Delegates at the denomination’s convention approved a stricter ban on female pastors and rejected the appeals of two churches led by women to remain in the denomination.
Yikes. There is quite a pattern developing in the religious right, in the US at least. We are turning back the clock folks.
This is the primary lens which so many who prosthelize are happy to ignore. The words in the Bible are words written by humans over centuries. It is an iterative document which is still being tweaked by people, and to claim that any part of it is the untarnished word of God is to ignore the fact that humans are terribly fallible.
The Bible was written with a Human agenda, and the faith which organized religion fetishizes is more correctly described as faith in the humans who represent their words as of divine origin. It is a faith that the human representation of a divine will is correct, and that those who claim to speak with divine authority have no incentive to misrepresent reality in exchange for positions of power, status, and wealth.
The sheer number of abuses made in the name of divinity, all ascribing to speak with the will of the single divine truth, make it incredibly obvious to anyone not indoctrinated that if 99.9% of religions are bunk by virtue of their own definition (this religion is true and others are not), the chance that 100% are is pretty high, and the chance that any truth which may have been heard is not twisted is so small as to not be worth considering.
This is the primary lens which so many who prosthelize are happy to ignore. The words in the Bible are words written by humans over centuries. It is an iterative document which is still being tweaked by people, and to claim that any part of it is the untarnished word of God is to ignore the fact that humans are terribly fallible.
The Bible was written with a Human agenda, and the faith which organized religion fetishizes is more correctly described as faith in the humans who represent their words as of divine origin. It is a faith that the human representation of a divine will is correct, and that those who claim to speak with divine authority have no incentive to misrepresent reality in exchange for positions of power, status, and wealth.
The sheer number of abuses made in the name of divinity, all ascribing to speak with the will of the single divine truth, make it incredibly obvious to anyone not indoctrinated that if 99.9% of religions are bunk by virtue of their own definition (this religion is true and others are not), the chance that 100% are is pretty high, and the chance that any truth which may have been heard is not twisted is so small as to not be worth considering.