Abusing the Faith

IN THE EIGHTEEN FORTIES Baptistdom split assunder, over slavery. What became the Southern Baptist Convention favored the "peculiar institution" as it was politically correctly described back in the day, favored it as does the Bible, hence the Christian religion. True Christians either condone slavery, as does the Bible, or, perhaps, they burn in hell? Or so it should be, for the sake of consistency and scriptural compliance. Now the SBC, keeping with tradition, is practicing and tacitly condoning another scriptural practice; the abuse of women and children. The practice is rape and pedophilia, rape being scriptural. Since we modern seular humanists beg to differ with scripture, the salacious Baptistry has been kept hidden from the world by SBC leadership, expediently. The victims are as young as three. To further facilitate their fun, the victims, whose complaints are deemed a distraction from sacred evangelism, from the sacred duty of shaming and bullying new recruits into the one true faith, have been and are being ignored, ridiculed, threatened, and brainwashed into believing they are the ones who are doing the devil's work, a dubious assertion to say the least. Join our gang or be cast into our imaginary hell. Conform or be outcast. How appealing. The Houston Chronicle exposed this religious peculiar institution in "Abusing the Faith", an incisive documentary. Thus busted, the church, with extreme reluctance, now admits the truth of it, since it has no other option at this point, the case having been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, so to speak. The SBC now dismissively blames the usual "a few bad apples", the stereotypical excuse. The church has maintained a secret list of perpetrators and victims for decades, a mere few hundred bad apple clergymen and a mere few thousand victims, and counting. Perhaps the forbidden index is kept partly to facilitate the savoring of their salacious achievement, partly to hide it. Known pedaphilic preachers are simply, expendiently transferred from one parish unto another, for their protection. This allows the fun and games to continue unabated. Victims are told that to err is human, to forgive, divine. Christ forgave, so must we all. Protestant and Catholic traditions go back a long way. In the eighteenth century Voltaire, practical and prescient, aware of Holy Roman Catholicism's own taste for debauchery, said of the Holy Roman church: "Crush the infamous thing"! This unsolicited advice made King Louis, a true Catholic, a tad nervous, but he protected the anti-establishment Voltaire, who was, after all, funny, entertaining, and lucrative for his patron, the king himself. Funny how wisdom from the past is aptly applicable to the contemporary world. Crush the infamous thing indeed.