LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Here's the fourth and final part of Salon's series on the Christian 'ex-gay' ministry.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

A Christian adoption agency in Mississippi has changed its practice of not placing children with Roman Catholic couples.

According to this article, the board voted unanimously to change the policy.

I like to do follow-ups to articles like this one, because it is good to see positive change in the Christian community.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

From Mainstream Baptist comes this critique of the Supreme Court nominee John Roberts:

If the report from People for the American Way is reliable, then Roberts is clearly an advocate for the government to extend special privileges and endorsements of majoritarian religious expression.

Roberts was co-author of a brief in the landmark Lee v. Weisman decision that argued in favor of prayers at public high school graduations. He argued that graduates opposed to religious exercises were free to voluntarily skip participating in their graduation exercises. SCOTUS ruled against Roberts opinion in that decision.

Roberts has also argued that the "Lemon test" should be jettisoned. The "Lemon test" is the standard that SCOTUS set forth in the landmark "Lemon v. Kurtzman" decision that gave guidance on how government legislation on religion could be considered constitutional. The "Lemon test" says the government's action must have 1) a legitimate secular purpose, 2) it must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and 3) it must not result in an "excessive entanglement" of government and religion.

In my opinion, Roberts opinions demonstrate extreme insensitivity toward the rights of religious minorities. When the hubris that demands special privilege is coupled with the obsequity that grants it, it inevitably creates enough outrage at such injustice that the privileged become despised and the privileges are rejected.

Links are on the blog page.

http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=6020
http://www.henryinstitute.org/commentary/read.php?article=20050601b (from the horse's mouth himself)

The senior VP for academic administration at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (which has been quite thoroughly turned dominionist by Al Mohler and his cronies) states flat out he's *training* his kids to be little sociopathic monsters:

Moore said a reader objected to an earlier column mentioning he took his two young sons to see “Stars War Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” because the film is “way too violent for children.”

Moore went on to say it is only the second movie the boys had ever seen.

“One was a tender, touching Christmas movie about a little boy who discovers that Christmas is all about believing in the miracles within,” he said. “The second was a cartoonishly violent movie in which men go face-to-face with evil aliens; often chopping off limbs in the heat of battle.”

Moore went on to quip that he repents of “taking them to the Christmas film.”

“This is because of my overall philosophy of childrearing,” he explained. “I am aiming to raise up violent sons.”

“I am not seeking to raise sons who are violent in the amoral, pagan sense of contemporary teenagers playing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ video games or carjacking motorists,” he explained. “I want them to be more violent than that.”

“I want them to understand that the Christian life is not a Hallmark Channel version of baptized sentimentality,” he continued. “Instead, it is a cosmic battle between an evil dragon and the child of the woman, an ancient warfare that now includes all who belong to the Child of the Promise (Rev 12).”

Sadly, this is *not* uncommon in dominionist households. They quite literally are instructing kids to be violent because in their mind they're breeding "Christian Soldiers".

And these are also the folks largely responsible for "Justice Sunday" and "Justice Sunday II" (Highview Baptist in Louisville is Al Mohler's church, and essentially the "home church" for the seminary)...

http://www.gwaihir.org/archives/2005/05/too_stupid_to_r.html (my apologies if this is a repeat)

Specifically:

Q: Mr. Vice President, thank you for coming to Georgia, and thank you and the President for your leadership in the war on terror. Millions of Americans appreciate that.

My question is, I watched the press conference the other night with the President, and it seems like when the two of you come up with serious ideas that those from the other faith, in the other party, all they do is demonize and, in many cases, just lie and try to divide the older generation, our grandparents from us, those in our 30s.

Yes, you are reading this right: Cheney is buying into the whole dominionist "If you aren't with us, you're with SATAN" thing. That statement is actually a coded message to dominionists.

And they're now officially, in Avengelical-speak, labeling *all* Democrats and Republicans who don't toe the dominionist party line as bona-fide devil-worshippers. (Explanation below.)

Dominionist groups, including the specific group I walked away from (the AoG) believe, flat out, if you are not a dominionist (and often a *good* dominionist at that)--if you're not a frothing Avengelical--you are a flat out diabolist. They see people from non-dominionist denominations as literal *devil worshippers*; they flat out claim there *are* only two faiths, Avengelicalism and, well, Satanism.

As noted before, dominionist groups don't even see other Christians as "truly Christian" (as evidenced by the fact that other mainstream denominations worldwide, even relatively conservative denominations like the Eastern Rite and the Roman Catholic Church, are getting increasingly angry about Avengelicals practicing "sheep-stealing"); they literally see all other non-dominionist denominations as "satanic" and even as *perversions* of Christianity itself (ironic, seeing as many of the institutions they label as "satanic" are as old as Christianity itself and most dominionist denominations are less than 100 years old; the oldest, the Southern Baptists, actually split from the mainstream Baptists over slavery in the 1840's and has gone hardcore dominionist largely in the past 15 years or so).