Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

I heard that the Bible has a recommendation for an abortion remedy, and I thought that was pretty cool, until I actually read it. Jesus, the Bible makes everything worse. Numbers 5:11-31.

11 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

12 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man’s wife go aside, and commit a trespass against him,

13 And a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner;

14 And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled:

15 Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance.

16 And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the Lord:

17 And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water:

18 And the priest shall set the woman before the Lord, and uncover the woman’s head, and put the offering of memorial in her hands, which is the jealousy offering: and the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse:

19 And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse:

20 But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband:

21 Then the priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman, The Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell;

22 And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.

23 And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water:

24 And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter.

25 Then the priest shall take the jealousy offering out of the woman’s hand, and shall wave the offering before the Lord, and offer it upon the altar:

26 And the priest shall take an handful of the offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water.

27 And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

28 And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.

29 This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband, and is defiled;

30 Or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon him, and he be jealous over his wife, and shall set the woman before the Lord, and the priest shall execute upon her all this law.

31 Then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity.

Yikes. Sure, abortion is OK in the Bible, but just for a woman who is suspected of adultery by her husband, and if she’s found guilty of adultery, then her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. I think maybe we shouldn’t be looking to the Christian holy book for guidance on this issue, or any other for that matter.

Maybe Xian hypocrisy is preferred to Xians being true to the Bible.

Another “solution”

A Christian football player from Texas (obviously, that’s all you need to be fully qualified to provide answers to everything) offers his answer to the problem of school shootings.

No, you absolute numpty. It’s the guns. European countries have a higher divorce rate than the US, and don’t have anywhere near the number of mass shootings we do. Mongolia has a lower rate, and when was the last time you read about schools getting shot up there? There isn’t even a hint of a correlation.

This “marriage is a covenant” nonsense is a tool evangelicals use to trap and dominate women. It’s an ugly, manipulative tactic.

Ken Ham loves it.

Here’s an excellent summary of that exercise in patriarchal thinking, in case you never heard of John MacArthur or The Master’s University and Seminary.

See, for example, yesterday’s Houston Chronicle article, which details how for decades in the Southern Baptist Convention “survivors and others who reported [sexual] abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action . . . even if it meant convicted molesters continued in ministry.”

And for another example, see the recent New York Times article about a conservative pastor in Fort Smith, Arkansas who was pushed out of his pulpit because he used the acronym “BLM” in his blog, and because he refused to head down the QAnon rabbit hole with his congregants.

One of the best sources on scandal-a-minute evangelicalism is the Roys Report. Established by investigative journalist Julie Roys, the Report “is a Christian media outlet, reporting the unvarnished truth about what’s happening in the Christian community so the church can be reformed and restored.” Determined to expose the seamy side of what she refers to as the “evangelical industrial complex,” the intrepid, persistent, and apparently fearless Roys has done remarkable work in exposing appalling truths about evangelical luminaries and institutions such as Mark Driscoll, Ravi Zacharias, Hillsong, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University, James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel, Matt Chandler and Acts 29, and Thomas White and Cedarville University (about which we also have written a great deal – here’s one example).

But near the top of Roys’ investigative hit parade is John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and chancellor emeritus of The Master’s University and Seminary (TMUS). In the past 27 months, Roys has written (I think I have the count right) 47 posts on MacArthur and his institutions (not to mention additional podcasts). In these articles she has detailed MacArthur’s claims that there is no pandemic (it’s a Satanic deception, which would be news to the families of the over 1 million Americans who have died from COVID) and his church’s and schools’ failure to report COVID cases; she has highlighted MacArthur’s huge salaries and wealth, blatant nepotism, and determination to keep financial details of his institutions a secret; and, she has reported accusations of plagiarism against the chancellor emeritus.

On top of all that corruption, MacArthur also believes “marriage is a covenant”…or, in other words, marriage is a prison for women.

This spring, Roys has focused on how MacArthur and his minions, taking a page out of the Southern Baptist Convention playbook, have a history of minimizing and covering up sexual abuse. Here a few examples:

And there is more. And all of this is in keeping with what John Street, chair of the graduate program in biblical counseling at TMUS, has taught his students:

  • A Christian wife should endure abuse by a non-Christian husband in the same way that missionaries endure persecution.
  • By enduring abuse a wife may win her husband to Christ.
  • When both spouses are Christian, the wife should rely on church processes, as government authorities must be the absolute last resort.
  • Domestic violence shelters are terrible places, as they teach women to be assertive.
  • The only grounds for divorce are unrepentant adultery and abandonment.

I watched my grandmother suffer for years in an abusive, broken marriage, and I don’t think she ever tried to get out of it. I think the last decades of her life would have been much happier if she could have escaped, although it probably would have accelerated my grandfather’s decline.

Patriarchy poisons everything

This is Franklin Graham, evangelical leader of the Southern Baptist convention, son of Billy Graham, yesterday, the 23rd of May. He’s got his priorities.

What’s somewhat surprising about this is that the day before, the Washington Post broke the news of a major scandal among the Southern Baptists. You’d think this should be a 5-alarm crisis for the evangelical leadership.

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. They also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves into a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

Somehow, I don’t think the campaign to bring back McDonald’s fried apple pies is going to be an adequate distraction from the bad news.

Franklin, and the rest of the world, might want to read that 300 page report. It begins…

For almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention (“SBC”) Executive Committee (“EC”) to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff. They made phone calls, mailed letters, sent emails, appeared at SBC and EC meetings, held rallies, and contacted the press…only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC.

Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse. They closely guarded information about abuse allegations and lawsuits, which were not shared with EC Trustees, and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations. In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.

It’s a familiar story that we’ve seen again and again. Women are harassed, they report the problem to a designated authority, said authority buries the report, the offenders continue to offend (maybe with the advantage of being reassigned to virgin territory), and the hierarchy responds to queries with What? No, we don’t have a sexual abuse problem. My files are empty of cases!. We’ve seen it in the Catholic church, and also in smaller entities like the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Maybe the problem isn’t religion. Maybe the real root of the problem is patriarchal social structures. We should start dismantling every organization that has a mob of men at the top, where processing reports of abuse is handled by a chain of men. That seems like a reasonable starting point to fixing an issue.

Alternative explanation: maybe Franklin Graham is right and the real problem is that McDonald’s now bakes their apple pies, rather than frying them.

After all, God speaks directly to the Graham family.

Why would anyone trust Greg Locke?

I did suggest that Greg Locke’s tax exempt status be revoked, as did many other people. It is now being reported that Locke has “dissolved” his status as a 501(c)(3) organization.

However, I have to bring up two facts. (1) This is a self-assertion that has not been verified, and (2) Greg Locke is a loud-mouthed liar. I’ll believe it when I see evidence that Locke’s church has started paying taxes on his revenue.

For now, you should look at the IRS statement on tax exemptions for churches.

Churches (including integrated auxiliaries and conventions or associations of churches) that meet the requirements of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code are automatically considered tax exempt and are not required to apply for and obtain recognition of exempt status from the IRS. Donors are allowed to claim a charitable deduction for donations to a church that meets the section 501(c)(3) requirements even though the church has neither sought nor received IRS recognition that it is tax exempt. In addition, because churches and certain other religious organizations are not required to file an annual return or notice with the IRS, they are not subject to automatic revocation of exemption for failure to file. See Annual Return Filing Exceptions for a complete list of organizations that are not required to file.

See that bit in boldface? Most churches do not have to apply for 501(c)(3) status. Just say you are a church (I presume you could have to show that you have a congregation, etc., or I could do the same), and the IRS doesn’t require you to file an application for that status. Locke very likely has never had to apply for 501c3 communism and didn’t have anything to renounce, and will probably not pay any taxes on his church by default.

Never ever take a Christian at their word, and especially don’t trust evangelical fanatics.

Oh boy, I’m a demon!

When will my supernatural demonic powers kick in? None of my curses ever seem to work.

I think a perfectly legitimate way to deal with ranting pastors like Greg Locke is to immediately revoke their tax exempt status. Any time a preacher gets blatantly partisan, or uses their pulpit to promote sedition, swiftly inform them that they are preaching politics rather than religion, and send them a bill for property tax and income tax.

It’s absurd that we just shrug and look away at that kind of behavior.

Jordan Peterson can’t see any holes in his argument

But I can!

The Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true in that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it’s like a metatruth, without it there couldn’t even be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that’s the most true thing, the most true thing isn’t some truth per se. It’s that which provides the precondition for all judgements of truth. I can’t see any holes in that argument. And I can’t see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either, because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem.

Oh, yeah, the familiar is/ought problem. I agree with the last sentence above, but what I don’t see is Peterson’s solution. So we should derive ethical direction from a collection of contradictory, incoherent myths in a specific holy book? Why should I accept the precondition of the Bible’s rules instead of some other holy book, or instead of a framework of empiricism? That’s all he’s saying, is that ethical action requires a standpoint and a goal, but he doesn’t even try to justify the mish-mash of primitive ideas in the Bible as that good perspective needed to drive ethical behavior.

Why should I consider the ravings of a Jungian weirdo with bizarre dietary beliefs to be representative of a “scientific perspective”?

In his tweet, he seems to be claiming that “the west” should have a different precondition for truth than the rest of the world. Is this relativism? Or maybe it’s post-modernism. I have no idea what philosophical mumbo-jumbo he’s drawing this claim from — I think it might just be what you get emerging from a drug-addled, overly-entitled brain.

Nice suit, though. It drapes well even when its contents are empty.

Kirk Cameron wants to control your children

He wants to save our children like he saved Christmas. By bombing.

Kirk Cameron is plugging his new, and no doubt terrible, movie.

Remember, Cameron is the guy whose post-TV career was dedicated to anti-science propaganda, criticizing the teaching of evolution. That should tell you how worthwhile his opinion is. He has now expanded his goals to changing the teaching of everything — he wants a narrow religious view forced on all of education, because anything outside his personal ideology is inaccurate and immoral.

Note that he says whoever controls the textbooks, controls the future and whoever controls the future will determine whether we live in a free country. His idea of a free country is one where the churches control the hearts and minds and souls of our children. How about if we instead give the children the best information and tools for learning that we’ve got, and leave their hearts and minds and “souls” to them?

There’s a reflection in the clouds above the Capitol!

Oh, and it’s satanic. A satanic portal. We know this because Roger Stone says so. Here’s a picture of it:

I wouldn’t have believed it, except they drew a gigantic, thick, crude orange oval around it, so it must be true. Also, the people testifying to it are so trustworthy.

That’s Steve Schultz, an evangelical Christian who runs something called “Elijah’s List”, where people talk about Bible prophecy, and Roger Stone, who has surrounded himself with pagan paraphernalia featuring his gods, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and another evangelical, Robin D. Bullock. Bullock would worry me, if I were a Christian. He’s nestled into an altar with candles and a sword and various paganish elements, so he’s clearly a witch.

What they have discovered is that if you have a brightly lit building or monument, you will sometimes see reflections in the clouds above it. It’s an entirely natural phenomenon. In their minds, though, they are frantically seeking out patterns that fit their presuppositions, and then interpreting them in a way that reinforces their beliefs. People do this all the time, and the interpretations become more and more extreme if you’re hanging out with a group that totally lacks any skeptical input — it’s self-reinforcing, and is just going to get crazier and crazier, with each of those three reassuring each other that no amount of wackiness is going to trigger reason.

So a glow in the sky become’s Satan’s cauldron and a portal to hell because they want to think the worst of the man in the White House. If we went back a few years and took a similar picture while Trump was in office, it would be a sign from God, like the star of Bethlehem, that the man below it was the anointed one.

Here’s a video by a guy who wasn’t a gullible Stone Stooge who went looking for the Satanic Portal. It wasn’t there. He sees lots of reflections and lens flares from the bright lights around the building, and speculates that the White House live webcam, which is situated high up on a nearby building, has one of those lights shining in such a way as to reflect off the lens.

Sounds reasonable, far more likely than Satan building a glowing portal in the sky. But hey, you wild and wacky evangelical Christians: keep on praying. It won’t do any harm, and keeps you busy.

The book bannings will continue

Now the Republicans want to ban math textbooks. Florida has rejected 54 out of 132 proposed math textbooks because Ron DeSantis says they contain Critical Race Theory. Really? I found an example of what they object to.

A few points I have to make:

1. That’s not CRT. Those are just story problems on a worksheet about Maya Angelou.

2. That’s actually a clever way to motivate students to carry out simple algebraic calculations.

3. Isn’t it obvious how it will help kids learn algebra? They have to use algebra to crack the code and puzzle out the whole story.

4. I can tell the critic just zeroed in on the mention of sexual abuse and prostitution. Those things exist. They happen. They don’t disappear if you close your eyes real tight.

5. It’s also not from a Florida math textbook. It’s taken from an unapproved collection of potential math problems from an online site. For shame, Ms Pushaw! You lied!

Florida is working so hard to become the worst state in the union. They’ll have to work harder, though, because Texas is attacking libraries.

In early November, an email dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

This is a Texas tradition. There are always prudes and bigots who object to books that don’t pander to their blinkered, ignorant worldview — remember Mel and Norma Gabler? — the problem is that Texas actually listens to them, and has an army of conservative politicians that rush to impose their 19th century views on their electorate. Literally. That’s what motivated the Gablers to go on their long-running crusade to wreck the American textbook industry.

Norma and Mel Gabler entered the field of textbook reform twenty years ago, after their son Jim came home from school disturbed at discrepancies between the 1954 American history text his eleventh-grade class was using and what his parents had taught him. The Gablers compared his text to history books printed in 1885 and 1921 and discovered differences. “Where can you go to get the truth?” Jim asked.

How dare our understanding of the world change? Although best known to me for their efforts to expunge evolution from biology classes, you can tell that what triggered them, from the timing, was race. Same as nowadays.

Bonnie Wallace’s letter is also revealing. The only reason she isn’t sponsoring a book burning is projection — she’s afraid the liberals want to do the same thing to her cherished books. I swear, though, no one is planning to ban the Bible, and if they were, I’d be right there in opposition. The Bible is a piece of our history, everyone should be exposed to it, just as they should be exposed to our history of slavery and lynchings. Besides, it’s such a useful tool for creating atheists.

She’s also lying about “pornographic filth”. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book is not at all pornographic, but only frankly discusses the effects of racism…but yeah, they don’t want that known.

They also want to ban a whole batch of children’s books, such as Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which is quite a lovely weird story, and has, as I recall, two pictures of naked little Mickey falling through a dream. My kids giggled at that and always pointed it out because nudity is so highly censored from all of our books. It was innocent, not pornographic, and only stood out because the prudes and assholes have gotten their way for so long.

Now it’s getting worse. They’re dissolving library boards so they can pack them with conservative Republicans.

Cunningham said in a statement that the restructuring of the library board was in keeping with Texas law and past practices to allow for “citizen participation from different perspectives.” The all-female board is overwhelmingly White and Republican, records show.

And the new board was ready to start focusing on its top priorities, including adding content of “academia, educational value and character building” and consulting with a local Christian school about their needs, Wells wrote in one email. Wells, a member of the local tea party who home-schools her six children, did not return calls for comment.

They’re also ridiculously Christian.

Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.

Most chillingly, they’re quietly disappearing books they don’t like from the libraries, firing librarians, and hinting that they aren’t required to even have a library.

“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.

I remember the Satanic panics of the 1980s, when all kinds of baseless nonsense about cults and child sacrifice and secret underground rituals made the rounds (often abetted by the police — ACAB — who made up horrific and false stories to further the repressive bullshit). We’re in the middle of another one right now. Their chants are all about “pedophiles” and “grooming”, and they use them and their lunatic fringe Christianity to justify all kinds of oppression.

Many who spoke praised the commissioners for their recent work “saving the children of Llano County” from “pornography” and “pedophiles,” often breaking into enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Amen!” Tension erupted when latecomers stuck in the hallway attempted to speak. “I’d like to speak in the name of Jesus!” one man yelled.

“Amen!” is the new “Sieg Heil!”