There’s a reflection in the clouds above the Capitol!

Oh, and it’s satanic. A satanic portal. We know this because Roger Stone says so. Here’s a picture of it:

I wouldn’t have believed it, except they drew a gigantic, thick, crude orange oval around it, so it must be true. Also, the people testifying to it are so trustworthy.

That’s Steve Schultz, an evangelical Christian who runs something called “Elijah’s List”, where people talk about Bible prophecy, and Roger Stone, who has surrounded himself with pagan paraphernalia featuring his gods, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and another evangelical, Robin D. Bullock. Bullock would worry me, if I were a Christian. He’s nestled into an altar with candles and a sword and various paganish elements, so he’s clearly a witch.

What they have discovered is that if you have a brightly lit building or monument, you will sometimes see reflections in the clouds above it. It’s an entirely natural phenomenon. In their minds, though, they are frantically seeking out patterns that fit their presuppositions, and then interpreting them in a way that reinforces their beliefs. People do this all the time, and the interpretations become more and more extreme if you’re hanging out with a group that totally lacks any skeptical input — it’s self-reinforcing, and is just going to get crazier and crazier, with each of those three reassuring each other that no amount of wackiness is going to trigger reason.

So a glow in the sky become’s Satan’s cauldron and a portal to hell because they want to think the worst of the man in the White House. If we went back a few years and took a similar picture while Trump was in office, it would be a sign from God, like the star of Bethlehem, that the man below it was the anointed one.

Here’s a video by a guy who wasn’t a gullible Stone Stooge who went looking for the Satanic Portal. It wasn’t there. He sees lots of reflections and lens flares from the bright lights around the building, and speculates that the White House live webcam, which is situated high up on a nearby building, has one of those lights shining in such a way as to reflect off the lens.

Sounds reasonable, far more likely than Satan building a glowing portal in the sky. But hey, you wild and wacky evangelical Christians: keep on praying. It won’t do any harm, and keeps you busy.

The book bannings will continue

Now the Republicans want to ban math textbooks. Florida has rejected 54 out of 132 proposed math textbooks because Ron DeSantis says they contain Critical Race Theory. Really? I found an example of what they object to.

A few points I have to make:

1. That’s not CRT. Those are just story problems on a worksheet about Maya Angelou.

2. That’s actually a clever way to motivate students to carry out simple algebraic calculations.

3. Isn’t it obvious how it will help kids learn algebra? They have to use algebra to crack the code and puzzle out the whole story.

4. I can tell the critic just zeroed in on the mention of sexual abuse and prostitution. Those things exist. They happen. They don’t disappear if you close your eyes real tight.

5. It’s also not from a Florida math textbook. It’s taken from an unapproved collection of potential math problems from an online site. For shame, Ms Pushaw! You lied!

Florida is working so hard to become the worst state in the union. They’ll have to work harder, though, because Texas is attacking libraries.

In early November, an email dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

This is a Texas tradition. There are always prudes and bigots who object to books that don’t pander to their blinkered, ignorant worldview — remember Mel and Norma Gabler? — the problem is that Texas actually listens to them, and has an army of conservative politicians that rush to impose their 19th century views on their electorate. Literally. That’s what motivated the Gablers to go on their long-running crusade to wreck the American textbook industry.

Norma and Mel Gabler entered the field of textbook reform twenty years ago, after their son Jim came home from school disturbed at discrepancies between the 1954 American history text his eleventh-grade class was using and what his parents had taught him. The Gablers compared his text to history books printed in 1885 and 1921 and discovered differences. “Where can you go to get the truth?” Jim asked.

How dare our understanding of the world change? Although best known to me for their efforts to expunge evolution from biology classes, you can tell that what triggered them, from the timing, was race. Same as nowadays.

Bonnie Wallace’s letter is also revealing. The only reason she isn’t sponsoring a book burning is projection — she’s afraid the liberals want to do the same thing to her cherished books. I swear, though, no one is planning to ban the Bible, and if they were, I’d be right there in opposition. The Bible is a piece of our history, everyone should be exposed to it, just as they should be exposed to our history of slavery and lynchings. Besides, it’s such a useful tool for creating atheists.

She’s also lying about “pornographic filth”. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book is not at all pornographic, but only frankly discusses the effects of racism…but yeah, they don’t want that known.

They also want to ban a whole batch of children’s books, such as Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which is quite a lovely weird story, and has, as I recall, two pictures of naked little Mickey falling through a dream. My kids giggled at that and always pointed it out because nudity is so highly censored from all of our books. It was innocent, not pornographic, and only stood out because the prudes and assholes have gotten their way for so long.

Now it’s getting worse. They’re dissolving library boards so they can pack them with conservative Republicans.

Cunningham said in a statement that the restructuring of the library board was in keeping with Texas law and past practices to allow for “citizen participation from different perspectives.” The all-female board is overwhelmingly White and Republican, records show.

And the new board was ready to start focusing on its top priorities, including adding content of “academia, educational value and character building” and consulting with a local Christian school about their needs, Wells wrote in one email. Wells, a member of the local tea party who home-schools her six children, did not return calls for comment.

They’re also ridiculously Christian.

Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.

Most chillingly, they’re quietly disappearing books they don’t like from the libraries, firing librarians, and hinting that they aren’t required to even have a library.

“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.

I remember the Satanic panics of the 1980s, when all kinds of baseless nonsense about cults and child sacrifice and secret underground rituals made the rounds (often abetted by the police — ACAB — who made up horrific and false stories to further the repressive bullshit). We’re in the middle of another one right now. Their chants are all about “pedophiles” and “grooming”, and they use them and their lunatic fringe Christianity to justify all kinds of oppression.

Many who spoke praised the commissioners for their recent work “saving the children of Llano County” from “pornography” and “pedophiles,” often breaking into enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Amen!” Tension erupted when latecomers stuck in the hallway attempted to speak. “I’d like to speak in the name of Jesus!” one man yelled.

“Amen!” is the new “Sieg Heil!”

An outbreak of vampires in Kentucky this weekend?

It’s the only way to interpret this rather ominous newspaper ad.

Except, right, it’s Easter, that weekend when the death-cult celebrates involuntary sacrifice and grisly torture methods.

It’s all OK, because maybe their victims of slow murder will pop back up and be alive again, despite the fact that in two thousand years of repeated trials with billions of participants, it’s never happened, not once, other than the occasional apocryphal hallucination.

In case you’d forgotten how bonkers the Christian Right is

Pat Robertson was compelled to rise from his crypt to remind us.

He is explaining to us that Putin is an agent of God who is making a righteous move to expand towards Israel to bring about the End Times. He’s going to take over Ukraine as part of a march towards the Dardenelles so that, when the Apocalypse arrives, he can kill all the Jews, except for the ones who convert to Christianity. A little geography reminder:

Taking Ukraine doesn’t get him that close to Robertson’s hallucinated destination. He’s also going to have to take Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I wonder how much Robertson’s prayers for victory every step of the way will help?

Robertson is barely able to move anymore, so we shouldn’t worry about him. There are others like him in the halls of Congress, though, who believe in that bizarre Christian eschatology of the End Times and the Rapture and who babble about “Judeo-Christian morality” while dreaming of the day all the Jews are eradicated or converted in a world-wide spasm of destruction…and who believe that would be a good thing. When you’re fantasizing about Hell on Earth and mass slaughter, I guess someone like Putin begins to look like a divine hero.

God cares about pronouns

Tragic news: a priest was carrying out baptisms wrongly. These were botched baptisms!

The diocese, which is trying to identify people baptized by Arango, set up a FAQ section on its website to confront issues related to the botched baptisms and also created a form for people who were initiated into the church by the priest to complete.

Arango’s error was in saying, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” when he should have begun the sentence by saying, “I baptize you.”

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Bishop Thomas Olmsted wrote in a mid-January message on the diocese’s site.

I think the priest had hiccups that day.

Think of all the Catholics baptized by a priest who erred in the precise formula: all the priests who stuttered, or sneezed, or paused too long at some random point in the incantation, or worst of all, spoke the rite in the wrong language. I don’t know what the right language is, but it’s probably not English or modern Italian. God is very finicky about these things, I guess.

It’s probably not German, either, which explains Hitler. Do they say “du” or “Sie” in the correct version? Maybe they’ve been getting it wrong all this time.

I wonder if the Catholic Church is more angry at the priest who screwed up the baptisms than they are at the priests who diddled choir boys?

I am once again confirmed in my decision to shun organized religion…even Satanist religions

I have long held reservations about the Satanic Temple. I am not at all keen on replacing one Christian superstition with another Christian superstition, even if the satanist are saying they don’t believe in any supernatural entities. It’s just an attention-getting hook, they say. I could see the argument that they are acting as a counterpoise to all those Good News Clubs that are infiltrating the public schools, or as a way to highlight the absurdity of religious teachings.

But are they really?

I have my doubts. Especially after reading this long expose of the Satanic Temple’s history. It begins to look like one guy’s marketing scam. They charter an insignificant few “After School Satan” clubs, they trigger hysterical shrieking from local pastors, they get in the newspapers and on local television news, Tucker Carlson invites Lucien Greaves onto his program, mission accomplished, the clubs are neglected and fall apart.

As late as September 2020, the Temple claimed to have active ASS clubs in nine school districts. A person searching for themselves to double-check could even find multiple national and local headlines about it:

Atlanta (Powder Springs, Ga.);
Los Angeles (Panorama City, Calif.);
Salt Lake City (Taylorsville, Utah);
Pensacola, Fla.;
Washington, D.C. (Capitol Heights, Md.),
Tucson, Ariz.; Springfield, Mo.;
Seattle (Mount Vernon, Wash.); and
Portland, Ore.

What you may notice (but journalists and fact-checkers never seem to) is that those stories don’t include the clubs getting to the point of actually meeting with students.

Ooops.

This is a good summary of the pseudo-religion.

What an awful, pathetic religion Satanism is if it wants to get national headlines, untraceable money, and the right to teach children but is too craven to even manage that.

Do we even need to get into Lucien Greaves’ sordid history of anti-semitism, racism, eugenics, and pandering to the far right?

Kids, you’re our only hope

I’ve been noting for years that the Christian right has been highly effective at packing school boards and city councils with idiots, primarily people who have made the Bible or Capitalism their god. It’s a tactic that works, since it’s a way to let a minority’s nonsensical perspective dominate community life. It allows them to introduce the most astonishing — and illegal — bullshit into the public schools.

Between calculus and European history classes at a West Virginia public high school, 16-year-old Cameron Mays and his classmates were told by their teacher to go to an evangelical Christian revival assembly.

When students arrived at the event in the school’s auditorium, they were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, Mays said. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Those who did not follow the Bible would go to hell when they died, they were told.

This isn’t just a West Virginia thing. I’ve lost touch with my local public school since all my kids graduated and got the hell out of town, but the local schools would pull this kind of stunt all the time. There are traveling evangelical Christian groups all over this state that make money by billing schools to put on “wholesome” or “moral” assemblies — see You Can Run But You Cannot Hide ministries, which has the goal To reshape America by re-directing the current and future generations both morally and spiritually through education, media, and the Judeo-Christian values found in our U.S. Constitution. They’re a known hate group, but they still manage to slither into our schools, and he’s still got a Christian talk radio show.

What they don’t take into account, though, is we can still get the kids. They’re too smart, and can see right through all that.

The Huntington High School junior sent a text to his father.

“Is this legal?” he asked.

The answer, according to the U.S. Constitution, is no. In fact, the separation of church and state is one of the country’s founding basic tenets, noted Huntington High School senior Max Nibert.

“Just to see that defamed and ignored in such a blatant way, it’s disheartening,” he said.

Nibert and other Huntington students staged a walkout during their homeroom period Wednesday to protest the assembly. More than 100 students left their classrooms chanting, “Separate the church and state” and, “My faith, my choice.”

A West Virginia school had a walkout led by the students to protest the willful insertion of evangelical Christian propaganda in their school. Let that sink in, preachers. Your message isn’t persuading the youth, it’s alienating them. Good.

Religion is a force that fosters fanaticism

What’s the difference between the insurrectionist’s prayer and the national prayer breakfast? Nothing.

It’s an unfortunately under-reported fact that our recent attempted insurrection had a strong unifying force: White Christian Nationalism. You didn’t see many atheists or Muslims or Jews storming the capitol, and you didn’t hear a lot of non-Christian rhetoric stirring up the mob. The organizations that promote the overthrow of the government are groups like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, the Groypers, etc., all fanatically Christian…or at least, eager to adopt a Christian facade to rationalize their violence.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Seidel highlighted what he called the preponderance of “openly militant” rhetoric that conflated religion and violence. He pointed to William McCall Calhoun Jr., a Georgia lawyer who reportedly claimed on social media that he was among those who “kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door” on Jan. 6. (Calhoun later claimed in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution that he did not personally enter any office.)

“God is on Trump’s side. God is not on the Democrats’ side,” Calhoun allegedly wrote in a social media post. “And if patriots have to kill 60 million of these communists, it is God’s will. Think ethnic cleansing but it’s anti-communist cleansing.”

In the report, Seidel recounts a conversation with New Yorker journalist Luke Mogelson, who recorded widely shared footage of insurrectionists attacking the U.S. Capitol and praying in the Senate chamber.

“The Christianity was one of the surprises to me in covering this stuff, and it has been hugely underestimated,” Mogelson told Seidel. “That Christian nationalism you talk about is the driving force and also the unifying force of these disparate players. It’s really Christianity that ties it all together.”

How can it be a surprise? This combination of Christianity and fascism has been openly on display for at least the last century. Here are a few ancient history quotes (ancient only because this is America, we forget the past as soon as it is behind us):

Eugene Debs in 1918:

No wonder Jackson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” He had the Wall Street gentry in mind or their prototypes, at least; for in every age it has been the tyrant, who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both. (Shouts of “Good, good” from the crowd) (applause).

Lonnie Jackson, 1923:

“The Ku Klux Klan comes wrapped in the American flag, as it were, advocating the American principles openly, with a Bible in its hand, and the very next day they are passing their neighbors with a mask over their faces. My conception of the fundamental principles of Americanism is that a man should have nothing to be ashamed of.”

A letter to the Kingsport, Tennessee Times:

The contention of my articles will be that, if and when fascism comes over America, it will be on the Kingsport plan—iron hand encased in a silk glove:

For God and Country!
Freedom and democracy!
Pure Anglo-Saxonism!
Liberty and the constitution!

—catchwords which will thwart the actual and real rights of the citizenry . . .

And this familiar quote:

In his book, “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.”

I repeat, how can this be a surprise? They are talking about a report written by a committee which included Kathryn Stewart, who has a new book, The Power Worshippers, which is specifically about the rise of religious nationalism.

Christian nationalism is a political ideology that ties the ideas of America to specific cultural and religious identities. It’s an anti-democratic ideology because it says the foundation of legitimate government is not our Constitution, our democratic system of governance or our imperfect history of absorbing different people from all over the world into pluralistic society — but rather, our government is tied to specific cultural and religious identities. It’s also a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large segments of the American public.

Man, I wish we had an active atheist movement that wasn’t tainted by authoritarianism and bigotry. I also wish we didn’t have such deep economic rifts that allowed Christian billionaires to astroturf our media and various organizations with fascist assholes like Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson.

As our holiday season winds down, give thanks that America is destroying religion

We atheists really can’t take credit for it — years of shaking our fists at the churches and patiently explaining that religion was all bullshit did nothing. What’s finally killing the churches is the one-two punch of the pandemic (turns out prayer doesn’t cure disease after all) and the hateful ideologies of the far right that have corrupted the churches in a way no one can ignore any more.

I predict an unfortunate side-effect, however: it’s the good people who honestly care about their congregations, and the people who actually believe in those radical Christian ideals of community and sacrifice and helping the poor who are giving up. The libertarians and the fundamentalist fanatics and the con artists are doing just fine. The WaPo has some anecdotes about various clergy abandoning their churches.

Aldape is part of an exodus of clergy who have left ministry in the past couple years because of a powerful combination of pandemic demands and political stress. Amid fights about masks and vaccine mandates, to how far religious leaders can go in expressing political views that might alienate some of their followers, to whether Zoom creates or stifles spiritual community, pastoral burnout has been high.

The past few years have jostled and rocked the labor market overall, with many millions losing and changing jobs either by force, by choice or a combination of the two. But some research and anecdotes suggest this period is a crisis for American clergy.

A Barna survey of Protestant pastors published last month found 38 percent said they’d considered quitting full-time ministry in the past year.

I sympathize with the pandemic stress, I’ve been feeling it too. I think a lot of teachers are reconsidering whether this job is worth it. We’re generally spared the follow-up punch, though, since we’re fortunate to live in a bubble of the well-educated, where we’ve already filtered out many of the assholes who afflict the citizenry. I think churches tend to select the other way.

Gustafson found himself at odds with higher-ranking clergy.

“I felt like, if people care more about their individual rights than caring for their neighbor, then it’s a matter of discipleship,” he recalled. He was told to “focus on Jesus,” he says. Then came fall 2020, and President Donald Trump’s comment in a presidential debate to right-wing extremists that they should “stand back and stand by.”

Gustafson posted to his Facebook page that he was disappointed in Trump.

Soon, he said, he was getting pushback from some congregants and clergy. One told him, he said, that half the church members were Trump voters and that his problem was that he didn’t love them.

He put in his notice at the end of 2020 and left in March.

Now it’s just not the clergy, but some members of those congregations are abandoning the church. Those departures are usually unsung and unnoticed, unless the apostate happens to be really, really rich. Those are the lost souls that really sting the church.

An advertising-technology billionaire has formally resigned his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and rebuked the faith over social issues and LGBTQ rights in an unusual public move.

Jeff T. Green has pledged to donate 90% of his estimated $5 billion fortune, starting with a $600,000 donation to the LGBTQ-rights group Equality Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

Green said in a Monday resignation letter to church President Russell M. Nelson that he hasn’t been active in the faith widely known as Mormon for more than a decade but wanted to make his departure official and remove his name from membership records.

That’s a good start, giving up on a repressive church and giving up most of his fortune (giving away 90% of $5 billion leaves him with $500 million, so he’s not exactly a modern day Siddhartha, but it’s commendable), and you have to appreciate his motivation.

“I believe the Mormon church has hindered global progress in women’s rights, civil rights and racial equality, and LGBTQ+ rights,” he wrote. Eleven family members and a friend formally resigned along with him.

Oh, he noticed? My years of living in Utah made me highly aware of the pernicious influence of the LDS church. You meet so many women who have resigned themselves to a life of pumping out babies, some in polygamous relationships that glorify the men, and all you have to do is walk down the streets near the temple to meet homeless kids, many of whom were kicked out of their homes because the church demonizes gay people. Mormonism is good at putting up a straight-laced facade over a broken morality.

It’s not just the Mormons, of course. How can anyone fail to notice Catholic pedophilia or Protestant greed? It’s a testimony to the power of superstition and fear that any religion survives at all.