Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Rank and file Methodists reject their elites in St. Louis, vote to reaffirm traditional morality

Conservative Christians Just Retook the United Methodist Church:

The mainline denomination voted on Tuesday to toughen its teachings against homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ clergy. It must now decide whether it will stay together.

The United Methodist Church has fractured over the role of LGBTQ people in the denomination. At a special conference in St. Louis this week, convened specifically to address divisions over LGBTQ issues, members voted to toughen prohibitions on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ clergy. ...

The bishops clearly did not have the support for which they had hoped. 
 

 

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Suddenly the Trump administration is all about promoting faggotry in the Middle East, about which Trump is clueless

Trump Administration Betrays America First With Gay Decriminalization Plan:

The Trump administration wants to pressure every country in the world to legalize homosexuality for the purpose of ostracizing Iran from the global stage. ... Trump himself seems unaware of the proposal, telling reporters “I don’t know” which reports they referred to. ...

"We need a new rational American foreign policy,” he said in an April 2016 speech outlining his foreign policy agenda. ... “In the Middle East our goals must be, and I mean must be, to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change."

“Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.”

Monday, February 25, 2019

Pretending no dull humanitarianism crept into the Christian gospel

The humanitarian’s chief concern is with humanity in the abstract, the supposed plight of faraway peoples of whom the humanitarian likely has little or no direct knowledge. ... In a sense, the religion of humanity sees everything from a remote distance. How blessed are we that—at least according to the Christian gospel—God doesn’t regard us with the same aloof, theoretical concern.

For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.

-- Matthew 26:11

For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.

-- Mark 14:7

For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

-- John 12:8

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Larry Norman: Is Christ a myth? a madman's whim?

The happy whimsey you pursue,
Till you at length believe it true,
Caught by your own delusive art,
You fancy first, and then assert.

-- Matthew Prior

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them

-- Mark 11:23f.

 

Larry Norman - First Day In Church (Poem Spoken) - [Live]


Thursday, February 21, 2019

So-called conservative and Methodist Rush Limbaugh doubts the existence of hell

Terrible Budget Bill Will Be Used Against Trump in 2020:

There’s also — the Republican Party, elected Republican Party is more afraid of government shutdowns than they are of going to hell, if there is one.

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Four out of five victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church are male, but The New York Times says this is impossible to sort out

Impossible only for The New York Times.

The unstated conclusion is that heterosexual priests, who outnumber their homosexual counterparts, would commit more offenses if only they had access to more girls, hence the Times' effort to exaggerate the number of homosexual priests to as high as 75% of the priesthood. The calumny implicit in this is as perverse as the growing acceptance of homosexuality is in the American Roman Catholic Church.

Homosexual priests overwhelming are to blame for these crimes against children, but we're supposed to feel all torn up about the homosexual priests' emotional health.

No wonder there's an exodus from the church (weekly attendance is half what it was in the 1970s), and from the readership of The New York Times (55% of what it was in 1993).


The idea that gay priests are responsible for child sexual abuse remains a persistent belief, especially in many conservative Catholic circles. For years, church leaders have been deeply confused about the relationship between gay men and sexual abuse. With every new abuse revelation, the tangled threads of the church’s sexual culture become even more impossible to sort out.

Study after study shows that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation. This is also true for priests, according to a famous study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the wake of revelations in 2002 about child sex abuse in the church. The John Jay research, which church leaders commissioned, found that same-sex experience did not make priests more likely to abuse minors, and that four out of five people who said they were victims were male. Researchers found no single cause for this abuse, but identified that abusive priests’ extensive access to boys had been critical to their choice of victims.

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Pope defrocks former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexually abusing "minors", should say "boys"

A former Roman Catholic archbishop and cardinal has been dismissed from the priesthood after the Vatican found him guilty of sexually abusing minors in a sign of an increasingly hardline stance taken by the church. Theodore McCarrick, 88, one of the prominent figures in the church, was defrocked just days before an unprecedented global summit of bishops to discuss child sexual abuse is convened by the Vatican. The Vatican’s move makes McCarrick the most senior figure to be removed from the priesthood in modern times. ...

An earlier Vatican hearing had found him guilty of soliciting for sex while hearing confession “with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power” and ordered his “dismissal from the clerical state”. McCarrick, who retired as archbishop of Washington DC in 2006, was forced to resign as a cardinal last July after a man publicly alleged that he had been sexually abused by the cleric from 1971, when he was a 16-year-old altar boy in New York. ...

Another man subsequently claimed he had also been abused as a child by McCarrick, and several former trainee priests alleged they had been sexually harassed by the former cardinal at his New Jersey beach house.
 

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

80% of Vatican priests are homosexuals, says new book

 
Eighty per cent of priests working at the Vatican are gay, although not necessarily sexually active, it is claimed in the book, In the Closet of the Vatican.
 

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Nadia Bolz-Weber's god is her SELF, and she still doesn't understand Paul of Tarsus

Probably never really read Paul, or Luther for that matter.

The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual Reformation:

The hypocrisy of purity culture, she argues, has recently been exposed through the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, as survivors of sexual violence within the Church speak out about abuse. “Purity culture equals rape culture,” she told me, by placing the onus on women. “It says to young women that your bodies aren’t your own and you can’t be a sexual being until you are the property of your future husband.” 

. . . and ye are not your own. -- I Corinthians 6:9

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Various, unconstant fortune

Fortune, that with malicious joy
Does man, her slave, oppress,
Still various and unconstant still,
Promotes, degrades, delights in strife,
And makes a lottery of life.

-- John Dryden

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Trump to prayer breakfast, the only people left who will believe him: "I will never let you down"

Trump has let his voters down by failing to repeal and replace Obamacare, signing tax reform benefiting corporations over individuals, and signing massive spending bills for defense and other programs without getting his signature objective, immigration enforcement and reform, for which he subsequently and vainly shut down the government after losing the US House and with it his leverage.


Wednesday, February 6, 2019

So, Jews don't believe in heaven

Or in reading:
 
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν).
 
-- Genesis 1:1
 
 

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

"Owned" is now popular but doth protest too much

Whole houses, of their whole desires possessed,
Are often ruin'd at their own request.

-- John Dryden

Monday, February 4, 2019

He that will not when he may . . .

He that will not when he may,
When he would he shall have nay.

-- An Old English proverb known to John Heywood, 1546

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.

-- John 9:4

Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.

-- II Thessalonians 3:6ff.