Heresy o' the Day: Episcopalian Baal Worship

This is really perplexing – Gene Veith has the story on a couple of Philly Episcopalian priests were worshipping Baal on the side.

The two were found to have been authors of a “Eucharist to our Mother Goddess” published on a Wicca website (and, for a while, on the Episcopal Church’s Office of Women’s Ministries site). Writing under the Druid and Wiccan names Oakwyse, Raven, Druis, and Glipsa, the liturgy evoked the Babylonian deity “Bel” and offered prayers to the “Queen of Heaven”: a reference not to the Virgin Mary but to Ishtar, the consort of Baal.

Yes, Baal. Even Cracked magazine understands he’s a loser.  Veith is perplexed, and rightly so:

But here we have overt worship of Bel (aka “Baal”) and Ishtar (aka “Asherah”), the specific deities the children of Israel were warned not to get syncretic with!  Don’t Episcopalian seminarian study the Old Testament?

There’s no telling what Episcopalian seminarians are going to study now under their new, radical Molech-worshipping Dean Katherine “abortion is a blessing” Ragsdale.  But between these double dipping Philly priests and the recently defrocked Muslim-Episcopalian priest Ann Holmes Redding, I’m just amazed at the level of heresy in which, not just Christians, but church leaders, will indulge.  These are people who are presumably educated in the doctrine of the faith which they’ve espoused.  Traditionally, if you stopped believing in your faith, you left it and associated yourself with a church whose doctrine you thought was correct.  Now defection-in-place is evidently in vogue.