News almost too crazy to believe
This has been a jaw-dropping week, and that does not even include the federal indictment of a former president of the United States that occurred in Miami on Tuesday.
For example, there was the startling news coming out of the Southern Baptist Convention, whereby the nation’s largest Protestant denomination removed from its rolls four churches for the transgression of having women pastors.
One of the churches was the super-large Saddleback Church of Orange County, California, formerly pastored by Rick Warren, now retired. In 2021, the church, whose weekly attendance regularly tops 20,000, ordained three female pastors.
What a sin!
“I never believed this could happen,” said Pastor Linda Barnes Popham of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, another of the churches tossed to the curb. “Why would you want to silence the voices of the faithful churches. Why?”
Why, indeed? Because, according to Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Men rule is God ordained and Jesus endorsed, according to the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Bible.
Is this really 2023?
A liturgical crisis of another kind is gripping the techies of Northern California, per an article in the New York Times which carried the stupefying headline, “Silicon Valley confronts the idea that the ‘Singularity’ is here.”
“Singularity” refers to the before and after, which until now was confined to the birth of Christ. In this instance, “singularity” refers to the introduction of bots so smart that the world is forever cleaved into the “before” and “after” of AI domination.
The Times spoke to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who declared that AI promises to “change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with one another.”
Google chief Sandar Pichai unblushingly remarked that the eminent triumphant of artificial intelligence would be “more profound than fire or electricity or anything else we [human beings] have done in the past.”
Intimated at were bot chips implants for the human brain.
As they regularly have in recent years, Republican politicians continued to awe and terrify.
Dusty Johnson, a Republican from South Dakota, declared of a procedural snafu brought on by the ultra conservative House Freedom Caucus, “This can’t be the new normal. We can’t afford to have this kind of disruption every week.”
Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona snapped back, “Who cares? I could care less….” At issue was the defection of a handful of Freedom Caucus members like himself on what is normally a routine party-line rules vote.
The defection tied the House in knots for several days.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, members of the Grand Old Party were calling in the cops on one another as they bickered over election denialism and MAGA credentialism.
To wit, Kalamazoo County Republicans were reported to have had a clash last summer which required a police presence. More recently, the same was required in Saginaw County to disentangle the fractured sides.
Meanwhile, a faction of Republicans in Hillside County hired armed guards to keep at bay another faction composed of 80 of the party faithful (or unfaithful, depending on your point of view).
Jon Smith of Hillside County told the Washington Post, “People are embarrassed to say they are Republicans. The George Bush-type crowd, the Mitt Romneys, the John McCains, all the rich, pompous, white globalists really have crippled our name for a long time.”
State party chairwoman Kristina Kamano has declared that “Marxist” Democrats hope to “erase the human family.”
None of this detracts from the flabbergasting revelations in the federal indictment against Donald Trump, most especially the haphazard locations utilized by the former president to stash boxes of government documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club.
These locations included a bathroom shower, a storage room connected to the estate’s high-traffic pool patio, and a stage in a lavish ballroom rented out for weddings and other private events.
Yikes.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.