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Posted on 05/17/2015 6:16:31 AM PDT by marshmallow
The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has voted to allow congregations to ordain gay ministers who are in same sex civil partnerships.
Delegates voted 309 in favour and 183 against.
The vote followed a church-wide debate and consultations with all 45 presbyteries, which voted 31 to 14 in favour of change.
A further vote will be held this week on whether or not to extend ordination to ministers in same sex marriages.
Supporters said it was time for the church to be inclusive and recognise the "mixed economy" of modern Scotland.
Opponents warned that the move was contrary to God's law, would prove divisive and lead to resignations.
A spokesman for the Church of Scotland said that the current stance meant that the Church had adopted a position which "maintains a traditional view of marriage between a man and woman, but allows individual congregations to 'opt out' if they wish to appoint a minister or a deacon in a same sex civil partnership."
No Kirk session can be forced into doing so.
The debate predates the legalisation of gay marriage, so the Assembly will be asked next Thursday to consider amending the new Kirk law to include ministers in same-sex marriages.
The ordaining of gay ministers has proved a controversial topic for years.
In 2009 some members attempted to block the appointment of the Reverend Scott Rennie, who is gay, to Queen's Cross Church in Aberdeen.
At the Kirk's gathering in 2011, commissioners voted to accept gay and lesbian clergy - on the condition they had declared their sexuality and were ordained before 2009.
The Kirk then prepared a report by its theological commission, which set out arguments on both sides.
Last year, the general assembly voted to allow presbyteries to debate whether congregations could opt out of.........
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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“...commissioners voted to accept gay and lesbian clergy - on the condition they had declared their sexuality and were ordained before 2009.”
weasels then...weasels now!
One cannot be a practicing homosexual and a minister.
Evidently, The Church of Scotland has decided to discard the parts of the Bible they do not approve of.
I guess we can stop pretending the Scots wear kilts and just call them what they are, skirts. Manly men in skirts.
I don’t think this is biblical.
God will not be mocked for much longer.
Even atheists should understand what happens when natural law is outlawed, and social insanity is made mandatory.
Look at junctures in history like France in the 1790s, Russia 1920s, Germany 1930s. Great evil and massive social disaster is coming down the pike. Count on it.
They have voted to become an apostate church!
And they obviously are not in communication with the Holy Spirit
Well, I for one wish the gay ministers and their husbands many healthy offspring...oh, wait...
Many “pleasers of men” think they can persuade God that homosexual sex is not an “abomination, “ as God says it is. Good luck with that.
the liberal progressive church always does the same thing. Starts with sin, lies to self to approve of that sin, subverts the teachings of the church, demands it change, votes God out.
If I could smugly add the ad line from the insurance company...”Now that’s progressive!”
well, in all honestly the church of scotland and church of england were never real churches to begin with.
Both were started to defy Gods law in regards to divorce.
I see no reason why they would start following his law now.
Well, our society is engaging in every form of licentious behavior the Bible warned against while also calling evil good and good evil.
Are we nearing the end times? I do not know. A good case can be made that we are.
End time prophecy aside, history has plenty of examples of high civilizations that fell once the civilization became self-indulgent to the point of decadence.
The Roman empire is probably the greatest example.
Yet, people will defend what is going on, saying “This time it is different.”
According to the article this "church" is allowing its "pastors" to "opt out" of any biblical precepts they personally would prefer to disregard.
Yes, it’s different. It will be much worse. Here is an excerpt from my short story “Alas, Brave New Babylon.”
How had it all happened so fast? I had a master’s degree in history, and I understood enough of it to come up with a few theories to explain what had happened, at least in the broad strokes.
Modern society was engineered for the maximum production of profits, providing the maximum comfort for the maximum population, using mankind’s most cutting-edge technical trickery and marketing magic for leverage. Maximum profits for producing maximum pleasures, and it would only get more maximum forever, as humanity’s greatest minds piled one technological miracle atop another, leading to ever-rising standards of living for most of the world’s billions of people. Onward and upward the towers of our modern cities soared into the sky as the suburbs spread outward and merged.
At least that’s how it was supposed to work. And it did work, for quite a while. But a few novelties unique to our time went almost unnoticed. Never before in history had so many been fed by so few, from so far away. By the end, our cities had grown into traps, with the easy creature comforts they promised as the bait. Billions of people moved into these technological beehives, where food, shelter, and (sometimes) work could be found in close proximity. City life was easier for the worker bees, and more profitable—and more controllable—for the queens.
That is, until the digital blood of the global communications network froze in all its infinite circuitry, and the machinery seized up and jammed in place. Suddenly left to their own nearly nonexistent devices, cut off from the food from distant agro-business farms, the inhabitants of our densely packed cities panicked and looted the stores and other food sources like locusts. After that, if the occasional travelers were to be believed, they literally consumed themselves. It was the modern consumer society’s final stage: Consumer, consume thyself. Did I, myself, see it? No. But what I saw with my own eyes in small-town and rural America left me in no doubt about what had taken place in the cities.
A popular historian from the end of the last century named Fukuyama had referred to the end of history, with an evolved mankind finally the master of the universe and his fate within it. Hardly the master, as it turned out. Instead, for decades we had lived inside an increasingly delicate techno-bubble, floating ever higher on digital money created from thin air, and we believed it was all as permanent as the pyramids!
As a history teacher, I considered it a massive conceit by modern man to denigrate as backward the long-lasting civilizations that existed before electricity, electronic gadgets, wireless devices, and computers. Earlier generations had built the great cathedrals, universities, and defensible walled cities on the surplus bounty of the nearby lands and the manual labor of the local folk. Buildings that have stood through the centuries, monuments to the past.
Modern man built illusions of wealth instead. In the end, the glittering high-definition wall screens were just dream merchants, presenting the convincing chimera of a perpetual cornucopia. But even the illusion of modern wealth was convincing when the abundance reached our doors. Thanks to the modern miracle of global communications and computer networks, the bounty always arrived just in time, from fish captured two oceans away to our daily bread trucked hundreds of miles to our tables. Fresh flowers and succulent fruit from other continents were jetted to our local markets within a day. And we believed it was all real, because it was real, at least for a while.
But the edible products that once filled our supermarkets typically passed through a dozen processing steps in a series of plants and factories before their final delivery. It was a networked ballet choreographed by powerful computers across thousands of miles. All the purchase orders and inventories existed somewhere in the cyber cloud. All payment was by electronic fund transfer, with digital currency zipping along optical fibers and between microwave antennas on mountaintops and satellites in space. Paper had disappeared so long ago that it didn’t even exist as a meaningful backup. At best, it was used for in-house emergency record keeping, and was useless for conducting modern trade.
For those millions of people without sufficient money, the government thoughtfully zapped electronic dollars onto their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards. Money for nothing, and your kicks for free—what could possibly go wrong? Especially with so many millions of the welfare recipients packed tightly into cities where nothing grew except illiteracy, crime, and rage.
A global delivery system optimized by the power of high-speed computation was a modern miracle that turned into a curse when it disappeared. The global network’s undeniable efficiency was a tempting siren, a fatal mirage that lured its victims into barren deserts or out onto stormy seas, far beyond safety or even rescue.
There was not enough food in the warehouses to endure seven weeks of famine, much less seven years. The perfection of the just-in-time delivery system meant that, like the finest Swiss watch, it had to work perfectly or it would not work at all. Like binary code: one or zero. All or nothing.
Any critical step collapses, any vital link fails, and the chain may break. At the Rupture, dozens of steps collapsed at once, and the entire machine stalled and ground to a halt, beginning with the hundreds of thousands of freight-carrying eighteen-wheelers that ran out of diesel fuel within a matter of days. They were looted and stripped to the axles where they came to rest.
It was a little better at first in the rural and semi-rural areas, at least as far as I had personally witnessed in Tennessee and North Carolina. Farmers with trucks that still ran could take their produce to market, for as long as they had fuel. They just couldn’t get paid for their efforts. Hand-written IOUs and good intentions can’t buy gasoline or diesel fuel from looted stations. Or animal feed or crop seed, or anything edible to humans.
4. TSUNAMIS
Sometimes in history there are social mega-tsunamis when demographic, cultural, and technological waves collide, sending up super-nodes that can be quite spectacular to observe from the distance and safety of a history textbook. They are much less enjoyable to experience personally. Pile up enough Kondratiev Waves and you might wind up at the end of a thousand-year super-cycle, this time with technology as the new rocket fuel poured on the fire.
Without food coming into the cities, latent societal fault lines exploded in a chain of sympathetic detonations. The young pushed aside the older generation that they blamed for sucking the system dry. The urban fought the rural when the cities were first emptied of food and then hope and then people. The devoutly religious battled the strident secularists. Big-government socialists, including most law enforcement, battled the libertarians and conservatives. Cross-racial tribalization fractured the fragile multicultural checkerboard.
When the power went out and the panic stampede for the last food commenced, all the fault lines ruptured at once. The government, from local to federal, never had a prayer of containing the explosion of violence and destruction that accompanied the Great Starvation.
The horror was totally unimaginable even a week before the screens went dark and everything in our world went haywire. Unimaginable because the ubiquitous entertainment screens were perfect for one thing (and they kept this distinction right to the end): distracting the masses. Better than any mule’s blinkers, the pleasure screens both attracted the eyes and fed the mind happy messages. Whatever you wanted, they were serving it 24/7 on a thousand television channels and a million interactive websites. Pick your poison. Entertain yourself to death.
What was the name of that pop star vixen at the last Super Bowl? She was wearing a dominatrix outfit with shiny sharpened rivets in the usual places. And where did she come by her Aldous Huxley, singing “hug me till you drug me, kiss me till I’m in a coma,” nearly word for word from Huxley’s Brave New World? No doubt she’d never read a book in her life, much less that one.
Before the collapse, the high-def screens had allowed each watcher to choose from a virtual infinity of customizable fantasies, but there was usually nothing behind those magical glass windows but a plasterboard wall and another stark habitation cubicle built the other way around for the next inhabitant over. Within the dying hive there was no incoming food, fuel, or running water. Not even electricity to move the stale air.
Soon after the screens went black, the pharmacy-dispensed medications ran out as well, the cold-turkey withdrawal pouring more fuel on our raging social fires. Our Brave New World featured Huxley’s “Christianity without the tears,” until the Soma was gone. A gram is better than a damn, until there are no more grams left but plenty of damnation to go around—and people are damned mad when they’re starving.
If you ask me, looking back, our society went mad long before the Rupture. Who could honestly believe that modern first-world economies could continue to borrow half their annual operating costs from their own future generations, and from foreign banks and foreign governments that were likewise borrowing from their future generations? When in history has that sweetly delusional practice ever lasted more than a few generations before cracking up? Never, that I am aware of.
Frankly, for the rapidly diminishing minority of us left who were neither mathematically nor historically illiterate, the years before the Rupture were like living on the slopes of Vesuvius around AD seventy-something, while sniffing the stink of sulfur on the wind. What’s all that smoking and rumbling? a few of us asked. Smiling mainstream media news anchors answered: We’re not sure, but rest easy. Top government experts are studying it, and they will have a full report ready soon.
In the meantime, pop another Soma and switch back to Celebrity Nation. A gram is better than a damn, so why not make it two? Who needs old-fashioned morality when we have fashioned a brave new reality better suited to our own modern tastes? New and improved, by Ford! Just Google it. Remember Google? Gone with the wind.
“God will not be mocked for much longer.
Even atheists should understand what happens when natural law is outlawed, and social insanity is made mandatory.
Look at junctures in history like France in the 1790s, Russia 1920s, Germany 1930s. Great evil and massive social disaster is coming down the pike. Count on it.”
I think that’s what today’s liberals want.
55 million little ones sacrificed on the alter of convenience, might as well be Moloch, means God has every reason to withdraw his hand.
Why we haven’t had complete financial collapse yet is a complete mystery. Well, it isn’t a mystery to me and those who believe, any way.
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