In which the bromancer excels and Dame Slap is tiresomely IPA predictable ...

 

 

 

Every so often the bromancer comes up with a classic, which is why the pond indulges him so. It's worth the wait, it's worth the ploughing through the chaff to get to the biblical wheat ...

Now the pond can hear cries of concern in the distance. What about the war on China if the bromancer wanders off with the clap happies?

Relax, other reptiles have that under control, with the early weekend news devoted to the war and the passing of pink helicopters ...

 

 

 

So it's possible to move on to the bromancer relaxed and in good spirits and full of praise for the long absent lord for relief from the tedium of a weekend which might otherwise have been spent in the company of a book, or a movie, or a walk in the winter chill, or if you happen to be in Victoria, a candle-lit dinner in a blacked out, full blown, flood-riven gale ... 

 

It's sublime nonsense of course, but that's part of the bromancer charm. By luck, there was a good story in The New Yorker recently about the Southern Baptist Convention (outside the paywall at the moment), an institution deeply embedded in slavery ...

The Southern Baptist Convention was founded, in 1845, to safeguard the institution of slavery. Northern Baptists had recently ruled that men who owned slaves were no longer permitted to serve as missionaries, and slaveholding Baptists decided to form their own group in protest. Founders of the new organization claimed that, according to the Bible, slavery was “an institution of heaven.” They pushed the idea that Black people were descended from the Biblical figure Ham, Noah’s cursed son, and that their subjugation was therefore divinely ordained. “They were one bad marketing meeting away from calling themselves the ‘Confederate Baptist Convention,’ ” Onwuchekwa, the pastor in Atlanta, told me. In 1863, the Southern Baptists pledged to support the Confederacy in the Civil War. According to a 2018 report put out by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the role that slavery played within the organization, one early leader believed that “slavery was no mere necessary evil, but rather a God-ordained institution to be perpetuated.”
In the twentieth century, the S.B.C. went through a period of relative opening, allowing for wide-ranging readings of scripture and letting its academic institutions flourish. In the twenties, for example, at the time of the Scopes trial and the attendant controversy over the teaching of evolution in schools, the organization left room for its members to accept the conclusions of science. In 1971, the S.B.C. went so far as to say that women should be allowed some measure of choice regarding abortion. But, in the late seventies, there was a backlash within the organization that came to be known as the conservative resurgence. Hard-liners took over the S.B.C., and, in the name of returning it to the teachings of the Bible, pushed back on several social issues. They fought efforts to diversify the leadership and pressed for stricter scriptural interpretations, arguing, for example, that women must submit to the will of men. Before the conservative resurgence, some women were ordained as pastors in the S.B.C.; afterward, that practice largely ended, and hard-liners argued that women also shouldn’t teach Sunday-school classes or even work outside the home...

Heil the lord and pass the ammunition brother ...

 

 

 

Hey nonny no, on we go ... and remember, since it's the bromancer, there's a good chance to munch a little human flesh and swig on human blood on a Sunday ... him being a devotee of what evangelicals would call the whore of Babylon, its followers destined to an eternity of hellfire ...

 

How did such insanity get anywhere? Could it be that the bromancer works for an insane company full of loons tucking into the loonacy?

 

 

Heil the lord and pass the ammunition brother ...

 

 

 

 

Sorry, the pond will try not to keep interrupting ...

 

 

 

 
Trump himself is neither racist nor anti-Semitic? Oh don't worry, the pond promised not to interrupt, nor get agitated about internet sources, when all they needed to do was turn to the Murdochians ... nor will the pond worry about the notion that many evangelical leaders have turned decisively against the Donald ...

What happened was that some black leaders turned, and the reaction, per The New Yorker story, was typical and expected ...

...In Texas, McKissic read the statement with dismay. “It’s putting lipstick on racism,” he told me. As he saw it, the fight over C.R.T. was also the fight for the future of the S.B.C. A cabal of reactionary, aging white men was trying to maintain control of the organization, and, in order to hold on to power, those men were stoking people’s fears of creeping liberalism. (A spokesperson for the S.B.C. said that it was a sprawling organization whose members held a wide range of viewpoints.) In January, 2021, McKissic wrote an article titled “We Are Getting Off The Bus,” denouncing the rejection of C.R.T. in the November statement and explaining that he was leaving a Texas chapter of the S.B.C. “I am not willing to allow them to dictate what the belief systems, definitions and authoritative binding, academic and ecclesiastical decisions [are] regarding how race is to be communicated in the local church,” he wrote.
McKissic’s decision took place alongside a larger campaign called #LeaveLOUD, which is led by the Witness, a Black Christian collective urging Christians of color to abandon white churches that continue to condone systemic racism. For decades, people of color have been quietly leaving conservative, majority-white churches and faith-based communities; the Witness hopes to prompt change by encouraging people to make more noise. No denomination is immune to the scourge of racism, but congregants of color say that the problem is particularly visible in the S.B.C. “I have had endless meetings, one-on-one conversations, meetings with the elders, letters to the church, pleading for the barest minimum of dignity and respect when it came to church practices,” Jemar Tisby, the author of “The Color of Compromise” and a leader of the #LeaveLOUD campaign, told me. “And I have been met with gaslighting, denial, minimization, ostracization.”
On Twitter, the backlash to McKissic’s announcement was severe. Several days after he spoke out, he received a letter in the mail from a former S.B.C. member named John Rutledge, saying that Black people had “invaded the church” and that the issues were “beyond the Negroes’ intellectual capacities.” The letter said, of Black people, “Like two-year-olds, they know only how to whine and throw tantrums. The SBC should bid them goodbye and good riddance!” (S.B.C. leaders condemned the letter. Rutledge could not be reached for comment.) McKissic told me that, when he read it, “I was shocked”; he posted it on Facebook “as an example of a real live racist.” Still, McKissic found the letter instructive. “What I appreciated about Mr. Rutledge is that he had the nerve to stick his name to what a small group of people feels in the S.B.C.,” McKissic told me. “To a certain extent, that’s what the anti-C.R.T. crowd reflects, and it’s on those grounds I can’t stay.”

So much for race and racism not being part of Xianity ... 

Now at this point the pond should note that the reptiles inserted an entirely predictable snap to break up the bromancer's text ...

 

 

 

 

 

Sheesh, what happened to the reptiles and their illustrations? And there are so many good and compelling ones to hand ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heil the lord and pass the ammunition brother ... and the pond promises it will try not to interrupt ...

 

Ah yes, it's all the fault of the left, and social media, and nothing at all to do with the Murdochians of the Tucker kind, or indeed the bromancer himself, who has always been ambivalent about the orange one. And lo and behold, then the reptiles decided to insert a snap of Billy, meaning the pond had to produce its own pre-emptive snap ...

 

 

Heil the lord and on with the next gobbet and that snap of Billy, who himself had a passing nodding time with racism ... (Graudian here)

Once leaders like Martin Luther King Jr began practicing civil disobedience and asking for the federal government to guarantee African Americans’ rights, Graham’s support evaporated.
Within days of the publication of King’s famous 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Graham told reporters that the Baptist minister should “put the brakes on a little bit”.
He criticized civil rights activists for focusing on changing laws rather than hearts.
In 1971, Graham published The Jesus Generation, a book on the coming apocalypse. Looking for signs of Jesus’s second coming had become an obsession of Graham’s, as it was for millions of other evangelicals in the mid-20th century.
In the book, Graham praised the wisdom of young people who rejected the federal government as a tool for rectifying injustices.
“These young people don’t put much stock in the old slogans of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society,” he said. “They believe that utopia will arrive only when Jesus returns. Thus these young people are on sound Biblical ground.”

Sorry, sorry, always with the interruptitis ...

 

 

Did that line stick in the mind? It was a bromancer classic ...

I have often written on the growing madness on the left. The thing is you expect madness and extremism on the progressive left, increasingly unmoored from reality and common sense. You don’t expect it from Christians.

Indeed, no. You expect Xians to speak in tongues to imaginary friends, a bit like a kid asking Santa for a decent Xssie present. What could be saner than that?

 

 

Heil brother, and pass the ammunition ...

 

They also believe that the Catholic church is the whore of Babylon and its followers are destined to an eternity in hellfire? Oh wait, did the pond already mention that? Here, have a wafer full of meaty human flesh, and a glass of wine that might pass for human blood, if you happen to be in the mood for a little transubstantiation...

Well it's been a most excellent trip ...

 

 

... and the pond has just one last chance to be a spoilsport.

Cop this line ...

In all the circumstances, and given the available choices, voting for Trump was not unreasonable.

Yes, a vote for a pussy groping, porn star fucking narcissist and multiple bankrupt, with not a hint of empathy, what could possibly go wrong, except apart from an insurrection, and weird times at memorial services in Florida?

 

 

Now just so the bromancer remembers his place in the world ...

...During the Medieval Age, reformers and critics within the Catholic Church (some who eventually were elevated to sainthood) equated the papacy with the whore of Babylon, specifically for its internal corruption, practice of simony, and most importantly, its political maneuvering to enhance its earthly powers and dominions. Leaders of the Protestant movement (i.e., Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, Wesley), strengthened this association by generalizing the entire Church as corrupt, rather than a more complex analysis that would criticize specific periods and/or popes. The pope as Antichrist, leading the Catholic Church as whore into apostasy, was not only a mainstream interpretation during the rise of Protestantism, but has remained a popular interpretation, especially among many fundamentalists, dispensationalists and right-leaning evangelicals today... (here)

Well it's impossible for the reptiles to maintain that sort of exceptional work all the time, and so the pond must follow with a disappointing by the IPA numbers piece from Dame Slap as its dessert serve ..

Yes, it's a standard bout of IPA ABC bashing, and this time the pond promises not to interrupt, because when confronted with the predictable, best get it over with quickly, as Stormy apparently thought about the Donald ...

 

Well a voluntary licence fee is a different angle from the usual IPA talk of privatising the ABC, but the pond understands Dame Slap is only proposing it as a kind of krogering, as opposed, perhaps to a rogering ...

 

Actually, and this is what sticks in the reptile craw, is that no money was paid to Xian Porter. Not a brass razoo, not a hint of a settlement, not even a token penny or even a sixpence, as used to be the case when damages were proven, but thought to be inconsequential or petty ... and so the Dame's anger is mighty and righteous, with a smoting and a smiting here and there ...

 

Um, perhaps some humbug about how interviews get arranged? Never mind, the pond marveled at this recent lizard Oz editorial ...

 

They voice their support for strong women?

Nope, they fear and loathe the likes of Sally Neighbour and Ita, and the lizard Oz pages are routinely full of denunciations of women in the ABC ...

 

Oh indeed, indeed, be mute in the famous Dame Slap way,  and so to Dame Slap reminding us that she is just the IPA chairman and so gets on extremely well with IPA alumni of the Jimbo kind ...

 
Funny really, for a mob so reliant on a handout from Gina, just another of a zillion IPA assaults on the ABC, just one of a quadrillion of reptile assaults, but never mind, time for a little light relief, thanks to the immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here ... because sighting a reptile piece in praise of the ABC is a bit like hoping for a unicorn sighting ...