Oops is in a way how FBC Jax Watchdog was robbed of his anonymity.
Formerly anonymous blogger Thomas A. Rich's identity was made public after an unnecessary investigation whose details are still being unearthed in court.
Although some evidence pertaining to the involvement of Florida State Attorney Angela Corey was somehow inadvertently destroyed.
Really, and that destruction is cited as part of an argument against deposing Corey as part of the proceedings.
"Oops!" indeed.
Another injustice.
A Florida federal district court refused this week to dismiss the claim by blogger Tom Rich (FBC Jax Watchdog) that Assistant Fla. State Attorney Stephen Siegel violated Rich's right to speak anonymously, and trampled on the Establishment Clause because defendants had no secular purpose for their actions.
The lawsuit alleges Siegel issued subpoenas that helped Jacksonville police officer Robert Hinson -- who was a member of First Baptist Church of Jacksonvilla, Fla. -- identify Rich when there was no evidence of criminal activity.
Dismissed in the same action were civil claims against State Attorney Angela Corey for her office’s role.
Rich’s claims against the police officer and against First Baptist were unaffected because they weren’t involved in this motion to dismiss.
Emerging standards for unmasking anonymous bloggers were certainly not met in Rich's case.
To prevail in this instance, Rich must now prove the violations he alleges. But even at this juncture, the case is a caution for those who would twist legal authority to unmask an anonymous blogger without compelling legal justification. Abuse of power has a price.
[H/T: Religion Clause]
Madeleine Bunting writes:
But perhaps New Atheism's publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in God is Back that the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one. What numerous countries are now demonstrating from the US to Asia, from Africa to the Middle East and Latin America, is that modernisation, far from entailing secularisation, is actually leading to increased and intensified forms of religiosity. According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the future across most of the globe is going to be very religious.
To the sceptical European, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, scanning my stuffed bookshelf, which of these defences of God are going to help explain this enduring appeal? Start with Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth: "we are meaning-seeking creatures" who "invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting … and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value". That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life (the first chapters of which are published on the net as What on Earth Am I Here For?). The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose.
Read the entire piece here.
Seeking to disfellowship Atlanta's Druid Hills Baptist Church, the Georgia Baptist Convention (GBC) is fleeing present reality. The GBC executive committee recommended that change at its March 16 meeting and Shelia M. Poole of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote today:
“It seems sad that they decided to go backwards in time,” said the 52-year-old Mimi Walker, a former missionary in the Philippines. “I’m not sure what the value is of trying to go back in time when women were held in subservience.”
The overarching result, not value, is a steadily smaller, more strictly Batholic and of course less diverse Southern Baptist Convention.
Put a woman in the pulpit and the ax of Southern Baptist discipline falls. The Georgia Baptist Convention is preparing to disfellowship Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta because the Reverend Mimi Walker is a co-pastor there. While critics write the South Carolina Baptist Courier to abjure Eau Claire Baptist Church for calling Kelly Dickerson Strum to be co-pastor, one suggesting that church discipline is in order.
Yet amid the recurrent revelations of Southern Baptist pastoral sexual abuse, again documented by Christa Brown, no equivalent scripture-laced outpourings about applying the force of denominational discipline to the protection of the young from sexual wolves in Baptist clerical cloth. Or disfellowship of churches which ship predators of the cloth along to other congregations without a word of warning.
Oh no. Policy is clear: Women in the pulpit are a danger to the entire denomination. As are homosexuals welcomed into the pews. For the proliferation of predators, however, Southern Baptist Churches are autonomous. No denominational consequence for negligence.
Officials of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) on Wednesday asked 500-member Royal Lane Baptist Church of North Dallas "to remove the partnership with the BGCT from any of its church’s publications" until questions regarding the church's apparent tolerance for homosexual members are resolved. BGCT officials also said they would hold in escrow any funds received from the church while the issue is being resolved.
As of this writing, the church Web site does not link to BGCT as a ministry partner.
Their site's About Us section does still conclude:
Royal Lane is an ecumenical Baptist congregation affiliated with The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and The Baptist General Convention of Texas.
Royal Lane's membership "includes BGCT employees and a BGCT executive board member. BGCT employees must belong to an affiliated church, so a split with Royal Lane could force some to choose between workplace and worship place," the Dallas Morning News reported.
The issue was raised recently when the church's diaconate voted to rewrite the About Us section of its Web site to include:
Royal Lane Baptist Church is an inclusive, multi-generational congregation joined in Christian community. We are a vibrant mosaic of varied racial identities, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and denominational backgrounds.
The church is considering its response.
University Baptist Church in Austin was disfellowshipped by the BGCT in 1994 "for ordaining a gay man as deacon and for failing to regard homosexuality as sinful." The church has been expelled by the Austin Baptist Association in 1943 for accepting black members, and later readmitted. In the 1970s, University was the first in the Southern Baptist Convention to ordain women as deacons, the church history shows. It left the Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 "because of ramifications of the fundamentalist takeover of that organization."
Broadway Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, postponed a similar confrontation last year when it chose not to send messengers to the BGCT annual convention. Broadway was nonetheless found not to be in friendly cooperation by the Southern Baptist Convention last year because it was deemed to "approve and endorse homosexual behavior" as a result of a confrontation provoked when it published photographs of same-sex couples in the church directory.
Broadway's expulsion by the SBC was an assertion of the kind of Cathist inflexibility that independent demographic analysis predicts will frustrate achievement of expansive evangelism goals like those discussed by the SBC's Great Commission Resurgence Task Force.
Hiring veteran journalists to counter-investigate the St. Petersburg Times was a strategy with something of a reverse twist. Scientology is under scrutiny in Australia [1,2,3], headed for the silver screen in Germany and still on the pages of U.S. news publications [1,2,3].
Just for example, you understand.
All of the well-known Scientology strategies keep applying, as makers of the film "Bis Nichts Mehr Bleibt" (Until Nothing Remains) illustrated when they reported via the Guardian:
The film team said it had been "bombarded" with phone calls and emails from the organisation during production. The head of the Southwest German broadcasting organisation, Carl Bergengruen who was involved in the project, said Scientology had "tried via various means to discover details about the film" and that the film crew was even tailed by a Scientology representative.
"We are fearful that the organisation will try to use all legal means to try to stop the film being shown," he said.
The film itself sounds like a classical Scientology exit story with an especially tragic conclusion:
According to the makers of Until Nothing Remains, the €2.5m (£2.3 m) drama, which is due to air in a prime-time slot at the end of March, is based on the true story of Heiner von Rönns, who left Scientology and suffered the subsequent break-up of his family.
Scientology calls the film false and intolerant, and distributed flyers at a Hamburg preview, accusing the filmmakers of aiming to "create a mood of intolerance and discrimination against a religious community."
All of that effort to defeat critics while building attractive homes for the church. Yet as PZ Meyers pointed out from his reading of the NY Times investigation, they're apparently shrinking:
The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church's spokesman, gave the numbers of Sea Org members (8,000), of Scientologists in the Tampa-Clearwater area (12,000) and of L. Ron Hubbard's books printed in the last two and a half years (67 million). But asked about the church's membership, Mr. Davis said, "I couldn't tell you an exact figure, but it's certainly, it's most definitely in the millions in the U.S. and millions abroad."
He said he did not know how to account for the findings in the American Religious Identification Survey that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008.
If you make projections from those numbers, as Meyers did, they appear to have done some magnificent architectural restoration without building a future.
The opening lines of the preview refer to Scientologist Tom Cruise’s role in the movie "Valkyrie." There was considerable tension while Valkyrie was being filmed. At one point, according to the London Daily Mail, Thomas Gandow, Sect Commissioner for the German Evangelical Church, "said the film is propaganda for Scientology" and described Cruise was the 'Goebbels of Scientology.'"
Royal Lane Baptist Church is an inclusive, multi-generational congregation joined in Christian community. We are a vibrant mosaic of varied racial identities, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and denominational backgrounds.That did not represent a change of heart by the church, as Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News reported:
"In effect, this is a collective coming out about who we are and have been for a long time," said Ruth May, vice chair of the deacons.Debate over the issue immediately related BGCT/SBC action against local churches with regard to homosexuality and their failure to apply similar force to sexual predators. Nathan Barnes wrote:
. . .
[The Rev. David] Matthews, who became Royal Lane's pastor last year, said the Bible "understood through the prism of Jesus" calls for full acceptance of gays and lesbians.
The leadership of the SBC and apparently the BGCT are not willing to sacrifice church autonomy to catalog and track sex offending clergy but are willing to sacrifice it to keep GLBT folks from serving the Lord.In rejoinder, another commenter said, "If aberrant behavior is to be accepted as normal and within God's provision for human sexual expression, why not pedophilia, or bestiality, or??" and Barnes responded:
BUT pedophila is already accepted. No church has been disassociated from the SBC or BGCT for passing on sex offending clergy to other churches.Christa Brown said at Stop Baptist Predators:
It's not a double standard. It's the standard.
Mr. Barnes got it exactly right. Baptist leaders have so twisted the doctrine of local church autonomy as to make it little more than an easily manipulated excuse to serve their own ends. It’s pure contrivance for Baptist leaders to say they can’t do anything about clergy predators because of local church autonomy. After all, look at how quick they are to interfere with churches that admit to having gay members.Like the Roman Catholic Church, the SBC is attempting to assert ethical/spiritual authority in the midst of a long public parade of evidence of its failure to protect young Christians from predatory members of its own clergy.
The Anglican Church in American (ACA), with some 100 dioceses and 5,200 members, swim the Tiber. The House of Bishops of the Anglican Church in America, Traditional Anglican Communion, announced Thursday:
We, the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church in America of the Traditional Anglican Communion have met in Orlando, Florida, together with our Primate and the Reverend Christopher Phillips of the "Anglican Use" Parish of Our Lady of the Atonement (San Antonio, Texas) and others.
At this meeting, the decision was made formally to request the implementation of the provisions of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus in the United States of America by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
They are the first major U.S. exodus to join the 68,115,001 Catholic Church, U.S.
The ACA was formed from conservative breakaways from the Episcopal Church )United States), which is part of the nAnglican Communio that is headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Whereas the ACA is a branch of the Traditional Anglican Communion -- the group which from the outset was expected to be the first to accept Pope Benedict XVI's October offer.
Abused by Baylor University when she had to courage to report being assaulted by "murdering minister" Matt Baker when he was a student there, Lora Wilson is still a target of reflexive abuse.
Blame the victim is a hideous American practice, not exclusively a Southern Baptist sin -- one at which Christa Brown fired back when Lora Wilson was maligned with Baker's words in a recent blog comment.
The smear continues in part because the Southern Baptist institutions which are at fault have failed to acknowledge their responsibility. Christa writes:
To this day, no Baylor official has made any public expression of remorse. No one at First Baptist of Waco, a church that had two reports of Baker’s abuse, has expressed any sorrow about letting the man move on without consequence. No one at the Baptist General Convention of Texas has offered any explanation for how someone with so many abuse and assault reports could move so easily through its affiliated churches and organizations. And no one in Baptistland has made even the feeblest of effort to reach out to the many more who were likely wounded by “murdering minister” Matt Baker -- the many who are probably still silent.
Christa Brown parsed the verbal signatures of a clerical sexual predator from the testimony about Southern Baptist pastor Matt Baker in his Waco, Texas, murder trial.
Excerpting from Erin Quinn's trial blog, Brown creates a hair-raising dictionary of sexually predatory grooming and controlling intimidation by a pastor who is systematically misusing his occupational authority. For example, Baker's former mistress, Vanessa Bulls, testified that:
She was testifying to events in a world where clerical predators flourish because in well-documented ways, they are allowed to flourish. Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland and Christen Argueta have documented the psychological profile and techniques of sexually abusive pastors. The common themes of the church environment which allows clerical predators to flourish and as Brown says, "church-hop through Baptistland," have also been well-explained.
The murder of Kari Baker and surrounding human devastation showed with startling drama how tragically lives spin out as a result of Baptistland's refusal to impose well-known remedies to clerical predation. Investigators found evidence that Matt Baker had for years led “a secret life as a sexual predator.” Brown wrote:
Prosecutors said that he had made advances and assaults on at least 13 young women, including 4 minors. Yet, despite multiple reports of sexual abuse and sexual assault, Matt Baker was always able to continue his career through churches, schools, and organizations affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
When a Waco, Texas, jury found Matt Baker guilty Wednesday, it by implication indicted Southern Baptist failure to act forcefully to stop clerical predators in its midst.
The Louisiana Baptist Message's new pay-to-read Web site apparently skidded on launch. They have rolled out a lurid red, top-heavy, new Web design which combines mostly subscriber-only content, some of which is free elsewhere, with incomplete sections (Plan of Salvation, Focus, Image Archive, Links of Interest).
A Southern Baptist official state newspaper with an empty Salvation section?
It is too early to draw lasting conclusions, but the early returns are not encouraging.
We greeted as suicidal their announcement last year of pay-wall plans. And they're not disappointing us. The Missouri Word & Way saw a slight decline (-8.18%) in Web traffic while the North Carolina Biblical Recorder saw a sharp increase (+160.7%) during the period of sharp Louisiana Baptist Message decline(-55.9%). The yearly change percentages are +428.77% for Word & Way, +105.84% for the Biblical Recorder and -19.02% for the Baptist Message.
The Baptist Message changes also disrupted existing links to its earlier content. For example, their redesign broke the links to a Louisiana Baptist Messenger Editor Kelly Boggs editorial in CounterFactual Kelly Boggs.
The combined effects of putting up a pay wall, redesign/launch errors and uninspiring content are likely to keep the Baptist Message in the Web readership basement. Or below.
Should they be nominated for Web Pages That Suck?
We will follow their experiment with flagging interest.
Sandy Springs, Ga., slowed the Church of Scientology's dramatic 2009 growth by denying a rezoning required to expand a former office building into their Georgia headquarters.
Ever aggressive, Scientology filed two lawsuits on Wednesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:
The church filed religious discrimination complaints in U.S. District Court on Wednesday and Fulton County Superior Court on Thursday.
Both suits contend that the city infringed on the church’s religious rights in the City Council's vote Dec. 15 that approved the rezoning of the building at Roswell Road and Glenridge Drive but denied the church’s request to add a fourth floor by enclosing a basement parking garage, saying there wasn’t enough parking.
The pre-lawsuit Scientology vs. Sandy Springs story was blogged in detail by xenubarb at Daily Kos.
Conflict and Scientology go hand-in-hand. Remember last year's dramatic exits, legal reversals, impending movie, investigations and media takedowns?
Ed Brayton at ScienceBlogs writes about another Scientology lawsuit.
In this one, a politically active New Jersey a businessman is being sued for allegedly attempting to force Scientology upon his employees.
Michael Deak of My CentralJersey.com writes:
Calling a lawsuit brought against his business as "replete with misrepresentations and outright lies,'' a new member of the Borough Council is denying the charges, including one that an employee was fired for not becoming a member of the Church of Scientology.
John Buckley, who on New Year's Day was sworn into a three-year term as a councilman after winning a seat in the November election, said he and his company, Open House Direct "will vigorously defend against these unfounded claims and to also demonstrate that this is nothing but an attempt to harass us and to hurt our ability to do business.''
Three former employees — Maurice Grays, John Knapp and Larry Kolakowski — last month filed suit in Superior Court seeking legal relief, claiming they were victims of a hostile work environment and retaliation at the company on Hamilton Street.
Add to these the threatened Scientology suit in France against the Daughters of Saint Paul [which we blogged about earlier this month] and you have the makings of another fascinating year of watching Scientology-in-action.
Scientology blundered toward the new year with a pugilistic response to questions about why three of its top spiritual achievers publicly left the cult, er, church.
Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin of the St. Petersburg Times wrote that "Geir Isene of Norway and Americans Mary Jo Leavitt and Sherry Katz" announced their split with Scientology:
Isene left first, a decision that emboldened Leavitt, who inspired Katz. Such departures are rare among the church's elite group of OT VIIIs, who are held up as role models in Scientology. The three each told the St. Petersburg Times that they had spent decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach the church's spiritual pinnacle.
All three stressed their ongoing belief in Scientology and say they remain grateful for how it helped them. Yet they took to the Internet — an act strongly discouraged by church leaders, who decry public airing of problems — to share their reasons for leaving. They said they hoped it would resonate within the Scientology community.
Scientology's response was similar in assaultive tone to the reaction to Catholic Online [here]. Tommy Davis of Scientology wrote in a letter to the Times:
Your biased approach to stories regarding my religion is by now well documented. You, Joe Childs in particular, actively seek out only those individuals who have something negative to say about the Church; if they do not fit your agenda then you attempt to coach them and coax them into doing so by "educating" them about Scientology until you have "adjusted" their viewpoint accordingly and when that does not work you simply put words in their mouth. This is your pattern, which was unknown to the Church until recently, and has been your modus operandi for the better part of two decades.
All this fists-up rhetoric from an organization whose evangelism is so slickly finished it puts most of the competition to shame. Consider this leaked, internal push for their Ideal Org program. Maybe it is a little too long. And doesn't mention the V-like Ideal Org uniforms. But consider:
Okey-dokey. You too can help convert your friends to a money-sucking program that promises mastery of immortality and if you or they try to leave, discipline may get a lot rougher than denial of communion.
Religion cannot answer "most or all of today's problems" for a slowly but steadly growing minority of Americans.
In 1957, less than 10% said that religion "is largely old-fashioned and out of date."
Last week, it had grown to 29%.
The Religion | Newswriters Association offers Top Religion Stories of 2009 - the result of a survey of more than 100 religion journalists. They emphasize the top 10 but actually offer the top 23 stories, beginning with Obama’s June speech "pledging a new beginning in Muslim/U.S. relations." Of that, the Springfield News-Leader wrote:
Obama extended a hand to the Islamic world in a speech in Cairo while quoting from the Quran, the Gospel of Matthew and the Talmud, the collection of Jewish law.
"So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity," Obama said in the speech. "And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end."
Time Magazine has its Top 10 Religion Stories for 2009, although they are more topics than stories.
The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty offers the top 10 religious liberty stories of 2009 (in reverse order). Some are stores in the journalistic sense. But as with Time, most are topics attended by brief essays. Number one, for example, is "New President brings change, but delays some tough decisions."
Catholic News Service tells us 2009 was a busy year for the pope, reviewing those top stories, albeit without enumeration. Not critical reviews, BTW.
The London Telegraph's Martin Beckford (religion and social affairs correspondent) has his own Top religion stories of 2009. In his view, "Following a year of turmoil in the worldwide Anglican Communion over women bishops and homosexuality, over the past 12 months most of the newsworthy events seem to have involved the Roman Catholic Church and Britain."
Regret The Error's Typo of the Year (amid its top corrected journalistic errors of 2009) is about religion:
The Daily Universe, a student paper at BYU, recalled and trashed 18,000 copies of an edition after discovering a typo. Notably, it was a typo that could have offended the Mormon church. The paper issued a brief apology and also published a lengthy article to explain the error.
That can happen when one substitutes "apostate" for "apostle" thus referring in a photo cutline to a nonexistent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints group called, "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates."
We need the nones to see the probable meaning of the most recent Gallup analysis of tracking data for the relationship between intensity of religious faith and political party identification.
First, the Gallup analysis concludes:
The percentage of Americans who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party drops from 49% among the highly religious to 26% among those who are not religious. The percentage who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party rises from 37% among the highly religious to 56% among those who are not religious. For comparison, the party figures for November among all adults in these data are 40% Republicans/Republican leaners and 45% Democrats/Democratic leaners.
Thus, Republicans are in the plurality among highly religious Americans. For each of the other three groups, Democrats are equal with or higher in number than Republicans. The Democratic edge expands as religiosity decreases. Among the not-religious group, Democrats have a 30-point edge over Republicans.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that the "percentage of Christians in America" on the decline and nones are on the rise. Specifically:
The non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population. If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse to answer our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble “Nones” in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.
Thus, as long as Republicanism's principal appeal is to the most fervent Christians, as Gallup found, Republican political influence is likely to continue to wane.
Heschel is at right, with beard.
"At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses," Abraham Joshua Heschel began his January 14, 1963 speech "Religion and Race."
Speaking of Faith this week offers an extraordinary broadcast/podcast looking back at this "a mystic who wrote transcendent, poetic words about God. At the same time, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and organized religious leadership against the war in Vietnam, embodying the social activism of the biblical prophets he studied."
Here.
Noah Lottick, 24, committed suicide last June in May of 1990, having given virtually all of his money to the Church of Scientology. Time Magazine writes:
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.
Read the entire article here.
More recently, the Scientology wars have come to Catholic Online.
Mainstream Baptist dissects Manhattan Declaration's overstatement and distortion. They are not echoes of righteousness, he explains:
In my mind, there's something about Jesus' injunction to "let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay" (Matt. 5:37) that is applicable beyond oath-taking situations and confirms the truth that "anything beyond these is of the evil one." Christians have no business embellishing the truth and twisting it for political purposes and that is what the Manhattan Declaration does from beginning to end.
All driven by the desperation of a Christian Right which feels power slipping through its fingers like sand.
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