Yikes. There is quite a pattern developing in the religious right, in the US at least. We are turning back the clock folks.
I want to go back to the 50s because of high corporate tax rates. You want to go back to the 50s because minorities were afraid. We are not the same.
Never forget, men of quality do not fear equality.
SBC also voted to affirm the explusions of two churches, including Saddleback Church, which was founded by highly respected author Rick Warren and is one of the largest baptist churches in the country. They claim nearly 25,000 people in weekly attendance. And Warren’s books, including “The Purpose-Driven Life,” are used all over, including in my then-relatively liberal Lutheran church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddleback_Church
They were expelled because a woman acted as a youth pastor.
Wow. That’s like kicking the Yankees out of MLB because the league thinks that players should be able to have long hair.
They continue their march towards irrelevance.
what in the fuck. this is why younger people hate religion.
This is why religion is indoctrinated. While I can accept, even while not believing, the argument that spirituality is innate, organized religion is entirely a human construct.
“Spirituality is innate” is such a copout for me. In my opinion, it just means people have an imagination and emotions, but I don’t want to admit magic isn’t real so I’ll call it spirituality.
Yep, spirituality is an emergent property with respect to imagination and a lack of omniscience; if something happens that is not explainable by an individual’s knowledge they’ll find it easy to come up with an imagined explanation.
This is why earlier religions explained things like the seasons, weather, earthquakes, volcanos, stars, etc through imagined gods while those same, evolved, religions don’t attempt to do so anymore. We understand them scientifically now.
Young people need to understand, first and foremost, that (almost) everything you believe is wrong. Young people are inherently naive and inexperienced, and must look to their elders and the Bible to learn the proper way to think and behave. Know that God does not change and human nature does not change either. Ever. We all have a lot to learn. Humility is the key. I say this in all acknowledgement that despite my age, I still know next to nothing. If you feel hatred towards religion or anything else (or anyone else), first accept that you are wrong, and then ask God for His guidance.
This is not surprising as SBC membership has been steadily declining and this, alongside the overall decline of Christianity in America, is leaving only the most conservative and extreme views behind. This act will only serve to ensure the decline continues as they are really just digging their own grave.
This is such a great observation that it seems obvious as soon as I read it, but it didn’t occur to me at all, especially in the sense you have framed:
The decline of Christianity isn’t a dissipation, it’s a contraction towards the hard core.
Gaming that out leads to some pretty alarming scenarios, and that’s relative to the alarming scenario we are currently living through!
As a former SBC kid, I’m more shocked they would kick out one of their highest grossing businesses out, purely from financial standpoint. Typically, they used to just gloss over this stuff and pretend they didn’t know.
That “pattern” has been around for at least fifty years. This is merely a continuation of it.
I just want to point out that a group of people are gathering to ensure that they don’t agree to follow a person that they don’t have any obligation to follow anyway.
This is why I couldn’t make it through Handmaid’s Tale, its just too close to home at this point.
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Actual Christian here. This decision is not extreme, whatsoever, though I get that it appears extreme to non-believers and feminists. The thing to understand here is that Christians follow the Bible. And conversely, those who do not follow the Bible are not Christian. So let’s take a look at a relevant Bible passage (1 Timothy 2:11-12):
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.Now that’s the word of God. It’s eternal, unchanging, and dictates how He wills us to live.
It’s definitely out-of-step with modern secular culture, and that’s a very good thing from the Christian perspective. We are God’s peculiar people (Titus 2:11-15).
I suppose I’m a former actual Christian, raised in the church, homeschooled K-12, not SBC but not unfamiliar with it. Point is, I know enough to know that modern Christianity is the accumulation of a series of compromises, concessions, and reinterpretations of the eternal Word of God over the centuries.
Interpreted literally, that passage also outlaws woman from teaching even Sunday School, much less my mom from Home Schooling me. Certainly I should have been in authority over her by the time I was, what, 13?
So basically, I appreciate and respect the perspective, but I’m not entirely buying it as a rational explanation for this.
Thank you for being respectful! I can’t claim my interpretation of scripture is any better than yours or anyone else’s. I get your point, truly. But my point is just that the SBC’s decision is firmly rooted in scripture, and that makes it a pretty normal decision for a Christian organization to make. If you wish to interpret that passage differently, nobody’s going to stop you, and I’m sure you’re not alone. But at the same time, you can understand the SBC’s perspective.
