Midwest Conservative Journal

The password is…schadenfreude. Ding!

Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring ‘green’ waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired.

School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.

But with no water moving through the school’s copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.

‘It was pretty disgusting,’ school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

‘The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.’

Now, the school district, which was hoping to save $100 a year in water costs for each waterless urinal, must pay $500,000 to repair the damage and replace the appliances with the traditional flush variety in four high schools. 

Neither the school, nor Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the Los Angeles-based maker of the urinals, thought to check the pipes before installing the new urinals.

I don’t find this even remotely amusing and if you do, you really ought to be ashamed of yourselves.  Okay, so the school district screwed up royally.  So now the only wise and constructive response is to AHHHHHH HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HEE, HEE, HEE, HA, HA, HA, HEE, HEE, HEE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP IT, YOU’RE KILLING ME, HA, HA, HA, HEE, HEE, HEE, HO, HO, HO, HEE, HEE, HEE…

Greg Griffith jacks a walk-off grand slam into the seats:

I’m not looking toward General Convention 2012 with fear and trembling at all. I looked toward GC06 that way, and GC09, but now I look toward General Convention 2012 only with a knowing smile, and an odd but strangely comfortable sense of satisfaction.

And here is why:

Because I know what will happen in Indianapolis. I know who will gather there… and who will not.

I know what they will do, and what they will not do.

I don’t look at GC12 and wonder, “What will become of my parish?”, or “What will become of my diocese?”, and certainly not “What will become of the Episcopal Church.”

I know what will happen: The Episcopal Church will continue its free-fall into irrelevancy and incoherency. Around my diocese and my parish, there will be a few families who leave, but most of them will shake their heads for a moment at the shame of it all, cluck their tongues, then say, “At least our bishop won’t be allowing any of that nonsense down here. Nosirree…”

Greg has four words for people who think that.  Wake the hell up.

All the while, blissfully ignorant that he has no choice in the matter. Oh, he won’t have to cave to the gay cabal any time soon, and perhaps won’t ever have to. If he doesn’t retire in a few years, he’ll be left alone by 815 to serve out his episcopacy in relative peace. But if he succeeds in holding the line, he will, without a doubt, be the last bishop of his diocese to do so. If he or any aspiring candidate thinks his successor will be able to keep from authorizing gay blessings in his churches, he is sadly mistaken. Compliance to the New Order will shortly be a requirement for all incoming bishops.

At this point, it doesn’t really matter when the Episcopal Organization began to die.

Some say its fate was sealed when Gene Robinson was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Righter was acquitted of heresy charges. Some say it was sealed when the Philadelphia Eleven were illegally ordained. Some say it was sealed when John Spong was allowed, with impunity, to go on a gay-ordination spree. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Pike was allowed to keep his mitre after denying the Trinity.

All that does matter is that the Episcopalians quite happily knocked back the hemlock with their eyes wide open.

He and his compatriots threw in with this agenda, figuring they had found their generation’s civil rights movement, and that all the warm social-justice fuzzy which accrued to that movement 50 years ago would accrue to theirs as well. They figured they would be heroes. They figured far more people would applaud them for their courage, and reward with them their presence and contributions, than would ever be alienated and driven off by the depravity and hollowness of their cause.

They figured wrong.

The decline in membership, attendance, giving, and legitimacy in the Episcopal Church has coincided with many things, but make no mistake: There is one and only one thing that has caused it, and that’s an abandonment of the core doctrines of the faith in favor of new-age spiritualism, and a celebration of sexual deviancy practiced by perhaps two percent of the country’s population.

Read the whole brilliant thing.

For my part, I think that on some level, I knew that the Episcopal Church was doomed at least a decade before I heard the name Gene Robinson.  That’s a tough thing to admit about the church your mother passionately loved almost as much as she loved you and made a point of having you baptized into.

But make no mistake.  The dark forces that eventually gave a pointy hat and a hooked stick to an unrepentant sinner began to dominate church affairs long before 2003.  As many of you have quite correctly observed in the comments here, Gene Robinson is inevitable in a church that tolerates John Shelby Spong.

I get that.  So why did I stay as long as I did?  Rationalization; traditional Episcopalians are past masters at that.  The prayer book?  Well it’s nowhere near as good as it was but it’s still Christian, isn’t it?  Spong?  He’s just some weirdo back east somewhere.  He has nothing whatsoever to do with us. 

The fact that you needed Billy Graham to explain the Christian religion to you?  Maybe so but I’ve picked up lots of spiritual insights here.  The general brain-dead leftism of the Episcopal Church these days?  All the more important for me to stay in as a testimony against it.  And on and on.

In 2003, rationalization, at least for me, was no longer possible.  Robbie got his pointy hat and my diocese and my parish heartily approved.  I could explain John Spong away by saying that he speaks only for himself, not for the wider church and that the best thing to do is to ignore the megalogmaniacal old fraud.

But when your church enthusiastically turns its back on the clear words of Holy Scripture, jettisons 2,000 years of Christian teaching as if it was yesterday’s newspaper, dynamites what little possibility of Christian unity there was and begins demonizing opponents of its course, when, in other words, people like Louie Crew, Susan Russell and Elizabeth Kaeton pull off their revolution, then God just kicked the last stepladder out from under you.

You have no more options.  So you can either stay where you are and continue to pretend that nothing’s wrong(my rector and bishop are perfectly orthodox).  Or you can read the signs of the times and admit that while your current rector and bishop are conservatives, their successors will be much more “moderate.”  Their successors will be more moderate still.  And so on and so on.

Eventually, sooner rather than later considering the Episcopal trajectory, you’ll reach a Sunday when, during coffee hour following his regular parochial visitation, your new “moderate” bishop tells your parish that he takes great pleasure in introducing you and your fellow parishioners to your new rector.

And his husband.

Please send money:

In this last year, your Diocesan Council and the Diocesan Staff have been willing to engage in creative adaptation. We’ve found many ways to save money, to do more with less, and still accomplish more for the mission of the Church in Georgia. I’m pleased to say that, for second consecutive year, the Diocesan budget has ended in the black. And even though our revenue has been essentially flat for two years, we have greatly increased the services and support we offer the clergy and congregations of our Diocese. In other words, we’ve adapted. We’re doing an excellent job of putting Billy Beane’s principles to work by getting every ounce of mission out of the scarce resources we have. As you’ll hear in the reports today, this comes from a lot of hard work.

Jack.

All analogies in the end fall short, but let me stretch this one out some more. The Diocese of Georgia is currently like the Oakland A’s. We have a good, competitive team on the field. But what if our competitive team on the field, in this analogy that would be the clergy and lay leaders of the Diocese, what if we had that same team but with the resources of the New York Yankees? Oh my, what we could do to follow Jesus’ command to “produce fruit, fruit that will last.”

Scratch.

It’s my belief that we’ve reached the limits of what we can do with the resources we currently have.

Dead presidents.

But this can only take us so far. Believe me, I love the team we have. They’re the most hard-working and creative disciples any church could have. I wouldn’t trade them for anyone on any other team, say, for example, in the Diocese of Atlanta (the NY Yankees of GA). Yet, there’s only so much we can do with less.

Benjamins.

That’s why our Campaign for Congregational Development is essential for our future. The last time our Diocese had a campaign was 20 years ago. It was for $1.6 million. And $500,000 of that came as a grant from the Episcopal Church. For those who say we send money to the Episcopal Church and we never get anything back, I say to you that 20 years ago we got a $500,000 gift. That campaign helped build buildings and buy land. And 20 years later we can see the good fruit that campaign produced.

Hundies.

When your Diocesan Council and I see an opportunity for such mission and we reach into our pockets for the resources to engage that mission, we discover our pockets are near empty. That has to change if we’re to fulfill the Great Commission and to live the Great Commandment in this Diocese. You put the Great Commission together with the Great Commandment and it’s clear: We’re called to make disciples by bringing them into a Church that loves God by loving our neighbors.

Simoleons.

That’s what this Campaign for Congregational Development is all about: Making disciples by bringing them into a Church that loves both God and neighbor actively and audaciously. So, it can’t be about tinkering around the edges. It can’t be just a nip or tuck for the Body of Christ in Georgia. It has to be about a reformation of the age-old mission Jesus embodied. It has to be about ending once and for all the seven last words of the Church: “We’ve never done it that way before.”

Cabbage.

The Campaign we’re entering now, however, is not focused on building buildings or buying land. We don’t need more buildings or more land today. What we need is to make more disciples and to make a bigger difference in our communities. This campaign is about building up our congregations so they can be even more effective in their witness to the truth of God found in Jesus Christ.

Kaysh.

This Campaign will be successful if all of us are on the team and on the field. We can’t afford to have any of us on the bench burying our talents in the ground. You know that parable of Jesus. The servants of the master please their master by taking some risks, by putting their talents into play. The parable concludes with those who took the risks seeing their risks rewarded, but the one who buried his talent in the ground, well, let’s just say, things didn’t end well for him.

Your loving son,

Scott Benhase.

Remember back when the Church allegedly burned people at the stake for translating the Bible into various national languages so people could read it on their own?  Ah, thinks George Clifford, sadly and wistfully.  Those were the days:

For years, I, like most clergy, frequently and indiscriminately exhorted Christians to pick up a Bible and read it. No more. I have realized that this advice, although well intentioned, is usually counterproductive, causing more disaffection from Christianity and guilt than spiritual growth.

Why is that, George?  Because the idiots in the pews aren’t intelligent enough to know what it is that they’re reading.

The Bible, written over a period of more than one thousand years, contains multiple diverse worldviews, all of them foreign to twenty-first century life in the United States. The person who genuinely wants to understand the biblical text benefits by beginning with good introductions to both the Old Testament and New Testament. These provide overviews of important historical, linguistic, textual, and literary issues. Commentaries and Bible dictionaries offer more specific assistance related to particular passages.

In other words, to read the Bible with even a moderate level of informed comprehension, a reader needs to invest substantial time and effort in acquiring the knowledge and skills that seminarians generally learn in their first year or two of biblical studies. In contrast to the pseudo-scholars with their interlinear versions, developing the linguistic knowledge to appreciate and ponder the text in Hebrew or Greek requires even more years of work.

Translation: don’t try this at home.  Just stick to your Danielle Steel or your John Grisham or whatever other brain-dead crap you people read and leave the Bible alone because only highly-trained professionals like us are able to tell you what it means.  Nothing good can come of letting you people read your Bibles unsupervised.

Beginning when I was in seminary over three decades ago, I have frequently heard seminarians lament the alienation and disaffection that they experienced as they began their biblical studies. Devotional reading of the Bible had nurtured their faith and often played an instrumental role in the spiritual journey that led them to seminary en route to seeking ordination. Now their academic studies challenged, if not actually contradicted, what they believed was the Word of God they had previously heard in their devotional reading of beloved texts.

Søren?  Want to field that one?

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Thanks, man.  But you don’t get it, says Clifford.  Let people read Bibles by themselves and who knows what weird crap they might start believing.

Devotional reading was the pervasive approach among Bible reading Protestants – whether mainline Church members, evangelicals, or fundamentalists – to whom I ministered in the Navy. These good people considered themselves Christians in spite of both their theological ignorance and (being kind) eccentricities.

On the one hand, the reader may uncritically accept the text as authoritative and adopt an unscientific (creation in seven days; people walking on water), unhistorical (hundreds of thousands of slaves exiting Egypt; the slaughter of innocents), and theologically bogus (God ordering mass slaughter; women subservient to men) reading.

Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church is complicit in giving people this unfortunate choice. In sermons, confirmation classes, and other venues – most recently, a campaign to get people to read the Bible through in a year – we regularly encourage people to pick up the Bible and read it. Bible studies typically consist of the blind leading the blind: well-meaning, devout believers telling one another what God is saying to them through a particular text. Lectio divina is similar: listen to the text and hear the Holy Spirit speak to you.

Ballgame, thanks for playing.  Nobody and I mean NOBODY does sneering theological condescension better than Episcopalians.

Do you know the best way to evaluate a particular church?  Read a statement of its theological positions?  Evaluate its theology based on how closely it adheres to the Bible and the theology of the Church as a whole?

No and no.  The best way to evaluate a church is to evaluate the kinds of people it produces.  And there’s only one effective place to do that.

Coffee hour.

When I was still part of it, the Episcopal Church used to publicly say nice things about other churches and worked with other churches all the time.  Even today, many Episcopalians profess great respect for Catholic saints and various aspects of the Catholic tradition, even to the point of giving Catholic names to their “religious orders.”

The term “Anglo-Catholic” exists for a reason.

I don’t really care what you publicly proclaim.  I do care what you say in private when you think no one is listening.  And I have never heard more visceral contempt toward other Christian traditions than I used to hear while walking around my Episcopal parish dining hall with a cup of coffee in my hand.

Is Clifford concerned about heresy taking hold in someone’s life?  Yes and no.  He is not at all concerned about the possibility that you might read your Bible, go off, start some kind of cult and begin speaking in tongues or something.

But George is concerned, gravely concerned, that you might read your Bible, decide that, “Biblical scholarship” notwithstanding, it means exactly what it says, conclude that the Episcopal Church is dead wrong about practically everything and join the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Southern Baptist or some other Christian church that actually believes all this mythological garbage.

After all, if Romans 10:9 has a specific cultural context and if its meaning can only be interpreted by trained professionals and no one else, the Christian religion is worthless.

No sane man alive finds this attractive.  That is all.

Pew Research has some encouraging news for Barack Obama:

A new analysis shows that the share of voters identifying with or leaning toward the GOP has either grown or held steady in every major religious group. This includes both religious groups that are part of the GOP’s traditional constituency as well as some groups that have tended to be more aligned with the Democratic Party, including Jewish voters. In general, the pattern among religious groups mirrors that among the electorate as a whole; the number of voters who identify as a Democrat has declined, while the number saying they lean toward the GOP has risen.

Among white evangelical Protestants (a traditionally Republican group), support for the GOP has grown from 65% in 2008 to 70% today. The GOP has also posted gains among Mormons, with 80% now saying they identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Republican gains are also apparent among white mainline Protestants (who were evenly divided between the parties in 2008 but who now favor the GOP by a 12-point margin) and white non-Hispanic Catholics (among whom an eight-point Democratic advantage in 2008 has become a seven-point Republican advantage at the end of 2011). Even Jewish voters, who have traditionally been and remain one of the strongest Democratic constituencies, have moved noticeably in the Republican direction; Jewish voters favored the Democrats by a 52-point margin in 2008 but now prefer the Democratic Party by a significantly smaller 36-point margin. There has been less change in the partisanship of black Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, two other strongly Democratic groups.

The analysis shows that across several religious groups, the move toward the GOP has been at least as large – if not more pronounced – among those under age 30 as among those 30 and older. White evangelicals under 30, for instance, are now more heavily Republican than those over 30 (82% vs. 69%); in 2008, by contrast, the partisan preferences of younger evangelicals closely matched those of evangelicals over age 30. And among white non-Hispanic Catholics under age 30, support for the GOP has increased from 41% in 2008 to 54% in 2011.