How about if we cast a critical eye on every church?

Last summer, I did some spider-hunting around Murdock, Minnesota. It’s the typical slow, sleepy, small rural town (with spiders! But that’s every town). It’s unfortunate claim to fame now is that Asatru moved in and bought a church dedicated to the premise that white people, especially northern European white people, are better than others. They probably assumed that this would be a fine, comfortable fit with the predominantly German and Scandinavian folk of Minnesota.

Except the townfolk are less than thrilled with the city council choosing to approve the founding of a church.

The decision alarmed many residents, particularly residents of color who until recently lived comfortably in the majority-white town. Ms. Barron said she and other mothers had discussed taking turns to watch their children when they play outside. When the elementary school asked Latino families to participate in a video production, Ms. Barron said, many declined.

“I don’t feel threatened right now. But I feel worried,” she said. “What worries me is losing our sense of peace.”

Many residents fear that similar groups will try “to get some sort of toehold here because they feel this is some refuge where they can come and foment this hate,” said Pete Kennedy, 59, an engineer who has lived in the town for about 50 years.

Town leaders have insisted they had no choice but to grant a conditional-use permit, or CUP, because of legal protections that forbid governments from using land-use regulations to impose a substantial burden on people trying to practice their religion.

Interesting. I wonder if they’d feel the same principled concern when a new Baptist church, or Plymouth Brethren church, or Lutheran church, or Catholic church petitions for approval to take over some real estate in town. This is not to imply that the Asatru church should be allowed to do their thing (they are truly repulsive), but that what I’ve seen around towns in this region is that every vacant building is quickly occupied by yet another cult. When our movie theater in Morris went out of business, a group of fundamentalists threatened to buy it and turn into yet another church! Fortunately, they were foiled by a local co-op.

Maybe city councils around here should question every application by every religion to take over productive real estate and replace it with untaxable dead voids in our city planning.

By the way, here’s what it costs to start a church in rural Minnesota.

In June, it was sold to the Assembly for $45,000, according to county records.

Sheesh. You mean instead of paying off a lawyer I could have bought a whole church?

Three religions at once

What a strange clip from Fox News. The garbage is flowing thick and fast here, and I count at least 3 dogmas on display.

The first is American exceptionalism. The presenter starts by claiming that Americans are individualistic…on Fox News, which builds its revenue on the sheep-like ability of Americans to follow their brand of bullshit obsessively.

Then this “doctor” is brought on to talk about the pandemic, and what is he concerned with? Football! Seriously, dude? Football is so important that he’s outraged that a game might be called off?

Fox News doctor Marc Siegel on Sunday encouraged people to have gatherings for Christmas and Hanukkah because COVID-19 is “almost like a biblical plague.”

Siegel made the remarks during a Fox News segment on National Football League (NFL) players who he claimed are being “punished” by COVID-19 restrictions.

“Do we want no Christmas? Do we want no Hanukkah?” Siegel complained. “We’re praying for miracles right now to get us out of this COVID-19 pandemic. It’s almost a biblical plague it seems like.”

We can’t cancel Christmas because we need to pray for the end of the pandemic! These guys have never heard of the idea of praying quietly at home, I guess. No profit in it.

I’ve always just mocked the idea that there is a war on Christmas, since most people are fine with everyone else celebrating midwinter however they want — I’m not going to march into your house and knock over your Christmas tree. But maybe we need to get more militant about some aspects of the holiday if we’ve got idiots insisting we have to defy basic disease prevention protocols to maintain his superstition.

Why you gotta do me like this, Anthony?

I go many long months without ever thinking of Michael Voris and his fanatical contingent of radical Catholics, but then a long-time reader has to fill me in on what he’s been up to, and I watch another of his videos. Voris is getting crazier and more extremist all the time. He’s a one-issue religious loon, and that issue is abortion. He claims that racism, nuclear war, the death penalty…none of these add up to a body count like abortion, not even close and that abortion is the great evil all the way back to the apostles — really? The Bible doesn’t make much of a big deal about it — and that Catholics who oppose the death penalty, for instance, are wasting their time because the Bible is fine with executing criminals (like, you know, the big guy who gets murdered on a cross at the start of the New Testament?). He’s a Catholic who despises the Catholicism of the church and the Pope and all that.

He also despises the Democrats, the Party of Death, who are all Marxists, and is horrified that a whole quarter of US bishops are registered Democrats. Joe Biden? Marxist? That alone should make you realize we’re not listening to a guy playing with a whole deck. No, according to Voris, he’s not happy with a Catholic being elected to the presidency, because Biden is actually a heretical gay-marrying child-killer. You see,

Biden and his party are evil, full stop. No Catholic, especially a member of the clergy, should be vague about this evil in the slightest. But if Biden captures the Catholic vote and goes on to win the White House, no doubt the champagne corks will be popping all over bishopland, but their partying will be short-lived. Marxists always kill those who got them to power. Regardless of how loyal they might have been on the path to power, thinking they would somehow be rewarded, their reward will be the wrong end of a gun barrel.

So get ready, everyone, Joe Biden is going to dispatch commie death squads to slaughter the Catholic church hierarchy.

I guess we do need to keep an eye on the fringe Catholics, who are taking paranoia to whole new levels.

If I may make a safe prediction: the churches, all of them, including the Catholic church, will do just fine under a Democratic government. They always do. Biden won’t lift a finger to support the separation of church and state.

Pray for the Preznit

O Lord, the President says he has COVID-19.

We thank you, Jesus, for this once compelling Donald to tell the truth. You did tell him not to lie this time, right? It’s a bit out of character for him, so if he actually has the disease for realz, it would be a kind of divine revelation, I think, a true sign from God. I am praying that his infection is real and true and a sign that he has been touched by the aerosolized Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!

Please, God, make sure he is touched hard.

Forgive him, Lord, for his lapse in listening to the sweet seductive whispers of Satan and getting tested in the first place. We know he’d be fine if he hadn’t tasted of the PCR Test of Knowledge of Positive and Negative Results, and the disease would have just disappeared if he hadn’t peeked. Please forgive him for testing your wisdom, too, and I’m praying real hard that you don’t cast him out of the Rose Garden for his weakness. The temptation was great, he was so desperate for a positive result, any result, of his presidency, and he reached for the one that was in his range.

Sweet Jesus, I beg you to not let him sicken and die, or to spread the plague among the Republican leadership, especially not to Mike Pence, who is surely so holy that he probably does not need chastisement. Oh, wait, Pence is getting tested, too? Never mind. Whip him with your sacred disease, for he surely knows that his suffering would be just.

O Lord, praise You for finally reaching the mind of this worthless <snerk> atheist, getting me down on my knees and beseeching the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to deliver <choke> Donald Trump of this totally imaginary disease that disappeared over the summer and is just like a little flu <hork> and was created by the Democrats conspiring with the Chinese if it were real, which it isn’t <HAAaaa!>.

No, Lord, I’m not sniggering. I’m…I’m…speaking in tongues, that’s the ticket. Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to praying like a motherfucker for that wretched soul. It’s the least I can do.

Grifters gotta grift

That Catholic reactionary, Michael O’Fallon, is running another “Sovereign Nations” conference. It’s very important you know.

The funny thing is that their #2 speaker, after O’Fallon himself, is James Lindsay, the regressive atheist buddy of Boghossian, who is so desperate for attention that he sells himself off to endorse a religious organization with religious goals.

Double irony: if you look at that twitter thread, it’s got angry Christians complaining that the conference includes a liberal atheist, with O’Fallon insisting that no, it’s entirely secular, when all the other speakers are Christian ministers, and the blurb describing the con is this:

The Christian Church finds itself societally in interesting times; times of rapid change, uncertainty, and division, where all that was our sure objective standards seem to be melting into air.

Also indicative is that there are no women speakers, although there are an awful lot of truly secular events that also forget the womz.

The people with bugs in their brains are a vital segment of American culture, after all

I’m usually on the progressive side of current affairs, but I don’t know. Maybe Black Lives Matter is going too far — after all, Pat Robertson tells me so.

Robertson said he agreed with the general premise behind BLM, but “that legitimate thing has been hijacked by these radicals and they’re using that label to put forth an agenda and people need to be aware of it.”

“They’re talking about Marxist communism,” Robertson said. “They’re talking about destroying the nuclear family. They’re talking about destroying essentially Christianity as being racist. And all the way through, they want to upend the capitalist structure and destroy America.”

“People should be aware that they’re not just standing with the poor oppressed Black people,” Robertson added. “Of course we want to stand with people against police brutality. Of course we do. But we don’t want to go along with a lesbian, anti-family, anti-capitalist Marxist revolution. We don’t want that for America.”

I had no idea those poor oppressed Black people were a gang of lesbian anti-capitalist Marxists who…wait a minute. If that were true, I’d support them even more! Although it’s not true. Most of the people participating in BLM protests are heterosexuals with families who would be happy if the structure of American society gave them justice and security. At its core, this is not a radical movement unless you think treating black people with dignity and respect and equality is radical — which is probably Robertson’s position anyway.

I think we need a second opinion here, so let’s ask Michele Bachmann? Wait, what year is this? Why does anyone give a flying fuck what Robertson and Bachmann think?

Oh, right, because they are entertainingly bugnuts, as long as you’re not one of the people they hate.

“Antifa is, if you go to their website, their materials, they are directly traceable to the Communist Party because their goal is the overthrow of the United States government and to bring communism into America,” Bachmann said. “Just like Black Lives Matter, this is not a new movement either. On their website, these are transgender Marxists, transgender Black Marxists who are seeking the overthrow the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family.”

“What people need to understand is that 103 years ago, there were no communist countries in this world,” she said. “But this same idea where you have a pretext, you create something—like right now the pretext in America is race wars, that we’re seeing race wars on America’s streets—what this is is a cover to bring about communism and a communist takeover. It happened in communist China. It happened in Venezuela, many countries. What people need to understand, the viewers, is that we currently right now are in a situation where communists are trying to come in and take over America.”

“You say, ‘Aren’t you a little overheated? Isn’t this melodramatic?’” [OMG, Bachmann read my mind! At least, the restrained, polite part of my mind. If she’d gone deeper, she would have used stronger words] Bachmann continued. “This is exactly what a communist revolution looks like. They think they’re going to do it by electing Joe Biden and then once Joe Biden is elected, they think that these Davos, Switzerland, meetings that go on, they think that what they’re going to do is have the United States’ economy collapse, move to a digital currency globally, and then we move into a global-type government. I mean, it’s bizarre, but this is their goal.”

“For people who know their Bible, this is exactly what the prophets told us,” she added. “So, we stand on the word of God, the Bible, and we say, ‘Satan, flee, we’re going to stand on the truth of God.’ And so that’s why now more than ever, between now and the election, what we need to do is pray and cry out to Almighty God and ask for his protection over America and to speak in this election.”

Jeez, but the Cold War really wrecked people psychologically. It’s not the 1950s anymore, the Commies are not and never were hiding under your bed, and it is not anti-American to be smart enough to realize that capitalism is broken and needs, at the very least, a major overhaul. Biden is a political centrist beholden to all the moneyed lobbyists, not a transgender lesbian Black Marxist. You are not a little overheated, Michele. You and Pat Robertson are malignant freaks with bugs in your brain that you call “god” and a terrifying authoritarian streak.

It’s awfully hard to find a reliable pool boy anymore

Jerry Falwell Jr. has been the king of hypocrisy, presiding over a Christian “university” (actually, a profit-making real estate scheme) that imposes absurdly restrictive moral standards on its students, while romping about in a hedonistic life style, he and his wife indulging in all kinds of sexy escapades. Pick one or the other, guy!

It’s all over now. Falwell finally gets the axe.

Jerry Falwell Jr. has agreed to resign as president of Liberty University on Monday, according to a school official. The move came after a series of personal scandals rocked the evangelical university he has led since 2007.

Opposition to his presidency had been growing but came to a dramatic head after two new reports about a young man Falwell and his wife befriended at a Florida pool, went into business with and who allegedly was sexually connected to the couple. One report painted Falwell as the victim of an obsessive affair; the other as an eager participant manipulating a naive young man.

I’m sure a cushy deal was struck to get his slimy head out of the all-important money-making enterprise, and he won’t be suffering at all. Now the real fun can begin!