In 2015, [God] spoke to me and said Donald Trump would become president,” Christmas said. “Did not look possible. He became president. Most of us thought that he would become president again this time, and he was. He won it by about 80 million votes.
Kent Christmas, Holy Man
I guess people who believe in talking snakes will believe just about anything.
Nobody with a properly functioning mind can any longer regard conservatives as anything but a dangerous national enemy.
The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas cheered against COVID-19 vaccinations, drawing concern from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“It’s horrifying,” Fauci told CNN in an interview Sunday. “They’re cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives.”
Something has gone wildly wrong, wildly sick, on the Right. They are no longer part of the decent, educated world — and they are NOT conservatives in any meaningful sense of the word; they’ve degenerated into sick nihilists.
The Republican Party of Donald Trump is past salvation; we need a third party if health is ever to be restored to our public life.
The Washington Post has up a nice piece investigating the role of religion’s decline in the January 6th insurrection.
Many forces contributed to the attack on the Capitol, including Trump’s false claims of electoral victory and American anger with institutions. But part of the mix, say experts on American religion, is the fact that the country is in a period when institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight.
That has created room for what Yale University sociologist Phil Gorski calls a religious “melee, a free for all.”
It’s a thoughtful piece and well worth your time.
Seriously, you couldn’t make this up: After decades of denigrating science because it undermines the Christian narrative, Holy Men are feeling sorry for themselves because they can’t convince their congregants to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
State health officials are conducting informal focus groups and outreach to try to ease pastors’ concerns about discussing vaccination, but progress is often elusive, they said. Many pastors said they have already lost congregants to fights over coronavirus restrictions and fear risking further desertions by promoting vaccinations. Others said their congregations are so ideologically opposed to the vaccine that discussing it would not be worth the trouble.
“If I put forth effort to push it, I’d be wasting my breath,” said Nathan White, a pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in Skipwith, Va., a small town near the North Carolina border.
Sorry — but they get no sympathy from me. I’ve heard grotesque misrepresentations of science from preachers, some so grievous that I’ve honestly marveled that the congregation doesn’t burst into laughter. And now, after decades of telling their congregations that science can’t be trusted — What do you know? — their congregations won’t stand in line to get vaccinated and are dying off.
Wait till somebody explains to the surviving morons that it’s natural selection, evolution, at work.
An atypically fond recollection of Madelyn Murray O’Hair:
Someone who was very important to me is Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She started the American atheist movement and at one point she was the most hated woman in America, because her goal — which she achieved — was to get rid of prayer in schools. She believed in the separation of church and state, and in the First Amendment. She really fought, and she used her son as one of the plaintiffs in a suit against the Baltimore City Public School System. In the ’60s, there was so much prayer and religious indoctrination in schools, which she thought was ludicrous, and so do I. It’s like, Excuse me, which God? Whose God? Do you mean grandpa, in a white robe with a beard who murdered his own son, put him on a cross? [emphasis in original]
There aren’t many people out there with kind things to say about O’Hair, but everyone who appreciates the First Amendment ought to be a fan. I seriously need to get busy on that biography project.
