Tag Archives: religion

While browsing threads on Twitter the other day I saw a random outraged atheist ranting about one of the survivors of the mall shooting in Allen, Texas. Outraged Atheist was outraged because the survivor had thanked god, which proves religious believers are monsters: he’s saying he deserved to live but the victims didn’t! What a shitty human being!

No, that’s not what he’s saying, but that’s not the first time I’ve seen similar arguments. Back in the 1990s, skater Tonya Harding paid someone to assault skating rival Nancy Kerrigan with a hammer to her knees. At some point after the attack, Kerrigan asked, as people do, how something this would happen to her. A windbag columnist (I don’t have the name) declared this proved Kerrigan was a shallow, selfish bitch — what she should have done is ask why violence and assault happen at all. By focusing on herself, she proved she thinks she’s some special snowflake who should never suffer anything bad.

I have very little sympathy for this ass-hat viewpoint. The Allen mall dude just lived through a nightmare; Kerrigan, an assault that could have crippled her. Focusing on themselves rather than pondering “why does evil happen? What does it say about god/the universe that terrible things happen to innocent people?” seems natural to me. As Susan Neiman says in Evil in Modern Thought, even secular, rationalist philosophers have struggled with the problem of evil. I’m inclined to give people coming out of a traumatic experience a little slack.

Besides, the Allen survivor didn’t say he deserved God’s help better than the dead. The idea that God saves us not for merit but for his own incomprehensible reasons is a common one in Christianity. “Why didn’t God save the others?” is a valid question but I don’t think the survivor was offering “I’m better than them” as the answer — if he’d said it, the Outraged Atheist didn’t mention it (I’m sure he would have).

Not what I’d intended to post today but I wanted to get that off my chest. To make up for taking your time, here’s a photo of a silly bush in our neighborhood.

About forty years ago, PBS did a documentary on what was then the extreme right of American Christian conservatism, people who openly advocated for theocracy. The kind of extremists that supposedly sensible moderate conservatives such as Jerry Falwell backed away from (though Falwell was hardly a moderate, being a devout segregationist).

That was then; now calls for a “Christian nation” and claims we were always a Christian nation (until the godless liberals took over) are the Republican norm. And more and more of them are open about an extreme, militant Christianity, asserting, for example, that it’s good to burn books. They really hate “the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject.”

Or consider Republican Mark Steffen, Kansas State Senator: he believes the US is a Christian nation (wrong) and the separation of church and state is a myth (also wrong) and says he’ll legislate based on his Biblical worldview and what his community wants. When a Muslim in his district asked how he’d represent her his response was that he’d “try to convert you.”

Over in South Carolina, Senator Tim Scott says government should kneel before the church. I recommend reporters in the relevant areas ask both him and Steffen how they define things like Christianity and “the church.” Does it include Catholics? Mormons? Churches that allow gay marriage or women preaching? When Scott says Christians can “exercise their faith wherever they go” what does he mean? That they have a right to pray anywhere? They should feel free to insult and bully gays?

Another shift is that right-wingers are increasingly trying to broaden the right to discriminate beyond religion. In Florida there’s a bill that might let doctors refuse patients based on moral objections — and possibly let insurers refuse coverage too (Republicans deny that, but they lie a lot). I think that’s significant. First Amendment exemptions were based on freedom of religion, which is not the same as morality. The latter gives bigots considerably more leeway to discriminate.

Of course they’d shriek blue murder if this were used against them (“Sorry Pastor Steve, you got this disease sleeping around on your wife — I can’t condone your adultery.”) or if doctors claimed their morals required them to provide patients with abortions or trans-related medical care. On the first point, they’re probably counting on a)liberals generally aren’t fans of discrimination, and b)all the right-wing justices throwing out opposing claims.

For the second, Republicans won’t acknowledge those religious claims as legitimate. A synagogue has filed a lawsuit arguing that Florida’s abortion restrictions violate Jewish religious views; a right-winger made the argument that other than conservative Orthodox Judaism, Jews don’t have real religious beliefs. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made the same argument against liberal Christians down the road. Especially given the growing cries that liberals are literally agents of Satan.

As Fred Clark says, when Texas has schools post the Ten Commandments, it’s going to be the Protestant version — which makes it less about morals and more about See, Our Religion is Best! The same purpose as Confederate monuments. Oh, and forget parents’ rights: as not enough parents are right-wing Christian Republicans, Family Research Council urges those who are to indoctrinate other people’s children.

The supposed secular rationale is that posting the Commandments and imposing religion on others will make us better people. Never mind that when Protestant Christian Bible readings and prayer were the norm in schools nice white Christians lynched thousands of blacks. Nor did Christianity stop the Southern Baptists from covering up abuse and harassment. Nor, as Texas State Rep. James Talarico points out, will posting commandments about having no graven images do much to stop school shootings. No more than replacing school mental health professionals with chaplains will do students any good. But I’m sure the churches will appreciate the added revenue stream.

And when all else fails they can shriek that whoever opposes them serves Satan. It often sounds over the top and comical but people have gone to jail in past Satanic panics. The religious right is following a long tradition of loving America while hating their fellow Americans.

Ansley Quiros says that we too need to “unabashedly invoke the language of morality. Of religion. We must make the choices plain. Admittedly, that is difficult when so much of our political speech is spiritually tinctured hyperbole. And yet, those who care, still, about goodness and justice and mercy, should not abandon the effort. ” I think President Biden gets this, for example, marking the careers and futures destroyed by the 1950s lavender panic.

Even the people who want to make the USA a Christian nation don’t agree on what it will be like or how to get there. Although I suspect they’d all agree with this extremist that violence is an option. And I’m sure they’ll agree that you can’t be Christian and a Democrat (or a liberal). Bullshit artist Milo Yiannopoulos calls for reinstating blasphemy laws as part of creating that Christian nation. Dennis Prager insists you can’t have a functioning society not based on the Bible. Charlie Kirk is all in on a Christian America.

Small wonder anti-Semitism is on the rise. When you start invoking the terrible threat of George Soros, you’re not sliding into anti-Semitism, you’re there. In the end, a lot of conspiracy believers wind up anti-Semitic. Partly that’s because it’s not taboo these days: “There is less shame. People feel they can say and do anything,”

“After characterizing the vast majority of American Jews as lacking obligations—and as thus having no affirmative duties of consistency or integrity—seemingly because the Jewish conception of religious authority is not the Christian one, Blackman makes egregious legal errors that should worry adherents of any minority faith and nonbelievers as well.” — a look at a legal argument Jewish beliefs aren’t substantial enough to get First Amendment protection when they clash with Christianity.

One good sign we’re not a theocracy yet: the Christian baker who refused to bake a cake with trans-flag icing colors has lost in court again.

The federal government provides millions for HIV prevention, with emphasis on treatment for gay men, communities of color and the transgender community. Tennessee says no. Not nominally for religious reasons, but I know how I’d bet. Ditto South Dakota declaring it will prosecute pharmacists who provide abortion medication.

Just how did the Jews interpret the Biblical verse that says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?

Back in the 1960s, Tim LaHaye, late light of the religious right expressed outrage that a Christian college would mourn the death of Martin Luther King (the right wing hated MLK, then as well as now).

Want to join the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville. You have to sign a pledge to fight LGBTQ rights. Right, we can’t have “sinners” in a good Christian church (sarcasm font). Christian attorney Matt Staver is asking for donations to fight gay rights — I guess his anti-vax fundraising grift has run out of steam. But the religious right still wants you to think they’re the ones being persecuted.

When it became impossible for the Southern Baptist Convention to ignore the abuse scandal, they tried to shift concerns to critical race theory (didn’t work). Here’s one example from their ugly history.

“The Southern Baptist Convention must have realized it was dealing with highly explosive information. For years, it denied keeping a list of abusers. That turned out to be a lie. By August 2018, staff at the Executive Committee had a file of 585 possible abusers. But the purpose of that internal list was institutional self-protection from lawsuits.” — from a WaPo report.

Some former members of People of Praise, Amy Coney Barrett’s sect, argue that church has its own abuse problems.

“Speaking of people of faith is about as coherent as speaking of people of politics, as if for example fascists and liberal democrats are united at some fundamental level by the fact that they have strong beliefs about politics”

How Christianity turned so toxic.

Speaking of toxic, I presume Trump’s declaration he’ll punish doctors for providing trans care and “promote positive education about the nuclear family” is reminding the religious right that if they elect him again, he’ll have their back.

“There is no moral truth, only alternatives,” isn’t the other side of Paprocki’s argument. It’s simply his self-serving, inaccurate, willfully ignorant caricature of the opposing side.” — Slacktivist looks at the conservative Christian whine that they, and only they have moral truth on their side.

“hat’s where this weird little story gets really interesting and challenging. Because Abraham is a righteous man. And what does the righteous man do? The righteous man pleads for Sodom.“‘

No, Biden’s state department defending the rights of non-Christians around the world is not the same as promoting atheism. But lies that liberals and Democrats hate God — even with lifelong Catholic Biden at the helm — are a Republican reflex.

And here’s another reflex, Lauren Boebert blaming her husband’s indecent exposure arrest was the woman’s fault.

Newt Gingrich claims liberals are the real theocrats: “it’s a cult of environmentalism, it’s a cult of transgenderism. It’s a cult of income redistribution. You’ve got a whole list of things. It’s a cult of anti-white racism.” Gingrich became an irrelevant loudmouth when he left office, but it seems were stuck with him.

“The defendants were also accused of trying to illegally break away from the denomination to keep Stocker in the pulpit.”

Jesse Lee Peters, a right-wing misogynist preacher who condemned Brett Kavanaugh for having too many daughters, is virulently anti-gay. At least publicly.

Another day, another Christian minister groomer. Another grooming pastor has won $2 million in a lawsuit over guards beating him up in prison. Depressingly it seems he was on the right side in that case.

Senator James Lankford used to direct youth programming at Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center. After a statutory rape case there some years back, he claimed that 13 year olds such as the victim can be consensual sex partners. Um, no.

Some pastors and church officials accused of assault or harassment have a simple solution: sue the accuser.

“They encountered a climate more like Lord of the Flies, where staff were given free rein to restrain and beat students, and where some kids were emotionally and sexually abused. They claim Agapé has functioned like a “cult” and “Christian torture compound” for decades, allowing adults to manhandle teenagers and withhold food, water, and proper clothing.

“The priest had gotten my home phone and talked to my dad prior to me getting home and telling him what was going on,” Pfisterer said. “And I got beat for lying to him. And so, I never said another word to anyone.” — one of the stories coming out now that California has temporarily suspended the statute of limitations in sex-abuse cases.

Anti-gay activist Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council has now registered as a church: it’s “no longer required to file a public tax return, known as a Form 990, revealing key staffer salaries, the names of board members and related organizations, large payments to independent contractors and grants the organization has made. Unlike with other charities, IRS investigators can’t initiate an audit on a church unless a high-level Treasury Department official has approved the investigation.”

“‘Preying on the poor is Bad’ is not a shared moral premise and won’t be received as one” because for right-wing Christians the Golden Rule isn’t enough.

So if Arizona Republican candidate Jerome Davison truly believes his claims the Democrats are giving birth to Antichrist, what does he imagine he can do about it? If the prophecies in the Book of Revelation are coming to pass, electing him or re-electing Trump ain’t going to do squat against the will of God that the end times begin. I’d never suggest a religious man is lying to get votes from suckers, but — okay, I’d totally suggest that.

” Madonna has been involved in satanism from the very beginning. For reasons I have yet to figure out, the global elite are still intent on using this now fifty-something woman concerning their end time agenda. “— One religious conservative’s paranoia about Madonna, which Fred Clark puts under scrutiny. Among other points, he notes that the writer considers her views about secret conspiracies to be unremarkable, mainstream Christianity.

As you may have heard, it looks like an upcoming Supreme Court case will bring back school prayer. Which won’t stop evangelical conservatives whining about how they’re persecuted. Or one Fox host arguing opposition to school prayer justifies shutting down public education. Or refusing to name a court building after an honored judge who made the right ruling in a prayer case

Plenty of conservatives, such as Newt Gingrich, would like to go beyond school prayer and impose a national Christian religion. But as Clark says again (I’m linking to a whole bunch of his posts today) — which sect, Newt? Which of the many flavors of Christianity do they intend to pick? Is speaking of tongues Satanic? Will Mormons and Catholics be accepted as Christians (I know plenty of Protestants who say No! to both)? We should challenge people on this point as often as possible.

“Bigotry is the antidote to education.”

“The core belief of hegemonic religion is that religion cannot be freely exercised unless it is also established in law.”

Back in the 1990s and early 21st century, there was an effort at racial reconciliation in the evangelical community. It died with Trayvon Martin.

A conservative Christian pastor argues George Washington’s slaveowning wasn’t inconsistent with his Christian faith because he was a compassionate slaveowner. As noted at the link, bullshit. But I can see why conservatives flinch from teaching accurate history of racism if this is what they want to believe.

I’ve never bought the idea that it’s somehow a moral compromise to provide wedding licenses or services for a wedding you personally disapprove of. But the battle goes on. Happily Virginia rejected a bill that would have given religious groups the freedom to discriminate.

“This is the great fear of all religious hegemons and it arose, then as now, from the great incomprehension of such believers. They could not conceive of the world that Roger Williams imagined and advocated — a world in which religious belief is voluntary. ” — Clark on the horror of many Americans when they learned the new national constitution didn’t impose a state religion.

Wannabe Georgia Senator Herschel Walker brings up the old argument that monkeys can’t have evolved into humans because monkeys are still here. Apparently he thinks (or pretends to) that it was some magic transformation rather than a multi-generational thing.

One thing about religious conservatives, they have no problem ignoring the Bible’s prohibition on bearing false witness against others.

Here’s a bit of doubletalk: Oklahoma insists banning nonbinary birth certificates is based on science, yet the governor openly admits it’s based on his Christian faith.

Lots of Christians (myself included) have taken the covid vaccines. But Rep. Matt Gaetz pretends military vaccine mandates are meant to drive Christians out of the military.

Unsurprisingly, some Christian adoption agencies that discriminate against gay would-be parents are also willing to discriminate against Jews,.

Christian opposition to LGBTQ book displays has led to the library not only having no exhibits about relationships or gender but banning the romance book club. In Florida, Walton County (near my former home) has banned a cute book on babies.

And meanwhile the right-wing pretense they’re serving God by fighting pedophiles continues. After all, it’s an excuse to ask for money. Of course, as Clark says, this kind of thing has a long history. And yet, somehow, we won’t see the same outcry against Robert Fenton, a pastor who allegedly sexually assaulted a 14-year-old when he was in his thirties. The pastor of the church they both attended says Fenton compared the relationship to Joseph marrying a much younger Mary — not the first time I’ve heard that excuse.

Some Christians are big on spiritual warfare — which somehow always equates to protecting straight white male power.

Slacktivist blogger Fred Clark has been discussing for years the degree to which racism is part and parcel of white evangelical theology. Case in point, the Southern Baptist Seminary decided not to remove slave-owning Southern Baptist names from buildings on campus: after all, we’re all sinners, right? Clark: “This is where we flinch, quaver, and look away. It’s almost impossible not to. Al Mohler’s inability or refusal to cast more than a passing glance at such horror is perfectly understandable. But if we do not make ourselves look, we will never come to see.” Clark also discusses and ponders how slaveowning shaped the SBC founders’ theology. “There is work to be done. For all of us. And it won’t be easy, or simple, or pleasant. But it is necessary.”

“For many white evangelicals, the 2016 election represented a last-ditch effort at preserving a way of life that seemed to be coming to an end.” Which may be why one legal effort claims supporting Black Lives Matter violates conservative Christians’ freedom of religion. As Fred Clark says, this is what happens when powerful people imagine they’re the persecuted ones.

“Andy Stanley reminds me a lot of Earl Stallings. Stallings fretted about Bull Connor the same way that Stanley frets about Donald Trump. He wanted to make sure people understood that he did not approve of that sort of thing. Not that he actually condemned it, mind you, but that he did not approve of it at all. Like Stanley, Stallings lived “in a time of intense political anger” and so his attempts to “put faith before politics” involved “grasping uncertainly at the line between speaking prophetically and making everybody mad.”

Some Trump advocates insist the Bible requires Trump’s enemies to pray for him. At the link, Libby Anne points out the Bible says the opposite in some places.

“White Southern Christians argued that any unbiased reading of the Bible proved that slavery was as legitimate a domestic relationship as marriage and parenthood.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Libby Anne also argues that when you deny reality enough to embrace creationism, it’s only a short step to conspiracy thinking.

Republicans say it’s wrong to attack religious faith — until they go after Democrats. No surprise: the fundamental tenet of right-wing American Christiniaty is that they have the right to punch down, but nobody has the right to punch back up.

“Most of us are not exceptionally virtuous and heroic. Recognizing that is the first step in learning to become better, learning to speak out on behalf of others before it is too late for them or for us.”

“There’s so much potent, culture-shifting wokeness afoot, they complain. Democrats have no choice but to…reject it?”

A city uneasily decides it can’t win a First Amendment fight over a white supremacist church.

“This performance of piety in the face of evil is empty, because it does not deal with the core issue: white evangelicalism’s own racism.”

A false prophet insists as he and his ilk prophesied Trump would win, it must be true.

“I have never seen so much mobilized prayer in my life. If prayer was going to do it, Trump would be president until he was 90.”

“Public opinion surveys reveal a more deeply disturbing truth: that the lie of white supremacy — that white people’s lives are more important than those of others — continues to be one of the primary ties that bind Trump and the white evangelical world.” And evangelical support for Trump’s attempted coup suggests that instead of changing society by changing hearts and minds, they just want to win.

Others see the pandemic as an opportunity to sell their extremist views.