Category Archives: Barmy Baptists

How not to speak about homosexuality from the pulpit

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From here:

RALEIGH, North Carolina — A North Carolina group said it plans to hold a public protest on Sunday to denounce a Baptist minister’s anti-gay and lesbian sermon that has drawn hundreds of thousands of views on the Internet.

Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina told his congregation during a May 13 sermon that the Bible and God opposed homosexuality and that gay and lesbian people should be put in concentration camps.

“Build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long,” Worley said according to the video posted on YouTube. “Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”

I would like to make a few points about this:

First, Pastor Charles Worley seems to have missed one of the main features of Christianity: God loves everyone so much that he sent his only Son to die on the cross to atone for our sins. That includes the sin of homosexual sex.

Second, we as Christians are called to love as God loves; that includes homosexuals who indulge in same-sex activities. Loving a person means befriending them, accepting them, caring for them, treating them with dignity and wishing the best for them. At the same time, loving a person is not to condone – or bless – something that we believe is sinful; that is because repeated sin for which there has been no repentance destroys a person. How can you claim to love someone while approving of what will be their eternal undoing?

Third, if sinners are to be corralled behind an electric fence, we will all find ourselves there since we are all sinners. This is a basic tenet of Christianity; how a pastor can miss it is beyond me. Homosexual sex may be distasteful to heterosexuals but as a sin it is no more or less abhorrent that a whole catalogue of other sins, a catalogue that includes envy, greed, idolatry, gossip, jealousy, heterosexual fornication and so on. C. S. Lewis made the point (exactly where escapes me for the moment) that the most pernicious sins are the less visible internal ones that are thoroughly ingrained in our souls – like pride. Pastor Charles Worley could benefit by ruminating on that.

Fourth, the Bible tells us that homosexual acts are sinful. It does not tell us that being attracted to someone of the same sex is sinful any more than it tells us being attracted to someone of the opposite sex to whom we are not married is. Sinfulness is existential: it all depends on what you do with the attraction, whether you resist temptation or cave in to it.

Fifth, pastors like Charles Worley give Christianity a bad name and are an embarrassment to Christians whose intellect is still intact.

Here is the clip that has caused all the fuss:

Baptists against Christianity

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Who needs atheists when you have Baptists:

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty filed an amicus brief in the appeal of a case brought by two residents of Forsyth County, N.C., who filed suit in March 2007 against the county. The residents challenged the county’s practice of allowing sectarian government-sponsored prayers at county board of commissioners meetings under the First and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution and sections of the North Carolina Constitution. They claimed the Board’s prayers advance Christianity and have the effect of affiliating the Board with it.

Abortion is a “God given right” according to one Baptist Minister

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For the mother, of course; Carlton Veazey, a Baptist minister, doesn’t seem to think unborn babies have a God-given right not to be aborted:

Rev. Carlton Veazy, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told a small crowd of pro-abortion protesters that women have a “God-given right” to abortion and that opposition from pro-life congressmen and religious leaders would never take it away.

Veazy, closing speaker at a “Stop Stupak” rally on Capitol Hill staged by major pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL-Pro Choice, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) told the crowd that not only did they have a constitutional right to abortion, but that they had a God-given one as well.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that religious people don’t support choice,” Veazy said at the gathering in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right.”

There is a disconnection between Veazey’s pro-abortion view and the love he has for his children and grandchildren that borders on mental derangement:

As for me, this work is an extension of the constantly maturing love I have for my children, and now my grandchildren and the children of the village. Every day I feel blessed that I am a father to all my children, that I’m still on this journey, and that I am faithfully, prayerfully, pro-choice.

I am pro-choice too: I’m pro giving the unborn the chance to choose life without the threat of being dismembered or burned to death in utero.