The religion that is destroying America

Sometimes, I too can swaddle myself in cherished delusions and believe for a time that the world might get better. Look! The “nones” are gradually increasing in number, and less than half the American population denies evolution! The trends are going the right way! Then, unfortunately, I have to read some uncomfortable facts.

Pentecostalism, broadly speaking, now has as many as 600 million adherents worldwide, or more than a quarter of all Christians. It has a huge presence in Brazil, where it played a decisive role in the rise of the populist demagogue Jair Bolsonaro; in Hungary, where it helped elevate the explicitly illiberal Viktor Orbán; and in Guatemala, where Pentecostal evangelicalism was exported from the United States to counter the influence of the Second Vatican Council and the rise of liberation theology. It is surging among migrant workers in Gulf states, where some Pentecostal networks provide key services to the disempowered, and also in Nigeria, where human trafficking organizations have infiltrated certain Pentecostal networks. From the perspective of some global leaders of the movement, the United States looks like an aging and corrupt capital—the kind of place where missionaries must go as much as the place where they come from.

The evidence suggests that their timing is good. “Pentecostalism represents a rare feat in American religion—a tradition that is growing,” according to Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. “The Assemblies of God, which stands as the largest Pentecostal denomination, has seen a 50 percent increase in membership over the last three decades, while every other prominent Protestant denomination has seen their membership decline precipitously.”

Katherine Stewart calls them “Spirit Warrior Christians”, and we’ve all seen them in action. They’re the wackaloons who go into hysterics about the gays and the trans, who serve as prayer leaders and spiritual consultants to Republican politicians, and regard deep ignorance as a good qualification to serve in government. They are best defined by who they hate.

The demons that merit the emphasis of reactionary Pentecostals and neo-charismatics today often have to do with the belief that the secular liberal world is infested with “the LGBT agenda” and, in particular, “transgender ideology.” Whatever one makes of the policy details, considered abstractly, the relentless focus on this single issue is an expression of hostility toward a perceived liberal establishment. If evil has a face, it is that of the “expert,” the professor, and perhaps above all the liberal nonbeliever who urges everybody to pursue their own ideas of good and base their moral code on the principles of empathy and rationalism, rather than biblical truth.

You talkin’ about me?

It’s way past time we started doing something about the root causes of this lunacy, and it’s not about evangelizing atheism at people. It’s about correcting the inequalities in society.

The most fruitful line of investigation and response has to focus on the root causes of the religious transformation. Religion in America is starting to look more like religion in Brazil and Guatemala because America, in some aspects, is starting to resemble Brazil and Guatemala: increasingly unequal, bitterly divided, corrupt, rife with disinformation, and unstable. If we want people to choose different gods, we might think about tackling the conditions that lead them to prefer one kind over another.

The oligarchs have plowed the land of America, and found it fertile.

I, for one, will welcome our new State Religion

Robert Garcia, a newly-elected Democratic representative, has chosen the book upon which he will swear the oath of office, and it is not a Bible.

Like any other lawmaker, Rep.-elect Robert Garcia will swear his oath of office on a foundational text. He chose the US Constitution over the Bible or another religious book, and when the time comes, he’ll also take his oath with three sentimental items, including the first edition comic of Superman.

“I’ve read almost all genres, but Superman is always the character that stood out and spoke to me the most,” Garcia, a Democrat from California, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.

Reporters on Tuesday spotted the vintage comic book among the items laid out in the House of Representatives in preparation of the swearing-in of newly elected members. In a tweet, Garcia, who describes himself as a comic book nerd in his Twitter bio, acknowledged it was for him. He said he will be sworn in to Congress with the Constitution as well as a photograph of his parents, who both died during the pandemic; his naturalization paperwork from when he became a US citizen; and the first edition of Superman, which he borrowed from the Library of Congress.

I’m happy to see that someone chose something wholesome, rather than that archaic book of misogyny, racism, and violence. Immigrants have to stick together, too.

Pro-natalists, long-termists, the Church of the Future Police…what a nightmare

Malcolm & Simone Collins, a pair of grinning fascist gobshites

Look to the right. If you ever wanted to see a pair of gold-plated smirking morons, there they are. Those two, Malcolm and Simone Collins, were cooked in the crucible of weird Silicon Valley culture — he was a manager at Google, while she worked for Peter Thiel — and they came up with a techno-fetishist cult built on their misunderstanding of science. It’s a horror story.

Googleplex, the Google HQ in Mountain View, California, is an incubator for new religious movements. Ten years ago, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the Singularity. In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion of the Future Police, began by former Google manager Malcolm Collins and his wife Simone.

The Collinses came to my attention last month, thanks to a great article by Julia Black in Business Insider, called ‘Can Super Babies Save the World’. They’re the founders of pronatalist.org, and part of a pronatalist movement growing in Silicon Valley and around the world. Pronatalists think the world is facing a population crisis: not too many people, but too few. They think civilization is threatened because of lowering birth rates, ageing populations and plummeting male fertility (average sperm count fell 50% between 1973 and 2019, and no one is sure why).

OK, I might be persuaded that the carrying capacity of the planet might be somewhat greater than the current number of 7.9 billion, but only if there was a more equitable division of wealth — the rich are resource hogs — and if we made a concerted effort to develop more sustainable technologies. Somehow, I don’t think a pair of smug Silicon Valley smegholes would go along with that. I also think that all you have to do is examine the dismal prospects of climate change and environmental decline to see we can’t sustain the current population, so blithely suggesting we can just increase it more without consequences is insane.

Also, can I just say that naming your cult The Religion of Future Police sounds rather fascist?

These people are basically long-termists who are open about one of their goals. They aren’t just trying to expand humanity as a whole, they specifically want their own personal lineage to take over the world.

as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population. If they succeed, Malcolm continued, ‘we could set the future of our species’.

Their math is sort of right – 8 kids per child per generation for 11 generations is 8,589,934,592, or 8½ billion descendants. Imagine pressuring your children with the requirement that they must have at least 8 kids each! Unfortunately, they don’t carry through on the calculation. Since each generation after the first is only going to be half Collins (unless they’re also going to encourage incest), the individuals in that last generation are only going to be 0.0098% Collins, assuming there’s no interbreeding at all, which is unlikely given they’ll constitute a population of over 8 billion people. It’s a silly and innumerate endeavor. 99% of that 11th generation are going to be derived from genetic contributions from all the other people on Earth, and with any luck they’ll completely dilute out the taint of the Collins Family insanity.

They’re also open about trying to ‘improve’ the genetics of their children with crude engineering. Very crude. They don’t know what they’re doing at all.

They’re making children through IVF, which produces as many as a dozen fertilized eggs in a dish which can then be implanted back into Simone. A cell can be taken from each developing embryo and subjected to sequence analysis, and then they pore over the list of alleles and pick the very best super-baby combination. Or they think they do. We can’t do the kind of prediction of traits from raw genomic data that they are imagining.

Probably the most controversial part of their plan is their embrace of genetic enhancement for their children, something which they say is a secret pursuit among the tech rich. ‘We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,’ Malcolm said. They used a company called Genomic Prediction, started by physicist Steve Hsu, which offers polygenic risk scores on embryos. Julia Black writes:

Though Genomic Prediction’s “LifeView” test officially offers risk scores only for 11 polygenic disorders — including schizophrenia and five types of cancer — they allowed the Collinses to access the raw genetic data for their own analysis. Simone and Malcolm then took their data export to a company called SelfDecode, which typically runs tests on adult DNA samples, to analyze what the Collinses called “the fun stuff.”

Sitting on the couch, Simone pulled up a spreadsheet filled with red and green numbers. Each row represented one of their embryos from the sixth batch, and the columns a variety of relative risk factors, from obesity to heart disease to headaches. The Collinses’ top priority was one of the most disputed categories: what they called “mental-performance-adjacent traits,” including stress, chronically low mood, brain fog, mood swings, fatigue, anxiety, and ADHD. With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo №3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses’ third child.

Oh god, Stephen Hsu? they’re taking genetic advice from a racist physicist? All the traits they think they are selecting for are complex polygenic behavioral phenomena, products of currently uninterpretable combinatorial interactions. They think they’re being rational and logical by making choices based on numerical scores, but it’s all garbage in, garbage out.

Cocky little ignoramuses, aren’t they? Just the sort to base their life choices on a religion.

I wondered how they were paying for all this gee-whiz techno pseudo-science? Easy. They’re running a religious grift.

Today they live in a farmhouse in Philadelphia with three children and a fourth on the way. They’re launching a VC fund and accepting enrollments for The Collins Institute School for the Gifted, a $20,000-a-year course in homeschooling which teaches students math, coding, how to pitch, how to run successful email campaigns, and other life-skills. They’re also running a match-making service for alpha adults, and they’ve launched their own religion with an elaborate theology described in a GoogleDoc.

They’re selling a $20,000 course in homeschooling! You know, sending your kids to a public school is a better investment — they’ll get qualified teachers who are regularly assessed, and a curriculum set by state standards. I know, sometimes public schools can be awful for many kids, but it’s not because they lack a good framework. It’s because other people can be assholes.

A homeschool run by those two arrogant know-nothings, though, is guaranteed to have an enriched population of privileged assholes.

Their status as confirmed assholes can be determined by reading their Collins Family Theology document. It’s a turgid, pretentious mess that makes sweeping pronouncements about human nature, bolstered by a few citations to short science articles which I can tell you, he uses inappropriately. Malcolm Collins has a painfully linear and determinist view of genetics. For instance,

Our culture also resists instinctual attachment to biological identity, instead contextualizing children as more “us” than we—our present biological bundles—are. Consider that each biological kid you have is 50% you. As soon as you have more than three kids, there is more of your biological identity (1.5X) in them than there is in you.

By coincidence, I happen to have three kids. That does not mean 1.5 copies of me exist — each one is a unique combinations of genes and experience. You cannot quantify “biological identity” in that simple-minded way!

What they’re doing is building a relabeled version of eugenics, based on the same conceptual errors as the original eugenics. They’re making the same horrific categorizations that the Nazis did. If you don’t accept their views, then you’re a husk — something non-human.

They call their religion ‘secular Calvinism’ — interestingly, the scientist JBS Haldane called eugenics ‘scientific Calvinism’ in the 1920s. They believe the ultimate good in the universe is ‘sapience’. More humans = more sapience. More educated and more free-thinking humans = even more sapience. Intelligent, free-thinking humans are better, according to this theology, than conformist dull-witted herd-humans, or what the Collinses call ‘husks’:

we call them a “husk” because when someone halts the process of creative destruction — refusing to explore, weigh, and sometimes to accept new ideas — they stop being meaningfully human (in our House’s view, at least).

When eugenicists say that people who think differently to them are ‘husks’ who have ‘stopped being meaningfully human’, that’s a red flag folks!

To make it a little bit worse, their kids are taught to idolize the Future Police, an imagined population in the far distant future who are looking back and judging them for how well they assist their destiny in coming to be.

Future police as a family tradition are also very useful in conveying more complex concepts exemplifying our Secular Calvinist cultural framework (such as predestination, the future that must come to pass, and the Elect) in ways that a child can easily understand. For example, it is easy to explain to a kid why the Future Police have no motivation to protect an individual who lives only for themselves or their immediate community instead of the future of the species and their family. The concept of Future Police can be used to teach kids to constantly consider how their actions impact humanity in both the near and distant future.

Future Police also allow for fun family holiday traditions. For example, at the beginning of each year, our family has a celebration in which we combine common New Year’s traditions (such as making commitments to the future) with Future Police motifs, encouraging our kids to “prove their dedication to the future” to these distant descendents in order to curry their favor and secure gifts and privileges.

“Fun.” And then they all join in a rousing chorus of Tomorrow Belongs to Me. I call it terrifying children with threats of the Future Police judging them for failing to curry favor. This is just the same old fucked-up Christian guilt-trip.

Sure, Googleplex is an incubator for new religious movements, but they’re all loony as hell, all seem to converge on the same ol’ authoritarian cultishness, and I hope they all die and fade away.

What’s killing the church?

Here’s an observation: as Christianity fades in England and Wales, some evangelical religious groups are finding a niche, like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. I guess stodgy old Anglicanism is losing its flavor. However, these new churches are poisoning the well, doing a fabulous job of producing disaffected ex-followers. You might wonder how that works.

UCKG is an evangelical, Pentecostal church, first started in Brazil. It now has a presence across the globe, including more than 50 full- and part-time branches in the UK, the most recent of which opened in Nottingham this month. Many are located in some of the most economically deprived parts of the country.

The church’s Brazilian founder, Edir Macedo, has been included on Forbes’ billionaires list. Twice this year he has flown into the UK, and around Europe, on private jets owned by the church. In Brazil, congregants’ donations were used to build a temple in São Paulo as tall as an 18-storey building.

You ought to be immediately suspicious of any church in which the head priest is a billionaire. I’d be giving the side-eye to any pastor who is even a millionaire, for that matter — how can you get wealthy honestly by preaching to the poor and needy? You can’t. The only way is by fleecing the flock.

As an atheist, though, what do I know? Maybe Jesus was just raking in the loaves and fishes, making a fortune with a chain of bakeries and fish and chip shops. Just like how Macedo might be working hard at honest labor, rather than begging his adherents to give him all their money.

Crossing a demographic bridge

The United Kingdom has tripped over the precipice into godlessness. Or at least, into following a different god. They’re waaay ahead of the United States.

England and Wales are now minority Christian countries, according to the 2021 census, which also shows that Leicester and Birmingham have become the first UK cities to have “minority majorities”.

The census revealed a 5.5 million drop in the number of Christians and a 1.2 million rise in the number of people following Islam, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million. The changes equate to a 17% fall in Christians and 44% increase in the number of Muslims. It is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian.

Meanwhile, 37.2% of people – 22.2 million – declared they had “no religion”, the second most common response after Christian. It means that over the past 20 years the proportion of people reporting no religion has soared from 14.8%.

The question I have, though, is that if atheists are so much smarter than other people, and if the percentage of atheists have more than doubled, how do we explain Brexit and the party of Tory wankers running the country? Maybe something is wrong with my premises.

Who is a greater danger to society?

Person the first, Travis Clark, a defrocked priest who was arrested for having consensual relations with two sex workers in a Catholic church:

A former Catholic priest who was arrested in 2020 after a passerby saw him and two dominatrices having sex on the altar of Pearl River church pleaded guilty Monday to a single count of felony obscenity. Travis Clark listened to 22nd Judicial District Judge Ellen Creel read the elements of the obscenity statute at the courthouse in Covington. Clark, 39, received a suspended prison sentence and will serve probation.

Clark and two women, Mindy Dixon and Melissa Cheng, were arrested in September 2020 after a passerby noticed lights on at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Pearl River. The witness saw Clark, partially naked, having sex with two women who were wearing corsets. When police arrived, they seized sex toys, stage lights, a cell phone and the tripod-mounted camera.

Person the second, a fully frocked Gregory Aymond, who carried out magic rituals to erase the demonic presence of the sex workers, among the least of his silly superstitious acts:

New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond last appeared on JMG in October 2020 when he held a ritual burning of the altar upon which “demonic” dominatrices had filmed a three-way with a local priest in view of passersby.

Earlier in 2020 he appeared here when his archdiocese declared bankruptcy in the face of an avalanche of abuse lawsuits.

Also in 2020, Aymond flew aboard a World War II-era biplane on Good Friday to sprinkle holy water on New Orleans in order to stop the spread of coronavirus.

More seriously, he has defended pedophiles, opposed abortion, and wants gays back in the closet, the usual vile Catholic shit.

Which one scares you more?

Wow, I guess that last election was more devastating than I thought

I thought the 2022 elections were rather good news, not great, but the Democrats did a little better than expected, and there’s some faint hope that our “liberal” party was going to wake up to the importance of talking about the issues that matter. We didn’t dig ourselves into a deeper hole, and maybe, if we keep working at it, we can someday reverse the descent that began in the 1980s.

Alas, poor Michael Voris. He has taken the outcome hard. Now he declares that the four pillars of his worldview — America, the Military, Notre Dame, and the Church — have been shattered. His hate group, the Church Militant will persevere, but he’s fighting a rear-guard action while playing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as we slide down the slippery (lubricated with gay lube and the blood of babies) slope to Hell, all because the Republicans failed to take the senate this time.

[cue Sad Trombone and teeny-tiny violin]

Look on the bright side, Michael. He announced a while back that he’d lived the wild life in his thirties, and made a public confession.

Whatever the matter, I will now reveal that for most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men. From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women.

He consecrated specifically my chastity to Our Blessed Mother. Well, there’s no point to that anymore, America is dead, the military is full of liberals, Notre Dame has become theologically insane, and the church is corrupt, so get out there and party like a mad man!

Believe them when they tell you what they want to do

Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.

I remember when everyone thought atheism was radical.

Just a thought: are these far-right loons finally insane enough to repel the majority of Americans? Or are they actually winning converts to their bloody causes?

Oh, wait. I just realized that Twitter is in the process of melting down, and that it’s entirely possible that every time over the last 10 or 15 years that I’ve linked to Twitter, that’s going to become a dead link, and I better make sure to include a link to a more stable, reliable source from now on. That excerpt of one of Nutty Nick’s rants is also enshrined on Right Wing Watch.

The death of Twitter is going to punch holes in blogs everywhere.

Your religiously-motivated murders must be tidy and conservative!

The day of the election, Michael Voris of the Vortex/Church Militant posted a strange video. The grey/blonde junkyard rat he uses for a toupee is noticeably tousled, and his voice is mildly agitated. He starts off by thanking god that the GOP was going to stop the evil ones, so he seems to be confident that there is going to be a Republican sweep (with reservations: the forces of darkness…have complete control of one political party and partial control over the other, and we lost the war over morality, so evident today in even the GOP, which just warmly embraces sodomy as marriage — it’s a bit of a mixed message), but his real message is simple: if conservative Catholics don’t get their way, then violence is justified.

You may notice his message here is also confused. He keeps insisting that political action is the first resort and that violence is the very last resort, but hey, if you can’t ban abortion and gay marriage, then yeah, go for it, start busting heads.

Now we are in a pitched battle in the political arena—the last remaining line before all-out civil war. If you love peace and you don’t want to see violence, then you better get involved on the political front.

And let’s be clear about this for all the phony or delusional pacifists out there: Violence in and of itself is not immoral. It depends on the circumstances, and sometimes, even, it’s necessary: self defense, the subduing of an aggressor threatening the life of your family, the Son of God in the temple violently whipping the money changers.

Wait. One of his examples is not like the others. I can agree that violence in self-defense against violence is acceptable, but if you’re the Son of God you’re allowed to be violent against capitalists? Bring on the Communist Revolution then. Except that Voris hates Communists, and that’s exactly what the Democrats are. Except also that I suspect what he really means to say is that whipping The Jews is just fine and dandy.

The idea that violence must always, at all times, always be avoided is not Catholic. Remember the Crusades? Sometimes violence must be unleashed to protect the innocent.

Wait again. The Crusades were about protecting the innocent? What I remember is that the Crusades were violent invasions of the Middle East justified by a welter of complex political and religious excuses that mainly ended up killing a lot of people to no good end. I interpret this to mean that violence is bad except when religious rationalizations allow you to unleash it. He’s kind of arbitrary in what he accepts as “protecting the innocent”.

But lethal violence—because of its drastic, you-can-never-come-back-from-it consequences—must never be the first resort. In fact, it must always be the last resort, and then not be allowed to turn into an orgy of dominance over the foe.

Nonetheless, violence does — must — always be an option. Welcome to a fallen world.

Violence is bad, mmm-kay, but it must always be an option. I’ll let you know when the option must be exercised. Stay tuned to the Vortex for the signal!

Remember, no orgies. Orgies are bad. The Church Militant only endorses strait-laced murders.

God’s big money cheaters

Make AiG’s nightmare a reality!

Churches already have so many unwarranted privileges that it’s simply being greedy when they also flout the few laws that constrain them. ProPublica exposes what we already knew was happening everywhere: churches ignoring the law to meddle in politics.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 20 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under the law, pastors can endorse candidates in their personal capacities outside of church and weigh in on political issues from the pulpit as long as they don’t veer into support or condemnation of a particular candidate. But the law prohibits pastors from endorsing candidates during official church functions such as sermons.

Violations can lead to the revocation of a church’s tax-exempt status.

Oooh, what a terrifying punishment.

Since the IRS has been unable to enforce the law, I suggest cutting through all the hesitations and simply revoke the tax-exempt status of all churches. There’s no legitimate reason that setting up a panhandling shop and calling it a god’s house should make its owners free of property and income taxes. Start rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, you know.