Call the Church Police!

Or, on second thought, maybe don't.

A new bill working its way through the Mississippi legislature called the “Mississippi Church Protection Act” would allow members of religious congregations to be endowed with the same "shoot to kill" authority currently extended to police officers. If the bill passes, killing someone while acting as a participant of a church or other house of worship will be treated as justifiable homicide.

The Bill passed the Mississippi House in February and, on Wednesday, the Senate approved it, making one minor amendment. It is now scheduled to go back to the House where it will then find its way to the governor’s desk. This Bill legally recognizes actual “soldiers of Christ” and grants them the power to kill. What’s more, there is no justification for granting churches extra rights that other citizens do not have. By passing this bill, the state of Mississippi effectively recognizes churches as their own sovereign entities — mini-states that are tax-free and immune from their acts of violence carried out in their official duties.

“The ‘Mississippi Church of Protection Act’ is well deserving of the title for ‘Worst State Bill.’ This legislation would put ‘soldiers of God’ above the law, allowing them to act as judge, jury, and executioner,” said Larry T. Decker, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America. “Religious institutions are already exempt from taxation, financial transparency, and many civil rights laws. The Mississippi Church Protection Act would constitute an unprecedented and dangerous next step. Belonging to a church should not afford anyone the same rights and protections as law enforcement. This legislation emboldens extremists by creating a legal means for radical preachers to enlist their congregants into ‘God’s army.'”

Let me also point out that the bill would authorize "Soldiers of Thelema" as well. Does Mississippi really want that? My guess is that there will all sorts of hemming and hawing the moment any non-Christian religion tries to do this, the case will be appealed to the Supreme Court, and the law will be declared unconstitutional because the state will try to argue that it only should apply to Christians. But that's just not allowed. Either everyone has to be able to do it, or no one can.

Me, I vote for no one. We already have enough trouble dealing with police officers who kill civilians. Why would anybody want to extend that to members of religious congregations? As a point, if somebody barges into a church with a gun and starts shooting people, members of the congregation who happen to be armed are already allowed to shoot back in self-defense. So I fail to see what this bill could possible accomplish.

Bend Over for the Jesus Shot

Okay, I'll admit it. This article is not as dirty as my headline implies. It's still pretty disturbing, though, in a totally different way. Just in time for Easter, an Oklahoma doctor who spent time in prison for fraud is being investigated for offering his patients something he calls "the Jesus shot." Nobody knows what's in it or how it works. But for $300, Dr. John Michael Lonergan claims that it will take away pain for life, regardless of the source.

Recent e-mails sent to News 9's newsroom claim the doctor is actively injecting people across the state with a mysterious formula called the "Jesus shot." News 9 tracked Lonergan to Full Circle Health in Edmond as well as Doorway To Health in Moore.

A receptionist at the Edmond clinic answered questions in a recorded phone call with News 9.

News 9: "Why is it called the Jesus shot?

Clinic: "I don't know why [Lonergan] calls it that."

News 9: "What's in it?"

Clinic: "You would have to sit down for a consultation with [Lonergan]. I do not know what the formula is."

Full Circle Health Clinic Director Barbie Schrick says Lonergan is a part-time employee. Schrick promises to investigate Lonergan's "miracle injection." The "Jesus shot" is described as an injection that takes away pain for life. It costs $300, according to the clinic.

"I am so glad you're telling me about this," Schrick told News 9's Michael Konopasek. "Thank God for the news that investigates and finds things out for people. Thank you."

Backing up a bit, one of the blogs I've been following for a number of years is Mike Sententia's Magic of Thought. Mike and I have similar backgrounds - we're both computer programmers with strong interests in exploring the overlap between magick and conventional science.

One of the main differences in our perspectives is that he comes from an energy healing background, and he's convinced that healing is one of the best areas to explore in terms of proving magick to skeptics. I disagree with that assertion entirely, because even in conventional science, healing is a mess. Introducing magical and/or spiritual concepts into it only makes that worse.

Now Poor Oppressed Christians Can't Win

The recent death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has complicated what I consider the stupidest religious freedom case ever brought before the court, Zubik v. Burwell. In the case, a charity called Little Sisters of the Poor is trying to argue that filling out and mailing a form violates their religious rights. What's so especially dumb about the case is that all the form in question does is assert said rights.

As a religious charity, Little Sisters of the Poor is eligible for a religious accommodation from the employer mandate to cover contraception for its employees. Little Sisters is a Roman Catholic charity, so they are opposed to providing this coverage. Thanks to the accommodation, all they have to do is fill out a form that tells the government they are opting out, and coverage is provided at no cost to the employee on a separate rider.

The entire process is simple and balances the religious rights of the employer with those of the employee, who may or may not have any religious objection to contraception at all. But in true Poor Oppressed Christian fashion, Little Sisters claims that unless they can deny all contraception coverage to their employees and prevent anyone else from doing so as well, their rights are still being violated.

Like I said - really, really stupid. All of the lower courts have ruled against this nonsense by wide margins, as they should.

An evenly split ruling, with the court's four liberals backing the Obama administration against the four conservative justices, would leave in place lower-court rulings rejecting challenges brought by the Christian organizations that oppose providing contraception coverage for religious reasons.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often casts the deciding vote in close cases, appeared more aligned with the court's three other conservatives in favoring the challengers, which primarily were Roman Catholic including the archdiocese of Washington.

Good to Know!

Have you ever wondered how long it would take for a vampire to drink all of your blood? If so, a group of science students with too much time on their hands at the University of Leicester claim to have figured it out. According to their calculations, it would take a little under six and a half minutes to drain 1.3 pints of blood - and at least forty-two minutes to drain a human body completely.

To make their calculation, students at the University of Leicester used fluid dynamics to estimate how long it would take for the blood to flow out of a hole in the carotid artery.

They assumed the external carotid artery itself would have a diameter of 0.2 inches (0.5cm) and calculated the speed of the blood flowing into it travels at 1.34mph (0.6 metres per second).

They then calculated the pressure difference should a hole be punctured into the artery by comparing the average human blood pressure in arteries to air pressure. By factoring in the density of the blood at room temperature, they calculated that the blood would leave the puncture wound at 11mph (five metres per second).

The students also assumed their fictional vampire's fangs would leave puncture holes just 0.02 inches (0.5mm) wide and factored in the density of the blood at room temperature.

They performed the calculations to coincide with the 85th anniversary of Tod Browning's 1931 horror film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi.

Now I'm not a vampirologist or whatever it is they call themselves, but even I can see the problem here. These calculations assume that the vampire doesn't suck - which, of course, everyone knows they do, in more ways than one. So comparing the pressure of blood in the carotid artery to regular air pressure will yield a value that's too slow. Still, movies and television programs often show vampires draining their victims in a second or two, which is unrealistic even if they can create a perfect vacuum.

Maybe Anne Rice had it right all along - vampires can drain their victims almost instantly because they have super-speed relative to everything else in the world. But could that effect really extend to the speed at which they can extract blood from their victims?

Pay to Pray?

So called prosperity gospel evangelists are well-known for running what is essentially a scam, claiming that donations to their ministries serves as "seeds" that will be multiplied by God many times over if only their parishioners have enough faith. Because of the way religious freedom works in the United States, they are free to make such claims because people are allowed to believe whatever they want, and donate to anyone they choose.

Seattle businessman Benjamin Rogovy, though, seems to have taken this idea a little too far. He was recently ordered by a judge to pay back millions of dollars raised by what is described as a "Pay to Pray" website that promised to pray for visitors in exchange for small donations ranging from $11 to $35.

Rogovy’s websites — christianprayercenter.com and oracioncristiana.org — offered to pray for desperate English and Spanish speakers if they paid between $9 and $35 for the service. He created fake ministers who would assist with religious ceremonies and were available for consultation. The CPC also used the name “Pastor Eric Johnson”; according to the attorney general’s office neither Pastor Johnson nor Pastor Carlson exist.

In addition, Rogovy locked his hapless victims into recurring monthly payments through a “deliberately confusing website”.

“The AGO investigation found that once consumers submitted and paid for a prayer request, they were directed to a Web page that gave them the option to receive ‘continued blessings’,” Ferguson’s statement said. “Between 2011 and 2015, CPC collected more than $7 million from 125,000 consumers nationwide. Some of these consumers were charged repeatedly, resulting in a total of over 400,000 transactions.”

Consumers must file a complaint with the Washington state attorney general’s office by 12 June to receive a refund. They can do so online, and will receive an e-mail from the Christian Prayer Center by 6 April informing them of the process.

The problem with the operation appears to be that it was built on a bunch of fraudulent claims. Rogovy's site claimed that he had ministers on staff who were actually doing the praying, except it came out that this was not true. His "ministers" were aliases created by Rogovy himself who never did any praying. Also, the website apparently operated in a confusing fashion that led to visitors being signed up for ongoing monthly charges.

Fired Over Kim Davis

Kim Davis, the anti-gay Kentucky county clerk who became briefly famous for refusing to let her office do its job, hasn't been in the news much lately. But according to Vatican sources, her case has led to serious repercussions for apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

Viganò arranged for Davis to briefly meet Pope Francis during his last visit to the United States. Davis and her supporters immediately issued a false public statement that the Pope supported their position, which provoked an online firestorm of controversy. Since the Pope didn't support Davis in any sense of the word, he was not amused.

So now rather than Kim Davis, it looks like the person set to lose their job over this whole mess is Viganò, who is slated to be removed as apostolic nuncio.

During the pope’s visit to the U.S. last year, Viganò arranged for him to meet with Davis, the Rowan County clerk, who shut down all marriage operations in her office to avoid serving same-sex couples after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. After she was sued and disobeyed a federal judge's order to resume marriage operations, she went to jail for contempt of court before agreeing that her office would serve all eligible couples.

Davis and her attorneys at Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT legal group, said she and her husband met privately with Pope Francis, who told her to “stay strong.” After news reports appeared about the meeting, held at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C., Vatican officials said the session was not private — the Davises were among several dozen people in a papal reception— and that the pope did not discuss the details of her situation. “His meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” a Vatican spokesman said at the time. Davis is not Catholic but a member of the Apostolic Pentecostal Christian faith.

Davis is an elected official, so she can't just be fired. But the state actually worked out a pretty simple compromise that wasn't widely publicized and which I actually don't have much of a problem with. Davis does not have to personally sign off on applications for the same-sex marriages she opposes as long as she lets somebody else from her office do it. To be legally valid, the applications never needed to be signed by her personally.

It's a pretty sad testimony to the psychology of religious extremists in this country that instead of just handing same-sex marriage applications to the person next to her to sign, she had to make a huge stink in the media, whining about how her rights were being violated if anyone in her office was allowed to sign off on them. But apparently, nobody else in her office has any problem doing that.

The point was never that Davis had to personally sign, which she considers to be against her beliefs. The point was that as a public servant, she was not allowed to demand that her office prevent others from exercising rights that her religion condemns. As I've pointed out many times, religious freedom isn't free. If you want to claim those rights for yourself, you have to be willing to extend them to everyone else.

A Simple Pathworking Ritual

Normally I put up all of the technical magick posts on Mondays, but a reader asked me how I would go about doing a pathworking for path 11, which corresponds to the Fool card of the Tarot and the element of Air. Once I worked on that for a bit, it became clear that I could just as easily write up a general article describing my methods for doing this basic magical practice.

The term "pathworking" refers to aligning your field of awareness with one of the twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life and experiencing what that state of consciousness/portion of the universe has to offer you.

Often, in addition to the landscape of the path itself, you will encounter various entities along the way of whom you can ask questions related to the nature and function of the path, both generally and in the context of your life and magical practice.

Donald Michael Kraig talks about pathworking in Modern Magick, and my main complaint about his presentation is that nowhere in his book does he include the Greater Rituals of the Pentagram and Hexagram. You can do pathworking without them, by prolonged meditation or intricate navigation up the Tree of Life, but the Greater rituals make the process much cleaner and simpler.

Some books present pathworkings as elaborate guided meditations in which you are instructed to experience various specific aspects of the path in a particular order. I don't use those. They are far too constrictive, and I have found that even with a bit of practice, it is easy enough to explore the path on your own "in the spirit vision" without much external guidance.

So here's the method. The temple should be set up with a cushion or chair in the center suitable for meditation rather than any sort of table or altar. If there is an altar, it should be placed in the east. The Tarot card corresponding to the path you will be exploring may be placed on this altar so it can be easily seen. Then the ritual proceeds as follows.

A Mystery Tradition for the Modern World?

Mystery traditions are as old as human civilization. Nobody has any idea who first came up with the concept of exploiting the human brain's reaction to uncertainty in order to create stronger memory impressions, but it has proved to be an effective method for creating changes in consciousness. I belong to two organizations that make use of this technology, Ordo Templi Orientis and Freemasonry, which are not so much secret societies as societies with secrets.

People sometimes question why members of both organizations keep the details of our initiation rituals secret, and some conspiracy theorists have proposed that it is because said initiations involve everything from criminal actions to communion with the alien lizards who secretly rule the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the reason that we keep the initiations secret is simply because that's how they work. When you walk into a situation that is entirely unknown, your brain and mind react differently than they do if you know what's about to happen.

The rituals of Masonry in particular have been published in many places over the years, and if you look hard enough you can probably find them, or at least enough information about them to figure out what's going to happen. But if you ever plan on becoming a Mason, I highly recommend that you don't do this. Without the element of uncertainty, the degrees are far less effective, and if you read ahead you're not putting anything over on the fraternity - all you are doing is cheating yourself out of the experience.

In that context I found this article from Vice especially interesting. It details the operations of a group called The Latitude Society that was essentially a tech startup designed to take advantage of the mystery tradition playbook. Its products were unique experiences based on the structure of the secret societies of old, and in this respect it was a secret society specifically tailored to the Internet age. It eventually failed, but while it was operational it represented a fascinating experiment in group dynamics.