Southern Baptists Vote to Further Expand Restrictions on Women as Leaders
Southern Baptists Vote to Further Expand Restrictions on Women as Leaders
Yikes. There is quite a pattern developing in the religious right, in the US at least. We are turning back the clock folks.
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.
Well that's sort of condescending. Age doesn't make people inherently wiser, and a lack of belief in religion doesn't imply naivete or inexperience--just a shortage of believable evidence. It's actually far more naive to believe something without strong evidence, isn't it?
Yeah, otherwise young people might start to think that women are somehow equal to men and all sorts of other crazy things. Gotta nip that stuff in the bud, right?
Never forget, men of quality do not fear equality.
Well said, and a fitting first comment for you on Lemmy. Welcome.
Thank you, took a few days to get my bearings, but I think I'm starting to figure it out. Looking forward to seeing how these communities grow.
Oh that’s good. I may use that in the future.
Regressivists hate progress, more news at 11.
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.
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!
The hard core was always there, the more moderate ones were just cloaking it
This is why I couldn't make it through Handmaid's Tale, its just too close to home at this point.
Yep. I havn't been able to watch it despite my friends swearing by it. It's all too familiar to me and the way I grew up.
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.
They continue their march towards irrelevance.
Actual ex-Christian here.
The concept that you seem to be failing to grasp -- and I can't blame you because it escaped me as a Christian as well -- is that these are rules that you are welcome to follow. Your religion tells you what you can and can't do. You can make that choice. The problem comes when you try to apply that to anyone else who doesn't accept it. Your religion's rules don't apply to me, because I'm not part of your religion.
I'm willing to coexist with Christians. But that coexistence has to go both ways.
I grew up in a church that was consciously literalist and held the Bible as inerrant. I'm no longer religious, but looking back with the blinders of those doctrines on, I have to wonder if I might still be a believer if those ideas hadn't been drilled into me.
I'm all on board with the Jesus of the Gospels; he seems like a pretty cool dude who didn't have any time for people in power exploiting the downtrodden. But the Old Testament, on the other hand, is a mess, and it includes passages casting God as a bloodthirsty murderer making the Pharoah resist Moses just so that he could send more plagues against Egypt, prophets speaking for God in the language of the abusive boyfriend who tells his partner that it's her fault that he's hurting her (basically every one of the prophets, but take Ezekiel 16 as a representative example), God guiding Joshua through an ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and God commanding the genocide of the Amalekites and then punishing King Saul for being insufficiently thorough about it.
Let's not even mention that weird bit of erotic literature that's tucked into the middle for some reason (and don't try to sell me on the idea that "Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle" is a metaphor for anything other than really nice boobs)...
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have the letters of Paul where, when you look at it without bias, it's plainly clear that he's a religious conservative trying to pull the radical early church back into line with his own personal mores. Small wonder that hundreds of years later, when the church was The Church and falling into conservative patterns of orthodoxy, they picked the epistles they did to canonize as The Complete and Unerring Word of God...
Now that’s the word of God. It’s eternal, unchanging
Hasn't the Bible been translated from Greek and Hebrew multiple times?
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.
but I’m not entirely buying it as a rational explanation for this.
This literally could go for anything in the Bible. As the person said, the Bible is the word of God, Christians follow the Bible without questioning the word of God. It is, inherently, not based on rational, it is based on Authority.
I think even from a christian perspective the right thing to do wouldnt be to just accept a collection of scriptures as absolute truths (or to be precise the exact interpretation of those scriptures by the leaders of the group they happened to get into).
If you dont examine your beliefs with regard to historic evidence, and critical thinking you would have no way of knowing if there was some work by people (or if you believe in that even satan) when the current biblical canon was set up or when jewish tradition formed the old testament, etc.
Church leaders obviously dont talk about this that much, but being a follower of jesus and a good christian doesnt require one tho view the whole bible and one specific reading of it as a unified work of truth.
I dont know your exact stance on this topic, but in my experience there are too many people that dont examine the way current day teachings of their community got formed throughout history and just treat it like if god revealed it himself to them here and now.
If you happen to be interested here is a video by a yewish guy (though he views the bible from a historical viewpoint not in an orthodox way) exploring what we currently know about the bible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqSkXmFun14
Hope i didnt sound disrespectful, i just like when discourse makes us revise our deeper beliefs.
Now that’s the word of God.
No, it's not.
I's the words of many men claiming they know what God says. The divinity of Christ wasn't even decided on the church until the 4th century during council sessions like that of Nicea.
This decision is not extreme
Yes it is.
This is the primary lens which so many who prosthelize are happy to ignore. The words in the Bible are words written by humans over centuries. It is an iterative document which is still being tweaked by people, and to claim that any part of it is the untarnished word of God is to ignore the fact that humans are terribly fallible.
The Bible was written with a Human agenda, and the faith which organized religion fetishizes is more correctly described as faith in the humans who represent their words as of divine origin. It is a faith that the human representation of a divine will is correct, and that those who claim to speak with divine authority have no incentive to misrepresent reality in exchange for positions of power, status, and wealth.
The sheer number of abuses made in the name of divinity, all ascribing to speak with the will of the single divine truth, make it incredibly obvious to anyone not indoctrinated that if 99.9% of religions are bunk by virtue of their own definition (this religion is true and others are not), the chance that 100% are is pretty high, and the chance that any truth which may have been heard is not twisted is so small as to not be worth considering.
Now that's the word of God. It's eternal, unchanging
Except for all those various translations and interpretations that say different things.
This sort of nonsensical thinking has poisoned human minds for long enough. Now that it's finally fading into irrelevance, I say good riddance.
People are well aware of the 'why' behind these types of decisions. There's a reason Christianity is considered abhorrently sexist by a huge number of people.
It's definitely out-of-step with modern secular culture, and that's a very good thing from the Christian perspective
I assume you think slavery should be reinstated as well, since the new testament tells slaves to obey their earthly masters?
Paul was a legit Rabbi. Old habits die hard.
It's argued that Paul didn't write Timothy 1. But beyond that, Paul was a false prophet, who took the good work of Jesus and twisted it into his own religion. I often ask Christians who they follow: Jesus or Paul?
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.
Christofascism is making its final stand.
Part of me wonders if this is just me getting older and well into the "back in my day" stage of life when I worry that things are getting significantly worse. But it really feels like this poor country is in a serious backward arc and I'm genuinely worried for my kids.
I see the either you’re with us or against us mentality is alive and well. :/
What do you expect from an ideology so doggedly sectarian they do mental gymnastics to justify why a loving god would create people predestined for eternal conscious torment in Hell rather than admit they might be wrong?
These people ‘solve’ the problem of evil like a bag and a river solves the problem of too many kittens.
That “pattern” has been around for at least fifty years. This is merely a continuation of it.
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.
Thank you so much I needed this
I want to go back to the ‘50s to berate the post war town planners in the UK, as the saying goes at least the Luftwaffe had the decency to replace our buildings with nothing uglier than rubble.