Another reason to have voted for Kamala

Just ask Doug Wilson.

“If Kamala [Harris] had won the presidency, there would have been basically zero evangelicals in the White House administration,” Wilson said. “And although Donald Trump is not an evangelical by any stretch … his administration is full of them.”

Doug has something in common with Richard Dawkins.

“So probably the best illustration of this would be church bells? Yes. Minarets? No,” he said.

Why?

“Because, the public space would belong to Christ,” he added.

He also doesn’t want women to vote, let alone run for high office.

Wilson also wants to repeal women’s right to vote. When asked why, he was quick to respond.

“Because it’s a good idea,” he said, adding that he wants it replaced with household voting, with women only voting if they are the head of their household.

I voted for Kamala Harris. It’s nice that a pig like Doug Wilson is reassuring me that my vote was righteous.

I refuse to celebrate Christian Nationalist holidays

These gomers make it so hard to celebrate Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, which means most Americans are thinking about hot dogs and fireworks, neither of which interest me, and the Christian Nationalists are all reading that one line in the Declaration of Independence that represents the totality of their perspective: “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Forget the Constitution and forget that the bulk of the Declaration was an enumeration of the offenses of the British king, which the current American president is trying to repeat. The Discovery Institute is going all out on that line, with John West writing a whole book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul on their obsession. Wait…the Bible? I thought the Discovery Institute was scientific and secular!

Anyway Charles Thaxton and Stephen Meyer have written an op-ed plugging that theme. It’s terrible, muddled and sloppy, exactly what I expect for the DI.

It’s trying to argue that there are two perspectives, one God-centered that enables human dignity, and the other is scientific, which…they avoid specifying. It’s just not giving God credit, and therefore it’s implied that respect for human dignity will be somehow diminished. It’s an argument based on potential consequences which they don’t support with evidence.

Yet we in the U.S. and other Western countries, with our own familiar materialist scientific view of man, have created a curious situation. The orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity contend that man has dignity because he has been created in the image and glory of God. If the orthodox view is false, as is widely assumed in the academic and legal professions, then one must wonder how long it will be until we in the West reason correctly from a strictly scientific perception of human nature.

The religious perspective has done a poor job of supporting the value of human lives — Christian orthodoxies are all about an afterlife, and has been used to justify slavery. That half of their argument is unsupported, and they don’t bother to support it — just assume that religious beliefs are good. The other half, that science is going to diminish us, is even weaker: they don’t have evidence, we are expected to wonder how long it will be until a strictly scientific perception of human nature leads to some inevitable outcome, which we should assume will be dire.

I’m amazed at how frothy and vague their argument is. It’s the Discovery Institute, though, so they think handwaving at Darwin and Marx is sufficient to prove their thesis.

We might well remember that neither the edifice of Western technical sophistication nor the “science” of Marx, or of Darwin, can provide any firm ground for asserting these rights. Instead, productive proclamations of human rights depend upon a shared conviction that man’s dignity is inherent — safe from any political expedient — as our Western religious heritage once asserted, and as the Declaration of Independence still does

The Declaration of Independence is a 250 year old document that tried, successfully, to justify a separation from a colonial power. I don’t care if it “asserts” an 18th century view on the relationship between humanity and an imaginary god. I have a belief in man’s dignity based on an evolving humanism, not the words of a slave-holder.

Public, and especially political, references to this heritage doubtless offend the sensibilities of a secular age. Nevertheless, if the traditional understanding of man is correct, if it is not only doctrinal but factual, then governments can derive human rights from a dignity that actually exists. But if the traditional view is false and the modern scientific view prevails, then there is no dignity and human rights are a delusion, around the world and in the West as well.

Weird. So if you derive human rights from your fantasies about an invisible superman, then that actually exists. But if don’t believe in this god (and don’t forget, it has to be their specific Christian god), then human rights are a delusion. You know, humanists aren’t the ones arguing for the violation of human rights, that seems to be the domain of sectarian and racist ideologies. Thaxton and Meyer can try to wrap themselves in the thin thread of a single line in an old document, but it still leaves them naked.

From vanity to insanity

We’re deep in the insanity phase of the progression, and it’s obvious. A report has been released that exposes the way Trump hijacked the 250th anniversary celebration for his own personal profit and to promote an ugly ideology, much beloved of the right wing, but contrary to to history of the US.

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

I remember the 200th anniversary celebration. You may recall that Gerald Ford was the president then, but he didn’t issue bicentennial coins with his face on them, or hire a religious organization to lead the event, or appear prominently in any of the celebrations that were going on — it was generally non-partisan. It was also a weird political era, since we’d just chased Nixon out of office in 1974 for his criminal chicanery. May I suggest that we do something similar to celebrate the semiquincentennial? That would be a lovely tradition to continue.

As we’ve come to expect from the Trump crime family, it was all about the money, funneling it into their personal pockets. This is an outrageous level of corruption.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is one phrase you hear repeated over and over again, from TPUSA and PragerU and the White House: our rights are not given to us by the government, but by God. I always thought those rights were derived from the people, but that slogan is being pushed everywhere in the Freedom250 propaganda train.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

For a thorough breakdown of all the ways Freedom250 is lying to us, and in particular an analysis of the “Freedom Trucks” that PragerU was paid $14 million to deliver, I recommend the following video. That $14 million was stolen from public libraries and museums. It’s 45 minutes long, well worth it for the righteous anger and disgust it will generate.

It ends with a call to action: visit the American Library Association for things you can do to save our libraries and the propagation of a truer history.

Also, fuck Dennis Prager, Erica Kirk, and every member of the Trump family.

Forgive and forget

One of Christianity’s most pernicious and harmful ideas is that a deathbed conversion is sufficient to erase all of your sins (“sin” being one of the worst ideas of all) and get you into heaven, a paradise of joy where you are rejoined with your grandparents and your childhood puppy and you get to eat soft-serve ice cream all day and instantly learn how to play a harp. Well, the details of an eternal life in paradise are left vague, but for sure you will be tormented and in despair for eternity for the sin of being an atheist or failing to obey your parents if you don’t express your love for Jesus. Great crimes can be forgiven if all you do is accept Jesus before you kick the bucket. Adolf Hitler might be burning in hellfire right now, but he could have been saved if, after ordering the murder of six million Jews, he had just let Jesus into his heart before allowing a Russian soldier to blow his brains out.

It’s so easy. They call us atheists hedonists who want to indulge in anti-social behaviors without consequences, but Christians have this bizarre imaginary get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to commit any horror they want, as long as they have good timing and deploy their repentance excuse before they croak.

Let’s make it even easier. There are sects where not only must good Christians practice forgiveness of sins, but they are required to forget that a sin was committed at all, and most importantly they must not penalize anyone for a sin that they have repented. They create a culture of incessant cycles of forgiveness and forgetting, where you can commit horrible acts and not only get into heaven, but remain members in good standing of your church and community.

The abusers and victims all belonged to the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or the OALC, a Scandinavian-rooted revivalist church that teaches its followers that heaven is reserved just for them. To get there, according to current and former members, they must follow a strict doctrine, which emphasizes asking for forgiveness for their sins and says that being forgiven by a fellow church member washes away those sins.

What’s more, the church teaches that once a perpetrator is forgiven, anyone who speaks about the wrongdoing — including the victim — can be accused of harboring an unforgiving heart. Those who have left the church, as well as some who are still with it, say this means the burden of sin shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who refuses to let the matter rest.

The OALC has congregations in the US and Canada, particularly in Minnesota, Wyoming, and Washington state — the headquarters of the church are in Sweden, explaining the geographic distribution of the cult. And the OALC has a problem.

The OALC is full of pedophiles and rapists that can’t be purged from the church, because all a bad actor has to do is ask for forgiveness and not only will he be granted a Christ-like absolution, but everyone in the church is obligated to adopt a kind of communal amnesia and pretend the act never happened. It’s a kind of social experiment: what if people really took the doctrine of forgiveness of sins seriously? Now we know. It creates a haven for vile, rapacious behavior, and the bad actors will thrive. It’s an interesting conundrum that this doctrine, called Laestadianism, leads to an extremely moralistic, close-minded religion that at the same time creates conditions that allow extreme immorality to flourish.

The church’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Minnesota, Wyoming and southern Washington. Families rely heavily on one another socially, financially and spiritually while keeping their distance from what members often call “the world” — outsiders and secular influences viewed as dangerous or corrupting. Even ordinary activities like watching TV and dancing are treated as transgressions that must be confessed. One abuse victim said she felt anxious every time she turned on her car radio, fearing that if she listened to a pop song and died in a crash before asking forgiveness, she could go to hell.

While most of its practitioners live in fear of turning on a radio, some see the church as a playground for pedophilia.

Over 10 years, authorities alleged, Charles Massie had sexually abused at least seven girls. Some of the abuse occurred at his house and some at his businesses, where young girls worked part time. But the vast majority of the abuse occurred at church, according to court documents. Investigators tallied 832 incidents where Massie sat near the girls’ parents, allegedly fondling the girls’ genitals and breasts. One victim, who told the police she was 5 or 6 years old when she was abused by Massie, said that he “raped me with his fingers.”

Wyoming has charged Charles Massie with nine counts of sexual abuse and sexual battery. He is being held in jail in Nebraska, where prosecutors also have charged him in connection with sexual assaults. He has pleaded not guilty in both states. He could not be reached for comment.

When investigators in Moorcroft contacted families of the victims, they learned that the families already knew about the abuse. One had learned of it three years earlier, according to charges. But according to court records, none of them had told the police. Instead, the charges say, the father of some of the victims had told their preacher, David Lindberg, about the abuse in 2024. Charles Massie would later turn himself in, but not for another year.

The fox is in the henhouse, and the culture of the church is to adopt a willful blindness…very convenient for predators.

The Wyoming church isn’t the only one to face accusations that it failed to report abusers. In southwestern Washington in 2017, a jury convicted church member Carsie Tikka of raping a 9-year-old boy. But one woman, who was a member of the church at the time, said that years before he was charged, Tikka had assaulted her stepchildren and the leaders had done nothing to stop him. Instead, Tikka asked her family for forgiveness.

When secular society catches up to these criminals, it does what the church is incapable of doing. Tikka was convicted and sent to prison, but I don’t think he will learn.

Then Tikka illustrated the central problem facing prosecutors and victims alike — a powerful religious culture that prioritizes spiritual absolution over secular justice — with his final, defiant words:

“My sins have been forgiven,” Tikka told the judge. “Have yours?”

The all-powerful lord of the universe, source of all morality, has told him that raping boys was OK. Who are you to disagree with him?

Happy news on the religious front

You may have the impression that Minnesota is chock-full of Scandinavian Lutherans, but that’s not so: German Catholics make up an even larger proportion of the state population. There is a band running east-west in the center of the state that is very Catholic, centered on the city of St Cloud, about an hour west of Minneapolis. This is the Diocese of St Cloud.

The good news is that many Catholics are falling away from the church.

The change is part of the diocese’s plan to consolidate its 131 parishes into just 48, a dramatic reshuffling of religious and community life in this historically Catholic region of central Minnesota.

Church officials say a declining Catholic population, lower Mass attendance and a shortage of priests leave them little choice.

That’s the way I want to see it happening: not blowing up churches, not punishing believers, just a slow, steady, and entirely voluntary departure of believers from the folly of religion. (Although I would like to see an end to religious tax exemptions; we shouldn’t punish people for believing, but we also shouldn’t be rewarding them for it.)

We can simply sit back and wait as religious belief slowly sublimates and eventually disappears. Catholicism is just one subset of fading religions.

The changes also reflect broader religious trends in Minnesota and the U.S.

Across the country, Catholic dioceses are grappling with similar challenges. According to the Pew Research Center, about 40 percent of U.S. Catholics seldom or never attend Mass.

While the population within the St. Cloud Diocese has grown by about 7 percent since 2010, the number of Catholics has fallen from 22 percent to 16 percent, according to diocesan figures. During the same period, Mass attendance has declined by one-third.

Some churches are less than half full on Sundays, Kresky said. At the same time, insurance, maintenance and operating costs continue to rise, she said. And some churches in the diocese are just a few miles or even a few blocks apart.

The churches they have left are all propped up on the benefit of tax exemptions. Let’s accelerate their fade into irrelevance, leaving behind nothing but some interesting empty architecture. Bye-bye!

I would have forgotten that today is Easter, if the president hadn’t reminded me

I thought Xians were supposed to celebrate with colored eggs and church services and a nice family dinner. I was wrong. They celebrate it with threats of bombings and cursing and mocking religions. Good to know.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J.
TRUMP

I think I’ll pass on the whole fuckin’ holiday.

Oh no! I have to agree with a Catholic!

And it’s the Pope, no less!

Pope Leo made a plea on Wednesday for countries to offer their ​citizens universal healthcare, calling it a “moral imperative” that ‌people have access to the health services they need.
Previous popes have called for countries to offer universal healthcare, but calling ​an issue a “moral imperative” is an unusually strong ​term for a pope to use, indicating that ⁠something is required by Catholic teaching.

Wow. I do agree completely with that — universal healthcare is one of the basic things a government should provide for its people. Otherwise, what is the point of the government? We form a community to provide mutual aid and give us all better healthcare, better education, better defense, better food, clean water, clean air…I could go on.

Thank you, Pope Leo XIV, for wielding your religious influence for a good cause.

Now I’m worried, though. What is JD Vance, our Catholic vice-president, going to do? He’s already killed one pope, is he getting a death squad together to dispatch to the Vatican? I would also ask if our very Catholic Supreme Court is going to recognize their moral imperative now.

The video corporate media doesn’t want you to see

This clip was yanked from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert because Trumpian sycophants did not care at all for James Talarico’s lefty message, criticism of the Christian Right, and opposition to the Republican scumbags of Texas. So I’m doing my small part to disseminate it further.

My opinion: he’s fine, but I’m sick of all the pandering to non-right-wing Christians. Maybe it’s too far for Texas, but I’d rather see a forthrightly secular candidate just dismiss all the imaginary saintliness of the Christian faith. It’s never been this idealized “love your neighbor” belief that they preach.

Internationally humiliated

I just learned that one of the featured talks in the US Pavilion at Davos (I detest Davos anyway) is titled Did God Take The World’s First Selfie in 33 A.D. It’s about the Shroud of Turin, which some gullible adherents think is a genuine artifact from Jesus’ time, rather than a medieval fake used to gouge money out of Christian pilgrims.

I can’t even.

This is what the United States of America looks like to the rest of the world: a nation of rubes and yokels.

Every time I try to feel sympathy for a church, they push me away

I had no idea what Cities Church was like. This is the church in St Paul were protesters disrupted a service, horrified at the fact that one of the pastors was also an ICE field agent. Several people have been arrested, and Bondi’s Department of Justice promises a full investigation of the affair.

I think it is rightful to protest a church that takes advantage of the separation of church and state to get tax exemptions, but then hosts a clergy that preaches against secular government. Don’t burn them down, but at the very least the people should have the right to alert the community that one of the pastors is a hypocrite, on the one hand preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and on the other hand arresting and deporting and bullying the poor and needy. Let everyone know what a lying fraud he is.

But now I learn about Cities Church’s long-running reputation. One protest is not enough.

“[T]hey are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God,” wrote Rick Pidcock, a former fundamentalist and worship music expert, in a lengthy exposé for Baptist News Global. According to Pidcock, Cities Church is rooted in a network of far-right churches that teach “male headship and female submission” so extreme that their thought leader, John Piper, has argued that women shouldn’t even occupy management positions where men might have to answer to them.

Parnell himself has written extensively about how men “are given a charge to lead.” Under his leadership, female parishioners teach courses on learning to submit to your husband even when it’s “overwhelming, frustrating, or maybe even impossible,” as it seemed to be for a former church member who told Pidcock that the pastors pressured her to stay in a marriage with an emotionally abusive man who bankrupted his family by spending money on online sex workers.

Among Cities Church’s pastors is Joe Rigney, who has recently become a MAGA media darling because he, along with podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, has been pushing the idea that empathy is a sin. Rigney has partnered with Doug Wilson, a pastor who has praised race relations under slavery and denounced women’s suffrage, to argue that people are “being manipulated by empathy.” Rigney’s misogyny is never far from the surface, including when he denounced empathy as evidence that “feminism is a cancer” because it allows women to move beyond just being “life-givers and nurturers” and into public spaces, where their allegedly toxic compassion is a “curse.”

“Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves,” Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist who now works to expose the movement on his YouTube channel, told Salon. “This church should be disrupted. As far as I’m concerned, Jesus would’ve been right with those protesters.”

Whitaker’s view illuminates what the MAGA freakout over this protest is ignoring: that freedom of religion is not a shield against criticism of a church’s teachings, especially when those teachings are impacting the lives of other people. Cities Church, he said, “is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens.” The anti-empathy and bigoted views taught inside the church are directly affecting people outside of it.

This is the Church of Doug Wilson, not the Church of Jesus, and it’s nothing but a sheltered little pocket of poison infesting the body politic. We have a system in which you are not even allowed to criticize the most evil, odious views if they are said by a man wearing a clerical collar, and it has to stop.

I don’t agree that empathy is a sin, but that’s OK because I feel no empathy for a nest of vipers in my state.