More details have come out about the recent forced resignations at La Serra University. I’ve been wanting to get this out for a few days, but I’ve been too busy with work.

Spectrum, the most liberal of the independent Adventist magazines, has had very good coverage of this as details of come forward. Here’s an exerpt from one such article:

The conversation had been very frank on April 20 when the La Sierra University faculty met with the president of the North American Division Dan Jackson and Larry Blackmer, NAD Education Director. The faculty had questions for the church administrators about the Adventist Accrediting Association board’s vote to revisit LSU in 2012 rather than granting them the five year term of accreditation that had been recommended to the Board by AAA’s visiting team.

LSU Board member Lenny Darnell wanted to be sure that he could recall all that transpired, so he turned on his cell phone’s recording device and let it run.

After the meeting he and three friends—Jeff Kaatz, LSU vice president of development; Jim Beach, LSU dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Gary Bradley, professor of biology—went to a private home where they continued their conversation about the LSU meeting while watching the Los Angeles Lakers play the New Orleans Hornets in an NBA basketball playoff game. What the four friends did not realize is that the phone recorder continued to run during their discussion.

The recording was not malicious, but it’s use was. Apparently Darnell is unaware of how large an audio file should be for the length of material it contains. By the sounds of it, it must have had 8 hours of recording. Just as a courtesy you should never email files that large. He should have at least checked to see if he’d recorded too much or encoded it into a more compressed format, but we can’t expect everyone to be that tech savvy.

For those who don’t know, drinking alcohol is one of the most severe of offenses in the Adventist community. They are very staunch teetotalers. It is a gateway to other sins since it lowers inhibitions and its an important distinguishing characteristic between Adventists and apostate Christianity.

To put it clearly, in the outside world it would be a less serious offense to cheat on your wife with a drunken hookup, than to do the same thing completely sober, not that it would be a good excuse. In the Adventist world, especially for those employed by the church, it would be a bigger deal to cheat while your drunk than to do it sober since it’s two sins and not just one.

It’s no surprise to me that they could all be canned for alcohol consumption and everybody could also probably get fired for the kinds of things they say about their bosses in private conversations. I hate to say it, but the university may actually be telling the truth when they say that this had nothing to do with the biology controversy.

Then again, none of this would have gone far enough to get anyone in trouble if it hadn’t been for the controversy. Either way, this was an easy way to get the apostate evolutionist out of the classroom. It’ll probably also be used as an example of how accepting evolution over church doctrine will lead to other sins.