129. appertain

appertain, verb: To belong as a part, right, possession or attribute.

It’s days like this that it seems entirely possible to make a career just out of covering the insane things that John Piper says and does. Because if the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church isn’t hating on gays, he’s hating on disaster victims:

It wasn’t all that long ago that Piper, in his officious capacity as proxy head of the Baptist General Conference (the Protestant Pope, if you will), was ascribing blame for a tornado that struck downtown Minneapolis on 19 August 2009 to a gathering of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America that was voting to allow openly gay pastors to serve. (They voted in the affirmative.) Here are a few choice words from what he had to say that day:

• “The church has always embraced those who forsake sexual sin but who still struggle with homosexual desires, rejoicing with them that all our fallen, sinful, disordered lives (all of us, no exceptions) are forgiven if we turn to Christ in faith.”
• “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin.”
• “Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture.”
• “Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality.”

The very notion that Piper thinks he has the god-given right to chime in on every matter, that people actually listen to him, and that he thinks that people should listen to him (on pain of excommunication, or the Protestant equivalent thereof) is offensive enough. It’s as obnoxious as the tendency for actors and other celebrities to take to the media to share with everyone their important opinions on everything from politics to the horrors of genocide.

Tell ya what: When you live in a regular house like the rest of us instead of your McMansion or McCondo because you give the lion’s share of your multi-million dollar fortune that comes from pretending for a living, then maybe your opinion will be worth something.

Now, to be fair, more recently there have been actors who participate in and support charity work—and not just for the sake of humblebragging either.

Brad Pitt (an outspoken atheist), for example, actively supports local and global charities (including the ONE Campaign, Alliance for the Lost Boys and the Mineseeker Foundation), worked to build housing for New Orleans hurricane victims, and is on the forefront of promoting green and sustainable housing (because he’s actually somewhat knowledgeable about architecture). He’s also vocal about promoting fact-based scientific education, advancing medical research (including research into embryonic stem-cells), and curtailing religious propagandizing.

Ellen DeGeneres has used her visibility as a talk show host and comedian to promote gay rights, and supports organizations such as Feeding America (formerly Second Harvest), Malaria No More, and Project Zambi, a foundation that provides support for African children orphaned by AIDS. She was recently made spokesperson for JC Penny, which prompted the formation of the group One Million Moms (a subsidiary of the homophobic and ironically-named American Family Association), who threatened to boycott the store (yes, all 40,000 of them) but succeeded only in bringing more visibility to the issue of gay rights and homophobia. Thanks! The group recently attacked the Archie comic and Toys R Us for a comic featuring a gay marriage, and just yesterday launched a boycott campaign going after Hardee’s for a “sleazy” ad that they call “an affront to all decent men, women and children!”

You know what I call an affront (aside from actively promoting hate, homophobia and bigotry)? Preaching at victims of a natural disaster.

In his most recent blog posting, John Piper had the following things to say to us, and to the people of Maryville and Henryville:

• “If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.”
• “Perhaps God chose Job for that deadly wind because only the likes of Job would respond: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
• “This is a word to those of us who sit safely in Minneapolis or Hollywood and survey the desolation of Maryville and Henryville. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Every deadly wind in any town is a divine warning to every town.”
• “God’s will for America under his mighty hand, is that every Christian, every Jew, every Muslim, every person of every religion or non-religion, turn from sin and come to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and eternal life. Jesus rules the wind. The tornadoes were his.”

And lest Piper come off too judgmental (if such a thing were possible):

•  “But before Jesus took any life in rural America, he gave his own on the rugged cross. Come to me, he says, to America — to the devastated and to the smugly self-sufficient.”

Did you catch that? “Before Jesus took any life in rural America.” Then he has the effrontery to defend his homicidal Jesus for killing 40 people in Indiana—including a 15-month-old infant who was sucked up into the tornado as it killed her parents and two siblings.

This is the consequence of having a toxic worldview, let alone a toxic theology: Namely, that we are all wretched, disgusting sinners in the hands (and at the mercy) of an angry god. And if you’re on the “right side” of this god (which comes at the cost of opposing science, human rights, and apparently human decency), you have the privilege of telling everyone else how terrible they are and that they need to “get right with god.” And Piper and others like him (my entire family included) thinks they’re doing the human race a favor by “proclaiming the Truth” (yes, capital “T”) and the “good news” of Salvation for all of us rebellious, profligate degenerates.

It’s like they’re trying to make atheists of us all.

126. bandy

bandy, verb: 1. To pass from one to another or back and forth; give and take. 2. To throw or strike to and fro or from side to side, as a ball in tennis. 3. To circulate freely.

Some days I stare forever at a blank screen and wonder what to write about.

Some days social media just hands it to me in a neat little package with a bow.

I was tipped off to the fact that this weekend (on Friday around noon, to be precise), John Piper, the homophobic pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in downtown Minneapolis, went on the following homophobic rant:

I’m not really sure what set him off this time, aside from Maryland’s upcoming vote to approve same-sex marriage, but I love the fact that he started his rant with a self-fulfilling prophesy. And that all this translates to: “The sky is falling!”

To briefly address each of these tweets one-by-one, as I just said, by quoting 1 Corinthians 4:12, he’s giving himself license to throw up his hands later and say, “We told them they were going to hate us!” He’s refusing to take responsibility for the wrong-headed, offensive nature of his theology that prevents him from accepting anyone who doesn’t live up to his notion of what a decent human being is supposed to be.

As to his second tweet (which rings mildly treasonous), as the Fifth Doctor said of the Daleks, “However you respond them is seen as an act of provocation.” Conservative fundamentalism is and has been living in a wartime mindset for quite some time, convinced as they are that we are living in the End Times and that the return of Jesus is nigh. They are also convinced that the person of Satan is actively working in the world to pervert it and incite the human race into rebellion (deliberate or inadvertent) against god. This tweet won’t make make sense unless you understand that very important point.

To the third—well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

To the last one, his definition of marriage is so narrow and based on something that is itself a fiction that to tie it into something as insoluble as “the glory of god” would be laughable if it wasn’t tragic. If you aren’t familiar with that phrase, one of the central themes of Piper’s teaching is the primacy of the Glory of God, a concept that is found throughout the bible, but may be more familiar to Catholic and Anglican readers from the answer to the first question from the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man?
Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Now, I may not be a deity, but if I handed you a list of ways I felt were acceptable for you to show your love for me, you’d be quite right to call me a narcissist. After all, that’s in the very DSM-IV criterion for narcissism.

I don’t have to tell you that I think Piper terribly wrong, or that he’s dangerous and a societal menace. But through his Pie In The Sky theology, he is directing everyone who listens to him (and there are a lot of them who literally hang on his every word) to be precisely the opposite of the qualities that the figurehead of his religion exemplified in the Gospels (if you leave out the crazy bits like cursing fig trees)—namely, showing love, acceptance, charity and generosity towards your fellow human beings.

And these are the people of my state who will be going out in November in droves to vote in the affirmative for the constitutional amendment defining marriage as only being between a man and a woman.

Tell me again that religion is harmless.

Now, to that pesky third tweet. The insanity of these reformed theology fundamentalists is how they pick and choose which parts of their bible they will apply to the rest of the world—as if the rest of the world was somehow supposed to recognize the authority of a 2,000 year-old book authored by a xenophobic Bronze Age tribe obsessed with blood and sexual purity. For instance, since they’re so hot for quoting Leviticus when they’re bashing gays:

“You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it. You shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes. You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord.”
— Leviticus 19:26-28 (English Standard Version)

How many Christians do you know who openly sport tattoos, trim their facial hair, read horoscopes and eat rare steaks?

“But that’s the Old Testament” the contemporary Christian whines. “Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets. We don’t have to follow those old laws anymore.”

Then it stands to reason that if he fulfilled the ones above, then he also fulfilled all the rest, including Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13; and if those have been nullified, then the whole rest of the case for homosexuality being a “sin” falls apart. And what is John Piper and that third tweet of his left with at that point other than prejudice and bigotry? For that matter, what is the American Family Association, Peter LaBarbera, James Dobson, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and the denizens of fear and ignorance left with?

The sad truth is that they, along with the rest of America that refuses to progress, will be dragged kicking and screaming into obsolescence, watching in a prison of self-imposed horror like Elizabeth Báthory as their influence withers and wanes before their little despotic eyes.

If gays are allowed to marry, will that endanger heterosexual marriages? Nope. As it’s been observed, the only people threatening heterosexual marriage are heterosexuals.

If teens are taught about safe sex or *gasp* the existence of homosexuals in school, will they turn gay? Nope, although apparently the American Life League would seem to disagree slightly.