The Men Whose Prayers are Hindered

May 18th, 2012

The Bible warns husbands that if they disregard the pleas of their wives, God will disregard their pleas.

Peter warns husbands, who in his society were the absolute rulers of their families, of the consequences of failing to honor their wives: “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.” 1Peter 3:7 Some scholars believe that his reference to spiritual consequences for failing to honor a wife is an allusion to Malachi 2:15 ” Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.” Treating a woman with kindness and dignity is essential for a man’s own spiritual well being.

To some readers, this may sound merely like a quaint idea. And yet we are seeing these warnings from both the Old and the New Testaments proved out in the prayerlessness, fragile egos, perverted sins, and incredible imbecility of doctrine and preaching in Christian Fundamentalism. I’m sure that many current Fundamentalists can defend themselves on this count by summing up prayer meetings and prayer chains, and prayer letters, etc. But the markers of successful prayer are not time or intent or appearance, but rather, change, compassion, peace, and the ability to be unswayed by present circumstances, to actually see through them to the eternal counsels of God behind them.

If we look at Christian Fundamentalism today, we see a religion that builds no hospitals, erects no libraries, forsakes all social justice (and remember, once upon a time, it was Christians who fought for the rights of the insane, the debtors, the orphaned, and the diseased.), and has placed its trust in politicians and the right to bear arms. Fundamentalist preachers leap from issue to issue, and from headline to headline. They present Christianity as “under attack,” when the reality is that Christ is victorious.

Now, previously, I illustrated my points by embedding a video of Jack Schaap rambling like an enraged barbarian about women. But FBCH has pulled all those videos of Schaap, now that those videos have been used by so many of us as evidence of his depravity and lunacy. So I’ll just have to continue the discussion in text.

David, the prophets, and even the Lord Jesus Himself complained to God and reproached Him for His seeming severity. People ignorant of prayer only mouth platitudes to God.

As I have documented more and more abuse cases in Christian Fundamentalism, I can honestly say that my prayer life has increased. When it comes to doubting the goodness of God, a person can go either of two ways: either get angry and shun Him, or get angry (or sad) and go to Him, repeatedly, about the matters that trouble the person’s confidence in God. Ultimately, I took the second option. After a few years, I began to suspect that this had been His design all along.

Prayer is not, as the Fundamentalists practice it (or say they practice it) a presentation to God with a long list of other people’s needs. I mean, intercession comes into prayer. But prayer at its foundations is communion with God. And, again, while Christian Fundamentalists depict that communion as a point of total surrender and total agreement with God, anybody who actually prays with true intent will tell you that prayer is also complaint to God, and reasoning with Him about the troubles around us, and laying before Him the reasons He ought to change some of His current policies.

God has enthroned Christ. And Christ has made us His ministers. And like any appointed ministers, we come before Him to tell Him what is going on in His kingdom.

Believers pray for God to have compassion, and by this means God increases our compassion. Where you see no compassion, you are seeing people whose prayers are hindered.

Thus, by prayer we become more aware of the suffering of others and more aware of the God to whom we bring our accounts. And it’s these prayers that God answers. Prayer itself has to be based on a ruthless honesty that sees things as they are (which takes time, and always gets more and more honest and clear), and repeatedly goes to God about the matter.

But when men abuse their wives, abuse their children, cover up for child molesters, and place their confidence in a counterfeit of what Christianity actually is, then yes, their prayers are hindered. That’s why we don’t see Christian Fundamentalism building hospitals, libraries, etc. Nor have they been able to come out with any significant apologetics to the world to justify faith in Christ or answer the weighty questions that trouble mankind. Christian Fundamentalism has lost the touchpoint with God: prayerful communion that both widens the human capacity for compassion on others, and also deepens a person’s understanding of the complexity, sovereignty, mystery of God and His willingness to hear the reports of His ministers and accept their counsels at His throne. Christian Fundamentalism lacks compassion, has a track record of abuse, and is filled with nonsense and heresies. Those are the ultimate evidences of its failure at prayer.

PS: Here is the video of Schaap, with an intro by Darrell Dow:

Posted in Christiianity: Women and Authority, Fundamentalism and Stupidity | 5 Comments »

Empty Tombs Across the Landscape

May 17th, 2012

I believe that I love because Christ first loved me.

Documenting clergy abuse in Fundamentalism definitely has its down side. I often feel (rightly or wrongly) that I have seen the worst depravity to which human kind can sink. And it has assaulted my faith, tested it, tried it, and made it waver. But I am a Christian, and even in deepest doubt and the darkness of not seeing any remedy, I believe that the only reason I love the Lambs is because Jesus Christ has loved them and has loved me.

This is the power of the resurrection, the power of Christ over Death. Into this selfish, shallow, silly country that was once braver and better than it is now, a selfish, narcissistic counterfeit of Christianity took root, entrenched in valuing itself for what it is, honoring its own traditions and its own leaders, cherishing its self-appointed freedom from ever having to attend to the Body of Christ, preying upon the innocent and discarding them, in God’s name.

You would think that any frail life, once snared by those in power in this false religion, would perish. And, certainly, it has its dead bodies hidden under its hems. And yet, I have seen those who went down into the tomb of abuse and abandonment, as children, in this false religion: raped, beaten, some starved, some actually worked as slaves, all as children, emerge as saints. They love and they do good. They even have learned to forgive while seeking justice and the protection of the latest generation.

She was vulgar, cruel, and violent. But when she died, some of her former victims mourned her.

When Pat Williams died, a mother of evil deeds and a woman who brought sorrow to the innocent as fast and as plentifully as she could, and who reveled in the suffering of girls, I saw her former victims, many of them, actually mourn for her, and worry over how severe God would be with her. They pitied her; they wished for her forgiveness and restoration. In this same way, I have seen many others who have been humiliated down to the root of what it is to be a human being, stand up again, in their right minds, and live lives of dignity, bringing relief and dignity to others.

And this is the first taste of the empty tomb. This is the same power that conquers death. I know that Christ arose because I have known the risen Christ in me, and I see the risen Christ among His Lambs working His life through them and overcoming sin and death. This dark landscape will turn to light and joy, but I see the lanterns and the candles now, unwinking and unquenchable, for the simple reason that the people of Christ have died with Christ and are risen with Christ, and Christ is at work in them. This is the power of the resurrection.

Posted in devotionals | 2 Comments »

Judge Denies Philip Caminiti’s Motion to Dismiss Based on Religious Freedom

May 16th, 2012

Hat tip to Nick for this information:

I always find it so satisfying when these guys draw women judges.

Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi agreed that indicted pastor Philip Caminiti has a “a sincerely held religious belief” in beating small children with a wooden stick across their bare bottoms to make them better people. (I mean, how else could you excuse such a belief, unless you want to call it a sexual fetish, and I doubt he would do that.) But she pointed out the flaw in Caminiti’s logic: “Scripture doesn’t specify how and when the rod should be used,” Sumi told him. She also pointed out that Caminiti had already demonstrated willingness to alter church policy to comply with government rules of child safety. So even Caminiti could not show that he was certain or “religiously sincere” in the details of his belief.

One lawyer has explained it this way: it is not criminal for Caminiti to persuade his church members of the rightness of corporal punishment, if he has a sincerely held religious conviction that corporal punishment is a necessary part of child rearing. But when it comes to a particular child, at a particular age, who Caminiti advised should be subjected to a specific beating, that was actually solicitation of a criminal offense. Or it could have been. The trial will determine if that, in fact, is what he did. Infants and toddlers in the church had been beaten until they were bruised and had welts. Caminiti is alleged to have specifically directed such punishments against those specific children, and those punishments in particular constituted child abuse. If that is proved, it means that he was operating beyond religious conscience and had instead become part of the criminal acts. It is not illegal to spank your children in this country. But it is illegal to commit assault. And it’s illegal to use authority or influence to solicit assault against a child.

Is Philip Caminiti really a man of sincere religious conviction? Or just a nitwit who cannot interpret the Bible properly?

As I have written previously, the Bible’s injunctions to use a rod against a “lad” (to give the closest translation), have nothing to do with infants and toddlers, or even daughters. In the permissive fathering style of the Old Testament, young men and boys committed petty crimes an acts of hooliganism, and were protected by their fathers when they did these things. The injunctions to use a rod on them come from only one source: Proverbs. Fathers at that time were the only Law. They lived in a patriarchy. If they did not punish the criminal or drunken or lewd behavior of their sons, then their sons would do great harm to others.

But by the time of the New Testament, when cities and more complex societal structures were in place, we don’t see Solomon’s injunctions repeated, ever. Christ never endorsed them. Neither did Paul. In that culture, where Roman fathers tended to be severe, and peasant fathers in some of the Greek nations could abandon their families with impunity, love of children, care for them, and gentleness with them are advocated. I wouldn’t say that spanking is never necessary, but it certainly ought to be a last resort. The fondness of Fundamentalists for frequent, harsh, and immediate spanking (or really, beatings, in many cases) seems, to me, to come more from a misplaced confidence in the power of hitting over the power of reasoning and loving rebuke, rather than from any real knowledge of the Bible.

Posted in Aleitheia Bible Church - Black Earth WI, Philip B. Caminiti | No Comments »

Blame the Victims, Blame the Parents, Blame Everybody Except Child Molesting Preachers….

May 15th, 2012

In the following essay, Ron Williams, director at the infamous Hephzibah House, proceeds to blame child molesting on immodest clothing and unwary parents. He specifically allows “God- ordained authority figures, or to those delegated by the same” complete, unquestioned liberty to supervise children, in spite of the staggering record of child molesting that has occurred and continues to occur in churches, by ministers and other church officers.

Every child molested by Bob Gray of Trinity Baptist, Jacksonville Florida (and investigators have put the number as high as 200), was modestly dressed, both girls and boys. This article is taken from the flaming torch website:

MOLESTATION: Our Present Circumstances
By RONALD E. WILLIAMS, Pastor, BELIEVERS BAPTIST CHURCH AND DIRECTOR OF HEPHZIBAH HOUSE

Obscured by the frenetic pace of modern life and a consuming focus on materialism, many 21st Century sojourners have not discerned the palpable erosion of morality in our land.

Measurable elements of our society openly live in unbridled lusts and moral abandon.

However, it is no longer a disaffected minority of our culture that has been adversely affected by effacing God’s moral law and the inner law of conscience. A generalized moral malaise has settled over our landscape that has brought leanness to the soul of most of our nation.

In a society and culture no longer governed by God’s unchanging moral principles, social pathologies abound. Hostility to Biblical religion thrives in our land in a way that would make the participants of the French Revolution of the late 1700′s proud. Secularism, humanism and paganism are thriving in post- Christian America. We are jaded, effete and pagan as a nation.

THE LAST DAYS

In 67 AD, Paul, by inspiration of God, delineated the literal events we observe taking place in our culture. In 2 Timothy 3:1- 9, he described these times as “perilous times” that would occur in the “last days? (2 Timothy 3:1).

Technically, these “last days” describe that period between 67 AD and the return of Christ. However,, one can logically expect the sad litany of wicked practices described in verses 2 – 5 to intensify as the end of the age draws near.

When our nation honored the Lord, we were exalted (“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people” Proverbs 14:34), but we now bear an increasingly marked reproach. Disdaining our God brings ominous results: “The wicked shall be turned into Hell, and all the nations that forget God.” (Psalm 9:17)

Note some of the particular descriptions Paul uses to explain these perilous times: “lovers of their own selves, unholy, without natural affection, incontinent, fierce, heady and lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God”. (verses 2 – 4).

Such dissolute libertines can be expected to engage in pernicious, aberrant, self-serving and anti-social behavior. Hence, a culture of self has yielded a catastrophic destruction of the nuclear family (50% divorce rate, unprecedented number of working mothers, burgeoning growth of single parent homes).

Temperance, or self-control is becoming an endangered character quality in our culture. Personal responsibility and the notion, “I am accountable for my behavior,” is gradually disappearing from the modern scene.

SEXUAL PREDATION

In addition to breaking a marriage covenant, killing an unwanted unborn child, titillating one’s dissolute libido with pornography, accepting sodomy as an alternative way to live, a debauched citizen of these perilous times will easily become an unblushing sexual predator.

When Paul characterized this class of souls as “fierce” (verse 3), he was aptly using a word which literally means an “untamed beast.” How else can one describe an individual who will prey on vulnerable, defenseless youth to satiate his demented and twisted libido?

IT IS HAPPENING TO OUR CHILDREN

In over 30 years at Hephzibah House, we have listened to numerous tragic tales of girls whose innocence has been stolen and scarred by their father, step-father, brother, step-brother, grandfather, or other respected and trusted family member or authority figure.

These victimized girls arrive with troubled spirits, a sad demeanor and a haunting look. Some have learned to sublimate, and their horrifying past experiences are a secret personal nightmare over which they constantly seek to erase its effects from their present and future experience.

Most, however, suffer ongoing consequences that retard spiritual growth and victory, mitigate against a lack of genuine, consistent joy and engender a deficient view of self

LINGERING CONSEQUENCES

A victim of incest and/or molestation sometimes considers herself beyond the reach of a “normal life” by virtue of being so “soiled and dirty.” Such girls are often left with a predisposition to be promiscuous, finding a pathetic value in numerous dalliances that in fact only serve to further desensitize and scar her soul.

Others fear rejection and/or judgment if she unburdens her soul about her victimization. Thus, she purposely conceals her past and carries a heavy burden of guilt and shame she is not equipped to carry.

Also, some old enough to understand the subsequent consequences of reporting a parent, sibling or authority figure, do not want to be responsible for “breaking up the family,” or the incarceration of the one that has victimized her. Like some abused and battered wives, she endures the agony of “her secret” rather than jeopardize the security she believes she still has in her relationship, as dysfunctional and aberrant as it is.

VICTORY IS POSSIBLE

I vividly remember the confession of one young lady in our ministry who haltingly and hesitantly shared her sordid story of having been used by her father over a prolonged period of several years. As she was encouraged by a sympathetic ear, she poured out the facts she had been hiding.

One could easily discern the emotional and spiritual catharsis that ensued as she unburdened her soul and sought help, healing and grace from the Lord. I am glad to report she is now happily married, a contented mother of children, and in the Lord’s work today.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

What about prevention? Can these unspeakable crimes against youngsters be prevented? As the apostasy deepens and these “perilous times” become more dangerous, loving parents need to be aware we are living in a hostile and dangerous atmosphere.

One can no longer assume one’s neighbor, friend or relative is controlled by the dictates of a morally enlightened conscience. Some youngsters are violated by pastors, missionaries and gray- headed grandparents!

Nor can one escape by living in remote areas, away from population centers. Several of our girls have voluntarily or involuntarily been violated by their own family members, through they lived in sparsely populated, remote places.

Several procedures can be put in place in every home to inhibit or retard the incidence of these grievous crimes. Modest behavior and dress should be a hallmark of every moral home. It is not decent and enlightened behavior to parade around in front of family members in various stages of nudity, it is shameful and alluring, especially as young bodies mature and develop.

It is noteworthy that God provided coats of skins to cover nudity once man fell in sin. Nakedness in Scripture is universally proclaimed as being “shameful.” Every child early on should be taught to cover their nakedness and to never expose themselves in shameful ways.

Supervision of children should be predicated on the fact that we live in a wicked and sinful world, and that ubiquitous, imminent dangers lurk for unsupervised, trusting and naive youngsters. Not only so, but every youngster himself is possessed of a wicked, fallen nature, and therefore is in critical need of constant moral supervision and accountability.

Children should always be under the supervision of their God-ordained authority figures, or to those delegated by the same. Such practices as sleeping overnight at friends’ houses, riding in automobiles with members of the opposite sex, or unsupervised outings ought to be forbidden. In each case, the parent does not have control or supervision. The defilement of an unsupervised and unassuming Dinah is an alarming illustration from antiquity, and may I say we do not live in an environment morally superior to Schechem (Genesis 34:1-2).

Children, young people and teens ought not to be left home alone. Many a youngster has lost their innocence with one of their siblings as parents are away and naively assuming nothing would happen to their child at home.

Commercial television, contemporary music, worldly videos and salacious periodicals and newspapers do not encourage young people to remain pure in thought and deed. Nominal Christianity is actually dangerous for a youngster in these perilous times; they become inoculated with a weakened form of the real thing and consequently become immunized against the real thing (vital Christianity).

They become desensitized to the plague of their heart, the insidious and pernicious character of sin and the absolute necessity of a holy walk. Having friends with questionable character and participating in worldly activities does not help youngsters to grow strong in spirit.

Recreational dating ought to be viewed for what it is: wicked, worldly, unbiblical and an activity that predisposes its participants to harmful lusts and temptations, including future marital problems.

BE SOBER, VIGILANT, PROTECTIVE

Praise God for the resilience of children and the healing balm of God’s grace for those involved in molestation/incest. However, it is a severe bump in the road for its victims, and its scarring, debilitating effects ought to be a stirring motivation for every parent to be vigilant, sober, watchful and protective. If it occurs, it ought not to happen because of carelessness and naivete’, but in spite of every caution and care.

Dear Parent, do not be deceived by our enlightened culture. Do not become so consumed with the business of modern life that you forget we are living in a hostile, depraved and debauched world. Sexual predation is a tragic reality perpetrated on multitudes of hapless youngsters by rapacious, intemperate felons, who have no compunction about the innocence, youth or vulnerability of their victims.

Until the inchoative character and maturity of your child is in full bloom, your children need your active guidance, protection and oversight. Just as locked doors “keep our friends out,” but do not accuse them of burglary, living by standards requiring constant parental supervision of children, insistence on modesty, shamefacedness and being demure, will prevent much molestation without accusing anyone of being a predator.

TORCH EDITOR: These are wise words coming from Pastor Williams. Here in the Las Vegas area there have been six public school teachers arrested and charged with sexual crimes with children. Also a Catholic School and a Baptist School with the same problem. These were crimes against both boys and girls. Some of these predators are already serving jail time. THIS IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.

END OF QUOTED MATERIAL

Yes, it is only the tip of the iceberg. Both of the flaming idiots who run the torch web page, and Ron Williams himself continue in the game of make-believe when it comes to gross sexual abuse that is going on in the Religious Right. It’s not the fault of television, or radio, or modern times. Sex abuse is the fault of men who consider themselves to be entitled to help themselves to the lives of others. And that mindset for preachers is encouraged and endorsed in Christian Fundamentalism.

Posted in church abuse, danger zone, Hephzibah House | 4 Comments »

Vindemiatrix

May 14th, 2012

Do not attempt to gather the grapes
For the grapes will gather you;
The vines reach up to heaven,
And the grapes will gather you.

Don’t aim the prow to riven the front
For the front will riven you.
The winds push through forever,
And the front will riven you.

If you build a house of terror,
The terrors imprison you.
And sowing tears grows widows,
But the widows harvest you.

Posted in danger zone, Fighting the Flying Monkeys | No Comments »

Which Biblical Villain are You?

May 13th, 2012

If you take this quiz, you will be assigned to a biblical villain. So there’s no opting out just because you go soul winning and won’t let your wife wear trousers. The quiz finds the villain in all of us!

Goliath
You are Goliath, a proud warrior of your people. Though despite your personal glory, you remained a foot soldier instead of the king that you probably could have been. This is because you are content to let someone else dominate the world. You are rather lazy and unmotivated, so naturally, you tend to avoid positions of responsibility like the plague. You are a gentle hero to your countrymen (i.e. your friends, family, social groups), but a despised villain to people outside of these groups. This is probably due to your arrogance and open hostility. In fact, you are very well known for your directness and your “mean what you say, say what you mean” attitude. This attribute, combined with your pride, gives you an uncanny resemblance to the WWF wrestlers of today—you are viewed as either a hero or a villain depending on the allegiance of the fans.
Link: The Which Biblical Villain Are You Test written by MetalliScats

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Answering the Allegations Against Me

May 12th, 2012

From May 19, 2011

I think it is revolting that I have to do this. But after the events of last night, I have to. So if you are wondering if I’m some sort of agent for Bob Jones University, or if I am huckstering money from the Lambs, here is my rebuttal and my account of the ongoing harassment I am getting, a harassment based on reasons that don’t even make sense:

http://www.jeriwho.net/jocelyn/

Updated January 5, 2012
Regrettably, I have updated the page in the reference above. I have appended more nonsensical (and vague) allegations. I did this because now the story has changed. And I’ve typed in my replies.

Posted in Fighting the Flying Monkeys | 59 Comments »

Fundamentalism and Clergy Sex Abuse of Children, in a Nutshell

May 12th, 2012

Posted in Fundamentalist Corruption, Light Stuff | 1 Comment »

The Ghosts of Raptures Past

May 11th, 2012

The Rapture in 1992!Nothing keeps a Dispensationalist church excited and on its toes like a new rapture myth. The last great hoopla over the imminent Rapture was just prior to 2000, but decades earlier, (as I went through my teens and 20s in Fundamentalism,) I also lived through the Rapture-76 and Rapture-84 cycles. Apparently there was another one in 1992, which I missed because by then I had stopped believing in Dispensationalist eschatology. But you would have had to live under a rock to miss the incredible hoopla and hullabaloo over the fabled Y2K Rapture of 2000.

And, of course, if you are a part of the culture of the Rapture, you also have seen your share of the Anti-Christ. Henry Kissinger was my first Anti-Christ. He was a Jewish man in political office, which was the real reason so many Fundamentalists distrusted him, but his name also adds up to 666, and that was all the evidence they needed. You have to be my age to remember the many sermons in which Kissinger was vilified for all the evil he was intending towards this country and the world. And even if you are my age and lived through the same types of sermons, you’ve probably forgotten, because as soon as Kissinger became unimportant on the world scene, he was forgotten by Fundamentalism. But since Kissinger we’ve had popes who were the Anti-Christ, Russian leaders (Gorbachev created a short-lived big scare. Again, his evil was bolstered by that weird birth mark on his head.)

Of course our latest Anti-Christ is President Obama. And our latest Rapture is scheduled for 2012.

And this date owes its credibility to the Mayan Calendar, which–to put it very simply–runs out on December 21, 2012. Astrologers have also noted that the earth’s ecliptic will align with the center-line of the Milky Way on that day. By the way, the Mayans and other Mesoamericans did not know that back when they formed their calendar. Their Long Count system is based on a unit of 20 days, and they used their own complex numerology to develop the long counts that describe cycles, or “epochs” of time. The Mesoamerican astrologers were not into ecliptic alignments; they were into Venus. And the shorter Venus cycles do dovetail nicely with the Long Count cycles.

But I would like to point out that the bedrock of all of this Rapture hoopla is nothing other than astrology. And let me point out that the Mesoamericans were pretty good astrologers, but they read the heavens in terms of their cultures being the center of everything. For example, the Aztecs used the same basic astrology as the Mayans. They did correctly foresee that a white man would cross the water, arrive in 1519, and subjugate their empire. Incorrectly, they decided he would be one of their gods, Quetzalcoatl, and they built a mythology around him with the idea that he could eventually be appeased. Well, he wasn’t a god, and he was never appeased. He was Cortez, and he wanted to plunder them. But it was unthinkable to the Aztecs to consider that some other nation somewhere way out there would send an agent that would destroy the Aztecs, the center of the creation.

Let me clear up a few more myths about the current Rapture craze: Obama is not the Anti-Christ. Guns will neither hasten nor help the Rapture. The I-Ching does NOT specify the year 2012 any where. The I-Ching is not concerned with dates or the end of the world at all. Several astrologies do recognize that this current era is a time of shifting of the ages, but none of them predict that the world will end.

What I would like to point out is that Fundamentalists, who often insist they do not set dates, have been setting dates for decades and getting it wrong. At what point will the 2012′ers stop and acknowledge that they were wrong back in 2000? Prior to that in 1992, etc. Come on guys, quit picking dates. It won’t be the end of the world if you actually preach the Bible instead of the Mayan Long Count.

Posted in Rapture Stuff | 7 Comments »

Loss of Faith

May 10th, 2012

Psychologist Bob Altmeyer, in his series of tests given to both religious and non-religious audiences, discovered that loss of faith that occurs in the transition from child hood to adulthood occurs for three reasons among Fundamentalists:

Weakness in Christian teachings. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have fallen a long way from the days of CS Lewis’ radio talks. They simply cannot argue as well for Christianity as non-Christians can argue for a more secular outlook. And this failure encompasses far more than just arguments about Creation. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists cannot argue convincingly about the moral fallout of homosexual behavior, the reason to stick with a bad marriage and make it work, the role of personal responsibility in social issues.

Science. This is pretty close to the first item, but I think the distinction is that Fundamentalism forces its adherents to ignore new discoveries in genetics and physics that support evolutionary theory. Not having an answer to new discoveries, pretending they are not there, indicts Fundamentalism.

Hypocrisy. This is the point of my post. When questioned, people who had abandoned Fundamentalism credited the gross hypocrisy of Christian Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism as the final straw.

Altmeyer doesn’t provide any reasoning beyond his evidence and the reasons given by those who no longer believe. But I will supply some reasoning about the failure of American Christendom to keep the faith.

I have frequently observed that Fundamentalists believe in an inert, dead, random cosmos. In essence, while maintaining that they believe in Creationism, they use the evidences of atheism and an atheistic view of the universe to support their argument. So yes, that would be a doomed method of argument.

Second, modern Western Christianity has lost the philosophical underpinnings that made Christianity work for centuries in the centers of learning across Europe. And one chief concept that has been lost is the concept of the Real and what I would now call “the apparent” but which was more commonly called “the accidental”. A Creationist point of view could exist quite comfortably alongside an evolutionary point of view if a person recognized the distinction between the Real and the Apparent (or accidental). God did do everything that Genesis says He did, but it was manifested in the material world in an apparent way, or an apparent/accidental way. Neither contradicts the other if we understand that all apparent/accidental manifestations of God’s decrees bear the limitations of entering the material world.

Preachers will tell you that from our vantage point we don’t plainly see what God is doing. And then they become offended when science, which is entirely based upon human observation, backs them up. We do not clearly see the entirety of Creation in six days for the simple reason that we are limited in how we can perceive an event that originated in heaven and was obscured by the Fall. The event itself is limited in that we suspect that the days themselves were not the same lengths as days are now. Time itself, its nature and the way it works, was altered by the Fall of man, so we are going to see a skewed presentation of what happened at Creation.

Paul wrote that we see through a glass darkly, and that is certainly true. The further back we try to look at something that had its origin before man and at Heaven’s throne, the greater the distortion.

This loss of an ability to make a distinction between the Real and the Apparent effects just about everything in American conservative Christianity. For example, the Bible is read like a parts manual, (or, as Charles Martin as pointed out, like an end user agreement) with Christian teachers telling congregations to follow programmed instructions to get the results that they want. They reduce the significance to Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, etc. The idea that the Bible is bigger than the sum of its parts, that it intentionally forces us to consider and reconsider what it is saying, that it requires debate and difference among frail and fallen humans for them to properly pay sufficient attention to it, is written off as unbelief in Fundamentalism (and Evangelicalism). A small-print Bible fits neatly into a hip pocket and therefore all of God’s Truth can fit neatly into a hip pocket. That’s the materialistic spirituality of Christian Fundamentalism (and Evangelicalism).

Christianity itself, which was founded and grew because of love that glorified God and proved the resurrection, deity, and presence of Christ with us, has been redefined in the Religious Right to being a team sign-up list. American Christianity no longer goes seeking sinners. Instead it seeks to sign up people who want to be Christians and meet the criteria of being straight, Republican, monogamous, and drug-free. It bullies gays, Moslems, and other non-believers. It favors war and capitalism because it wants to retain power.

Who wouldn’t lose faith in a religion like that? Furthermore, it ignores its own increasing tally of gross sin: huckstering, fraud, pedophilia, and domestic violence, as it points an accusatory finger at others.

That’s not my religion, and that’s not what Christianity is. And that’s why people lose faith in it. Genuine love and concern for others, genuine humility before God, and genuine love of mercy and peace are the arguments for Christianity. Nobody can refute them. But living them out means truly believing in the Real Christ, the One Who has told His followers to take up a Cross and follow Him. And American Christianity, certainly Christian Fundamentalism, abandoned that a long time ago.

Posted in Fundamentalism and Stupidity, Fundamentalist Corruption | 13 Comments »

« Older Entries