F Rosa Rubicondior: Insanity
Showing posts with label Insanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Insanity. Show all posts

Tuesday 30 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said...


NASA’s Webb Depicts Staggering Structure in 19 Nearby Spiral Galaxies - NASA Science

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 628, is split diagonally in this image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at top left, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s on bottom right. Webb and Hubble’s images show a striking contrast, an inverse of darkness and light. Why? Webb’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light and Hubble’s showcase visible light. Dust absorbs ultraviolet and visible light, and then re-emits it in the infrared. In Webb's images, we see dust glowing in infrared light. In Hubble’s images, dark regions are where starlight is absorbed by dust.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team
Continuing with the theme of how different the universe really is compared to the laughably naive description of it in the Bible where the sun, moon and stars were stuck to a dome over Earth above which there was just water. And the stars could even be shaken loose by earthquakes when they would fall to Earth and could be trampled on by goats.

By contrast, here are the latest clutch of images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are all of face-on spiral galaxies taken in the infra-red spectrum. Compare them to the description in Genesis where the entire Universe has a small, flat Earth at the centre of it.

Wednesday 14 September 2022

Creationism In Crisis - Scientists Find Evidence of Domesticated Animals From Thousands of Years Before God Allegedly Created Them

What ancient dung reveals about Epipaleolithic animal tending | Plos One
Reconstruction of the Epipalaeolithic hut showing a person sitting on the area outside of the hut where dung had accumulated.

Credit: Andrew Moore, CC-BY 4.0

A paper published today in PLoS One, will make grim reading for anyone still trying to cling to the discredited notion of Bible inerrancy in matters of science and history, because it shows that humans had domesticated cattle at least before 12,300 years ago., i.e. 8,000 years before Bible literalists believe Earth was created.

The evidence was found by Alexia Smith of the Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, U.S.A, and colleagues, in the shape of crystals of dung spherulites — tiny calcium carbonate clumps found in the dung of animals - at Abu Hureyra, Syria, at a site which had been occupied for several thousand years, spanning the transition of human culture from hunter-gatherers to farming and cattle herding.

It is also evidence of that transition because those who kept these small herd of animals, probably mostly sheep, were still hunter-gatherers, so this marks the beginning of cattle herding in the area.

PLoS describe the finding and its significance in information released ahead of publication:

Friday 9 September 2022

Unintelligent Designer News - When Yesterday's Soltion to the Problem You Created Earlier, is Today's Problem Waiting To Be Solved

These female hummingbirds evolved to look like males — apparently to evade aggression | UW News
Female white-necked jacobin hummingbird with male-like plumage
Female white-necked jacobin hummingbird with male-like plumage
Irene Mendez Cruz
If you share the childish creationist belief in intelligent [sic] design, you must accept that the designer behaves like an amnesiac or an idiot, constantly discovering that the solution it designed to solve yesterday's problem is today's problem waiting to be solved. The result is an almost infinite number of examples of arms races and their results to be found throughout nature. An offshoot of this process is various forms of mimicry, where one species comes to resemble another because that helps protect it from a predator on both.

A case in point, but one with a slight twist, is the fact that one in five females of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird, Florisuga mellivora, have bright 'male' plumage instead of the usual duller ‘female’ plumage, however, they still have the lighter female bodyweight and have female patterns of behaviour.

Males of the species have dazzling blue-and-white plumage, as do all juveniles. Males are also aggressive in defending their territory and food sources. About 80% of the females develop a duller, green and white plumage as they mature. This pattern, where males are brightly coloured and the females are duller is common in birds, where males display to defend their territory and to attract a mate, while the females which don’t need to display to attract a mate, can afford to be duller and more difficult for predators to see.

So ,the question is, why do about 20% of F. melliflora hummingbird develop a 'male' plumage while retaining a lighter female body and behaviour? This was the question scientists from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA and the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA set out to answer.

The answer turned out to be an unusual case of mimicry, where the females are not mimicking another species for protection, but males of the same species. This works because the males are bullies and cowards, and tend to pick on the light-weight females while avoiding picking a fight with other males and with juveniles (which also seem to be getting protection against the cowardly males by, unusually for birds, having adult ‘male’ plumage as juveniles).

As the news release from Washington University explains:

Monday 5 September 2022

Covidiot News - Massive Success for the Pro-Trump, Self-Genocide Campaign

Covid-19: U.S. Life Expectancy Continued to Decrease in 2021, Study Finds - USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology

More evidence of the astonishingly stupid, but highly successful pro-Trump antivaxx campaign against the COVID-19 vaccinations was produced today in the form of evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic death rate in the USA produced a significant fall in life-expectancy in 2021, continuing a sharp fall in 2020. It also showed how there were persistent disparities in life expectancy by race and ethnicity.

The antivaxx campaign came about in support of the then president, Donald Trump, who, realising he was out of his depth with the science, but due to his narcissistic personality disorder, was incapable of admitting it, panicked and set about politicizing the pandemic, threatening and vilifying scientists who tried to advise him and pressurizing officials to supress bad news and provide disinformation.

He first declared the pandemic to be a hoax, then to be a mild illness that would be over by April (2020) and which could be prevented with wackadoodle, untested 'preventative' chloramphenicol. This subsequently turned out to not only be ineffective in preventing infection or minimising the symptoms but was positively dangerous.

At one point, in a comical pretence of medical expertise that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so seriously stupid, the fool even suggested drinking surface disinfectants or inserting a UV light source into the body to cure the disease. Soon, wearing face-covering and social distancing became political acts, as did getting vaccinated when the vaccines were produced. Evangelical preachers preached against face-masks and for the right to continue to hold super-spreader events in their churches, and Trump's election rallies in which face-coverings were discouraged, became serious super-spreader events in their own right.

Consequently, when the Omicron wave hit, the death toll became overwhelmingly of unvaccinated people in Republican-leading areas of America, to the extent that some commentators referred to it as a self-inflicted genocide of the most gullible, as the Republicans Party became possibly the first political party in history with policies seemingly designed to kill their own supporters and with supporters who believed that risking the lives of themselves, their families and society at large was the patriotic thing to do.

All to save the orange buffoon’s face.

Sunday 27 February 2022

Religious Stupidity News - Blundering Priest Now Trying to Save People From the Hellfire His Blunder Destined Them For

Pope Benedict XVI performing the ritual of baptism - but the words must be exact or God doesn't know it has been performed.
Priest’s new assignment: Helping those he invalidly baptized

The ludicrous tale of the Catholic priest who inadvertently condemned thousands of residents of St. Gregory Parish, Phoenix, Arizona USA, to hellfire by using a wrong word in the magic spell called baptism, took a new turn recently.

Having resigned as the parish priest, he took up a new role of baptising those he cursed, this time with the right words in the magic spell. The ritual of baptism inducts children into the Catholic Church, and so the 'one true faith', without their consent or participation. This then gives them special protection by God who casts everyone without the 'one true faith' into Hell, there to suffer an eternity of agony in hellfire.

The problem was that by using the wrong words, God was unaware that he, in the form of Jesus, for whom the priest was speaking, had baptised the children into the one true faith, so he doesn't know which ones to save and which ones to cast into the fiery pit for having the wrong faith. What Fr. Andrés Arango, should have said was "I baptise you...", instead, he said "We baptise you..." and obviously, "I" means "Jesus" in that context, and "We" doesn't, because, being specially anointed, a Catholic priest (but now any other priest, mind you!) speaks for Jesus, so God wouldn't know what was going on as he, being omniscient, doesn't understand a spell if even one word is wrong.

Sunday 20 February 2022

Oops! The Wrong Magic Spell has Doomed Thousands of Catholics to Hellfire, Apparently.

Casting a spell in the rite of baptism to ensure God knows you have the one true faith.
But the spell must be precise or it won't work!
A Catholic priest in Arizona resigned after discovering he'd incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms for over 20 years

The thing about protective magic spells is that they must be said exactly, without the slightest deviation or alteration, or they don't work, and when they are directed at an omniscient god, he/she doesn't understand them if even one word is wrong, so they don't work!

At least, this appears to be the official position of the Catholic Church, because Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, of Phoenix, Arizona, USA has informed thousands of people who assumed they had the protective spell of baptism cast on them by a parish priest, have no such protection because the said priest got one word of the spell wrong when performing the ritual, which also includes magic hand movements and magic water. In a letter to his distraught flock, Bishop Olmstead said:

Monday 10 January 2022

Covidiocy, Conspiracism and Creationist Self-Deception Explained

Why people deceive themselves - Newsportal - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Hard though it can be to understand, the reason people such as antivaxx covidiots, conspiracy theorists and Creationists, hold onto patently idiotic and counter-factual opinions has been explained as a process of self-deception by two researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany and the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

In a paper published on 6 January, 2022, in the journal Philosophical Psychology, Dr. Francesco Marchi and Professor Albert Newen describe four strategies used to stabilise and shield the positive self-image. According to their theory, self-deception helps people to stay motivated in difficult situations. Of course, self-deception is common to all people and not confined to those who hold wackadoodle opinions, but the way they hold doggedly to those patently wrong beliefs is understandable as a strategy for coping with cognitive dissonance.

Thursday 9 December 2021

Malevolent Designer News - Another Inexplicable Arms Race to Protect Us AND Keep Making Us Sick!

As hunter-gatherer cultures began to eat more ruminants, they encountered anthrax more regularly than their primate ancestors.
Image credit: Abubakar Balogun/Provided
Anthrax arms race helped Europeans evolve against disease | Cornell Chronicle

Creationist mode:


When Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer created the anthrax bacteria, the purpose was to create an organism that would lay dormant in the soil for tens or hundreds of years and then, when eaten by a grazing animal such as sheep or cattle, it would produce a toxin which killed the unfortunate animal, so it's body could rot and produce millions more spores to lay dormant in the soil and so repeat the cycle endlessly. We know this because this is the result and an omniscient, omnipotent creator must know what the result of its creations will be, so creates them for that purpose and that purpose only.

Also, part of this intended outcome was that, as human culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists with domesticated animals, humans too would catch anthrax from their domestic animals and die from the toxins the bacteria produce in their bodies. Humans were intended to catch anthrax by eating their cattle while their cattle caught it by grazing on anthrax-contaminated pastures.

Now researchers at Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine have discovered that Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer then went in for something it frequently does with the nasty little parasites it creates to kill us with - it started to have an arms race with itself to protect us from the bacteria it had created to harm us with, then by modifying the bacteria so they could overcome the defences if was giving us - just as today it is creating new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 so it can continue to make us sick despite the vaccines humans have created to defend themselves with.

Creationist mode:


At least, that, if they follow the logic of their Creationist dogmas, is how Creationists have to view the relationship between anthrax and humans and other animals.

Tuesday 16 November 2021

If Ever You're Feeling Really Stupid - 20 Absurdities That Some Adults Believe

  1. That Earth is flat and has a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. The moon and sun are lamps hung on this dome so we can tell day from night and the stars stuck to it can shake loose and fall to earth during earthquakes.
  2. That a magic man designed himself before he existed then self-assemble out of nothing with enough information to create a Universe out of nothing and micromanage it to the minutest level.
  3. That a hundred-year-old man built a wooden boat and rounded up two or seven of every species in the world to live together for a year sealed in that boat with only one small window for air, then they left the boat onto a sterile planet on which all living things had been destroyed, including the plants, but still found enough to eat so everything alive today is descended from those few survivors.
  4. That just five generations after the survivors left the boat in 2, there were enough people to support a massive civil engineering project to build a tower up to Heaven, which in those days was just above the sky over the Middle East, and that all the languages on Earth are the result of this population each being magically made to speak languages that non-one else could understand, because the project alarmed an omniscient, omnipotent god who lived in the Heaven.

Monday 27 September 2021

Christian Hate News - Loony Talibangelical Extremist Greg Locke on the War-Path.

Pastor Greg Locke, Global Vision Bible Church, Tennessee.
"This means war!"
Hate-Preacher Tells Right-Wing Crowd They’re Being Persecuted: “This Means War!” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Readers of this blog will be very familiar with false prophet, rabid homophobe and preacher of hate with a persecution complex, Greg Locke, who recently announced he was building the violent Church that Jesus wanted. An announcement that promptly got him banned from Twitter and resulted in several of his more offensive YouTube videos being taken down.

According to Locke, only gay people would do nothing while the evil, Satanic Democrats closed churches to stop them spreading the coronavirus, and Jesus wasn't gay so he would have defended his First Amendments rights with his Second Amendment rights.

It goes without saying that the US Constitution applied in 1st Century Palestine and Jesus jealously guarded his right to use guns to keep his churches open by posting armed thugs at the door to stop the authorities "trying something"!

I'm not a psychiatrist, but Locke's behaviour since he was shown to be a false prophet by falsely prophesying that Trump would win last November by a landslide because God had told him personally, he would arrange it, is becoming so bizarre and extreme that if his behaviour doesn't meet the definition of insanity, then insanity needs to be redefined.

Monday 13 September 2021

Covidiot News - Loony Talibangelical Nut Job "Destroys" COVID-19 - Again!

Kenneth Copeland, destroyed COVID, again!
Kenneth Copeland, Who Said COVID Was “Destroyed” a Year Ago, Is Saying It Again | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

The ridiculous grifter, Kenneth Copeland, darling of the Talibangelical extreme right, has demonstrated the credulity of his followers yet again, by claiming to have totally destroyed the coronavirus for at least the third time. The virus doesn't seem to have noticed this time either.

Readers may remember how, to the whoops and cheers of the fools in his audience, he 'destroyed' it in March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, just by blowing 'the wind of God' on it, spitting at it and pronouncing it gone for ever.

Tuesday 7 September 2021

Trumpanzee Lunatic News - Pastor Greg Locke "Building a Violent Church" for Jesus

Pastor Greg Locke
Building a violent church for Jesus
'Apostle' Michael Petro Says God Is Raising Up a 'Violent Church' Because Democrats Don't Tolerate Christianity | Right Wing Watch

Extremist Trumpanzee loon and self-style Prophet of God (PoG), Greg Lock, has never gotten over committing the cardinal sin for PoGs - prophesying a specific event on a specific date and so running the risk of being proved wrong and a false prophet. Lock, of course, is famous for prophesying a Trump win by a landslide last November, claiming God had revealed this to him and promised he would ensure it happened. Trump lost!

Now, as Locke dives deeper down the specially-constructed QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole, desperately trying to prove he isn't a false prophet because Trump won really (it's just that God was powerless to stop the massive, Satanic conspiracy to steal the election, apparently), he is becoming more and more extreme and revealing a tendency towards violence that many Christians find shocking for a supposed man of god and professed follower of Jesus. With every passing deadline by which the military were prophesied to have overthrown the Biden presidency, revealed the scale of the 'election fraud', named the 'child-trafficking paedophiles' responsible, executed the perpetrators, including the entire leadership of the Democratic Party, and reinstated Donald Trump in the White House (the last deadline being the end of August), Lock becomes ever more insane and increasingly violent.

Tuesday 31 August 2021

Christian False Prophet, Kat Kerr, Makes a Fool of Herself (and Her Followers) Again

Kat Kerr
Talibangelical Christian False Prophetess
Christian “Prophetess” Tries (and Fails) to Take “Authority” Over Hurricane Ida | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

As frauds go, they don't get more fraudulent than Christian Talibangelist, false prophetess, Kat Kerr.

Kerr earns her living telling her credulous followers implausible tales about her supposed multiple visits to Heaven to chat with her personal friends Jesus and his dad. She also claims to have the power to command vast armies of angels to guarantee the security of, for example, her beloved former president, Donald Trump's rallies, and to ensure he wins the presidential election in which he was booted out of office by the American electorate.

She also claims to be able to control the weather and take control of hurricanes and tropical storms; claims which her simpleton followers appear to believe despite her appalling record in that respect. Mind you, those who can believe a hurricane is sentient and has the ability to obey the words and magic spells of Kerr and her ilk can probably be persuaded to believe that which is manifestly untrue.

Monday 26 July 2021

CDC: 99.5% of COVID-19 Deaths are of Unvaccinated Individuals.

CDC: 99.5% of COVID-19 deaths are from unvaccinated individuals

Evidence of the efficacy, and so the good sense of getting vaccinated, of the anti-Covid vaccine is emerging in astonishing statistics from the USA, which is divided on tribal lines on the issue, with 'red' (Republican) states following the disastrous Donald Trump and evangelical Christian lead in minimising the seriousness of the vaccine, eschewing the measures to mitigate the pandemic and now in opposing the vaccines, having much higher infection/hospitalisation/death rates compared to 'blue' (Democrat) states.

According to figures produced by DCD director, Dr Rochelle Walensky during a White House briefing in early July, 99.5% of recent COVID-19 deaths are of people who were unvaccinated!

According to this report, Dr Walensky told journalists:

Sunday 4 July 2021

Talibangelical Nutter News - Robin Bullock Goes Even Further Round the Bend

Evangelist: The 2008 Democratic Convention Stage Was Modeled on Satan’s Throne | Beth Stoneburner | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

If you want to see the harm that fundamentalist religion can do to a person's mental state, you need look no further than Talibangelist Trumpanzee, Robin Bullock, of Youth Force Ministries Church International, who is now seeing things that aren't there and finding Satan lurking in everything.

Of course, as usual with Talibangelists who earn their living exploiting the fears and prejudices of vulnerable people who have been raised with a morbid theophobic psychosis as part of their fundamentalist conditioning, and since the line between insanity and religiosity is often blurred or non-existent, it is difficult to tell whether these are simply fantasies designed to appeal to his credulous audience or the genuine signs of clinical psychosis and evidence of the harm that religious fanaticism can do, so I'll leave readers to decide that for themselves.

Monday 3 May 2021

Trumpanzee News - More Bull From Robin Bullock

Robin Bullock - False Prophet
Youth Force Ministries Church International
Robin Bullock Claims President Hillary Clinton Would Have Ushered in the Great Tribulation | Right Wing Watch

2020 did not go well for American televangelical 'Prophets of God' when all of their prophecies of a landslide win for Trump failed to come true, and 2021 has so far been even worse with so many of them having prophesied an imminent military coup or some other means of deposing Biden and reinstalling Trump in the White House.

So, fresh from his stunning failures at prophesying the future, loopy right-wing Trumpanzee Talibangelist and self-appointed 'Prophet of God', Robin Bullock, has now taken to prophesying the past. At least he seems to have learned the lesson that a successful prophet never makes himself a hostage to future events by prophesying something specific - that can fail to happen. Keep it general; keep it vague and always use words that can be reinterpreted later if need be.

Last Monday, he appeared on the loony right-wing Elijah Streams You Tube channel to tell his credulous followers that Barak Obama had planned the Covid-19 pandemic and for Hilary Clinton to become President in order to destroy America and usher in the 'End Times', because, as everyone knows, destroying America is what these supposed 'End Times' in the 'Book of Revelations' is all about.

Not only was the future existence of the USA known to the writers of the New Testament in 2nd century Rome, but the racial profile, social stratification and exact form of the democratic system that no-one had ever heard of at the time, was known, so they were accurately describing its destruction in 2020, give or take a year or two.

For the parochially ignorant American extreme right, 'America' and 'the World' are synonyms. Everything of any importance happens in the USA and onlythings that happens in the USA are of any importance. If their mythical god, Jesus, ever manifests himself, it will be in America, without a shadow of doubt, because he is American - and he speaks English.

Playing to their paranoias and hatred of the liberal left, Bullock told his credulous audience:
Remember when Barack Obama left the presidency? He said, ‘Maybe we were 15 to 20 years too early.’ Why would he say that? He’s talking about the demoralization period… He said, ‘Maybe we were 15 or 20 years too early,’ because he was a Saul Alinsky follower. He’s following the four stages of subversion.

He thought it was gonna happen, and he thought Hillary Clinton should have stepped in, and it was demoralized, destabilize, pushed to a crisis. The crisis was COVID. That’s what it was. It was to push the nation to a crisis — COVID — and so they planned on Hillary Clinton being president right at that moment. That’s why they went berserk when Trump won. They couldn’t get over that. They said, ‘We got to get him out, got to get him out, got to get him out, got to get him out,’ because they knew the virus was coming in 2020, and she should have been the president. And if it had been, the book of Revelation — we don’t have time to look at that — said she would have taken us into the Great Tribulation. And that’s what was planned.
The Saul Alinsky referred to is high on the conservative right's demonology because he advocated social justice and democratic community action to achieve it. Elements of his 'community action' teaching were initially adopted by the right wing Republican faction, the Tea Party, until they realised that both Obama and Hillery Clinton had studied his work too, so he instantly became the focus of misrepresentation and bogeyman scaremongering by the extreme right.

In fact, both Clinton and Obama had been critical of aspects of his direct community action, but that was lost on the right wing propagandists looking to smear them with accusations of un-American activities and ambitions. How dare anyone advocate social justice for the poor and dispossessed and even racial minorities? They'll be wanting real democracy, equal rights and a say in shaping their own destiny next! Then where would we be!? The 'End Times' indeed for the extreme right.

But Bullock seems even more confused than usual here. Aren't these 'End Times' what every evangelical fruitloop Christian is working for? Isn't that the time when the greatest thing they can hope for will happen - their imaginary friend comes and kills everyone who disagrees with them and they get everything for themselves and the reward of a grandstand view to watch people, even their friends and relatives, being tortured for eternity in the final satiation of their hatred for anyone who isn't in their cult?

This case highlights the difference between mental health-care in the UK and the rest of the civilised world, and the USA. In the civilised world people who hear voices and suffer from psychotic delusions and paranoia get admitted to a place of safety and given medication; in the USA they are put on television and people hang on their every word and give them money.

Look What Religion Can Be Used For! Kansa Rep. Mark Samsel Arrested for Battering a School Boy

Rep. Mark Samsel (R-Wellsville, Kansas)
Kansas Republican Mark Samsel arrested on battery charge after substitute teacher videos surface - The Washington Post

The other day, Christian fundamentalist and elected Representative for Kansas Wellsville, Mark Samsel, Republican, harangued a bunch of school kids about their sex live, masturbation, God and the Bible, then kneed one of the boys in the groin and invited his classmates to 'check his nuts', then told them they had permission to 'kick him in the balls'. He was acting as a substitute teacher at the time.

He was later arrested after complaints from parents and charged with battery. He was released on $1,000 the same day, and now claims it was a stunt in which his victim was fully compliant. They did it to warn the other children about the dangers of suicide [sic] allegedly. In a posting on SnapChat he said: It was all planned. Every little bit of it. That’s right. The kids and I planned ALL this to SEND A MESSAGE about art, mental health, teenage suicide, how we treat our educators and one another. To who? Parents. And grandparents. And all of Wellsville.
Samsel claimed he was trying to warn the children about:
A sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times [because] he has two parents and they’re both females. He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay.
And if you believe that, you'll probably believe anything.


Apparently, this is best done by pinning a child against a way and threatening to "Put the wrath of God in you" then sexually assaulting him in a way that could have affected his fertility and had life-changing consequences. After rhetorical questions about whether they enjoy 'making babies' because it feels good, he then asks the class if any of them have every masturbated and tells them not to answer because God knows already. At one point he asks the boy pinned against the wall if he believed God has been speaking to him (Samsel).

Samsel works with students in several capacities, including as a referee and through church groups, parents said. One parent, Joshua Zeck told the Kansas City Star:
I’m a concerned parent who doesn’t want this swept under the rug. He's around Kids all the time. He’s a state representative. He’s in a position of power.
Wellsville Unified School District Superintendent Ryan Bradbury said that Samsel will no longer be allowed to work for the district. Their priority is the safety of students.

Last February, Samsel was one of 13 Repuglicans who voted against a bill to end Kansas’s exclusion of spouses from sexual battery laws. Currently, it's not an offence for a man to rape or sexually assault his wife in Kansas, and Samsel wants to keep it that way. Speaking ahead of ther vote he said he did not want to criminalise sexual relations between spouses! Clearly, he has strange ideas about what normal sexual relations between spouses are and has no concern about the safety of women in an abusive marriage.

Samsel behaved like this because he is a fundamentalist Christian zealot.

The question is, has his Christian zealotry made him act in this bizarre way, or is it his excuse for sexually assaulting and verbally abusing children in his care? In other words, was Christian fundamentalism the cause of his insane behavious or was insanity the cause of his Christian fundamentalism?
Answers below, please.

Thursday 29 April 2021

Talibangelical Covidiot News - Death Threats for Advocating Anti-Covid Vaccine

Jamie Aten, Disaster psychologist, author and evangelical
Death threats for advocating anti-Covid vaccines.
For evangelical leader Jamie Aten, advocating for vaccines led to a death threat

An evangelical Christian who urged his fellow evangelicals to get the anti-covid vaccine says he has been getting death threats and other hate messages from his fellow evangelical Christians.

Jamie Aten is executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College and his work has generally been praised, but when he began urging his fellow evangelicals to get vaccinated, things turned ugly.

Among the emails he reported when he filed his complaint to the sheriff’s office in DuPage County, Illinois, was one telling him his work on vaccines was "punishable by death".

Another, received after he spoke to the New York Times about the importance of getting vaccinated, warned him that encouraging white evangelicals would "eventually lead to the murdering of all mankind". It continued with the veiled threat, "If I knew my stuff, I would know not to encourage people to get vaccinated because that’s what’s going to take down humanity more".

The importance of persuading white evangelical leaders to get a vaccine was highlighted by a recent Pew Research poll which showed that 37% of white evangelicals would not have the vaccine - one of the highest levels of vaccine scepticism for any American demographic. Given the large number of white evangelicals in the USA, this figure means it will be difficult to reach the required level for herd immunity to be effective in controlling the virus, so America will always have a high level of infections and the pandemic will last much longer and claim many more lives than it need.

Other surveys have shown that White Evangelical Christians are the least concerned about how their behaviour impacts on other people when it comes to holding super-spreader events in churches, wearing face masks and observing the social-distancing regulations, so it is hardly surprising that they are also least concerned about acting as a reservoir for the coronavirus and providing a means for new varieties to evolve, so long as they aren't slightly inconvenienced in any way.

Last year, under Trump's leadership, face-masks became a badge of tribal loyalty for Americans, like a MAGA hat. Now it seems a vaccination is also a sign of tribal loyalties.

But perhaps the most instructive thing in this story is not the stupidity of those, mostly Trumpanzee evangelical Christians, who are campaigning against the vaccines, but their quick resort to threats, like good fundamentalist Christians when people disagree with them.

Having just posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek item on Twitter about science flying a helicopter over the surface of Mars and asking what equivalent achievements religions had to matched it, I can understand how Aten feels, as I have also had veiled threats about what their imaginary friend is going to do to me if I don't agree with them and credit the work done by religious scientist to religion, not science. Apparently, they believe that science done by religious scientists is materially different to that done by non-religious scientists, so should be credited to religion, not science.

But Aten has chosen his bed-fellows himself. He might like to consider what it is about their mutual religion that can be used to excuse their selfishness and the threats of violence against anyone who dares to disagree with them. He chose to jump into bed with that particular rat pack so he shouldn't be surprised when they act entirely in character (with apologies to any rats who may have been offended by that metaphor). Laudable though his efforts are, he should be asking himself why they are evoking such a response in his co-religionists.


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Tuesday 20 April 2021

Right Wing Christian Racism News - "It's The Jews, I Tell You!"

Right-wing Christian pastor Rick Wiles,
Conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite.
Rick Wiles Says the US Is Under the Control of ‘Satanic Zionists’ | Right Wing Watch

The undercurrent of antisemitism in extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalism was given another noxious airing recently when radical right-wing Christian, conspiracy theorist and End Times broadcaster, Pastor Rick Wiles, declared that the United States is under the control of “Satanic Zionists.”.

Wiles, a non-denominational senior pastor at Flowing Streams Church in Vero Beach, Florida, with a long history of antisemitism, homophobia and support for Putin's Russia, delivered the following hate-filled rant to the audience of his TruNews [sic] broadcast:
The reason the ruling deep state of America hates the Russian people and wants to destroy them? It is the satanic Zionist power that overthrew the Russian government in 1917, did a human blood sacrifice of the Romanov family — a satanic ritual where they slaughtered the Romanovs, it was a satanic blood sacrifice — that same group of Satanists that overthrew the Russian people in 1917, that’s what controls America today.

That spirit right there is what is destroying the United States of America, destroying our freedom, destroying our culture, that spirit right there. That’s what’s making war against Russia. They overthrew it, they got free, they got out from under its bondage. And so who is under its bondage now? The American people. We’re under the bondage of that same satanic spirit.

Trumpanzee Talibangelical News - Just Another Nut-Job For Trump

Tod Coconato, President of Religious Liberty Coalition
Todd Coconato Says Christians Don’t Believe Biden Is President Because God’s ‘Mantle of Anointing’ Remains on Trump | Right Wing Watch

Leading Trumpanzee cultist, preacher and extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian 'prophet', Tod Coconato, is living in one of Trump's alternate realities so he can reconcile his false prophesy of a Trump landslide victory in 2020 with the fact that Biden won with the largest popular vote ever in American electoral history, and is now firmly installed as 46th President of the United States of America.

Coconato, self-appointed President of Religious Liberty Coalition, has now announced to his credulous followers that Biden is not really POTUS because God anointed Trump! Coconutjob announced this while live-streaming from his car last Wednesday.

Claiming, in best psychotic style, that he heard God speaking to him, and miraculously telling him exactly what he wanted to hear, almost like God was reading from a script that Coconato had handed him, he informed his dupes:
When I prayed about if we’d ever see President Trump as our president again, God just reminded me that he’s the one that chooses the leadership, not us. He allows certain things to happen, but he also responds to the prayers of the righteous. And what he was telling me is that just like David—and I think I said this in a past livestream—but just like David, President Trump has the mantle of leadership, has the anointing of leadership. That’s why it’s kind of confusing to saints that are looking, and they’re wondering what’s going on. Because they see Joe Biden and they’re like, ‘This guy doesn’t seem like he’s authentic, like he’s real; is he really the president?’ And I said, ‘God, why are so many people questioning if Joe Biden is the president? I mean, clearly this guy is the president of the United States. Are we to doubt that? Are we not to believe that?’ And God said, ‘It’s about the mantle, the mantle of anointing, which is on President Trump, not Biden.'
The 'Mantle of anointing', eh? That's the way, Todd! Talk gibberish so your dupes will think it holy wisdom!

It would be comical if only there wasn't a more sinister side to this lunacy.
There is a clear warning in that, and not only of the insanity that fundamentalist zealotry can cause (or does the insanity precede the zealotry?). Note Coconato's cavalier regard for the supremacy of the people in their choice of elected leaders. It's not they who choose the president but Coconato's compliant God (as announced by Coconato and other self-appointed 'saints' who claim to hear voices).

If these frauds ever achieve their goal of a Fundamentalist Taliban-style Christian Theocracy in America, these are the self-appointed people who will be deciding who forms the executive, the legislature and, indirectly, the judiciary!

Another examples of how:
Religion provides excuses for people who need excuses

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