And the award for kookiest mainstream religion goes to…
…the Southern Baptists. Bobby Welch couldn’t be here tonight to accept this award, so I’ll be receiving it in his place.
The Southern Baptist Convention just concluded its annual meeting in Nashville, TN. The SBC is currently the second largest denomination in the United States (after the Roman Catholic Church) with 16.3 million members, but the religion is still as nimble as any small, startup cult. Let’s take a look at some recent SBC highlights. First of all, the SBC broke away from the Baptist World Alliance last year because of the BWA’s “liberal drift.” That’s not a typo. The regular Baptists are too liberal for the SBC to tolerate any longer. They’re not the only ones the Southern Baptists have a problem with. Just today, the SBC ended an eight year boycot of an organization dedicated to the promotion of immorality and the degradation of the American family: The Walt Disney Company. Why was Disney being boycotted? Most agree that it was mostly because those dirty dwarf-mongers had been giving benefits to companions of gay employess.
Having dealt with left-wing activists and smut peddlers like the Baptist World Alliance and Disney, the SBC used this meeting to talk about the future. Tired of having to custom order “We’re Number 2″ foam fingers for the conventions, the Southern Baptists have their eyes on the prize. They are kicking off a baptism drive. The goal is to baptize 1 million new members between October 30th, 2005 and September 30th, 2006. That’s almost 3,000 new Southern Baptists a day. The preparation for this push was done during president Bobby Welch’s BUS TOUR of North America.
The SBC will be helped in this effort by the expansion of its “affinity church” program. Affinity churches are like little religious theme parties, designed to attract people with certain interests. While several niches are targeted, the Cowboy and Motorcycle Churches have been the most popular. ONLY 1,781 such congregations were founded in the last year. The SBC hopes to increase that rate.
What may hurt the baptism drive is the amount of time Southern Baptists will be spending investigating schools and pulling their children out of them. A new resolution passed at this year’s convention urges Southern Baptist parents to find out if their children’s schools support (read accept) the gay lifestyle and remove their children from the influence of any such schools.
President Bush addressed the convention via a live video feed. It was mostly the same stock comments on the issues important to Baptists. However, one comment jumped out at me. “From the landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the men and women who founded this nation in freedom relied on prayer to protect and preserve it.” Actually, no. They relied on muskets. Prayer was more helpful after being shot by one.
~I AM~
June 23rd, 2005 at at 2:51 am
Gee, I’m sure there is nothing to worry about here. Have they kicked out the KKK for being too soft on the homos yet?
June 23rd, 2005 at at 2:58 am
You know, I live in the second Bluest city in a Bluer than Blue state (suburb of LA, California), and a couple of weeks ago, over the course of a few days, these fliers started showing up on all our doorsteps for a new Baptist Church opening up not far away. First was some freebie reprint of one of the books of the New Testament, second was a very friendly flier with the implied “Find Jesus or else” bullshit.
Very bizarre that they’d open shop around here, though, because the neighborhood is a combination of devout Jews, New Agers, raving secularists and old world Catholics of both Mexican and European origin. And nobody is trying to convert anyone else, either. It’s a live and let live conclave — but seeing this literature pop up worries me. The American Taliban is trying to set up shop.
Well, godless help them if they ever have the balls to knock on my door and try to pull their religious schtick on me in person.
Reminds me of something a goth chick friend of mine in college did right in front of me once, and I damn near busted a gut. We were walking down Hollywood Blvd., and some religious freak held out a pamphlet and said, “Jesus loves you.” Without missing a beat, she said, “Satan loves you.” The fundie damn near shat a brick on the spot. Heh heh heh. Gotta love goth chicks with balls of brass.
June 23rd, 2005 at at 7:00 am
Actually, the SBC resolution that finally came up for the official vote was a rather watered-down version that lets parents reach their own decision as to whether or not to remove their children from a public school that supports a “pro-homosexual” (read: tolerance) program. The original version made it mandatory for a baptist child to be pulled out of any school that promoted “secular godlessness”, was “neutral to our Lord”, or did not acknowledge the “divinity of Christ”. The presbyterians soundly defeated a similar resolution last week.
I actuallly wish that both organizations would just go for the gusto and pull their kids out of our public schools. Let the “home-schooling” (i.e. the national program for illiteracy) movement come to a nice boil, and watch as religious folk quickly remove themself from the educated work-force. Not very fair to their kids, though.
By the way, the proper response to “Jesus loves you” is “That’s because I suck his cock”. This is even more effective if the speaker is male.
June 23rd, 2005 at at 1:25 pm
Excellent write up I AM. I was LOLing on many portions of the blog entry. Does anyone actually think this Church will be successful with getting 3000 baptisms a day?
If they fail, maybe we can tell them that it was because they didnt pray hard enough! Or better yet, we can tell them that we atheist prayed for them to fail and God chose our prayers over theirs because we prayed harder and better LMFAO!
June 23rd, 2005 at at 1:42 pm
This is one of your best posts. We need an atheistic version of The Onion. You could be lead editor.
June 23rd, 2005 at at 2:52 pm
With 3K Baptisms a day, probably done in great haste, the chances of drowning go up dramatically. I wonder, if you die during baptism, do you still go to heaven? If not, that’s not really fair. But this is the same God who visits the sin of the father on the son, so I guess injustice would be consistent.
June 23rd, 2005 at at 3:20 pm
Great post I AM, I was thinking about writing about this later today so I’m glad I saw this first. Now I’ll go to my backup topic. I don’t really know what to say to this kind of stuff besides damn, I hate religion. Their attacks on homosexuals is unbelievably cruel and just sickening to me.
June 23rd, 2005 at at 3:53 pm
LOL if homosexuality is so strongly condemned by God, then why did he invent it?
June 23rd, 2005 at at 5:48 pm
AK, Duh! Satan did it. I mean, we have free will. Err, it happened on the 7th day, when god was resting. Hey! The bible says Adam and Eve, not Adam and STEVE! (damn, I’m tired of that excuse). Oh, hell I don’t know. I just ain’t natural. Anyone knows that. Ask any biblethumper. They’ll tell you it’s a choice, not god’s doing.