Civil Commotion

Another whackjob Christian cult that beats, imprisons, and regulates the sex lives of its members.

Congregants of the Word of Faith Fellowship were regularly punched, smacked, choked, slammed to the floor or thrown through walls in a violent form of deliverance meant to “purify” sinners by beating out devils, 43 former members told The Associated Press in separate, exclusive interviews.

[ … ]

Those interviewed — most of them raised in the church — say Word of Faith leaders waged a decades-long cover-up to thwart investigations by law enforcement and social services officials, including strong-arming young victims and their parents to lie.

They said members were forbidden to seek outside medical attention for their injuries, which included cuts, sprains and cracked ribs.

Several former followers said some congregants were sexually abused, including minors.

Well … you know: When you’re no damn good, when you’re nothing but a putrid blot on a cosmos that is stoking hellfire even now, there’s nothing to do but take it.

Now, I grant that Word of Faith is not a typical church, but there should be no confusion about this, either: The difference between Word of Faith, and the little white church around the corner from your home, is one only of degree. Each is able to thrive only by degrading its members and turning them into obedient automatons, and after that is achieved the difference between the two churches hangs exclusively on the complex of psychoses found in the pastor.

Lawsuit: priest demanded sexual favors for Boy Scout badges

I’ve been sharing stories about sexual abuse by clergy for so long that I thought I’d seen it all, but … no. Somehow, this one tops them all.

This is bizarre, by even the dismal standards of the Tweeter-in-Chief. After all, Barack Obama had no influence on the budget during the first month he was in office, and The Donald hasn’t exercised any influence over the budget for the first month of his tenure.

Does he not know that? Does he think the rest of us don’t know that? Are the people who voted for him so abysmally ignorant that he is betting they don’t know that? Are they so abysmally ignorant that they’ll chock it up as one more indignity visited upon The Donald by the enemies of the people?

Seriously: What gives here? At face value, it looks goddam crazy.

This is probably a reaction to this story, which reports that Reince Priebus tried to inveigle the FBI into dismissing news reports that the Trump campaign was in constant contact with Russian intelligence agencies during the campaign.

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN.

Since it’s unlikely that the Trump administration would have told the story of their attempted meddling, we’re safe to suppose that the source of the story was the other half of the conversation, the FBI itself.

• If Trump is innocent of wrongdoing, his attitude would be something along the lines of, “The investigation is a bother when I’m trying to get my administration set up, but there is only one possible outcome and I’ll be happy to hear Director Comey affirm what we’ve said all along: We did nothing wrong.”

• All those phone calls with Russian intelligence operatives were not about soybean futures. There is no (publicly available) proof yet that the campaign colluded with Russian intelligence’s hacking of the Clinton e-mails — but there is no reasonable expectation but that’s what the FBI will find if it keeps digging.

Seriously: Have any of you, ever in your life, sat through a sermon without hearing some variation of “You’re no damn good”? I assure you that, once you have heard it, you won’t be able to sit in church without hearing it. I grant it might occasionally be obscured by the marketing lie that Christianity is all about love-love-love, but if you think carefully you’ll realize that your unworthiness to exist is a constant, relentless theme — in fact, a drumbeat.

It is your submission to that degradation which empowers preachers and enables the evil that religion does.