Civil Commotion

The most dangerous contagion we now confront is the coronavirus, which has killed more than 20,000 Americans and thrown more than 16 million out of work. The second-most-dangerous contagion is the conspiracy-mongering, hostility to science and outright irrationality promulgated by President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers. It will take intensive contact tracing to follow the spread of crackpot ideas: Is Trump infecting the cable news hosts, or are they infecting him? Suffice it to say, the president and his media fans are both afflicted with perilous misconceptions that are making the threat from the coronavirus far more acute.

At first, both Trump and his media toadies dismissed the threat from the coronavirus, claiming it was no worse than the flu and that it would miraculously disappear by April. Any suggestion that Trump was mishandling the threat was dismissed as a “hoax.” Then on March 13, Trump finally declared a national emergency, and the tone among the Fox News propagandists instantly changed — from deriding concern about the coronavirus among liberal bed-wetters to lauding Trump’s heroic wartime leadership.

Max Boot

Trump’s MAGA-cult has been steeping in FOX-led nutjobbery for so long that most will never be restored to sane citizenship, education, reality; they must be defeated and pushed to the side.

Count on Albert Mohler to tweet something on Easter that encapsulates in just a few words the ugliness and degradation at the heart of Christian thought.

Out salvation is secure. Our debt is paid.

Salvation? What’s that about? What debt? Oh … right. Being human, and all, we are born guilty, and depraved, and deserving of eternal punishment, and only the sacrifice of blood can mollify the wrath of Our Invisible Friend, who is totally ready to throw us worthless, no damn good humans in a lake of fire and sink the raft.

But because of the (temporary) sacrifice of one-third of himself, the blood debt is paid and we can avoid the lake of fire if we spend the rest of our lives sniveling and groveling before His publicists.

It’s degrading nonsense from beginning to end, and if the fools who believe it weren’t such damn nuisances I’d probably feel sorry for them.

Rational people know that Jesus is not coming back to earth. His bleached bones lie buried somewhere on a Judean hillside. What should alarm us is that millions and millions of people believe otherwise; that Jesus was crucified, resurrected from the dead, and returned to Heaven to await the day when his Father tells him to return to earth. These True Christians® are an existential threat, one that threatens to destroy the world. It is in everyone’s best interest that such people are marginalized. It’s time that rational people stop playing nice with believers who have apocalyptic ambitions. When your Evangelical friends on Facebook talk about the Coronavirus pandemic being a sign of the end times, please take them seriously. Many religious beliefs are harmless, cute relics [of] past human history. However, reading the news and interpreting it in light of the Bible is NOT harmless. People who read the news this way are dangerous, and when gathered together as a religious tribe, they can cause untold heartache and harm. We ignore them at our own peril.

Bruce Gerencser

Reason doesn’t work with the devout; if it did, they would have abandoned this preposterous claptrap a long time ago. The best defense is to put them out of your life, and marginalize them with your vote.

If Parishioners Die After Contracting COVID-19 … It’s a Sacrifice for God and Freedom!!!

Tony Spell, leader of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, tells TMZ … he thinks true Christians do not mind dying from COVID-19. He insists that what they fear instead is living in fear. As he puts it, “People that can prefer tyranny over freedom do not deserve freedom.”

Clearly, this sells to morons. There is no defense for the rest of us, however, but to put the Devout whose stupidity endangers us out of our lives.

A survey conducted by the Southern Baptist Convention finds that more than half of their pastors expect Jesus to return during their lifetime.

According to LifeWay, nearly nine out of 10 pastors see at least some current events “matching those Jesus said would occur shortly before He returns to Earth.”

According to the data, 56 percent of pastors either strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement: “I expect Jesus to return in my lifetime.” Twenty-four percent said they were “not sure,” while 20 percent either strongly or somewhat disagreed.

In total, 97 percent of pastors said they believe Christ will return to Earth again.

Remember, though: This is the same pack of morons who expect Jesus to protect attendees at their services in the midst of a global, highly infectious pandemic. We all know how that has worked out.