clearly warning that His judgment is coming on America and it’s going to be ugly. I knew it then, and I know it now.

I believe Jesus is soon to return to take all of His followers to Heaven with Him in The Rapture. While this will be deliverance for you and me, can you imagine the impact on our nation, let alone the world, when suddenly every single authentic Christian disappears? Institutions will collapse. Banks will close. The Stock Market will plunge. Planes will fall out of the sky. Cars will crash on the road. Government in America at every level will disintegrate. Families will be torn apart. In the unprecedented turmoil, our nation will be vulnerable for our enemies to seize the moment and attack us. There will be mass chaos, confusion, fear, grief, despair, anger, threats, danger — judgment.

Damn. Judgment. Since we are all naturally born no damn good, I’ve got to believe some grim stuff is coming our way, for sure.

The other possibility is that Ms. Lotz is merely reprising a scam that seems never to go out of style, because the stupid are like the poor: We will have them with us always.

UPDATE:   Just so’s you know, Pat Robertson is on exactly the same page:

I warned about this years and years ago that it was going to happen and it did, it has. What’s next? What’s next is what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. It is just a question of how soon the wrath of God is going to come on this land.

Uh-huh. The unexciting truth is that, if the Supreme Court affirms same-sex marriage, nothing whatever will change in the lives of the overwhelming majority of us.

I’ve wondered for years if the real cause of pastors’ hostility to the Internet isn’t satanic-porn and -gaming, but the ease with which information is shared — about their own execrable conduct, about the progress of scholarship. Daniel Dennett seems to think that might be right.

Today one of the largest categories of religious affiliation in the world—with more than a billion people—is no religion at all, the “Nones.” One out of six Americans is already a None; by 2050, the figure will be one out of four, according to a new Pew Research Center study. Churches are being closed by the hundreds, deconsecrated and rehabilitated as housing, offices, restaurants and the like, or just abandoned.

[ … ]

---

“Let any one dare to speak to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.”

Nietzsche

---

Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.

With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century.

[ … ]

Religious institutions, since their founding millennia ago, have managed to keep secrets and to control what their flocks knew about the world, about other religions and about the inner workings of their own religion with relative ease. Today it is next to impossible.

The progress of Biblical scholarship has been especially devastating; practically no scholar anywhere — those without a contractual obligation to uphold the company line, like the Southern Baptists, I mean — believes that Abraham or Moses actually existed, and there is solid reason to question the historicity of Jesus himself. King David has been shown to have been little more than a small-time regional gangster. The persecution stories are mostly myths (like today).

Christianity is not true, and there is no educated, intellectually serious dispute about that — and most pastors knew that when they graduated from seminary or, at least, had the information to know (if not the thinking skills). Today, thanks to the Internet, everybody else is figuring that out, too, and that’s why pastors are so strident nowadays: They know the jig is just about up.

Bernie Sanders is now formally a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Promising to fight what he deems “obscene levels” of income disparity and a campaign finance system that is a “real disgrace,” independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said Wednesday he will run for president as a Democrat.

[ … ]

The self-described “democratic socialist” enters the race as a robust liberal alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he pledged to do more than simply raise progressive issues or nudge the former secretary of state to the left in a campaign in which she is heavily favored.

This is fun. Sanders has no more chance of winning the nomination than Eugene McCarthy had in 1968 but, pressed from the Left by both Elizabeth Warren and himself, Hillary Clinton will be forced off her hack clichés and toward some honest-to-God attention to a middle class ravaged by the rise of a new oligarchy.

It is at least conceivable that, for the first time in decades, we’ll have a real choice on Election Day.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
III: General Remarks on Morality

§290   The moral hypothesis, designed with a view to justifying God, said: evil must be voluntary (simply in order that the voluntariness of goodness might be believed in); and again, all evil and suffering have an object which is salvation.

The notion “guilt” was considered as something which had no connection at all with the ultimate cause of existence and the notion “punishment” was held to be an educating and beneficent act, consequently an act proceeding from a good God.

The absolute dominion of moral valuations over all others: nobody doubted that God could not be evil and could do no harm, that is to say, perfection was understood merely as moral perfection.

From a column about the sexual abuse trial of Pastor Mike Sperou.

Church loyalists and Steven J. Sherlag, Sperou’s attorney, argue that only memory has been corrupted here. Memory is “dynamic,” Sherlag claims, evolving or eroding each time a group of seven women compare notes on how often their pastor was drunk, drug-addled or making out with their mother.

But you only need to listen to Sperou’s defenders to realize how boundaries in this community were obliterated by the demand for subservience and the desire for acceptance, no matter how perverse.