My beef with evangelicals
 

are essentially threefold.

First, they present themselves poorly in the national debate. With Jerry Falwell, Tammy Baker and the like as your spokepersons, you start to lose credibility out of the shoot.

Second, their overemphasis on grace, which in my mind dilutes the necessity to obey the commandments and to repent. Based on some data, I see little empirical evidence that evangelicals take their proclamations to heart. It seems to more cultural, more political, than a religion of convictions. That may sound odd given how much time some of them waste on anti-abortion efforts, but I'm stating how much emotion somebody invests, but how much conviction to the point of action in furtherance of self-discipline.

Third, the lack of a culture which assimilates and explains. The Catholics, the Jews, and even the Muslim to some extent, possess a culture, and academics that examine the world and the world of philosophy from their viewpoints. To a large extent, evangelicals eschew academic explanation. It can never be a substitute for conviction, but the absence thereof also points to an absence of substance.

You may have different experiences, but mine with evangelicals have been uniformly negative.

Many of the oppositions to the Church building temples have come from the evangelicals.

Much of interdenominational bigotry is sponsored by evangelicals.

It doesn't appear to be a living breathing religion. It's almost as if it's more political dogma than way of life. Feel free to disagree, because obviously some of my words are intended to be caricatures of caricatures.

it's been a while since I talked with an evangelical. maybe the last one was a med student, a year ahead of me. he offended probably everyone in the medical school with his aggressive tactics.

i think the evangelical strain appeals to the mullah-types. the ones that want a strict doctrine, black and white, that separates them from everyone else.

I thought you went to an evangelical med school.

You basically have your hard-core evangelicals like what you describe and then your generic Christians who sort of believe the evangelical doctrines but aren't that up on the Bible and aren't too aggressive about their beliefs. The hard-core are pretty much impossible to discuss anything with. I find the generic Christians already instinctively believe a lot of LDS doctrines but just don't realize that's what they are nor that their church doesn't teach those things.

My school was/is 100% secular with no connection to the Baptists.

Baylor Col of Med was never in Waco. Started in Dallas, then moved to Houston in 1943.

It then split from Baylor Univ. in 1969.

There is no connection (since 1969) between BCM and BU.

And I'm not sure it is fair to say Baptist = evangelical anyway.

Cool. I can bash evangelicals. Their core belief is that the Bible is literally true down to the last period. All the bad stuff flows from that fountainhead philosphy. Thank God they exist in the conext of our greater liberal society. To the extent we have domestic terrorists they are deviant fomrms of evangelicals.

I think you understate the significance of Jewish and Catholic culture. They pretty much generated and/or transmitted Western civilization up to the Eighteenth century, basically.

Not wanting to turn this thread into the origins of western culture, I went light in that arena.

Evangelicals and Southern Baptists pretty much overlap. Southern Baptists' origins are illuminating. A schism developed between Baptists and what would become Southern Baptists over the slavery issue.

Link to Baptist traditions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptist

How does a Baptist deal with the authority issue for baptism and the last supper?

I've never heard a logical explanation on that one.

The Apostolic traditions make more sense.

Easy. They simply don't accept the authority paradigm. That paradigm only exits in Chatholicism and Mormonism. Just because you take it for granted doesn't mean everyone else thinks it makes perfect sense. It's just a belief, dogma, like all the rest of it. Just because you or others who believe it believe it doesn't make it so for everyone. It's what you believe, so it's so for you; they believe something else, so it's not so for them. You each have your own distinct truth. And please don't cite the Bible to me as support for your belief.