Author: Ophelia Benson

So now I know. Like most people, I didn’t realize the people behind Rick Perry’s prayer party are weirder than other prayer police.

With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR’s stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of “spiritual warfare,” and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against.

They’re not just messing around.

The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.

It’s working.

Sarah Palin’s church of over twenty years, Wasilla Assembly of God, is still part of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination.  However, the leadership embraced the ideology of the NAR years ago and and numerous national and international apostles have spoken there.Both Jim Garlow, head of Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), and ReAL board member David Barton, have been working with the apostles for years.  As described in books by Apostles Cindy Jacobs and Alice Patterson, Barton has been working with Texas apostles for over a decade.  Barton’s Christian Nationalist histories, in which he portrays Democrats as the ongoing source of racism, play a significant role in outreach to African American pastors.

Oh well, the glaciers will melt so the rivers will dry up so the crops will fail so we’ll all die in the famines before they take over completely. That’s a relief.

Here’s another one, this time by a man, the pastor of a Reformed Baptist church in Aberystwyth, laying down the law for women.

So the sentiment of our text, that a wife is to submit to her husband, is found
throughout the Spirit-breathed New Testament. It is not a curious message found in just one place – like the phrase in the letter to the Corinthians of being baptized for the dead, whatever the correct meaning of that may be. So rejection of this word by those who claim to reverence the Lord Christ, is plain disobedience.

Except that it wasn’t the Lord Christ who is supposed to have said any of it, it was Paul; why does reverence for Jesus entail obedience to Paul? Because them’s the roolz of Christianity, but why else? Never mind; that’s theology; call a professional. Meanwhile –

A wife’s conduct toward her husband always says something about the church’s response to Christ, either right or wrong. If a woman does not honour her husband and is not loving toward him, if she is independent and defiant toward him, she proclaims this as the church’s response to Christ and thus attacks God’s Word.

Yikes. She’d better not be independent then.

…the reason why wives are to submit to their husbands is not because they are wonderful guys who deserve it. Sometimes husbands deserve very little from their wives. The reason why you submit is because your Lord Jesus Christ deserves it. Out of gratitude to him, for all that he has done for you, you submit. It is not because you love your husband that much, but it is because you love the Lord Jesus more.

But why is it so important to Jesus? And if it’s so important to him, why didn’t he say it himself instead of leaving it for Paul to tidy up?

More theology. I can never make sense of this stuff.

Oh, Guardian, honestly. Really?

Conservative thinktanks are in a bit of a bind when it comes to responding to the rise of Islamophobia. On the one hand they want to condemn the BNP and the English Defence League for their racism and violence, but on the other they want to downplay the extent and existence of anti-Muslim racism because it might deflect attention from “Islamism” – the catch-all term for politically active Muslims, which they see as the main problem facing the UK.

“Islamism” is not the (or a) catch-all term for politically active Muslims; that is completely ridiculous. It’s a term for political Islam, which is a different thing.

The difficulty with their position is that they end up condemning the peaceful political activism of Muslim groups…

No; Islamist groups, which are a different thing.

The record of these thinktanks is that their publications at best exaggerate the threat posed by “Islamists” and the supposed Islamisation of public institutions. Their concern is not over the threat of terrorism or even of any illegality.

Right, because that’s not all there is to be concerned over. Theocracy is something to be concerned over even if it takes power without violence and within the law.

Reassuringly, the commenters understand that. It’s too bad the Guardian doesn’t.

I’ve been thinking about the Robber’s Cave experiment often lately. I hadn’t heard of the illusion of asymmetric insight though. It’s pretty dang interesting. We think other people are mostly on the surface and easy to understand, while we think we ourselves are mostly hidden and difficult to understand. Really – well that’s conceited. I’ll have to learn to stop thinking that right away.

The same researchers asked people to describe a time when they feel most like themselves. Most subjects, 78 percent, described something internal and unobservable like the feeling of seeing their child excel or the rush of applause after playing for an audience. When asked to describe when they believed friends or relatives were most illustrative of their personalities, they described internal feelings only 28 percent of the time. Instead, they tended to describe actions. Tom is most like Tom when he is telling a dirty joke. Jill is most like Jill when she is rock climbing. You can’t see internal states of others, so you generally don’t use those states to describe their personalities.

Hmm. I can’t see them, but I’m certainly aware of them. I wonder if I’m a little non-average here, not because I’m wiser or better but because I’m more nerdy – or because I’m just more interested in the difference between inner and outer than the average. I wonder, but I’m sure not going to claim it, because what could be more hopeless than to look at the findings of a psych experiment and say “yes but I’m not like that.” Only only only…it seems to me I do often have the iceberg thought about people. But maybe everybody does, yet still answers the questions that way.

Anyway – the point is, you can always be confident that you’re giving yourself and your friends a lot more credit than you’re giving the other team, and you should keep that at the front of your mind.

I’m reading Kathryn Joyce’s book Quiverfull, and finding interesting things in the process. Like A Virtuous Woman (for her price, as you no doubt recall, is far above rubies – no not Ruby’s, stop that at once, 40 lashes).

A Virtuous Woman tells women how to be virtuous.

Can your husband know that if he needs to bring a co-worker home that the house will be reasonably neat? We will be looking at this in depth in a few days, but for now simply think about it. If your husband goes to work each day, can he trust that you will take care of your duties to the best of your ability?

If your husband asks you to make a phone call, do you forget? Do you think ahead and make plans to iron his shirts before they are needed?

Can he trust that your moods will remain relatively even most of the time and that he knows what to expect when he comes home? Or must he wonder what is in store for his arrival?

And so on and so on and so on, for a lot of words. What every servant shud kno.

This is a bad thing that happened, a very bad thing – an employee of a state department of public health was forced to close down his very useful, admired, educational blog because a guy who disagreed with him complained to his employers, and they said close it down or be fired.

Social media in health care are here to stay, and as Mr. Najera’s work has shown, can advance the lay person’s understanding of  public health and epidemiology.  But being a strong public advocate can invite push-back from people who disagree — say, over the value, safety, and efficacy of vaccines. Not all of those who disagree are civil or even rational.  Some of those who disagree elect to cause trouble in the advocate’s place of employment…

And sometimes they win. It’s a very bad thing.

An Irish bank loaned huge sums to Catholic dioceses in the US with the result that the dioceses in question were able to stay out of court.

Of the deals, by far the largest line of credit was for Los Angeles, for $256m. The diocese avoided going into court with abuse victims by reaching a settlement in advance.

It emerged afterwards that AIB loans and guarantees accounted for almost half of total settlement.

The deal included $175m in cash and another $25m to pay the interest, and helped Los Angeles avoid selling the bulk of its properties or reveal the true value of its total assets.

Which was very kind of the bank…which is odd, given that banks aren’t usually in the kindness business.

An AIB spokesman said: ‘AIB’s business focus in America was in the ‘Not for Profit’ areas and this included churches.

‘Any loans advanced were approved in accordance with AIBGroup policy.’

An AIB source said they were ‘standard commercial loans’.

Not for profit, but commercial? What does that mean?

Only after the revelations in the Boston diocese in 2002 did [one victim] set off on the long road to forcing the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to reveal what it knew. Esther’s case was one of hundreds, which were finally settled in mid 2007 for $660m.

…

And she had no idea until this week that Allied Irish Bank had helpfully stepped in with guarantees of hundreds of millions.

The deal allowed the Archdiocese to avoid going to court and opening all its documents to scrutiny.

What a very kind bank.