Max,

Suckers.
If there’s a sucker born every minute, that would come to 525,600 suckers per year….. add 1440 to that on leap years.

What happens when they turn the cameras off and think no one is watching or listening?

When JMac of Chicago was in the same off-the-record situation, he talked about uploading CP onto the personal laptop of his enemy, the editor of Christianity Today. While his Yes-Men Elders cheered him on.

Hell hath no fury like a Mancow who just realised he’d been used.

Nancy2(aka Kevlar): If there’s a sucker born every minute, that would come to 525,600 suckers per year….. add 1440 to that on leap years.

Yeah, but why do they all have to be church members!

Max: Yeah, but why do they all have to be church members!

Because, I think, traditional Christian theology and practice requires the absurd conversion of mythological stories into literal facts. “If you swallow THAT we can get you to swallow anything.”

This absurd conversion turns people into sheep.

Ideally I think Christianity would require the hard work of directly experiencing Christ in everything.
This builds the necessary muscles of skepticism and discernment.

The Quakers have embraced this view, some of them.

dee: “See, we care about Hispanics. They hired me.”

So he was the DEI Token.

Sandy: Ideally I think Christianity would require the hard work of directly experiencing Christ in everything.

What happens when Christianity has made you incapable of “experiencing Christ”?

Muff Potter: What ever happened to JMac?
Has been able to mine the gold fields of Coronado Isle? (San diego)

Dunno.
Last time anybody heard anything was that Road Rage Assault (fortunately he left his 9mm Emotional Support Companion in his bubba truck) and his social media posting of him cosplaying a Hell’s Angel, Andrew Tate-sized Alpha Male cigar and all. “ME TOUGH! SEE? SEE? SEE?”

Guy really needs to be made to pedal a tricycle around the Chicago Loop with a circus midget balanced on his shoulders. He’s already dressing the part (see above).

Headless Unicorn Guy: What happens when Christianity has made you incapable of “experiencing Christ”?

There are lots of other higher and lower states of consciousness to be explored.
I think we should teach our children to be discerning spiritual explorers.

dee: They didn’t keep their eyes on this creep

It should be clear by now that SBC leadership don’t have a lick of discernment about a lot of things these days.

Muff Potter: A dirtbag is a dirtbag is a dirtbag.

Hard for a skunk to change his stripes, even if you call him “Pastor.”

dee:
Max,

They didn’t keep their eyes on this creep;

Well gee, Dee! We gotta cut the poor boys some slack. I’m sure they are completely overwhelmed with the daunting task of reining in the females and keeping us in our place. Gotta put first things first.

Sandy,

I think that there may be further reasons that church members are vulnerable to being deceived about the true character of bad actors in their midst.

In the bits of the Evangelical movement I have observed, there is a belief that conversion results in profound change in a person’s character. The evidence by which of conversion is assessed to have taken place is, however, not the character change that conversion is thought to produce, but the more superficial test of verbal confession, doctrinal conformity, and a pretty minimal set of behavioral conformities to group expectations.

I do think that it is possible for deep change to happen in a brief period of time after a change of allegiance from “self” to “Christ”, but I think that such profound change may be a lot less common than the mainstream theology (or at least the way that is understood by “the people in the pews”) of regeneration at conversion would lead one to expect. Typically, people will continue to struggle with the same character issues that characterized them prior to conversion.

I think it is unwise to assume that because “this person talks the way I expect a righteous person to talk”, it follows that “this person is a righteous person.” (This is closely connected with the problems in present prevailing practices of pastoral selection — it seems to me that they are selected largely on “how they talk.”)

It’s unfortunate that it is prudent to start with a hermeneutic of suspicion toward other people, but that is where we are, IMO.

Samuel Conner,

I completely agree….

Samuel Conner: I think it is unwise to assume that because “this person talks the way I expect a righteous person to talk”, it follows that “this person is a righteous person.” (This is closely connected with the problems in present prevailing practices of pastoral selection — it seems to me that they are selected largely on “how they talk.”)

TWW archives are loaded with accounts of church leaders who talked the talk but did not walk the walk. Just because a man has a gift of gab and a working knowledge of the Bible does not necessarily mean he has been called by God to preach. Pastoral selection by mere men is a world of difference from pastoral calling by God. Most churches don’t have the spiritual wisdom to know the difference, so they are easily deceived when selecting a new pastor.

Samuel Conner: too difficult for consensus to emerge in a large group and the only effective structure is hierarchical,

The dividing line being the human troop-size limit of around 150 – the maximum number where we see them as Individuals instead of a faceless Collective.

Max: It should be clear by now that SBC leadership don’t have a lick of discernment about a lot of things these days.

Oh but they DO have Discernment!
The Holy Spirit has them on 24/7 speed dial “discerning” all those DEMONIC Jezebel Spirits in all those Uppity Femoid 304s!

(And don’t forget all those DEMONS! and WITCHES! under every bed and in every Goodwill sweater, all after YOUR Children! Yes, I am a survivor of The Satanic Panic; however could you guess?)

Where is this guy’s wife in all of this? Is she just standing by submissively, as the pastors tell her that her husband is a good guy, what he did wasn’t wrong, but divorcing his ass would be the ultimate sin? I thought the older women were supposed to teach the younger women, so why was this “pastor” helping (or his idea of helping) her? Were there no older women in the congregation to do that, if indeed she needed any help or guidance? Maybe he never read the book of Titus. I cannot wait for part 2 of this circus.

dee: Nancy2(aka Kevlar): If there’s a sucker born every minute, that would come to 525,600 suckers per year….. add 1440 to that on leap years.

This made me laugh this morning.

I believe Nancy commented one time that she was a math teacher.

Of course there is this one:

“There are 10 kinds of people. Those that understand binary and those that don’t.”

Max: Christianity Lite

Punched-card Fundamental minima become maxima a la Nicholas Cardinal Cusanus (a neo-gnostic) ensuing in jettisoning “most of” pneumatology of One Holy Spirit and all actual eschatology – both highlighted in the same Ascension – who is really “Sovereign” now?

Convenient vacuum for invented machinations; even polite ones are considered cool.

Max: I believe Nancy commented one time that she was a math teacher.

As long as it isn’t the Christian Math where pi = 3 because SCRIPTURE(TM)!
(I’m not making that up: “Ten cubits across and thirty cubits around” – 1 Kings 7:23–26 and 2 Chronicles 4:2–5)

Headless Unicorn Guy,

Pneumatology = Holy Spirit lore, excised by the early promoters of the Fundamentals (logically, the Comforter was given in fulness from Ascension, as our Samuel C pointed out not many years ago, and the New Testament models BOTH one-stage AND two-stage initiation).

Eschatology = the teaching on the period from Ascension to when Jesus shall return, excised by the early promoters of the Fundamentals, during which all the gifts are meant.

These are the areas where you, and also I, have witnessed craziness and slipperiness. Hal Lindsey, Kenneth Copeland, Macarthur-style heavy handedness, Piper-ish weirdness, a Torrey-like sense of indispensibility. Then placing themselves in our eye like they were some pope?

Some of the mild-mannered (followers of J I Packer maybe) say that the best antidote to bad teaching is no teaching.

They are the ones that are saying “everybody knows” when there was nothing to know because we weren’t being told (except to make our eyes skip bits when we read a normal Bible).

Enter into the resultant void, things equally weird, only slightly rebadged (Wimber, Bruce Ware). Age and sex cohorts aren’t meant to have any sense of comparison with what others have witnessed, or with any residual skill in reading and thinking others might have.

No, the best antidote is the real and most plain long term teaching (taught or not), I don’t call it “biblical” because that word got stolen.

The early promoters of the Fundamentals and their recent successors couldn’t achieve unity because there was insufficient content or value of inference to their level and sort of belief (and they were fixated on their idea of “ordinances”): we have asked them for bread and they have given us a stone. The Fundamentalists are new-agey (functional dispensationists) and are theological “liberals”.

Bait and switch-switch-switch, we don’t remember what the bait was nor what it has been switched to. Originally, as foreseen by good prophets, Jesus promised us providential salvation from the ravages of codependency on slippery characters.

There is more woo-woo in “conventional christianity” than some religion bosses would be comfortable having us realise. This is the breeding ground in which we don’t notice “doctrinally” when bullies arise.

Ps 22:22, “I shall tell of Your name”. They might recite this! Then they shouldn’t give us or the secular world half-truths.

Cusanus taught that nothing and everything are the same thing. He is part of the same general trend as Faustus in legend (which I haven’t read yet), Dee and Fludd * (connected with the Thirty Years’ War and Archbishop Laud), and sorcerers’ apprentices. But the issues are the same as they always have been.

Punched card sorting was explained to me when it was being phased out. Something like: if you hold cards up to the light or try to push a rod through (I can’t remember how that happened), only holes representing “search terms” work, unless all cards also have other terms in common for an unrelated reason. Much “authoritative” religion consists of taking away from God’s “search terms” while (the actual) St Paul says, “love believes ALL the things” and, “ALL Scripture is beneficial”.

{ * Frances Yates wrote about them but I gave away her book }