Walmart.sheep

Last updated on: May 21, 2015 at 7:24 pm by Fred Clark

Walmart.sheep 2015-05-21T18:15:10-04:00 Fred Clark

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• A Unitarian minister in Alabama was fined $250 and sentenced to six months of probation for “disorderly conduct.” Her crime? She was trying to conduct a wedding for a lesbian couple who had already secured a legal marriage license.

My guess is that Todd Starnes and the rest of the Christian hegemons whinging about imaginary “persecution of Christians” won’t be rallying behind this minister crying “Religious liberty!” But then, for Starnes et. al., Unitarians don’t count as Real, True Christians (except for the ones who also signed the Declaration of Independence and/or served as president), and “religious liberty” is reserved only for RTCs.

• As far as I know, the litigious billionaires who run Walmart have not yet claimed title to the domain name Walmart.sheep.

(I fully appreciate that others are likely to arrive at the point at which this is no longer funny before I personally arrive there. But I’m not there yet.)

• Rival white motorcycle gangs got in a shootout in Waco, Texas, leaving nine of them dead. Matthew Hagee says this is a sign of the End Times. Because, for the Hagees, everything is a sign of the End Times.

“The Bible says that in the End Times, lawlessness would abound,” Hagee said. This is what utter devotion to the Narrative of Decline does to your brain. He saw news of the shootout and concluded that the Rapture must be about to happen because lawlessness has reached an all-time high in Waco — the city that previously gave its name to the Waco Siege and the Waco Horror.

• Anne Graham Lotz cites far more generic signs of the End Times, but like the Hagees she’s convinced that those signs are clear and the Rapture is overdue. And she’s willing to offer a fairly specific time-range for that prediction: “I believe that in my lifetime, if I live out my lifetime, a natural lifetime, I believe I will live to see the return of Jesus in the Rapture when he comes back to take us to be with himself.”

Lotz is 67, but her dad is still hanging in there at 96, so let’s estimate this “natural lifetime” to be, say, the next 30 years. Put a marker on 2045. If Left Behind doesn’t turn into a documentary between now and then, then we’ll all know that Anne Graham Lotz is full of it.

Of course, the beauty of this prediction is that, by design, she won’t be around to have to defend herself once she’s been proved wrong. Like climate-denialists, she’s making a death bet. And, like all death bets, it’s based on the moral principle of “Screw everyone else, I’m getting mine and who cares about anybody else once I’m dead?”

It’s moral principles like that that make me think of Anne Graham Lotz as Franklin’s sister rather than as Billy’s daughter.

• Sikhs have a rule that says they cannot remove their turbans and uncover their heads publicly. But it is not their only rule and it is not the Most Important Thing (via):

A young Sikh man has been praised for breaking religious protocol and using his turban to cradle the head of an injured child in Auckland.

Harman Singh, 22, was one of the first at the scene after a 5-year-old was hit by a car while walking to school.

Singh said he didn’t think twice about removing his Siropao (turban) to help the child, who was bleeding from the head.

“I wasn’t thinking about the turban. I was thinking about the accident and I just thought, ‘He needs something on his head because he’s bleeding.’ That’s my job – to help,” Singh told nzherald.co.nz.

• That story recalls the story in the Gospels of Jesus healing a woman’s spine on the Sabbath. And also the story in the Gospels of Jesus healing a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. Matthew’s story is slightly different from Mark’s, and the story in Luke is different enough that it might be a completely separate story. Or not. So how are they all related? Which story came first? Is one more “accurate” than the others, or does that question miss the whole point?

This brings us back to the always-fascinating synoptic problem — which Paul Davidson continues to discuss here.

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