https://www.rawstory.com/jerry-falwell-jr-2666333522/
Nov. 22, 2023
Axios reports that journalist Tim Alberta is coming out with a new book in which Falwell Jr. candidly admits that his late father, Jerry Falwell, Sr., founded the university solely to be an institutional arm of the Republican Party and not to be a Christian university aimed at spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Dec. 22, 2022
If you don't believe science, ignore the weather warnings for the next few days. Don't bother letting your faucets drip tonight. Say a prayer asking for God to protect you, and you will be fine.
https://twitter.com/smc429/status/1599426448762494977
10:32 AM · Dec 4, 2022
Brown Eyed Susan
@smc429
Joel Osteen, one of the richest pastors in the US, has 5 fireplaces, 3 elevators, and a driveway that can fit over 20 cars, including his Ferrari.
Joel doesn't pay taxes, but you do.
Why is this?
If praying didn't keep him from having diabetes, why did he think it would protect him from Covid?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/01/media/marcus-lamb-covid-death/index.html
By Carma Hassan, Michelle Watson, CNN Business
Updated 9:27 AM ET, Thu December 2, 2021
Prominent Christian televangelist and anti-vaccine advocate Marcus Lamb died after being hospitalized with Covid-19, his family announced Tuesday.
Lamb founded Christian television network Daystar Television Network in 1997.
His wife Joni Lamb, announced the televangelist's death on Daystar's program streamed to Facebook Tuesday. She said her husband had diabetes but was healthy and was hospitalized after being diagnosed with Covid-19.
"He never talked about that, but he had diabetes, but he kept it in check. He was very healthy, he ate healthy, he kept his weight down, and always kept his sugar at a good level. But with trying to treat Covid and the pneumonia, the different protocols that are used, including many of the protocols we talked about here on Daystar, and we used those, and I used them and breezed through Covid.
-----
As the article says, Bethesda is closed, but their are still similar operations today.
https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/bethesda-home-girls-stolen-babies/index.html
by Tyler Kingkade
-----
Nov. 11, 2021More than three decades have passed since a federal lawsuit and a state investigation exposed the abuse hundreds of girls endured at the Bethesda Home for Girls, forcing the home to close.
Yet, the shadow of Bethesda lingers.
In recent interviews, more than a dozen former residents — most of whom are speaking about their experiences publicly for the first time — described their ongoing trauma from the months they spent locked up in Bethesda as children. The women said their relatives sent them to the home because they were rebellious, or were caught drinking or smoking. Many of them were pregnant.
-----
The former Bethesda residents described a brutal facility, where girls were beaten and called “whores” and “harlots.” Staff members censored the girls’ communication with outsiders, including their parents, former residents said. And for those who were pregnant, another trauma awaited: the removal of their babies.
It all went on in secret. There was no oversight from the state government, which at the time didn’t require child care centers to register with the state, let alone be inspected.
Then, in 1982, the allegations of abuse exploded into public view, in a federal lawsuit followed by investigations by welfare agents and judicial officers.
“The testimony of the things that occurred in the home was horrific,” said Dan Wise, an attorney who was appointed by the county court in 1984 to investigate Bethesda. “And it was, of course, all done in the name of the Lord with Bible-backed verses. It was an unbelievable situation behind closed doors.”
-----
I
remember how hypocritical people were about Islamists burning a statue
of Buddha, when Christians have done the same thing to other religions.
https://news.yahoo.com/nigerian-priest-saving-igbo-deities-231415240.html
While some Pentecostal preachers in eastern Nigeria set fire to statues and other ancient artefacts that they regard as symbols of idolatry, one Catholic priest is collecting them instead.
The artefacts are central to the traditional religions practised by the region's Igbo people, who see them as sacred, and possessing supernatural powers.
BBC Igbo's Chiagozie Nwonwu and Karina Igonikon report on the priest's efforts to protect a history that is being lost because of the actions of some preachers.
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/anti-vaxxer-hospitalised-covid-saying-202354380.html
Gustaf Kilander
Tue, June 1, 2021, 4:23 PM·2 min read
Rick Wiles, a right-wing Christian talk show host and anti-vaxxer has been hospitalised with Covid-19 after saying vaccines would wipe out “stupid people”.
Less than a month ago, Mr Wiles said he would never get vaccinated. His website, TruNews, announced over the weekend that had been infected and taken to hospital where he had been given oxygen. The announcement was reported by Right Wing Watch.
•••••
TruNews suddenly suspended its broadcast last week, announcing that it was “experiencing a sudden cluster of flu and COVID among some employees and their relatives”.
The outlet then said on Sunday that Mr Wiles had been hospitalised.
•••••
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/samuel-paty-beheading-france-girl-lied/
March 9, 2021 / 4:46 PM
A 13-year-old schoolgirl confessed that she lied about a French teacher who was beheaded after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the girl's lawyer. Samuel Paty, a secondary school teacher in a town near Paris, was killed last October by a radical Chechen teenager after showing the cartoons to students during a civics class about free speech.\
The unidentified girl told police that she lied about being in the class and falsely accused Paty of asking Muslim children to leave the class while he showed the pictures.
Her father, who has been charged in connection with the murder, posted several incendiary videos on Facebook based on his daughter's testimony which identified Paty.
"Everything in the investigation showed very early that she lied," the Paty family's lawyer Virginie Le Roy told RTL radio on Tuesday.
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/indigenous-leaders-warn-missionaries-turning-201329453.html
https://www.reuters.com/
Anthony Boadle
Thu, February 11, 2021, 3:13 PM
Medical teams working to immunize Brazil's remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine, say tribal leaders and advocates.
On the São Francisco reservation in the state of Amazonas, Jamamadi villagers sent health workers packing with bows and arrows when they visited by helicopter this month, said Claudemir da Silva, an Apurinã leader representing indigenous communities on the Purus river, a tributary of the Amazon.
"It's not happening in all villages, just in those that have missionaries or evangelical chapels where pastors are convincing the people not to receive the vaccine, that they will turn into an alligator and other crazy ideas," he said by phone.
•••••
From my experience with people like this, this is no surprise. Some of the most hate-filled, warped, unChristian people I have known have considered themselves Christians. They would still be torturing people to death for disagreeing with them about religion if they had their way. If the Bible is true, these haters will be going to hell.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/jeremiah-johnson-gets-threats-after-trump-prophesy-apology.html
By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter
Monday, January 11, 2021
Evangelical prophet Jeremiah Johnson said he’s now getting death threats from Christians after apologizing to his followers Thursday for “inaccurately prophesying” that President Donald Trump would win a second term.
Johnson, who also called out Christians for their idolatry of the outgoing president, revealed in a statement on Facebook Sunday that the attacks have shown him that “parts of the prophetic/charismatic movement are far SICKER than I could have ever dreamed of.”
“Over the last 72 hours, I have received multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry. I have been labeled a coward, sellout, a traitor to the Holy Spirit, and cussed out at least 500 times. We have lost ministry partners every hour and counting,” said the leader of Jeremiah Johnson Ministries.
“I have been flabbergasted at the barrage of continued conspiracy theories being sent every minute our way and the pure hatred being unleashed. To my great heartache, I’m convinced parts of the prophetic/charismatic movement are far SICKER than I could have ever dreamed of,” he explained. “I truthfully never realized how absolutely triggered and ballistic thousands and thousands of saints get about Donald Trump. It’s terrifying! It’s full of idolatry! If I helped to prop up this ideology concerning him, I will need to repent again and stir up even more hell.”
•••••
The results of being taught that "faith" is good, no matter how unlikely the belief.
https://news.yahoo.com/texas-megachurch-pastor-sent-prison-181206983.html
JUAN A. LOZANO
Thu, January 14, 2021, 1:12 PM
A Texas megachurch pastor and former spiritual adviser to two U.S. presidents has been sentenced to six years in prison for bilking investors out of millions of dollars.
Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, 67, was sentenced Wednesday in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he and his co-defendant, Gregory A. Smith, were indicted in 2018.
Caldwell, who in March pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, was the senior pastor of Houston's Windsor Village United Methodist Church, which has about 14,000 members. He's been a spiritual adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
•••••
Caldwell “used his status as the pastor of a mega-church to help convince the many victim investors that they were making a legitimate investment, but instead he took their hard-earned money from them and used it for his own personal gain,” Acting U.S. Attorney Alexander Van Hook said in a statement.
Caldwell used about $900,000 he received from the scheme to maintain his lifestyle and pay down credit cards and mortgages, according to the Justice Department. Caldwell has a master’s degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and had worked in the financial industry.
In November, Smith was also sentenced to six years in prison.
•••••
https://apnews.com/article/religion-ireland-43d509f3013c8d457b3d2f0683dc7efe
Ireland’s prime minister said Tuesday that the country must “face up to the full truth of our past,” as a long-awaited report recounted decades of harm done by church-run homes for unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of infants died.
Prime Minister Micheal Martin said young women and their children had paid a heavy price for Ireland’s “perverse religious morality” in past decades.
“We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for that dysfunction,” he said.
•••••
The final report of an inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes said that 9,000 children died in 18 different mother and baby homes during the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all children in the homes died, almost double the nationwide infant mortality rate, the report said. Major causes included respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, otherwise known as the stomach flu.
•••••
The commission of inquiry said about 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it investigated, with the greatest number of admissions in the 1960s and early 1970s.
•••••
Reminds me of the person I knew who wrote a song about the Oneness of every thing where she said "if you could feel what I feel" you would be a better person. She seemed to have a patronizing, superior attitude to other people.
Barbara Ellen
Sat 2 Jan 2021 12.30 EST
It would appear that the mindfulness movement is overrun by preening narcissists. Who could have guessed? A Dutch study by Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser, entitled An Exploration of Spiritual Superiority: The Paradox of Self-Enhancement, is the first to measure how people feel they’re more advanced than others in terms of wisdom, self-knowledge and psychic intuition.
An investigation involving around 3,700 people found that practices that are supposed to minimise the ego tend to enlarge it and that those who put extra effort into enhancing spirituality – mindfulness retreats, aura-reading, past life-regression – are the smuggest, most self-aggrandising and unbearable of all (I may be paraphrasing a tad there). Such people cling to unmeasurable and irrefutable claims about their innate superiority, such as greater insights into the human condition, deeper compassion for others and more advanced psychic abilities (they sense things, dontcha know!). Most of us will have come across people like this. Roughly 99% will wish that we hadn’t.
•••••
But hey, this is the time of year to make resolutions and, after a grind like 2020, people are entitled to search for meaning. They shouldn’t be lampooned or criticised for trying to broaden their horizons. However, as the study shows, too often this becomes less about “how can I be better?” to “how can I be better than you?”. Self-improvement morphs into a pious one-upmanship, a contest to become the most perceptive, enlightened, empathic, evolved. It’s no different, really, to travel bores droning on about far-flung beaches in Goa, only this time they’re “travelling to themselves”.
What I’ve found in life is that the genuinely spiritual don’t need to broadcast it or go on retreats about it. Truly spiritual people just are, but how could anyone make a quick buck out of that? There’s the real issue: mindfulness (awareness of how you think, feel, act, react) isn’t a bad thing, quite the opposite. However, there’s a global industry seeking to monetise it, turning people into self-absorbed, smug, crystal-stroking monsters determined to prove they’re a cut above spiritually as well as every other way. When you think about it, industries don’t have followers, they have clients. With the spiritual snake oil merchants, just like any other business model, the customer is always right.
https://news.yahoo.com/jerry-falwell-jr-spent-heavily-135804216.html
The Week
Peter Weber
Mon, December 14, 2020, 8:58 AM EST
erry Falwell Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University in August after a series of scandals involving sexual indiscretions and questionable use of university funds on friends and family, but Liberty's board is still split on the partisan direction Falwell steered the private evangelical Christian school founded by his father, Jerry Falwell Sr.
Especially divisive, Politico reports, is the question of whether Liberty should continue funding the Falkirk Center, a conservative "think tank" named after Falwell and GOP activist Charlie Kirk that "has produced no peer-reviewed academic work and bears little relation to study centers at other universities," but did run "pro-Trump ads, hired Trump allies including former adviser Sebastian Gorka and current Trump attorney Jenna Ellis to serve as fellows, and, in recent weeks, has aggressively promoted [President] Trump's baseless claims of election fraud."
As a 501c(3) nonprofit, Liberty University is technically barred from supporting political candidates and spending money on political campaigns. But the Falkirk Center, founded in 2019, "purchased campaign-season ads on Facebook, at least $50,000's worth of which were designated by the network as political ads, that promoted Trump and other Republican candidates by name," Politico reports. And more generally, since endorsing Trump for president in 2016, Falwell has "pumped millions of the nonprofit religious institution's funds into Republican causes and efforts to promote the Trump administration, blurring the lines between education and politics."
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/half-million-muslims-forced-pick-111142219.html
Louise Watt
Tue, December 15, 2020, 6:11 AM EST
China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities to pick cotton by hand in the western region of Xinjiang, a key source of the world’s cotton, according to a report by a Washington-based think tank.
Rights activists have estimated that Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uighurs and other, mostly Muslim, minorities in detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing denies that Uighurs’ rights are abused and says re-education centres provide vocational training to help people gain employment, and are necessary to curb extremism.
Now, information from Chinese government documents and state media reports provides evidence that at least half a million people have been forced to pick cotton through a coercive state-mandated labour transfer and poverty alleviation scheme, the Center for Global Policy says.
In 2018, three majority-Uighur areas within Xinjiang alone mobilised at least 570,000 people to pick cotton through the scheme, according to the think tank report published Monday.
It estimates that the total number of people from ethnic minorities sent to pick cotton “likely exceeds that figure by several hundred thousand”.
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/muslims-visualized-prophet-muhammad-words-130743796.html
Suleyman Dost, Assistant Professor of Classical Islam, Brandeis University
Tue, November 24, 2020, 8:07 AM EST
The republication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020 led to protests in several Muslim-majority countries. It also resulted in disturbing acts of violence: In the weeks that followed, two people were stabbed near the former headquarters of the magazine and a teacher was beheaded after he showed the cartoons during a classroom lesson.
Visual depiction of Muhammad is a sensitive issue for a number of reasons: Islam’s early stance against idolatry led to a general disapproval for images of living beings throughout Islamic history. Muslims seldom produced or circulated images of Muhammad or other notable early Muslims. The recent caricatures have offended many Muslims around the world.
This focus on the reactions to the images of Muhammad drowns out an important question: How did Muslims imagine him for centuries in the near total absence of icons and images?
•••••
The prophet’s earliest surviving biography, written a century after his death, runs into hundreds of pages in English. His final 10 years are so well-documented that some episodes of his life during this period can be tracked day by day.
Even more detailed are books from the early Islamic period dedicated specifically to the description of Muhammad’s body, character and manners. From a very popular ninth-century book on the subject titled “Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya” or The Sublime Qualities of Muhammad, Muslims learned everything from Muhammad’s height and body hair to his sleep habits, clothing preferences and favorite food.
•••••
That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. In fact, manuscripts from the 13th century onward did contain scenes from the prophet’s life, showing him in full figure initially and with a veiled face later on.
The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
•••••
The Islamic legal basis for banning images, including Muhammad’s, is less than straightforward and there are variations across denominations and legal schools.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
•••••
Most importantly, many Muslims find the caricatures offensive for its Islamophobic content. Some of the caricatures draw a coarse equation of Islam with violence or debauchery through Muhammad’s image, a pervasive theme in the colonial European scholarship on Muhammad.
Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued that such depictions can cause “moral injury” for Muslims, an emotional pain due to the special relation that they have with the prophet. Political scientist Andrew March sees the caricatures as “a political act” that could cause harm to the efforts of creating a “public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal.”
[Acts of violence because they because of an image help to turn people against the violent people."]
•••••
So God is mad because young people are fornicating, so his punishment is to send a disease that mainly kills older people?
https://news.yahoo.com/televangelist-referred-coronavirus-privilege-died-034254209.html
https://www.insider.com/televangelist-who-called-the-coronavirus-a-privilege-died-from-it-2020-11
Yelena Dzhanova
,INSIDER•November 7, 2020
A televangelist who once described the coronavirus pandemic as a "privilege" died from the disease Tuesday.
Irvin Baxter died in the hospital at 75, according to a press release from Endtime Ministries, which Baxter founded.
Baxter was a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and had suggested premarital sex was the reason the coronavirus exists.
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/horrified-deadly-attacks-french-muslims-093050893.html
ANGELA CHARLTON
,Associated Press•November 6, 2020
As a French-born Muslim, Elyazid Benferhat’s stomach turned when he heard about a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in Nice. Then he decided to act.
A self-described man of peace and pragmatism, Benferhat and a friend gathered a group of young Muslim men to stand guard outside their town's cathedral for the All Saints’ holiday weekend, to symbolically protect it and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers.
Parishioners at the 13th-century church in the southern town of Lodeve were deeply touched. The parish priest said their gesture gave him hope in a time of turmoil.
Benferhat, speaking with a distinctive southern French accent, identified himself as “more French than anything.” While his mother was born in Algeria, he was born in France and grew up speaking only French. “But I am also Muslim ... and we have seen Islamophobia in this country, and terrorism,” he told The Associated Press.
“In recent years, I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” because every time Islamic extremist violence strikes France, he said, French Muslims face new stigmatization, even though “we had nothing to do with it.”
He called the beheading of a teacher near Paris last month — targeted because he showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for a debate on free expression — an act of “unbelievable, unprecedented cruelty.”
Then when three people were killed last Thursday in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice, Benferhat said he was so sickened that he wanted to do something “so that everyone wakes up.”
•••••
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-light-triad-vs-dark-triad-of-personality?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The findings on the feelings of those who score high on the dark triad in relation to religion ("viewing their creative work and religious immortality as routes to death transcendence"). I have seen other people being skeptical that these people actually have the religious beliefs they espouse, but my own experience with them is that they are drawn to religion because it promises life after death, and that there is a God who is personally watching out for them.
McKay Coppins
September 29, 2020
One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personally—Creflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollar’s quest for a Gulfstream G650.
Trump seemed delighted by the “scam,” Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was “full of shit.”
“They’re all hustlers,” Trump said.
The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain.
•••••
But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.
•••••
It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons.
In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, “Can you believe that bullshit?” But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. “He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches,” the adviser told me.
•••••
To those who have known and worked with Trump closely, the notion that he might have a secret spiritual side is laughable. “I always assumed he was an atheist,” Barbara Res, a former executive at the Trump Organization, told me. “He’s not a religious guy,” A. J. Delgado, who worked on his 2016 campaign, told me. “Whenever I see a picture of him standing in a group of pastors, all of their hands on him, I see a thought bubble [with] the words ‘What suckers,’” Mary Trump, the president’s niece, told me.
•••••
