We’re still on this Pastor Worley thing. Hopefully it will be over soon.
However, here are two clips that are interesting to watch back to back. In the first, Anderson Cooper interviews Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, who strongly rebukes the hatred and genocidal words preached by Pastor Charles Worley of Maiden, North Carolina. It’s worth watching in its entirety, but this is an important quote:
In one fell swoop this angry minister managed to discredit from his pulpit both the Constitution of the United States and the compassion that we find in the bible, and additionally he did a very dangerous thing by planting seeds of hatred in sick minds that in the right circumstances can act on them and do the kind of violence that has no place in our world.
Now compare and contrast that with this local news footage where members of Worley’s Providence Road Baptist Church are interviewed, and remember the statement from Rev. Gaddy, involving “planting seeds of hatred in sick minds.”
Now, of course, we don’t know whether the people interviewed have “sick minds,” but that’s the point: we don’t know. We don’t know who is in earshot of this uninformed bigot, as he spews truly genocidal language against a minority group, from the pulpit. Regardless, here’s the end result, as David Badash explains:
Have no doubt: words like those from Pastor Worley, and his supporters, are contributing to the suicide deaths of our children.
Indeed. This is the cycle of spiritual bullying, perpetuated by those who hold the title of “reverend,” who command respect, and whose seeds of hatred grow in the hearts of their followers, and which eventually end up landing on vulnerable kids, thus becoming seeds of self-hatred. And all too often, those kids end up being news stories and statistics, all while the black hearts of the Religious Right maintain their insistence that they’re simply teaching the “good news” of “the Gospel.”
Who needs bad news when you’ve got “good news” like that?
All those churches who claim not to be anti-gay should be speaking out against this guy. Here’s their chance to do what they always say they do.
Not surprisingly, the people they interviewed who are members of his congregation sound like they have the intellect of a mollusk.
It’s almost (*almost*) too easy for antigay churches to speak out against kill-the-gays churches such as this one or Westboro Baptist.
The real power players among antigay megachurches exploit the extremists to make their own brutal policies (to ostracize, brainwash, fire, or imprison gays) appear graceful and compassionate by comparison.
Y’know, whenever some lunkhead says, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, three thoughts occur to me:
1. Why do they assume he would create two men instead of two women? I mean, if God’s a heterosexual male, then, like any other hetero male, he likes watching lesbians.
2. If God intended for humans to reproduce, he’d have have made Adam and Eve and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Because there’s no THIRD generation coming from just to people without something really weird and sick happening.
3. Is “Steve” a Hebrew name?
TWO people. Stupid absent-minded spelling error.
from the end of the video (quoting other Baptist Church with similar name): “Jesus preached that we love our neighbor, whether that neighbor is like us or not.”
Translation: we agree with them but are smart enough to be more careful how we allude to “our neighbors” without actually naming them or being mistaken for actually SUPPORTING “our neighbors.”
Perhaps “Adolph” Worley is the gays’ best friend. Rhetoric such as that can only come back to bite him, as Hitler’s did. What he said has nothing to do with Christian love.
Also, he needs some lessons in how to pronounce English properly. “Against” has an “a,” an “s” and a “t” in it.
Jerry
@Bill S.
Adam actually comes from the Sumerian Adamu — which means “mankind” — Eve is a Hebrew word, commonly translated to mean “rib” — however, according to scholars of Hebrew its actual meaning is: Eve (Heb. Ḥavvah), “mother of all the living” Check the Hebrew Encyclopedia if you doubt me. The reality therefore is that in Sumerian the root word that became haAdam and then Adam meant mankind and Eve in its original version was equally generic, meaning mother of all living — an appropriate name for the first woman.
Did these figures exist, even theologically, or were they seen as representations, even by those who created the stories? Most experts think that like “Sky” and “Moon” and so forth in other religious traditions they were intended to be archetypes, from the beginning – and not to be taken seriously.
Kind thoughts,
Reyn