Saturday, June 12, 2021

Hot and the Baptists

It's hot.  How hot is it, you wonder?  Why it's 110F, or 43.3C.  Really hot.  We were back from riding at 8:30 and it was pretty much time to go inside.  Humidity is 3% - I am using a lot of Chap Stick these days.  The next five days are forecast to be 111F, which is better than the old forecast which was 113.

I have some paltry photos to post.  These are from Thursday.  We had a slight cloud cover.  It was kind of pretty.

The agave that was blooming is now dying.  It's so sad that they have to perish after procreation.  It's sort of like male Praying Mantis' being eaten after reproducing with the mean girl Mantis'.

The flowers have turned into these pods, which break off.  I don't know if the pods are full of multiple seeds or if it's just one per pod.


Who follows the Southern Baptist Convention?  As a rule, I do not, but today there was a really long article on WAPO about the upcoming convention that will be held in Nashville.  Not surprisingly, most of those attending will be white men.  There is a schism forming in the convention between those who are willing to accept Critical Race Theory as a framework for understanding the sources and effects of structural racism, along with intersectionality to understand how it all works together.  I don't fully understand that sentence, but that's what the liberal wing of the convention is saying.  The conservative wing rejects Black Lives Matter, women having anything to say about anything, including whether or not they have non-consensual sex with their predatory pastors; they believe racism can be overcome through prayer, reading the bible, submission of women to their husbands and their husbands' submission to God.  

Many in the convention believe in complementarianism, which says men and women have separate roles, and men are the ones in charge.  "Among the nearly 800,000 words in the Bible, one sentence seems to contain Stone’s thinking on this matter. It’s from a letter the Apostle Paul wrote to his protege, Timothy: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”"  Paul was an apostle, every word he spoke was not necessarily divinely inspired, that was an opinion.  And yet, the Baptists have seized upon that as a justification of subjugating women.  There is a much shorter opinion piece on WAPO on the subject of why the SBC has not fixed its sexual abuse problem.  It was a much easier read than the long article.

The convention used to be allied with the Northern Baptists, but they broke over the issue of slavery in 1845, believing that the bible could also justify that.  They recanted in 1990.  NYT did a piece on the increasing amount of strife within the convention, and what the outcomes of the meeting in Nashville might be.  The SBC currently has 14.5 million members, they have lost membership over the last few years.

I grew up in the SBC, but I didn't last long.  When they told us in Sunday school that all of the pygmies in Africa were going to hell because they hadn't accepted Jesus as their personal savior, even though they'd never heard of Jesus, which was why we had to give money to the foreign missionaries, that just struck me as wrong headed thinking.  This helps explain my interest in what's happening with the convention.  Fun fact - Jimmy Carter left the SBC in 2000 due to the convention's increasingly rigid views.

Now from the department of things that are really bad, we have this.


Vaccination rates in the deep red south are abysmal, this variant is hard on the kids.  There is also the possibility of it being very bad for the elderly, whose immune response is not as good as it used to be, and is weak against the delta variant.  Sometimes I feel like this is never going to be over.

So on that happy note, I have nothing else to offer.

8 comments:

  1. religion is such a dumb contrivance, it is like a slew of folks getting together to argue who the REAL faerie queen is and who shall wear the invisible cape. Monumental wasted of brain power and time.

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  2. Anything that said I would need to be submissive would end up in the trash. Not happening. My parents didn't raise me to be a doormat.

    Record heat up here in Montana also. Not as bad as yours - high 90s and low hundreds - but that is really hot for here. And the wind never wants to stop. I'm so tired of it. But our nights are cooling down into the 60s which really helps.

    Folks up here think the covid issue is dead. Or didn't ever exist. Lots of unvaccinated people. Its a good thing we dont mind not being very social.

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  3. my recalcitrant friends at the other end of the street finally got their vaccines. I think their daughters finally pressured them into it. they aren't republicans and their concerns had more to do with their health issues but their doctors insisted they get it. as for those deep red Trump republicans that refuse the vaccine, they will eventually get the virus. another blog I read translated a paper by a German epidemiologist who has been involved in the study of covid from the beginning. it was very interesting, especially his view on herd immunity. he says in the human population that it's hogwash. a veterinarian term for the management of the health of small groups of animals that do not mingle with other herds does not apply to humans who travel the world. his consensus is if you aren't vaccinated you will get the virus and until everyone is either vaccinated for antibodies or has had the virus for antibodies it won't subside.

    the first thing I remember that rang wrong with me in christianity was that new born babies were born sinners.new born babies? next was there was only one way, one path, to 'god', if you didn't accept christ you were going to hell no matter how good a person you were. and then when I finally understood the whole women were to be submissive to men well, that clenched it. no fucking way.

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  4. My problem with Bible thumpers is they way they pick and choose which lines of the text to take as gospel, and ignore the inconvenient prescriptions. Not to mention, the modern day Bible has been rewritten again and again by men seeking to bolster their self-interests, and even the original books were written by mere humans, who are imperfect channelers of the divine on the best of days. I have a particular problem with St. Paul, have had ever since hearing his misogynistic gospel read in church as if it was just a regular sentiment, with no one stepping forward to say, wait a hot minute, you don't really accept what he's saying, do you? I began to move away from Bible thumpers on that very day.

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  5. You might even say it's HELLISHLY hot! LOL!

    Seriously, I grew up a Presbyterian, but I went to a local Baptist church a couple of times for church camp. I remember being shocked at how scary and strident it all seemed -- Presbyterians never talk about hell, at least not in my experience. But those Baptists were thumpers and proselytizers through and through. They used to be known as one of the most conservative forms of mainline Protestants, and the fact that they're now being considered too liberal gives an indication of how far to the right some in our country have wandered.

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  6. I appreciate what you say about the elderly whose immune systems might not be so great, even after being vaccinated. My folks live in western NC in a red county, and they were vaccinated just as soon as shots were available. But they also ditched their masks just as soon as the CDC and our governor suggested that was fine. I can't help but worry about them just a bit, especially since they had no side effects from Pfizer #2. Both my husband and I had pretty intense side effects, so I think our immune systems are much stronger than my folks, and as such, I don't worry about us. It really sucks that we just can't seem to end this thing, courtesy of so many jerks who won't get a frickin' vaccine, mostly for political reasons. Burns me up.

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  7. My uncle was SBC. My mother was SBC so she could ride my uncle's church's bus on outings. Both of them died in the late nineties. I doubt either of them would be SBC these days.

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  8. I have problems with the bible being god's word. Really? God only spoke to men? It's a book written by men, of course it's going to say that women must obey men.

    I wonder what things will look like in twenty years. Should be interesting.

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