from a new study by LifeWay Christian Resources:
On abortion: “Based on our conviction that all human life is sacred from conception until natural death, Christians must oppose abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, human cloning, and any technology or research that involves the destruction of a human embryo.”
Ethics Daily.com: Southern Baptist Study Puts Women in Their Place
I’m much more interested in the above quote than I am in the absolutely inane, silly SBC pronouncements about women. Actually, I’m glad the SBC is “pushing” the nonsense espoused by the likes of Al Mohler and company, since it can only serve to make more people in the rank and file of the SBC EMBARASSED at what is being presented as “what Southern Baptists believe” (ala the statements on women).
But for me, far more disturbing than their inability to shake male dominance, is their inability/unwillingness to put issues of war into their “respect for life” concerns. It is what belies just how “respectful” of life they really are.
What they really mean by “life” is the lives of middle class (and upper class) Americans. Iraqi deaths are completely acceptable at the hands of our government who shield us from the fact that 650,000 Iraqis have probably died as a result of our “leaders” decisions to deceive us and their determination to “remake” the Middle East (and it’s not even to “remake” them into a “democracy”, but rather a “democracy that ensures ‘free market’ ownership by capitalist firms from the outside who know how to ‘maximize profits’. ) For quite some time now, I have seen the SBC as “America’s denomination”. None of the leadership (that is allowed to speak their mind) is anything but glowingly patriotic (meaning, totally supportive of ALL of our present administration).
Al Mohler and his like are totally irrelevant. Mohler never speaks on the issue of the Iraq debacle. He certainly offers us plenty of the same old empty “sanctity of life” stuff, completely ignoring how wars are calculated, economics driven, rationalizations of how our “enemies” are threats to “our way of life”, when what the real threat that’s being fought is the lack of “cooperation” by the other party in the “free market” we are offering them.
They have raised up a generation of followers who have been trained to scoff at the notion that powerful people have undue influence on the ideologies driving the foreign policies of our government. Especially this administration, which has been more unabashed at pushing through pro-corporatist economic programs as ever before. Such notions cause “pro-Americans” to shake their heads and summarily dismiss the outlandish notions that the rich want to get richer, and have the means and the influence to “educate us” about how “the market” needs to be allowed to work; that it is benevolent and good for all of us, if we would only “let it work”. Even though scripture tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil”, it has become “ridiculous” to suggest that corporations would want to manipulate public perception in a manner that enables maximum support and are experts at “manufacturing consent”. It seems that such “scoffing” is just what the powers intend, and have accomplished.
It seems that the best argument they have for their scoffing is that such ideas are “anti-American”. Indeed, “pro-Americanism” is its own argument. It’s “anti-American”, so it has to be wrong. It is “conspiracy theory”, as if it doesn’t actually take the literal meaning of “conspiracy” to collaborate on a plan to “sell” the plan as something that is “other” (ie. “freedom and liberty”, “fighting communism” or “the war on terror”) than creating conditions that maximize profits.
