Anita Bryant was canceled by both the left and the right in America

The liberal consensus in 1964 was that atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair was the most hated woman in America. By 1980 Anita Bryant came in a close second.

The gay mafia canceled Anita Bryant for the obvious reasons, and the business and entertainment industries canceled her because politicization of such a toxic issue was universally deemed bad for the bottom line, but the evangelical right canceled her for divorcing her husband, leaving the once very popular singer and entertainer with no way to attract a crowd and make a buck.

“I don’t regret it, because I did the right thing,” she said in a 1990 interview. “Sometimes you have to pay a price for what you believe is right.”

She was a three-time Grammy nominee. LBJ absolutely loved her. Bob Hope entertained the troops in Vietnam and elsewhere with her for seven consecutive years. She was the face for many years of Florida orange juice, and of the Orange Bowl Parade, among other gigs.

She passed away from cancer in December, but the family did not announce her death until January 9th.

 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.  

-- Leviticus 18:22

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. 

-- Leviticus 20:13 

And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

-- Mark 10:12

 

Myths Christians tell themselves: In Christianity, humanity was not disposable ... In this way, the Christian God was radically different

 

Luke, the Greek

On the Nativity and Greek Myths

Andrew Fowler

 

Here was not only a god, but the God who loved humanity, rather than one who toyed with them as pawns like the Greek gods and goddesses. In Christianity, humanity was not disposable; and Jesus died for creation, as opposed to the people dying to please the gods. In this way, the Christian God was radically different.

 

If only it were so simple.

 

As myths telling tales of disposable humanity go, the reality has been that since the time of Christ a staggering number of human beings, roughly 50 billion, have died on planet Earth.

 

What has been the purpose of all those lives and of all those deaths? Have those been radically different in comparison with the more than 50 billion who lived and died before Jesus ever arrived on the scene?

 

One can argue convincingly that our lives have been better on balance, but hundreds of millions have come and gone in the Christian era itself who have suffered just as miserably as those who had come and gone before. And in the world right now the leading cause of death is abortion, some 70 million every year. None of them will ever be impressed by our home decor, and we will be disposed of as surely as they have been, but not soon enough for our crimes.

 

 

People recoil from reality and tell themselves tales to explain it and cope with it. Christians have been no exception, and have done the very same thing with their own religion. They have shunned the real content of their own scriptures which tell a different tale from the one encapsulated by the simple promise of everlasting life in John 3:16.

That was the tale of the good news for the few and the bad news for the many.

 

Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. ... Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. ... Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. ... There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.

 

-- Luke 13:3,5,24,28

 

And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

 

Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.

 

Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed. 

 

-- Luke 17:26ff.

 

This exclusive tale failed, and the world went on living and dying as before.

 

To cope with the failure, the Christians themselves replaced the way of the few with the inclusive way for the many which we now hear everywhere at Christmas since the first century. The former was falsified by events, but the latter is unfalsifiable because it is by definition beyond our ken. Some die and go to heaven. Some die and go to hell. It cannot be proven, but it also cannot be disproven. It is therefore the best of myths. It is durable. It helps people cope with the ugly facts of life and death. It gives hope to one third of the world's population, 2.38 billion people, the world's largest and most widespread religion, or so Artificial Intelligence tells me.

 

And if somehow I am wrong and this tale is in fact found to be falsifiable in some way some day, I am confident we will replace it again, because we are nothing if not myth-makers. We are not radically different, even if our God is. We are deceitful above all things.

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-- John 3:16

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. 

 

-- Galatians 2:20

 

 

Tom Holland, author of DOMINION, observes that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism, just as Oswald Spengler had maintained

Inescapable Influence, ‘How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’:

“That’s fine,” I seem to hear a skeptical reader saying. “This may work in the case of the Enlightenment, but you are not going to say that Marxism or Communism, for example, also had Christian roots, are you?” That’s precisely one of the subtler points Holland is making in Dominion. In the foundational texts of Christianity there are places where a fundamental solidarity with the poor and the hungry, the powerless and downtrodden, is formulated.  Jesus himself called these people “brothers,” and identified with them unreservedly (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”), whereas for those at the other end of the power spectrum, he had a different message (“Woe to you who are rich!”). And the first generations of Christians understood quite well what Christ had meant: “We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world,” writes Paul (1 Corinthians 4:13). Importantly, such a social vision is not just a peripheral feature of Christianity, or something added later by charitable souls, but stems from the central doctrine of Christianity: the Incarnation. As Holland puts it, “by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave,” Christ had “plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined.” In early Christian communities, all were “brothers” and “sisters,” everything was held in common, and power was deliberately shunned—a radical response to the radicalism of Christ’s own message. Various forms of what would later be called “socialism” or “communism,” recurrent throughout Christian history (from the Taborites to the Münster Anabaptists to countless other fringe groups) took those early communities as a good model to follow.

By the time Karl Marx entered the scene, then, Christianity already had a long and colorful history of toying with the communist idea. Coming from a solid rabbinical environment as he did, Marx didn’t fail to recognize a great Jewish teacher when he saw one, even when that teacher had ended up inspiring another religion altogether. Even the terminology used by Marx “to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation,’ ‘enslavement,’ ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets.” Marx’s famous formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” looks to Holland like a cheeky act of plagiarism from the Acts of the Apostles: “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had needed.” 

Shun excess, now and in the life to come

 

 

And a man must take with him to the house of death an adamantine faith in this, that even there he may be undazzled by riches and similar trumpery, and may not precipitate himself into tyrannies and similar doings and so work many evils past cure and suffer still greater himself, but may know how always to choose in such things the life that is seated in the mean and shun the excess in either direction, both in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come; for this is the greatest happiness for man.

-- Plato, Republic, 10.619a, b

The unintended consequences of religion: Liberal "political correctness" is to Puritanism as libertarian "going Galt" is to what?

Shunning:

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord . . .. -- 2 Cor. 6:17

Let Us Now Shun Famous Men, Like David Bentley Hart

Without fear of contradiction I can assert that the group most detested by all and sundry at this hour in America is the Westboro Baptists, who have the unmitigated gall to show up at military funerals and proclaim God's hate, hate!, for America, her soldiers and her symbols.

"Her" is said advisedly, because to the Westboro Baptists, America is a bitch, a whore, ancient Babylon re-incarnate, for her late friendship with homosexuality, among other things.

Closely following them in opprobrium is the US Supreme Court which has rather thumpingly ruled that these fanatics have a right to express their opinions as they do, which has been according to the law. As far as the Supremes would have it, the quarrel is local, the politics local, and the local laws the law until such time as the locals change it and the Westboro Baptists break it.

A writer for First Things, one David Bentley Hart, is quite beside himself over all this. Here he calls the Westboro Baptists barbarians, fiends, resorters to absolute license, and abusers, with Mr. Hart fancying that the founders would have had them duly arrested. Actually, the founders would have criticized the Westboro Baptists for their timid response to the moral outrage of homosexuality, the practitioners of which the founders would have characterized as the barbarians, the fiends, the abusers and licentious in the extreme. The rest of us they wouldn't recognize as countrymen.

The truth is Mr. Hart actually would have preferred a fascism of the judicial sort, while crying out the generic variety, saving him all this trouble.

True to the readership of First Things, Mr. Hart has taken it a bit in the shorts not for any of that, but for suggesting, facetiously enough, that the Westboro Baptists and the military families might usefully settle this by a duel, which should tell you two things.

One, many readers of First Things apparently live where Rush Limbaugh lives, in not liberally educated Literalville, in a different neighborhood from Rush but still the same town, which comes as quite as much a shock to me as it does to Mr. Hart.

Two, Mr. Hart is sufficiently unnerved by this that he has found it necessary to write a follow-up (here) in which he has proposed instead that we all quickly recover the manners of a bygone age and treat these Westboro Baptists to the cut instead of the duel, a refined social custom descended from the shunning teaching of, for example, Paul's First Corinthian Epistle, chapter the fifth.

Oh yeah, that'll hurt 'em.

Except that in First Corinthians, Paul advises shunning actually the sinners, like the homosexuals, whereas Mr. Hart advises shunning, well, the shunners, Paul, and the Westboro Baptists, for example.

If there is a God in heaven, the Westboro Baptists are surely His prophets, and Mr. Hart is one of their targets. I'd say they're scoring hits.