Baptist leadership in freedom of thought

Southern Baptist Convention intolerance not withstanding, Baptists were early leaders in the movement which gave us enlightened, Western religious liberty. Mainstream Baptist reminds us of revolutionary era Baptist evangelist John Leland, who wrote:

Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three gods, no god, or twenty gods, and let government protect him in so doing.

Of course it is important that the matter being discussed isn’t a principal concern of the Southern Baptist Convention but rather of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship [CBF]. Still quite Baptist, the CBF composed in considerable part of folks fleeing the shrinking SBC. The SBC isn’t just failing to recruit new members, as its Great Commission Resurgence suggests in part. It is still losing longtime members and churches which find the increasingly conservative “takeover” harder and harder to bear.

Spontaneous and other abortions

With 20 percent to a 40 percent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage (depending upon how it is measured), there are more miscarriages than abortions in the U.S. now, as Mark Silk observed recently.

Perhaps 900,000 miscarriages and just over 800,000 abortions. Which creates something of a puzzle, as Silk goes on to explain:

Those who believe that there is a live person from the moment of conception presumably struggle from time to time with the theodicy question: Why does a just God permit such destruction of innocent life?

There is debate, often attended by the grief of loss.

Read Silk’s brief blog in its entirety here.

When is leniency due?

Sex offenders are apparently unsurprised when Southern Baptist clergy seek clemency for them, as Raleigh, N.C., pastor Ricky Mill did last Monday for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.

The pastor’s good faith not at issue, but the overall predictability of the behavior is a concern.

In 2003 a researcher [.pdf] was told by a predator:

I considered church people easy to fool … they have a trust that comes from being Christians…They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people … I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.

The court was unconvinced, and on firm ground the plea for clemency made by Mills and others. Whatever the personal history of that individual offender, a study of child pornography offenders at the Butner, N.C., federal prison by M.L. Bourke and A.E. Hernandez Journal of Family Violence found:

More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child, they found, compared with 26 percent who were known to have committed any “hands on” offenses at sentencing. The researchers also counted many more total victims: 1,777, a more than 20-fold increase from the 75 identified when the men were sentenced.

That study suggests a risk to the community in releasing a known offender. The offender has a twelve-year history of “looking at images of children being molested and sexually abused,” and according to the Charlotte Observer had accumulated “more than 3,400 images and videos of naked, molested boys and girls, toddlers and teens.”

If the pattern of seeking leniency had not already been established in cases in involving crimes like and including sexual indecency with children, it might be overlooked. Instead, it should be corrected.

Bishop Williamson/SSPX conflagration may roar back to life [Addendum]

“The Vatican was warned about the Holocaust-denying views of SSPX Bishop Richard Willamson before it lifted his excommunication,” wrote Damian Thompson today. And the world is going to hear all about it. Wednesday night Sveriges Television AB will broadcast “an attack on the Holy Father” which covers what the Vatican knew about Williamson prior to the move toward rapprochement with Society of St. Pius X.

According to Carlos Antonio Palad, the promotion for the almost inevitably explosive program says:

Last winter the Catholic Church was shaken by the interview made by Uppdrag granskning with Bishop Richard Williamson. The Pope and the cardinals in charge assured the world that they had not known about the interview, but this is not true.

Swedish Bishop Arborelius: “From our side we passed the information on. That is so to say the usual way of doing it, the local church passes important news about the Church on to the papal representation.”

What did the Vatican know about the Holocaust-denying bishop?

None of this is going to leave the until recently somewhat reassured international Jewish community or not altogether mollified U.S. Bishops awash with good cheer. Nor will it smooth launch of the first round of discussions between the representatives of the Holy See and SSPX.

Exercising his gift for wry understatement, Thompson writes:

Anyway, now that Rorate Caeli has drawn attention to the documentary, you can rest assured that the Pope’s enemies and critics will get to work again. I’ll be interested to see what The Times [of London] makes of it. One request: this time, could the Vatican press office get its act together?

Answer [not from the Vatican]: Probably not.

Addendum: SSPX/Vatican talks set for mid-October

Vatican Spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi said recently that the Holy See will hold talks with the Society of St. Pius X during the last two weeks of October.

He also said that “the SSPX will be told very clearly what is not negotiable for the Holy See. This includes such fundamental conclusions of the Second Vatican Council as its positions on Judaism, other non-Christian religions, other Christian churches and on religious freedom as a basic human right.”

Those “fundamental conclusions” are of central public importance, for as you may recall, the furor which ensued in March after Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of four Lefebvrite bishops, drove Vatican-Jewish relations almost to the breaking point.

Health care is a right – Christian ethicists agree

Jennifer Harris explains that Christian ethicists view health care as basic right:

Other industrialized nations already provide basic health care, and consider it a human right rather than a commercial commodity, said Terry Rosell, professor of pastoral theology in ethics and ministry praxis at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan., and program associate for disparities in health and health care at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “They consider us to be barbarians for leaving out millions of our most vulnerable citizens—and non-citizens. They consider us immoral to allow some to grow rich off the sufferings of others.”

Read the entire piece here.

Religious sex offenders may be the worst [Addendum: Part of the price]

Analyzing of the criminal records and self-reported religious affiliations of 111 incarcerated sex offenders, researchers Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone at Australia’s Griffith University found:

… that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, serve to deter sexual offending behavior.

Another study found evidence that sexual predators consider churches an attractive environment. In 2003 one predator told a researcher [.pdf]:

I considered church people easy to fool…they have a trust that comes from being Christians…They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people … I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.

Despite their limitations, these studies do suggest that predators who stay in church understand how to manipulate the environment in ways which permit them to continue their predatory careers.

Neither possibility is a surprise to either the victims of clerical predators or those who labor for reform of church practices.

Addendum: Part of the human price

A study funded by the USA National Institute of Drug Abuse [.pdf] found that "Among more than 1,400 adult females, childhood sexual abuse was associated with increased likelihood of drug dependence, alcohol dependence, and psychiatric disorders. The associations are expressed as odds ratios: for example, women who experienced nongenital sexual abuse in childhood were 2.93 times more likely to suffer drug dependence as adults than were women who were not abused."

Network neutrality and believers

Religious Right blog storms and evangelical online social networking could come unpredictably and irrevocably to nothing if network neutrality died, and under the eight-year reign of the Bush administration, network neutrality was dying.

This morning Federal Communications Commission chief Julius Genachowski in a speech at the Brookings Institution said the FCC must be a “smart cop on the beat,” preserving Net Neutrality against increased efforts by providers to block services and applications over both wired and wireless connections.

It is in effect a fight for freedom of the 21st Century press, one in which we are all invited to participate, as he explained:

We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications (phone calls delivered over data networks) and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. We have even seen at least one service provider deny users access to political content.

It is and should be largely invisible that the underlying network architecture of the Internet makes possible ready access to all manner of online publishing.

As long as and only as long as the principles of network neutrality re sustained.

You can have sustained 21st Century freedom of online speech and press, if you can keep it in the face of the armies of loggyists deployed at a cost of millions of dollars in an attempt to eliminate network neutrality.

The FCC invites your participation in the process of shaping and sustaining network neutrality at http://www.openinternet.gov/.

Straw Huckabee indeed

No, the headline doesn’t say it all. Mark Silk explains why the results of the Values Voters straw poll favoring Mike Huckabee as the 2012 Republican nominee are likely to blow away with the next light political breeze.

This time the winner might be wise to Huckpack his candidate bags and go home. Even if the Republican Party falls more deeply into disarray, Huck can’t expect fellow Southern Baptist Richard Land to pull him out of a hat like a Palin Rabbit. He’s a known quantity whose appeal was narrow at last election time and remains, narrow.

Hate crime

The Anti-Defamation League has called for a new Georgia hate crimes law in the wake of the beating of Army reservist Tashawnea Hill at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Morrow, Georgia. The state had such a law but it was tossed out as unconstitutionally vague in 2004.

Errin Haines of the Associated Press wrote of the beating

The Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington has initiated a probe into Hill’s case. Police say Tashawnea Hill was kicked and punched Sept. 9 as Troy D. West screamed racial slurs outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Morrow, about 15 miles southeast of Atlanta. Authorities say West, 47, became enraged when Hill told him to be careful after he nearly hit her daughter while opening the restaurant’s door.

The FBI is investigating whether federal civil rights laws were violated by the assault.

General concern about the matter and its status as a hate crime has apparently been muted. Social conservatives, when they become concerned, typically oppose hate crimes legislation. Ambivalence seems to be commonplace. And the beat goes on.

May God be with him

Amen, Tony.