396 replies to this topic

[LFC]

So much for the lesson about not casting the first stone.

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A report from Baptist News says there's a growing trend within Texas Baptist churches where pastors are referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as "Jezebel" -- a misogynistic slur that describes a morally unrestrained woman.

In a Jan. 3 sermon at First Baptist of Rockwall, Pastor Steve Swofford asked, "What if something happens to [President Biden] and Jezebel has to take over? Jezebel Harris, isn't that her name?"

Two days after the presidential inauguration, another Texas pastor, First Baptist Church of Lindale's Tom Buck, also lobbed the epithet at the new vice president.

"I can't imagine any truly God-fearing Israelite who would've wanted their daughters to view Jezebel as an inspirational role model because she was a woman in power," he said on Twitter.

According to Baptist News, calling a Black woman "Jezebel" is a racist trope documented by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University. "It has roots in slavery and the perceived sexual promiscuity of Black women compared to white women."

The comments were called out by another Texas pastor, Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, who called on the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in a Twitter post to repudiate both Swofford and Buck, saying that referring to Harris as "Jezebel" in any context "is simply unwarranted & disrespectful & extremely harmful to the image of Southern Baptists, when this label emanates from the heart & mouth of an SBC pastor."

Buck, however, says he "fully stands by" the "Jezebel" characterization.

[LFC]

Maybe it's unfair to put this here but God™ appears to play a big role in inflaming this guy's psychosis. The only difference between him and millions of others is that he performed one highly visible crime.

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The Wisconsin pharmacist who intentionally sabotaged hundreds of doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine because he thought COVID-19 was a hoax, also believes the earth is flat and the sky is actually a “shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God.”

That’s according to a newly-unsealed FBI search warrant application obtained by The Daily Beast, which the bureau filed earlier this month requesting permission to analyze an iPhone, a laptop, and a thumb drive seized from Steven Brandenburg when he was arrested in late December.

Federal authorities accused Brandenburg, 46, of purposely destroying 570 doses of the vaccine by twice removing a box containing the vials from a refrigerator at Advocate Aurora Health Systems in Grafton, WI, where he worked the night shift. Brandenburg knew this could spoil the vaccine, which can only survive for up to 12 hours outside of refrigeration, said prosecutors. The damaged doses that Brandenburg tampered with were subsequently given to at least 57 patients.

The warrant application, filed in federal court by FBI Special Agent Lindsay Schloemer, reveals that Brandenburg’s delusions went far beyond doubting the reality of the coronavirus. Not only did Brandenburg insist the “microchipped” vaccine would “turn off people’s birth control and make others infertile,” he was convinced that the physical world around him was not what it seemed, a coworker told investigators.

“Some of the conspiracy theories Brandenburg told [the coworker] about included: the earth is flat; the sky is not real, rather it is a shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God; and Judgment Day is coming,” the 26-page filing says.

The coworker, identified in the document as pharmacy technician Sarah Sticker, told authorities that Brandenburg carried a .45-caliber handgun to work, which he said he needed “in case the military came to take him away.” Cops seized several firearms from Brandenburg’s home on New Year’s Eve.

[LFC]

Over at TPM a Christian who leverages his religion for the greater good wrote Christian Nationalism’s Role In The Insurrection Was Four Decades In The Making. He saw the brainwashing as he grew up. He sees the insurrection as the obvious outcome.

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While federal investigations into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol will no doubt continue for months, next week’s Senate trial in the second impeachment of Donald Trump brings into focus the question of who is accountable for the recent assault on American democracy. While the vote last week on the constitutionality of the trial signaled how Republican senators may vote on conviction, one thing is clear: Trump did not act alone in inciting the insurrection. Without a network of organizations, allies, politicians and devoted conspiracy theorists willing to encourage and spread his lies about voter fraud, Trump’s protest would have been silenced by his campaign’s losses in court following his defeat at the ballot box. Trump’s mendacity was possible because millions of people were led to believe they could trust his word as a matter of faith.

Reports from the Religion News Service to The New Yorker have noted the presence of Christian nationalist symbols, songs and leaders at the Capitol siege on Jan. 6 — from Paula White’s opening prayer at the rally outside the White House, to a “Jesus 2020” banner unfurled on the West steps of the Capitol, to the victory prayer offered by insurrectionists who occupied the Senate chamber after members had been evacuated to a secure location. Indeed, the presence of Christians and Christian symbolism at the Capitol riot was so pronounced that several pro-Trump pastors felt compelled to make public statements condemning the violence in the days that followed.

But the crowd at the Capitol on Jan. 6 did not just happen to be overwhelmingly white and Christian in the way you’d expect the crowd at a NASCAR race or a Garth Brooks concert to be. As Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who has followed Christian nationalist organizations for more than a decade, observed, “a reconstruction of the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 shows how a Christian-right group formed to ‘stop the steal’ worked to foment a bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt and justify a holy war against an illegitimate state.” Without the religious zeal and moral claims that Christian nationalism brought to the insurrection, it’s possible the attack might not have happened. The riot, it turns out, wasn’t so much a political protest as it was a religious crusade in the eyes of many members of the pro-Trump mob.

But as scholars of religious extremism have noted in different contexts around the world, crusades are not born overnight, nor are they a response to any single event. Crusades happen when the structures and symbols of a religious tradition are manipulated to inspire devotion to the political power of one group over another.

In her book “The Power Worshipers,” which chronicles the coordinated efforts of religious right organizations in recent decades, Katherine Stewart has written that the “leaders of the movement have quite consciously reframed the Christian religion itself to suit their political objectives and then promoted this new reactionary religion as widely as possible, thus turning citizens into congregants and congregants into voters.” While these organizations have often been described as the instigators of America’s culture wars, Stewart is clear in her account that their aim has always been power. When Donald Trump became a willing promoter of their “redemption” narrative — think, “Make America Great Again” — religious right groups quickly lined up to convince their followers that Trump was God’s instrument.

[LFC]

Gee, a prominent member of his Baptist Church. What a shock.

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A Pennsylvania prosecutor has been accused of sexually assaulting at least five female clients, including trading legal services for sex and demanding nude photographs, while he was retained as their defense attorney.

Bradford County District Attorney Chad Michael Salsman, 44, was charged Wednesday with a slew of crimes, including sexual assault, indecent assault, witness intimidation, obstruction of justice, and promoting prostitution, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement.

Prosecutors allege Salsman, a Republican elected in November 2019, manipulated several women into unwanted sexual acts and sexually assaulted them. After forcing some of the women into unwanted sex acts on his office desk, Salsman then directed them into his private bathroom to “clean up” using paper towels or cleaning wipes, according to a criminal complaint. Then, he threatened them into silence.

“Chad Salsman would regularly use his position and power as an attorney to coerce his victims into performing sexual acts on him,” Shapiro said in a statement. “He would bring them into his private office, under the guise of discussing their case, and used his knowledge of his clients’ vulnerabilities to negate their consent and sexually assault them.”

“Salsman picked these victims because they didn’t have any other choice, because he thought they would be easy to silence, and less likely to be believed if they ever came forward,” he added.

Salsman defeated long-time Assistant District Attorney Al Ondrey in 2019 to become the top prosecutor in Bradford County, a rural community three hours outside Philadelphia. Prior to that, he was an Adams County prosecutor and a private defense attorney in Bradford.

According to local media reports, he is a married father of three and, as recently as 2019, a vice-chairman of the missions committee for the Braintrim Baptist Church. He cited his three young daughters as his reason for running for DA.

[LFC]

Another article on the extremism we're seeing in America's religions. This one is at Politico and is called It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism.

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There’s a “strong authoritarian streak” that runs through parts of American evangelicalism, warns Elizabeth Neumann. What should be done about it?

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Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith. For this type of believer, love of God and love of country are sometimes seen as one and the same.

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Neumann says.

“[Christian nationalists] see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

How should the country, and the new administration, approach concerns about extremism among American Christians? What role can faith leaders play in trying to keep vulnerable believers from the temptations of conspiracy theories? And do the totems of American evangelicalism look at all different through the eyes of a national security expert?

To sort through all of this, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Neumann this week. A condensed transcript of that conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.

[Bact PhD]

Another take from Politico, this one about the role of “Prophecy”:

https://www.politico...-469598?cid=apn

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Enlow, Locke and Kerr are among dozens of Christian prophets in America—religious leaders with followings among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who claim the ability to predict the future based on dreams, visions and other supernatural phenomena. Some prophets are church leaders, while others operate independently. There are no official requirements for prophet status, though followers generally expect prophets to get at least a few prophecies right.

But, lately, that standard has come under duress—particularly when it comes to Donald Trump.

In 2015, spurred by the lengthy prophecy of a 27-year-old wunderkind named Jeremiah Johnson, many Pentecostals and charismatics embraced the idea that God had chosen Trump to restore America’s Christian moorings. Trump’s surprise win in 2016 offered a dramatic validation, and in 2020 dozens of prophets declared that he would win election again. This time, they were wrong. Yet, in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory, instead of apologizing or backtracking, a number of prophets continue to assert that it is God’s will for Trump to be in the White House and that a miraculous reversal is nigh. Enlow, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, has said Trump’s victory will be made clear by March.

I’d like to say I’m shocked, but nope. Not in the least. Too many charlatans and hustlers have been associated with these movements for too long—my newspaper horoscope has about as much predictive validity—and the sheep get sheared.

[LFC]

 Bact PhD, on 18 February 2021 - 02:51 PM, said:

I’d like to say I’m shocked, but nope. Not in the least. Too many charlatans and hustlers have been associated with these movements for too long—my newspaper horoscope has about as much predictive validity—and the sheep get sheared.

And they are more than ready and able of weaseling out of these prognostications too. Pick one ore more:

• The enemies of Trump, a.k.a. the army of Satan, have taken over our country because we didn't love God™ enough.
  
• We were so close but were betrayed by ______________. I wonder if Moscow Mitch's name might end up in that space.
  
• LOOK! SQUIRREL! There's an endless backlog of things to be righteously enraged about so lots and lots of squirrels.
  
• I'll just pretend that I never said anything and just go back to counting my millions.

[LFC]

I have no idea who this author is or if he has any respect among the Christian community but for me the first part of this article stinks with a blindness about the hate that American Christians have been pouring out for centuries. It's now suddenly a problem because it's turning into a civil war. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Perhaps not enough. Maybe if he lead with the last part while acknowledging their history I would have interpreted his tone differently.

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Did you ever hear the song that begins with the words, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord”? The lyrics are very simple, with the repeated refrain, “And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yeah they'll know we are Christians by our love.” Today, we might want to change that refrain to “they'll know we are Christians by our hate, by our hate.” We have become terribly disfigured in recent years, in many ways, the opposite of God’s intent. How on earth did this happen?

If you don’t believe me, visit some of our personal, Bible-affirming, Jesus-believing, social media pages, where we savage each other and attack each other and spread hearsay and even lies about one another with reckless abandon. They are hate-filled pages, pages filled with venom and poison, yet pages that ultimately reflect what is in our own hearts. I ask again: how on earth did this happen?

To give one recent, case in point, when my younger colleague Jeremiah Johnson publicly apologized for wrongly prophesying Trump’s reelection, he received a torrent of hate mail of the basest sort, almost all of it from professing Christians.

This is the fruit of the Spirit? This is the result of our fellowship with God? This is what happens when we are changed into the likeness of Jesus? Obviously not.

Yet I see this every day. We are vile. We are vicious. We are mean-spirited. We treat each other with disrespect and disdain. There is little honor. Little humility. Little grace.

[andydp]

 LFC, on 22 February 2021 - 03:23 PM, said:

I have no idea who this author is or if he has any respect among the Christian community but for me the first part of this article stinks with a blindness about the hate that American Christians have been pouring out for centuries. It's now suddenly a problem because it's turning into a civil war. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Perhaps not enough. Maybe if he lead with the last part while acknowledging their history I would have interpreted his tone differently.

I saw a meme the other day:

Republicans stop saying your'e Republicans

Christians stop saying you're Christian

[andydp]

[AnBr]

andydp, on 24 February 2021 - 08:58 AM, said:

And water is wet.

[HockeyDon]

andydp, on 24 February 2021 - 08:58 AM, said:

That second part simply isn't true. They are a perfect representation of Christianity.

[pnwguy]

HockeyDon, on 25 February 2021 - 09:42 AM, said:

That second part simply isn't true. They are a perfect representation of Christianity.

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Mahatma Gandhi

[LFC]

pnwguy, on 25 February 2021 - 10:39 AM, said:

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Mahatma Gandhi

--Pedro Cerrano

[andydp]

pnwguy, on 25 February 2021 - 10:39 AM, said:

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Whenever I get a "Holy Joe" spouting off about how they're a "good" Christian, I cite Chapter 6 of St Matthew's Gospel. For some reason it tends to clam them up.

1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

[LFC]

Here's yet another "Christian" right-wing darling. He was a sexual predator before a car accident took his ability to walk. He is now just a serial liar who loves to play the God™ card. In other words he's a nearly perfect match for the Christianist wing of the Republican Party.

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Some came forward during his campaign to share their experiences with Cawthorn on social media and in private. Last August, World magazine published the accounts of three women who said the young conservative sexually harassed and verbally assaulted them. One of these women was among those who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story. Cawthorn has unequivocally denied the accusations, telling the Daily Caller the story was a “mix of half-truths, untruths and potentially fabricated allegations.”

Then, in October, more than 160 members of the Patrick Henry community signed an open letter detailing “gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” including that Cawthorn “established a reputation of predatory behavior.” After the letter was published, Cawthorn told ABC 13 that it was based on rumors, and his campaign wrote in a Facebook post that he had the endorsement of a “significant number of PHC alumni and former students who knew him well.” The post was signed by just six people. Two worked for the campaign and a third was one of their relatives.

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While Cawthorn has painted women’s accounts of sexual misconduct and predatory behavior as politically motivated lies, this new investigation into his time at Patrick Henry College provides an in-depth examination of the allegations against the North Carolina representative and uncovers previously unreported details. More than 20 former Patrick Henry students told BuzzFeed News that Cawthorn harassed his women classmates. The students either said they experienced his sexually inappropriate behavior firsthand, comforted friends after a traumatizing incident, or were warned about his conduct by their dorm leaders. Although Cawthorn was only at the school for just over one semester, students said he quickly developed a reputation as someone who took advantage of and mistreated women.

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A former high school football player and avid athlete — his Instagram feed is peppered with videos in which he claimed he was training for the 2020 Paralympic Games, which wasn’t true — Cawthorn exuded a jock persona at school, classmates said.

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Charismatic and active on Twitter and Telegram, the new lawmaker, like the former president and his allies, has worked to build an image of himself as a “true patriot” whose mission is to drain the swamp and protect his supporters from the radical left while standing up for members of the military — despite the fact that he lied about his future at the Naval Academy. He was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer, and in recent months, he’s gained notoriety for being at the forefront of the effort to overturn the results of the presidential election, brazenly perpetuating lies about voter fraud, many of which he’s since walked back after a backlash.

From the referencing HuffPo piece.

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A former close friend of right-wing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told The Washington Post the lawmaker lied about a car wreck that partially paralyzed him.

Cawthorn’s account of the 2014 wreck — which he presented publicly in the chapel of his Christian college in Virginia three years later — was that a close friend had crashed the car in which he was a passenger, leaving him to die “in a fiery tomb,” the Post reported over the weekend.

But the friend, Bradley Ledford, told the newspaper in his first public comments about the crash that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreckage.

“It hurt very badly that he would say something as false as that,” Ledford told the paper. “That is not at all what happened. I pulled him out of the car the second that I was able to get out of the car.”

That was just one element of a story rich with lies, the Post reported. Cawthorn claimed he was “declared dead” after the wreck. He wasn’t. The police report noted he was “incapacitated.” Cawthorn said he was preparing before the crash to start studies at the U.S. Naval Academy ― a boast that he eventually turned into a campaign ad. But the news outlet AVL Watchdog reported in August that Cawthorn had been rejected by the Naval Academy before the crash.

Cawthorn, now 25, exploited his tale of his crash at age 18 for his successful 2020 House campaign. He’s now the youngest House representative.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 01 March 2021 - 01:28 PM, said:

Here's yet another "Christian" right-wing darling. He was a sexual predator before a car accident took his ability to walk. He is now just a serial liar who loves to play the God™ card. In other words he's a nearly perfect match for the Christianist wing of the Republican Party.

From the referencing HuffPo piece.

LFC mentioned having a visceral reaction to the photo of the guy who is anti-Semitic etc and employed by the California education system. I had a visceral reaction to this guy Cawthorn's photo. Spoiled jock jerk bully...in a wheel chair or out.