Deuteronomy 21:10-14
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

No other assholes gape as wide:

Meanwhile, in compassionately puckered sphincters, Occupy Seattle organizers are planning a counter-protest to shield funeral-goers from the sight and stench.

Wow:

In 2002, at the height of the outcry over the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests, the Archbishop of New York, Edward M. Egan, issued a letter to be read at Mass. In it, he offered an apology about the church’s handling of sex-abuse cases in New York and in Bridgeport, Conn., where he was previously posted.

“It is clear that today we have a much better understanding of this problem,” he wrote. “If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology. In a interview with Connecticut magazine published on the magazine’s Web site last week, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

Nahum 1:2-6
The Lord is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and rage. He takes revenge on all who oppose him and continues to rage against his enemies!

The Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished. He displays his power in the whirlwind and the storm. The billowing clouds are the dust beneath his feet.

At his command the oceans dry up, and the rivers disappear. The lush pastures of Bashan and Carmel fade, and the green forests of Lebanon wither.

In his presence the mountains quake, and the hills melt away; the earth trembles, and its people are destroyed.

Who can stand before his fierce anger? Who can survive his burning fury? His rage blazes forth like fire, and the mountains crumble to dust in his presence.

A pastor who—I presume—isn't affiliated with Mars Hill put up a post on The Broken Telegraph about "church discipline," as well as a partial answer to the question I posed in this story about Mars Hill Church and its way of exercising "church discipline": When does submission to a pastor's human authority go too far?

He/she writes:

We’re called to hold each other accountable because, if we’re going to wear the t-shirt that says we belong to Jesus, we need to help each other look like Jesus.

This is, of course, precisely where the rub comes because without severe limitations on this action, we run the risk of becoming the Taliban, both in our levels of scrutiny, and punishment, and hypocrisy. Unrestricted control of fallen people, in the name of ‘discipline’ doesn’t just turn people off from a particular local church - it turns people off to Christ. For that reason, the misuse of discipline needs to be held up to the light of scripture and exposed.

The pastor posted anonymously, which is too bad: An argument has so much more force when the arguer shows the courage of his convictions in public. But it's a start.

And it's a start for Christians who don't want to abdicate their reputations to loudmouths—behind the pulpit, on the campaign trail, wherever—who do not, in fact, represent them.

When stories surface about troubled institutions—like this week's story about Mars Hill Church—the institution typically reacts by pointing at the first whistleblower and saying: "That guy? He's crazy. Bad apple. We won't comment on the particulars of his case—because we want to respect his privacy, you understand—but he's not reliable. Just one crazy guy."

When the second whistleblower appears, the institution says "two crazy guys." With the third, it's "three crazy guys."

But when the fourth person appears, and the fifth and the seventh and the eleventh, you figure the whistleblowers were onto something. And that seems to be happening—people are sending more emails and posting more stories in comments threads about fleeing Mars Hill.

Bent Meyer, one of the well-liked elders who was controversially fired a few years ago, has posted his story over at The Wartburg Watch. It's worth reading—and here's an interesting tidbit about early Mars Hill ambition and tactics:

As to my motives, I want Mark’s best. In my opinion he is a very troubled man. He is caught in his own hell. The consequence, of course, is the influence he has on others, which is mixed.

He, Lief Moi, and Mike Gunn, together the founders of Mars Hill Church, sent out to focus on those that were young, upwardly mobile and future leaders. They wanted to position themselves to influence their faith decisions and their life choices. This is a lesson for many church leaders to learn from and choose for themselves.

Ex-members and other Christians have been writing in to share their experiences and advice.

Continue reading »

"Lance" is one of the primary sources for this week's story on Mars Hill Church. (He's the soft-spoken ex-military guy whose split from the church involved some of his "spiritual leaders" calling his girlfriend's father and threatening to call any future church he might attend to detail his "sins.")

Lance and I spent a little while strategizing how to protect his identity, but this afternoon he's waded into the comments thread with more details about his story.

Also: Only so many words can fit on a page of newsprint, and one of my regrets about this week's story was the lack of space to explore how and why the sources got so deeply involved in Mars Hill. Why would they join a church like that? Why would they stay? Why would they be so terrified of excommunication? The "contracts" that the discipline-cases are asked to sign are literally not worth the paper they're printed on—they're not contracts with God, they're contracts with human beings who claim to speak for God.

And so on. But Lance's comments (#102 in the thread), unmediated by me and the restrictions of print space, can give you a flavor:

To the readers – no one is perfect, at whichever point you condemn a person, you condemn yourself at the same point. the same goes in our court of laws with legal precidents. God has grace for all who sin and repent - even for those who don’t right away (our court system does not) Mars Hill does lots of good in the community, they support local business, they recycle, they donate huge quantities of money to food banks and other charitable organizations, and over all the point of their message is love – you just have to get past the strong punch lines and watch an entire series.

To fellow Christians – just as you would anyone else, encourage Mars Hill towards repentance, it is God's kindness and grace that leads men and women towards repentance. Not an Iron fist or slander, or libel, or gossip.

To my friends at Mars Hill – you know who I am, I love and miss you all, if I could still be there I would – we don’t leave a family when things go bad, we fix things. I am banned from Mars Hill and not allowed back without repentance. The specific thing I am called to repent for is not a sin, therefore I cannot repent of it. Remember Romans 2:17-29. I’m getting married, you are all invited, watch the mail.

Ok, let’s have some fun – I love comments! Mash it up everyone, I can take a beating.

More here.

The prayer:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

The idiot:

[Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R)] forwarded the prayer with his own message: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president [Obama] ! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”
O’Neal’s office refuses to apologize for the email, insisting that the message was only referring to Obama’s days in office.

The physicist:

Steven Weinberg: "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion."

Romans 1:26-27
Women no longer wanted to have sex in a natural way, and they did things with each other that were not natural. Men behaved in the same way. They stopped wanting to have sex with women and had strong desires for sex with other men.

Dom posted about this yesterday—someone who had an affair with a fellow congregant at Mars Hill reportedly had to sign a contract.

But when you read the terms of the contract, according to the blog Matthew Paul Turner, the folks at Mars Hill looks less to me like congregants than cultists:

Andrew will write out in detail his sexual and emotional attachment history with women and share it with XXX.

Andrew will write out in detail the chronology of events and sexual/emotional sin with K and share it with XXX and Pastor X.

Andrew will write out a list of all people he has sinned against during this timeframe, either by sexual/emotional sin, lying or deceiving, share it with XXX and develop a plan to confess sin and ask for forgiveness

It's fine if people want to be Christian or any other kind of religious: your faith is your faith and none of my businesses.

But submitting to this kind of public shaming and ritual humiliation—a Christian version of the early Maoist self-criticism and struggle sessions—is ridiculous. It's infantile. Nobody on the planet deserves that kind of submission. (Maybe God does, if you believe in that kind of thing. But certainly not a fellow human being.)

And any leader, religious or secular, who relies on this kind of tactic as a control strategy is—to use one of Pastor Driscoll's favorite words—perverse.

Or they will make you sign, according to the Matthew Paul Turner blog, a sexual discipline contract.

Revelation 13:1-2

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

If a couple of Christian nutjobs want to show up at the DMV and scream bible verses at a captive audience of people waiting in line... I say let 'em scream. That kind of assholery doesn't win converts. Just the opposite.

Atrios:

As I've before, I get why people oppose abortion but really don't get see any semi-rational reason for spending your time trying to ruin the lives of gay and lesbian people. And, no, the religion reason is no reason, as "ruining the lives of gay and lesbian people" really isn't too near the top of the Jesus agenda.

Most people who spend time trying to ruin the lives of gay and lesbian people—some people spend all their time on it, a lucky few do it for a living—give the "religion reason" when pressed about their motives. Jesus, as Atrios points out, didn't seem to give two santorum squarts about the issue. But what strikes me as odd about Christian conservatives who insist that their faith requires them to do all they can to ruin the lives of gays and lesbians here on earth—you would think eternal damnation would be punishment enough—is the pass they're happy to give to all the other people out there whose lives they should be trying ruin. Why aren't they trying to ruin the lives of atheists, adulterers, and Jews? (It might be more accurate to ask, "Why aren't they trying to ruin the lives of Jews anymore?") We're not the only "sinners," after all, so how come we're the only ones who come in for this ruin-your-life shit these days?

The story:

Jessica Ahlquist may have won her legal battle to remove an unconstitutional prayer banner from her public school, but that doesn’t mean she can finally resume her everyday life. No, now she’s receiving horrible comments from fellow classmates, community members, and other angry Christians who are very, very offended that their religion no longer has the special status to be forced upon others. There’s the general anti-atheist remarks:

“May that little, evil athiest teenage girl and that judge BURN IN HELL!”

“I hope there’s lots of banners in hell when your rotting in there you atheist fuck #TeamJesus”

“We can make so many jokes about this dumb bitch, but who cares #thatbitchisgointohell and Satan is gonna rape her.”

Then again, how can I have a problem with a person who is willing to entirely leave the punishment of this "evil athiest" to hell, to judgement day, to his/her God's supernatural system of justice? I only have a problem with those who want to be here for God, to be His soldier, messenger, or some such stupid thing.

John 1:36
When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”

John 5:2
Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.

A special puzzler edition of Slog Bible Study. Find the hidden meaning, and then discuss.

UPDATE: In the comment thread, Slog reader thatsnotright shows off his Bible chops. John 1:36, of course, prophesied the meager 136 yards quarterback Tim Tebow threw in the Denver Bronco's 45 to 10 loss to the New England Patriots yesterday, while John 5:2 prophesied Tebow's 5.2 yards per attempt.