Month: June 2023

There is absolutely nothing wrong with women who want to pastor a church. They should not be suspect as man hating, radical leftists or politically liberal. Their desire to walk with God publicly and lead others through life’s heartaches and hard times is sincere and noble. And women whose love of the spiritual life burns from the depth of their souls should be honored, encouraged, supported, and permitted. Instead, these few women are made out to be shamed, as if they should feel ashamed of their consecrated service.

The big news coming out of this summer’s Southern Baptist Convention was the reclarification that women are to remain silent in the church. Nothing new here, considering the organization once proclaimed its annual mission was to convert all Jews to Christianity. ‘What Hitler couldn’t do with The Holocaust, the SBC tries to finish.’ Isn’t it the same thing, just perhaps less cruel—destroying God’s chosen people? No, converting a whole people to Christianity has always been cruel one way or another.

And the same principle is involved in banning women from pastor positions. It’s more sinister than clarifying church policy.

What the ban on female pastors means is: women are sub human, a part of man yet never to be man’s equal. A teaching by the Apostle Paul is used to prove the point. According to the Bible, Paul once instructed a specific Early Christian church to keep their women silent in church matters. Through the centuries, however, other Christian denominations didn’t interpret the teaching as a must-do for women in order to keep them suppressed in leadership matters and in so assuming silent in family, home, finances and politics. (Why couldn’t women vote or hold elected positions from the beginning of this nation? Because women were considered air heads with no significant thoughts or ideas.)

What some men don’t get about women (or Blacks and other subsets of humanity) is women know they are human beings. Some men, given our collective history and goings-on today, seriously don’t agree. For a couple of centuries, the South used Bible to maintain slavery, saying according to scripture some people are just meant to be slaves. There isn’t a human being on God’s green earth who is meant to be a slave, an unpaid brutalized servant.

Great falling away

There is one solution to the SBC policy against women pastors. Change denominations. A few females may shed some tears in the process of tearing away from a church that has brought a life of joy and comfort, one that for the most part provided solutions and answers to every question. It’s as familiar as Christmas, grandma, fried chicken, banana pudding, dinner on the ground and singing old-time gospel hymns like I’ll Fly Away and Fill My Way Everyday with Love.

But when a branch of Christianity still believes half of humanity cannot serve as official church leaders? That’s just plain wrong. A study of Christianity will show major changes in thought and customs in the past 2,000 years. Let’s call these huge changes what they were and are today: a reality check. Times change us, often for the better.

The beauty is Christianity remains a major world religion. It is one that teaches spiritual faith in circumstances we don’t understand, kindness toward all people especially strangers, and (my personal favorite) loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The red words in the Bible should be considered the final say on matters of controversy. The red words say nothing about man’s superiority to women, women’s subservience to men, homosexuality, or abortion.

The problem, it seems, is what was not said in red.

[Psst. I’m thinking Jesus wouldn’t have a problem with women pastors. Seems so insignificant in the Big Picture.]

Another writers strike catches us without a lot of season finales, daily shows like The Daily Show, and weeklies like Real Time. Ugh. We’re already deep in re-runs from the current television season and bored to death. Gonna be a long hot summer, made longer by the spring writers strike.

The issues, however, were bound to come up in the dawn of AI (alternative intelligence? No, artificial intelligence). Yeah, there’s something now to contend with called Artificial Intelligence, and it’s leaving everyone anxious about their careers, work, and value. Nothing projected but a bleak future for us all. High-tech Orwellian society come to pass … in our lifetime. Please, make it go away! No, this is the real Twilight Zone. This time, we get to see how life turns out after the big scare. We’ll be living through this ordeal for years. We Americans once were told: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, if humans can’t get a job to pay for housing, food, family, and health, what’s the use (of living)?

Wanna be sedated

It’s funny the many films about the future depicted this age when robots and computers would do everything, yet humans in these scenarios still exist and have jobs. Worth, I don’t know, but jobs usually dealing with computers: large as a room with lots of very wide tape. The funniest one was Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It takes place 200 years in the future from 1973. In the early 1970s, Allen as usual plays himself: neurotic hypochondriac Dixieland clarinet-playing, flirty, bawdy joking New Yorker who finds himself alive in the future. There are many scenarios that we now see coming to pass: robots, the biggest industry, which are somehow male or female, gay or straight, sassy or all-business and do the housecleaning, cooking, and mundane chores of humans past. All cars are bulbous and driverless. There’s an orb for getting high and, well, an empty water-heater shaped unit used for creating a self-gratification of sorts in mere seconds. Woody looks drunk after staying in it too long while hiding from the law who’s after him.

The police in Sleeper are depicted as incompetent, ready to shoot, and unable to capture Woody. But they do eventually. He’s placed in a morgue-like sliding bed instead of a hospital room and is assigned a friendly supervisor who introduces him to their great society, one that is more efficient and capable of providing all human needs.

Allen’s great society has a world leader resembling the pope. TVs are wall screens, and each night the great leader speaks to the people who in turn wave back as if he can see them. There is a rumor that a political underground has killed the great leader, leaving only his nose … which will be cloned to become the leader again. There is a funny slapstick scene in a garden of gigantic fruit and vegetables. Woody runs into a still-operable VW Beetle with a bumper sticker that reads: Register commies, not guns.

It is eerie how many of Allen’s predictions are coming true now only 50 years into the future of the making of Sleeper. A sleeper, by the way, is a person loitering often found sleeping on a park bench or a public spot where he does not belong.

Allen’s computer rooms now fit in the palm of our hands. Reels of computer tape are unnecessary thanks to the microchip. Driverless cars are here featuring hands-free driving and self-parking including parallel spots. And let’s face it, who can’t wait for robots that clean our homes and do all the cooking? We already don’t have to shop for food anymore and can order anything from anywhere anytime and have it delivered to our homes.

Back to the writers’ strike. Writers are artists. They use their imaginations for a living. They want the responsibility to develop their own series and movies, themes, jokes, characters, dialogue, conflicts, and endings. Their strike is a collective effort to put their foot down, by God, and stop producers (who hold the money) from going the cheap AI route. Just because AI can do everything a writer can do in seconds without a salary or human need or complaint doesn’t mean our society should allow it.

It reminds me of what was said about TV back in the 1960s: that there are scripts passed around with the same premise, and all the shows use them. That would explain the episodes from almost every show about beatniks or hippies. The Flintstones did it with ‘bug music.’ Gilligan’s Island with The Mosquitos rock band. My Three Sons with a friend of the boys who is unrecognizable after growing his hair long, wearing a wild hippie shirt and love beads, and flashing a peace sign. The hippie episode even infiltrates Green Acres and the Beatniks in The Munsters featuring The Standells—the Beatniks at the rock party accepting the Munsters for whatever they are, no fear or judgement.  All of these episodes are my favorites. But, yes, it was done to death. And these shows were written by humans.

I suppose writers may have written themselves into a corner. Management is all about the bottom line (money and cost), and layoffs are going to happen during this painful transition. Not sure how the latest yet righteous rift between artist and management will mend. But the truth is they’ve always needed each other. Perhaps that’s the past. The problem with AI is it may not be a novelty. Humans may be fooled by art, written or visual, produced by computers. Humans created AI and programmed everything it can do.

Humans are sort of in control of AI for now. But no one can predict the future, even the future of AI. Knowing humans, however, I’d bet on a lot of AI systems being literally manhandled, physically blown away. History has shown that humans tend to destroy things that threaten us. Not sure if management’s gotten the word.