Civil Commotion

Further to the review of The Missionary Myth …

Here is an advertisement for Pious Al Mohler’s radio show, in this morning’s e-mail:

On today’s program, Dr. Mohler discusses the importance of raising your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord …

From the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘admonition:’

An act of admonishing; a warning, reproof; an utterance or statement of grave counsel or censure, esp. of ecclesiastical censure.

In short, the importance of keeping your kid feeling guilty and in fear of the Invisible Wizard Who Lives in the Sky … the very thing I described as a self-perpetuating sickness. The sickness is not, as Holy Men insist, man’s innate depravity; it is the teachings and the ascetic, anti-life ideals that drive them.

Morons on parade, 2010-Jan-27

• Pope John Paul II used to like to flog himself with a belt, according to a new book.
  

  It had long been rumoured that the Polish-born pontiff, who died five years ago, engaged in acts of penance and self-flagellation.

  But the practice has now been confirmed by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Vatican “postulator” who has the task of reviewing John Paul’s life and preparing a case for him being made a saint.

  Self-flagellation has been a rite of many religions since time immemorial, its ostensible purpose, in Christianity, being to remind the flagellant of the suffering of Jesus. I don’t buy it; as noted above, it is practiced in other religions as well. So far as I can tell, it’s nothing but degradation for the sake of degradation, an outward expression of the utter destruction of the individual that is the end ambition of virtually all religious thought.

• Apparently, there’s a problem with folk getting overly-friendly with their house pets up there in Alaska.
• That bunch of hot dogs who cooked-up a scheme to do something with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones (all of them born post-Watergate, and apparently hopelessly ignorant of modern American history), seem to be what passes for promising young intellectuals in the modern Republican Party.
  

  Four men accused of trying to tamper with Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office phones shared a common experience as young ideologues writing for conservative publications.

• Al Mohler, Holy Man and the Very Mightiest of the Southern Baptist theologians, pans The Shack as heretical for its theodicy and portrayal of the Doctrine of the Trinity.

  Oh … ho-hum. Theodicy is a non-starter; the so-called problem of evil arises solely from the unsustainable assertions that drive it: God is all-powerful, God is all-knowing, God loves us — so why is there so much misery in the world? Hmmm … as Ayn Rand used to say, there is only one reality; contradictions cannot exist. If you encounter one — check your premises.

  Holy Men, of course, can’t do that, because they are the keepers of the settled Eternal Truth. So they build ever more fanciful cotton-candy fairy castles in the sky.

  As for the Doctrine of the Trinity, notice this remark:
  

  While there is ample theological confusion to unpack there, suffice it to say that the Christian church has struggled for centuries to come to a faithful understanding of the Trinity in order to avoid just this kind of confusion — understanding that the Christian faith is itself at stake.

  The Doctrine of the Trinity entered Christian thought as a political compromise at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. It wasn’t supposed to make sense; it was supposed to make peace between all the factions so that they could do the buffet line and go home.

Morons on parade

• Pious Al Mohler is dismayed that so few Americans actually believe in hell, that is, in an actual place where your soul spends eternity on fire as punishment for not … well … mindlessly obeying the likes of fine, pious men like him.
  

  The current intellectual context allows virtually no respect for Christian affirmations of the exclusivity of the gospel, the true nature of human sin, the Bible’s teachings regarding human sexuality, and any number of other doctrines revealed in the Bible. The lesson of theological liberalism is clear—embarrassment is the gateway drug for theological accommodation and denial.

  Be sure of this: it will not stop with the air conditioning of hell.

• A California mother freaked-out when she discovered ‘oral sex’ defined in the dictionary used in her kid’s school, with the result that the school board removed Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10^th-edition from every school shelf in the district.

Demented quote of the day: Albert Mohler, on Haiti

Albert Mohler:

The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation is groaning under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point in the globe.

This, y’all’ll recall, because of that unfortunate incident with the bad fruit. How badly screwed-up and sin-obsessed does a human being have to be to write a sentence like that?

Revisiting Moon/Toy

The sad story of the failed engagement between missionary Lottie Moon and academic Crawford Toy is interesting only for what it reveals about the view of marriage and unthinking self-abnegation urged upon believers by fundamentalists. Moon, who ended the engagement because Toy doubted the literal truth of Genesis, was tormented by loneliness her entire life and died alone and mad in Japan. Toy married somebody else and died a highly respected scholar on the faculty of Harvard University.

The subsequent mythology has it that Moon was amongst the finest human beings who ever lived, and Toy amongst the worst, and Pious Al Mohler ain’t letting anybody say different.

Something deeply disturbing recently appeared at EthicsDaily.com, the Web site for the Baptist Center for Ethics. Tony Cartledge, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School and former editor of the Biblical Recorder, recently contributed an article that makes the astounding claim that both Lottie Moon and Crawford H. Toy should be considered “Baptist heroes.”

The problem with Toy, we learn, is that he went around having his very own personal unauthorized thoughts.

Neither Mohler’s piece, nor those he cites, add much to what is already a well-known story, but this little controversy is well worth a read for what it reveals about the resolutely inflexible mindset that guides these characters, and which the pastors they train are taught to take to, and urge upon, their congregations.