Groomers for Christ in Texas

The Texas senate approved this bill.

S.B. 1515 would require Texas public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. At present, Texas public schools have no such requirement, and this legislation only became legally feasible with the United States Supreme Court’s opinion last year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 142 S. Ct. 2407 (2022), which overturned the Lemon test under the Establishment Clause (found in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)) and instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition.

That’s not all!

The Senate also gave final passage to Senate Bill 1396, authored by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which would allow public and charter schools to adopt a policy requiring every campus to set aside a time for students and employees to read the Bible or other religious texts and to pray.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement that both bills are wins for religious freedom in Texas.

I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind, he said. Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back to our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans.

Somehow, forcing a sectarian version of religion on school children is now being labeled “religious freedom.”

I’m wondering how all those conservative atheists regard this development.

I like religious pluralism for keeping Catholic fanaticism in check

Here’s a fine Easter message for you: The world would be better if every man, woman, and child were Catholic. You are misusing freedom of religion when you use it to promote pluralism and false religions.

Oh yeah, the Church Militant never fails to provide entertaining intolerance for public consumption. It’s a strange mixed message, though. This guy is yelling about how pluralism is a good thing, and you shouldn’t be angry about it because everyone should be free to make the right choice (Catholicism) and the wrong choice (every other religion), but you should be getting mad that every single minor Catholic festival isn’t promoted as heavily as Christmas and Ramadan and Diwali. But have you ever looked at calendar of Catholic holy days? This week alone we had Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, and Black Saturday. Get to work and complain to your HR department that they aren’t sending out announcements and memos about every single Catholic holiday! If my university started spamming me about every single religious holiday — Catholics aren’t alone in packing the calendar with noise — I’d have to block their email.

And darn those rainbow flags. Offensive to the Church Militant! There are no gay people in the True Catholic church.

Anyway, I’m doing nothing for Easter at all other than grading and making a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. I hear that my granddaughter is going on a family Easter egg hunt, and that’s about as religious as we’re going to get. I guess I better get started on the holy rite of marking my students’ sins with a red pen.

Admit it, Texas: you want to be a theocracy

Also admit that you’re just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.

Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.

Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that it’s going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, it’s a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. I’m sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.

Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because they’re sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.

The Christian rot is everywhere

Hey, isn’t that Achilles from the movie Troy? I had no idea he was Christian.

I am not at all surprised by the revelation that evangelical Christians think they’re waging a holy war against trans people. Now we have even more evidence, in the email lobbyists write to politicians, with both incessantly claiming that God is on their side.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

The way these people talk to each other…it’s all Bible references and piety, while they’re advocating to increase the suffering of children. For someone like me, who is rather firmly anti-religious, it’s repulsive.

The repeated notes about “blessings” and “prayers,” as well as sign-offs like “God bless you” and “Under His wings,” proliferate throughout the emails, which frequently reference explicit religious motivations for targeting trans people.

“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

They can’t muster a good argument or a rational defense for their behavior, so they resort to claiming Biblical authority. It’s lazy and stupid and done for an evil purpose, and damn the evidence. For the Bible tells me so (which it doesn’t, actually — most of this stuff is interpolation and reading their biases into the text) is all they’ve got.

Emails from 2020 show right-wing lobbyists and politicians rejoicing after Idaho passed two anti-trans bills. One of the bills, which is still being fought by the ACLU, bans trans women and girls from girls’ sports, and is rooted in the myth that trans women have a leg up in sports, though evidence has consistently stated the opposite. “Dear Friends,” wrote Young, the Idaho representative, “I cannot thank you enough for your help and support! It is official—Governor Little signed both H500 and H509 today! Many tears and prayers of gratitude! The fight goes on!” Young sent the email to nearly 30 people, some of whom have also lobbied against abortion, including Deutsch.

It’s the same story with the abortion holy war. It’s all based on emotional biases and ignorance, bolstered by a misreading of their holy book. I bet if we had a trove of email from anti-abortion lobbyists and politicians, it would be full of the same sickening god-talk.

It’s also driven by paranoia and a persecution complex. They actually believe that trans people are an overwhelming powerful force bent on destroying a tiny band of Christian martyrs, so they need to eradicate them first.

“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

“I completely agree that it is Christian Nationalism, although I tend to refer to it as religious extremism,” Shupe said in an email to VICE News. “Christian Nationalists are a danger to the LGBTQ population, and society in general: a genuine threat to people’s lives and safety. They feign compassion while doing everything possible to strip us of our civil rights and ability to safely exist and participate in society.”

Yes! Christianity is the poison in America’s veins. It’s everywhere. It is the Goliath that you find imbedded in every city, every small town, and every little farm across the country.

It’s not the only cause for the prejudice, though. I have to wonder about the atheists who are happily siding with religious extremists to condemn the trans ‘agenda’.

Who would want this?

Also, where is Ray Comfort getting the money?

That’s a box full of crap you can get for free from LivingWaters/london. Just fill out the form at that link, giving Ray Comfort your address, and he will ship up to ten boxes of his book and Bible tracts about the coronation.

You could have a thousand copies of Ray’s book and six thousand cheesy tracts delivered to your doorstep, totally free. Unless you’re in the UK, EU, Australia, or New Zealand, in which case you don’t get the books, just 10,000 cheesy tracts. Or if you’re outside those countries, you get nothing, and will have to pick up your free tracts in person in London.

From this I have determined that Canada is truly blessed.

I thought about ordering a box, just to bleed a few drops from the bloated vampiric corpse of Ray Comfort’s unaccountably rich organization, but decided not to. My reasons: a) it’s not enough to exsanguinate the parasite, b) it would just encourage him, c) it’s incredibly wasteful and would just have to be recycled, and d) I don’t want to read his stupid book (I’ve read enough Comfort to know it will be awful), I don’t want his tracts, and I don’t need a box of waste paper in my house. The man is giving away free garbage, and that does not appeal.

I still have to wonder, though: does ol’ Ray have some multi-millionaire sugar daddy? Or does he get so much in donations from a horde of deluded Christians that he can afford these ridiculous give-aways? Does he pay taxes on all of his revenues that he then spends on evangelical nonsense?

By the way, Ray Comfort is very, very excited about the coronation…but he’s not going to bother to go himself. He wants his minions to do the humiliating work of distributing his crap to all the people who don’t want it in London.

They should never have increased the Twitter word count

It was a terrible mistake. They bumped the character limits from 140 to 280 for most people, and I have no idea what the limits are for the suckers who paid for their blue checks, but now we’re getting these long rambling rants from all the weirdos.

Ken Ham bought his precious blue check mark, of course.

He doesn’t like public schools. Take a deep breath.

Well, I realize this post may “stir the pot” somewhat, and I’ll brace for the responses! Should Christians send their kids to public schools? Now firstly I want to say it’s the parent’s decision as to where they send their kids to be educated. And I do recognize in a fallen world there are all sorts of family issues (eg: single parent families) for varied reasons.

However, at the very minimum, each Christian should build their thinking on God’s Word in regard to the training of children, and do the best they possible can, with much prayer & God’s help and hopefully the help of God’s people in the church, to attain to what God instructs as much as we are able.

From God’s Word we do get answers to: Who owns children? Parents & ultimately God. Who is responsible for the education of children? Parents, & in particular Fathers as the spiritual head. What is the priority of education? Spiritual/biblical worldview. What should we understand about children? They are not miniature adults & they have a sin nature. What warnings are there? Bad company corrupts bad character.

Many people in the church have told me their kids should be in the public school to witness to other kids. But what’s the biblical basis for this? When I ask, I’m usually told, “we are to be light and salt in this world.” Yes, true, but one can only shine light if one has it to shine. Yes, Matthew 5:13 states “you are the salt of the earth,” but Mark 9:50 also states, “Have salt in yourselves.”

Your kids can’t be salt till they have salt. And by salt it means they are to be filled with biblical truth, but also prepared with answers (1 Peter 3:15) to be able to withstand the attacks of the devil in the world they live in. That’s why @AiG provides all sorts of curricula for churches & homes to help raise generations filled with biblical truth & equipped to defend the Christian faith against the attacks of our day.

Now Scripture also warns in Matthew 5:13, that “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” In other words, contamination destroys.

Before our kids can be a witness to the world, they need to be filled with salt, as uncontaminated as possible, to know what they believe and why and be equipped to defend their faith.

Let’s face it, most of the public school system indoctrinates kids for 6 or so hours a day in the secular worldview of evolutionary naturalism & sexual humanism. Most churched kids have not survived the public education system and have walked away from the church. Very few exceptional kids from church homes survive and are able to be salt and light. Most become severely contaminated. This is reflected in the fact there’s been a massive generational loss from the church.

Bottom line, are you putting your own kids at risk from contamination because you want them in the system to witness to others? But how much have parents & the church really made sure such kids are truly filled with salt to be able to do this? Most churches have not taught apologetics and most have compromised God’s Word in Genesis, opening the door for that contamination to take hold. Most father’s have not been the spiritual head of their house as they should. Look at the evidence, most of the younger generations have walked away from the church. Generation Z is the first post-Christian generation & very atheistic in worldview.

Remember, when your kids are born, they don’t know about the bible, or Adam and Eve, or sin, or the promise of the Savior, or the Flood, or Babel, or the cross, or resurrection, or the saving gospel, or how to answer the attacks of our day. Our job as parents is make sure they are taught and equipped so they can impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ. Where are your kids spiritually? What legacy are you leaving in the younger generations? Who really has the greatest educational impact on your kids and grandkids?

I can answer that last question. If you’re talking about educational impact, it wasn’t my parents. I loved my parents, I thought they were great role models, they taught me to love knowledge, but I had to attend a public school to learn algebra, and grammar, and spelling, and basic chemistry, and home ec, and to read Melville and Dickens and Austen and Baldwin, and the framework of history. They weren’t educated as teachers and had work to do, and when they had free time, they wanted to enjoy being with their family.

Mr Ham’s problem is that he was never educated at all, and thinks learning about the bible, or Adam and Eve, or sin, or the promise of the Savior, or the Flood, or Babel, or the cross, or resurrection, or the saving gospel is an education. It wasn’t. He was fed lies.

Oh, but wait. To prove his point, Ham gives us some helpful illustrations.

Don’t go to college!

If you go to college, you’ll fill up with corruption that will make non-Christians happy.

But church will fill you with salt.

And the salt will poison all the non-Christians, because they’re like slugs or something.

Well, now I’m convinced. He’s an idiot, but he has some cheap-ass graphic illustrators working for him who can churn out appallingly bad images.

There’s more from the loquacious Mr Ham! Wait until you see his rant about science.

Want to learn about true science? Are your kids being indoctrinated by secularists in our secular institutions who don’t teach kids correctly about what science is and isn’t? Tired of the secular science programs that brainwash generations of kids in the anti-God religion of evolution/millions of years?

Real science confirms the Bible! But, sadly, many science programs don’t glorify God as the Creator. Instead, they teach humanism and atheistic evolutionary ideas to children. Because of this, many parents find it challenging to find engaging science programs that glorify God—but not anymore!

[cut short because it’s a lot of boring lies]

Real science is honest inquiry in which you can question and test your assumptions, and aren’t required to distort your answers to fit the Bible, which is not a science text. But Ken Ham has lots of money to fund his propaganda.

AiG delenda est

We seem to have succeeded in driving Kent Hovind underground. He still has a Twitter account, but as we all know, every Nazi on the planet can get a Twitter account. His Facebook page is almost dead, only sporadically updated. He set up a Dinosaur Adventure Land page on Facebook in 2016, in which he announces that Dinosaur Adventure Land is the funnest soul winning Christian theme park on the face of the planet, but nothing has ever been posted there. He has been banned from Facebook. I suspect he has accounts on the usual right-wing places, like Telegram and Gab, but I’m not going to bother checking on those.

As a grifter who relies on drawing in suckers to give him money for his pedophile-friendly cheesy little camp, all the pressure has hurt him. Even Matt Powell drifted away. I really wonder what his revenues are right now, and I would guess there’s been a bit of a financial crash for him.

However, Kent Hovind is low-hanging fruit. He’s a small time yokel with a following of even more ignorant yokels. He was broken when he spent 9 years in jail for tax evasion, and he’s never going to regain his former popularity.

The real threat is Ken Ham. Ham’s doctrine is virtually indistinguishable from Hovind’s (I’m sure they would argue about fine points of their theology), believing in a host of anti-scientific nonsense like that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old and that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, but the difference is that Ham is a politically savvy con artist who has successfully cheated Kentucky out of millions of dollars, and runs a multi-million dollar, elaborate Christian theme park where it costs over $70 just to park. It’s a redneck swimmin’ hole vs. expensive park for separating fools from their money.

Dinosaur Adventure Land

Ark Park

Ken Ham is a polished version of Kent Hovind who went straight for the big money — tax breaks from the state government, grand but pointless projects to lure in donations, national advertising to draw in tourists, and a slick and superficial theology to persuade the gullible that he’s presenting the truth of the Bible. If we’re going to rhetorically beat up creationists, Ham and Answers in Genesis are far more significant targets. They are the more powerful grifters.

At least we’ve got Dan Phelps, who is probably the most persistent and consistent opponent of AiG. He’s been hammering on AiG, and also on Kentucky’s complicity with the idiot’s version of Christianity that Ham peddles.

In late 2022, I began receiving, almost daily, “sponsored posts” in my Facebook feed for the Ark Encounter that were sponsored by the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (NKCVB). The NKCVB is partly funded by a tax charge when hotel rooms are rented in Northern Kentucky. Since the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are Kentucky tourist sites, the mere advertising of these sites is not objectionable. However, the wording describing the Ark Encounter is objectionable. The “sponsored ad” (see Figure 1 below) and working on the the NKCVB website https://www.meetnky.com/about-us/ is troublesome. The advertisement states that the Ark Encounter is “a full-sized replica” of Noah’s Ark, indicating that the NKCVB agrees with Answers in Genesis that the Ark actually existed. Obviously, one cannot have a “replica” of something that never existed.

Kentucky, you’re embarrassing yourself.

AiG, though, is really, really good at promoting itself. They can sell anything to anyone. Would you believe they’ve coopted the state’s DEI policies and an international LGBTQ+ organization?

I was about to ignore this as just another inane thing that Answers in Genesis (AiG) has received from a taxpayer supported government entity. However, I noticed that the NKCVB has the imprimatur of Destination Marketing’s Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Accreditation Program and The International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (actually the IGLBTQ+ Travel Association). This seemed very odd, given AiG’s stances on diversity and sexuality.

That’s impressive. They’ve got the LGBTQ community, or at least a few blind-sided organizations, to promote a company with these claims in their statement of faith.

  • “The concepts of ‘social justice,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘critical race theory’ as defined in modern terminology are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 1:1-20; James 2:8-9).”
  • “The only legitimate marriage, based on the creation ordinance in Genesis 1 and 2, sanctioned by God is the joining of one naturally born man and naturally born woman in a single, exclusive union as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other and has commanded that no sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, abuse, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God (Genesis 1:27-28, 2:24; Matthew 5:27-30; 19:4-5; Mark 10: 2-9; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-7; Hebrews 13:4).”
  • “Gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated. A person’s gender is determined at conception (fertilization), coded in the DNA, and cannot be changed by drugs, hormones, or surgery. Rejection of one’s biological sex (gender) or identifying oneself by the opposite sex is a sinful rejection of the way God made that person. These truths must be communicated with compassion, love, kindness, and respect, pointing everyone to the truth that God offers redemption and restoration to all who confess and forsake their sin, seeking his mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ (Genesis 1:26-28, 5:1-2; Psalm 51:5, 139: 13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; Matthew 1:20-21, 19:4-6; Mark 10:6; Luke 1:31; Acts 3: 19-21; Romans 10:9-10; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Galatians 3:28).”

Amazing. You think AiG will be sponsoring something like Disney’s Gay Days anytime soon?

Also, as Dan Points out, none of those Bible verses actually support any of their claims. That’s a common tactic of the Christian grifter, spewing out lists of Bible verses to confer false authority, while avoiding actually reading any of them.

But that’s not all. AiG has a hard-line stance on abortion — they advocate the death penalty for women who get abortions.

On January 25 the Creation Museum hosted a political event designed to fire up support for anti-abortion legislation in Kentucky. The event featured Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis (AiG) and Jeff Durbin of Apologia Church, Mesa, Arizona.

Durbin sees abortion as analogous to the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, although he thinks such a comparison “is a bit of an insult to Hitler,” given that, “if you take a body count of Hitler’s Germany to what we’ve had since Roe v. Wade, we beat him by the metric ton.” In response, Durbin argues that women who have abortions – and this includes instances of incest or rape – must be punished:

Whether it’s a mother who kills her child in the womb or a mother who kills her five-year-old twins by drowning them in the bathtub, we would want it to be treated as a murder charge, and for that to be applied consistently under the law. I believe that a just answer to murder is the death penalty. Historically that’s the standard we held to for a long time, and ultimately when God has spoken to the issue of justice for murder, he says it’s a life for a life.

Would you believe that AiG then claims that they are apolitical? Sure you would. But then readers here all know that Ken Ham is a big-time liar and fraud.

Shut ’em down. Choke off their revenue stream. Remember what the Bible tells us: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.” (Ezekiel 25:17)*.

*Totally fake quote from Pulp Fiction, but who cares?

Now that’s how I’m going to think of them all the time

The perfect abbreviation doesn’t exis…

Also, sorry everyone — I’ve been swamped lately. This was supposed to be my semester with a slightly lighter teaching load, but now it’s been increased by about 50% (just for this term, fortunately), and I’m going slightly insane. Add to that that the spiders are suddenly impressively fecund, and I have to do a lot of lab maintenance. Quickies are all I can manage.

How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?

There’s a hugely well-funded ad campaign going on right now, that will include one of those ridiculously expensive SuperBowl ads, that aims to clean up Jesus’ image. He’s about love, and tolerance, and all that sweetness and light stuff.

You might be wondering who is paying for this message. Americans United has you covered. They’ve been digging deep into the people funding these ads.

The Servant Foundation, also known as The Signatry, is behind the ad blitz. Over the next three years, the Servant Foundation plans to spend “about a billion dollars” toward this public relations campaign. They’ve hired a PR firm to address, in the firm’s words, the problem of “How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?”

I know, I know! Because modern conservative Christianity is a hate group, and they’ve been relying on buddy Jesus as a front man for hatred and intolerance. Instead of false advertising, maybe they should be using that money to clean up their act.

Once you get past the tolerant veneer, you discover the Servant Foundation is washing dirty money from some of the worst, most horrible Christian cults.

Of course, they’re the cause of their own problem – not only has the Servant Foundation funded hate groups, but the PR firm, Haven, has represented them. Key Shadow Network members Focus on the Family and Alliance Defending Freedom are in their portfolio.

Look who else they’re forking cash over to:

Other recipients of the Servant Foundation’s billion dollars in assets include:

  • Nearly $8 million went to Answers in Genesis, creationist Ken Ham’s fundamentalist ministry behind the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.
  • Over $1 million was designated for the anti-LGBTQ Campus Crusade for Christ (rebranded as “Cru” since 2011).
  • $374,800 went to Al Hayat Ministries, an organization that seeks to “respectfully yet fearlessly unveil the deception of Islam,” and runs an Arabic-language Christian satellite TV station with the goal of converting Muslims to Christianity.

In 2020 alone, we found donations to prominent Shadow Network members American Center for Law and Justice, First Liberty Institute, and Liberty Counsel.

Also helping to fund the Super Bowl ads are the Greens, the billionaire family behind the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and the Hobby Lobby craft store chain that got the Supreme Court to grant corporations a religious exemption to deny workers access to birth control.

Jesus isn’t political, if you don’t think right-wing Xianity is political. Jesus is for all people, except the gay ones or the trans ones. And they’re giving lots of bucks to creationism!

Good thing I won’t be watching the SuperBowl, and in particular won’t be watching the half-time ad glut, or I’d be puking into my nachos when that lying abomination came on.

And if you’re still wondering how Jesus became known as a front for hatred, just look at who is lying in his name.