Civil Commotion

Oh, man — the Philadelphia Diocese sex abuse scandal just keeps getting better.

A Philadelphia prosecutor broke new ground earlier this week when he named the Diocese an unindicted co-conspirator in decades of child sex abuse. Cleverly, he prosecuted a low-ranking member of the local hierarchy — who has apparently decided that he’s not going to take the fall all by himself.

An indicted Catholic church official is showing signs he won’t take the fall alone for the priest abuse scandal in Philadelphia, with his lawyer saying Wednesday that a successor threw him “under the bus.”

Monsignor William Lynn, 61, is the only official from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia facing trial for allegedly failing to remove accused predators from the priesthood. He served as secretary of clergy from 1992 to 2004.

Defense lawyers argue that Lynn took orders from then-Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua and other superiors in the church hierarchy.

Some thoughts, in no particular order.

• Catholic doctrine holds that good record-keeping is a duty, and that has facilitated legal discovery. Kudos to the (very few) prosectors who have demonstrated the nerve to go after the records, and to victims lawyers who have pursued them through countless obstacles and across oceans.

• A commonplace question goes like this: When are church members going to wise up, withhold their money, and let the churches fail? When are they going to acknowledge what is in plain sight?

  The answer is that they’ve been trained from infancy not to see. Those believers who race to the predatory pastor’s side and denounce his victims are not a claque of local oddities; they are the fulfillment of Christian teaching. They were raised to be victims, and they are the truth about what Christianity really is. They, too, are victims.

[H/T: Michael Hamar]

A North Carolina legislator and pastor thinks it’s high damn time we begin executing abortionists, preferably by hanging.

From an e-mail sent by Reverend Larry Pittman to his fellow members of the House:

It is good that DNA evidence can show that someone is innocent; but it needs to be emphasized that it can also help prove someone is guilty. If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.

Holy Man Pittman’s curriculum vitae informs us that he was instructed in the ways of righteousness right here in Wake Forest, at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I married Tammy Odom, of Mount Olive, NC, on August 29, 1976, after finishing college. Then I attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and was eventually ordained a Presbyterian Minister on March 20, 1983.

Things like this interest me; they do. Though the Inerrant Bible says not one word about abortion or abortionists, Pittman demands the public execution of providers. But the Bible specifies lots of things for which execution is required, and Pittman overlooks them as candidates for the noose.

• A man who refuses to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law

• Murderers

• Whoever strikes his father or mother

• Whoever steals a man is to be put to death

• A child who curses his parent(s)

• A stubborn and/or rebellious child

• A witch or sorcerer

• Anyone who sacrifices to other gods

• Adulterers

• Homosexuals

• If a man has sexual relations with both his wife and his mother-in-law, then all three of them must be put to death

• Those who commit bestiality

• A medium or wizard

• If a priest’s daughter becomes a prostitute, she is to be burnt with fire

• Blasphemers

• An unauthorized person who acts as a priest

• Anyone who causes someone to turn to another god

• A man is required to slay his friends and members of his own family who are guilty of worshipping another god

• A man who shows contempt for a judge or priest

• False prophets

• A betrothed virgin who is seduced in the city is to be put to death, unless she cried out

• Men and women who commit unnatural sexual acts

I am a fairly regular blasphemer, so I’m not complaining that Pittman overlooked the Biblically-sanctioned death penalties; I merely wonder … why?

And, hell, wouldn’t building scaffolds create jobs?

A committee of the Indiana legislature has endorsed by an 8-2 vote the teaching of Creationism in science classes.

Indiana’s public schools would be allowed to teach creationism in science classes under a bill endorsed Wednesday by a state Senate committee.

The Senate Education Committee voted 8-2 in favor of the bill despite experts and some senators saying teaching creationism likely would be ruled unconstitutional if challenged in court.

Committee Chairman Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, said he sponsored the bill because he believes creationism should be taught among the theories on the development of life and that the proposal wouldn’t force any changes in schools teaching evolution.

Ignorance and stupidity never rest.

It would be hard to overstate what a Big Deal it is that a handful of prominent evangelicals have publicly acknowledged what everybody with a background in the natural sciences has known for a couple of hundred years: Adam and Eve never existed.

Pete Enns, one of the few evangelicals with enough self-respect to face that truth, tries here to recast the story in a way that isn’t so damaging.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch — an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about “the beginning,” however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question “Where do humans come from?” They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious — and often political — beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel’s story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to say such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Wrongheaded, yes — but not in a minority. At least some of the local Southern Baptists are adamant that the Creation story is to be read literally, and that the earth is less than 10,000-years old.

Enns argues, contrarily, that the Creation story was never meant to be taken literally. Well … actually, I agree with that. What is not susceptible of any serious-minded dispute, however, is that the overwhelming majority of Jews, Christians, and Muslims have read the story literally. That’s why they so fervently agitate against the teaching of evolution in high school science classrooms.

For my part, I don’t believe Genesis 3 was ever meant to be read literally, and I don’t believe it was actually meant to be a creation account, either. I think it’s just another sliver-thin iteration of a story that’s with us today.

And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Genesis 3:22-24, NIV

Adam and Eve weren’t thrown out for disobedience per se, they were thrown out because they threatened the dominance of the gods.

Atrahasis, from ~ 1800 B.C., is the identical story, and so is the (true) Italian Hall massacre story from 1913. Go sit in some neighborhood bar in the Rust Belt, and I imagine you could hear yet another variation on the exact same tale today.

Isn’t that, in fact, the story being peddled by Newt Gingrich against Mitt Romney?

I know that growing up I though of suicide often since it seemed that death was the only solution to “my secret.” I know I am not alone in this and it drives me to distraction that too many youths are still being literally killed by religion and the falsely pious and self-satisfied “godly Christian” set, most of whom I personally view as probably psychologically disturbed and motivated by hate and transferred self-loathing.

Michael Hamar

I tried to kill myself when I was a teenager. It seemed like a natural progression for a young lesbian, growing up in the South. I kept my sexual orientation hidden until college, but that didn’t stop the taunting and the bullying I encountered in high school. I was teased relentlessly for my manner of dress—I wore boys’ shirts, jeans, jean jackets and boots or tennis shoes. I was teased for my short hair, my boyish mannerisms and, oh, yeah, my funny name.

It was torture—but school wasn’t the only place. There was also church; that good old Southern Baptist house of worship where I learned that my secret yearnings made me a sworn enemy of the God I had loved (and who I thought loved me) since childhood.

Candace Chellew-Hodge