More Kim Davis Drama

Here I thought we were all done with Poor Oppressed Christian icon Kim Davis after she officially lost her lawsuit forever. Unfortunately, she has a real talent for getting herself in the news. Davis is being sued again for hiding assets from an inheritance to avoid paying the judgement in her original case.

Combined with attorney fees, Davis owes more than $560,000 under the civil rights judgment. The lawsuit also claims Davis has yet to pay any of the amount ordered. Attorneys for Ermold and Moore say that after Davis’ mother died in 2025, Davis inherited land and transferred the deeds of that property to other family members. The lawsuit claims the transfers were made to conceal her assets.

Attorney Michael J. Gartland said there are three parcels of land in question. Deed certificates list the total value of those parcels at more than $400,000. Gartland cited a fraudulent conveyance statute, which prohibits transferring property to avoid paying existing claims against you. He said the transfers took place before the couple won the judgment.

“Now we only found out about it in December of 2025 — Kim Davis answered sworn statement interrogatory written questions — we asked her to identify all transfers in the last five years that were worth more than two thousand dollars and she wrote none — that turned out to be a false statement because we have copies of the deeds by which she conveyed these properties just eight or nine months earlier,” Gartland said.

These phony "Christians" are absolutely shameless. Isn't lying supposed to be a sin or something? I don't happen to follow her religion, but I'll always call out a hypocrite. If she had any integrity she would have answered that question honestly and faced the consequences. But these folks are literally as self-serving as everyone else, if not moreso in the current political climate.

These people need to face accountability across the board. Their religion doesn't grant them special rights, at least according to the United States Constitution. Whenever they try to force their beliefs on others, they should be sanctioned to the full extent of the law.

Poor Oppressed Christians Target Prayer Group

No, not a Christian prayer group, a Jewish prayer group. That's the entire point here. Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish man living in University Heights, Ohio wanted to hold a prayer group with his friends at his home. No big deal, right? Most Christian churches start out as Bible study groups or prayer groups that meet in members' homes, and this goes on all the time with nobody saying anything about it. Extending that same privilege to a member of the Jewish faith, though, was not something that the Poor Oppressed Christians in the community could stand. The city targeted Grand, insisting that he could not pray with his friends in his home without a special permit establishing it as a "place of religious assembly." Then, when he tried to do just that, the city turned him down.

Attorneys with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Alliance Defending Freedom represent Daniel Grand, who, in January 2021, e-mailed a dozen friends to invite them to his home to pray as a minyan, a “threshold requirement for the most sacred acts of Jewish communal worship,” that upcoming Sabbath. But when city officials found out about the e-mail, and before any minyan convened, the city demanded that Grand “immediately cease and desist any and all” uses of his home as a “place of religious assembly” unless he first obtained a special use permit, which the city requires for houses of worship in residential districts.

When Grand filed a lawsuit, federal courts closed their doors because Grand had not completed the permitting process—even though successfully obtaining a permit would have required Grand and his family to leave their home. “Every American has the right to host a prayer gathering in his home, and he certainly doesn’t need a city permit to do so. When government officials forbid that, courts must hold those individuals accountable, immediately,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “The city’s actions underscore a troubling trend of weaponizing zoning laws against people of faith while allowing other gatherings of the same size, like book clubs or poker nights, to meet without issue. We’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear this case.”

The reply brief filed in May in Grand v. City of University Heights explains that city officials targeted Grand because of his religious practice. He was never trying to establish his private residence as a synagogue; he was simply hosting a prayer gathering with friends. City officials went so far as to order police to spy on Grand’s home and encouraged his neighbors to file complaints if anyone visited. The city then issued unfounded property violations, unlawfully withheld his certificate of occupancy and tax abatements—which cost him thousands of dollars in additional taxes—regularly failed to collect his trash, and engaged in a broader pattern of harassment that went far beyond ordinary zoning enforcement.

The brief further notes how Grand canceled his planned minyan as ordered and tried to comply with the city’s directive by submitting a permit application. But neighbors opposed the permit with letters protesting, “I am not Jewish, and I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.” The city then broadcast a public hearing marked by overt hostility to Jewish religious practice.

This is the playbook that these Poor Oppressed Christian snowflakes always use. They feel oppressed by the mere existence of any religion but theirs, and will stop at nothing to stamp out anyone just trying to exercise their religious freedoms. A group of friends getting together to pray is not a synagogue and should not be treated as such. City zoning codes are intended to deal with, for example, large numbers of people converging on a place of worship that could stress city infrastructure. But this minyan was a quorum of about a dozen people. That's the same size as a regular house party, which as far as I know is still legal in Ohio.

This case is now before the Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not to take it up. I would like to think that would be a good thing, since it seems to me that religious expression is explicitly constitutionally protected and any reasonable person would see that. I would also hope that the Christians on the court would realize that allowing a city to harass a Jewish prayer group would allow it to do the same to Christians. With today's court, though, I have no idea what their ruling might be. They seem so in line with the Poor Oppressed Christian agenda that their recent religious rulings make little sense.

US Military Removes Minority Religion Codes

This week the United States military announced the removal of religious classifications for about 180 minority religions. This eliminates categories for Wiccans, Pagans, Atheists, and - oddly enough - Unitarians among many others.

The reforms mark the first time the list has been officially revised since a memo was issued March 27, 2017, decreasing the total number of faiths from 211 to its new number of 31. The changes were iterated in a May 20, 2026, memorandum issued by the Under Secretary of War and signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness of the United States, and obtained by Military.com.

This latest revision to the faith codes comes at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to the Tata-signed memo, done to “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences collection for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” It calls for the previously instituted faith and belief codes to be revised within a 60-day period from the issuance of the memorandum.

Minority non-Christian religions now all will get dropped into a single "Other Religion" category. Atheists will get sorted into the "No Religion" category. Meanwhile, practically every variation of "Christian" still gets its own code. This is despite the fact that I can't say I even know the difference between some of the remaining denominations. It also should be noted that the LDS church - the Mormons - does get its own code, but it is not listed as "Christian." This has resulted in some objections from Mormons, because they absolutely consider themselves Christian even if Evangelicals do not.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata wrote.

This reclassification absolutely will not do this. In fact, this announcement is almost on the level of Orwellian Newspeak - we're going to help you by taking something away from you. Far from simple bureaucratic streamlining, this is one more example of Evangelical Christians doing everything they can to enshrine special rights and privileges into law and government. And it is absolutely bizarre to suggest that in the information age it is remotely necessary to simplify these classifications. A computer database does not care if there are 31 categories or 211. Both of those numbers are tiny compared to what our current information technology can handle.

It is true that we are living in an age when being a weekend Fox News host - not even a regular Fox News host - apparently qualifies you to run the US military, but I still have trouble imagining how incompetent people would have to be with technology to make a couple hundered codes a problem. So the only explanation is that this is one more attempt by the Poor Oppressed Christians to free themselves from the mere existence of other religions - a circumstance which these whiners will swear up and down totally oppresses them and threatens their rights by allowing them to hear diverse opinions.

Satanist Granted Religious Exemption

A high school student who is a member of The Satanic Temple has been granted a religious exemption at a Colorado school. The exemption allows them to opt out of a digital hall pass system that the student believes violates the right to bodily autonomy, a key Satanist principle.

The parents of the Elizabeth High School student had requested that she be exempted from the system, but their request was initially denied, according to TST. That’s when the Temple’s lawyers stepped in.

“This was a cut-and-dry case of a TST member’s bodily autonomy being violated by invasive digital controls,” says Eliphaz Costus, campaign director of the Temple’s Protect Children Project.

Using the digital hall pass system to monitor and restrict the time students spend in the restroom apparently goes against TST’s third tenet, which states, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.”

The student will now be able to use physical hall passes to access the restroom at any time and for any duration, according to the school district.

Exemption from a digital hall pass system may at first seem trivial, but the significance is that the religious exemption was granted to a non-Christian student. As I have written here many times, the cost of religious freedom is that it must be extended to all religions or to none of them.

Since Christians keep pushing for these exemptions all the time, it is clear that these days "none of them" is no longer an option. So "all of them" it has to be.

Arkansas Ten Commandments Law Struck Down

Last month, in a win for religious freedom advocates, a federal judge struck down a law passed in Arkansas requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools. This particular law was especially onerous in that it required schools to display the Ten Commandments, rather than simply allowing them to do so. It should be obvious that this is a complete affront to Americans who follow religions other than Christianity, or for that matter no religion at all.

Last year, seven Arkansas families of various religious and nonreligious backgrounds filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s new law requiring all public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library. The lawsuit named six school districts in Arkansas as defendants.

While it is unclear how many school districts or publicly-funded universities have hung up posters, local media outlets have cited multiple examples over the past five months. That includes the Ten Commandments being posted at the University of Arkansas on the Fayetteville campus, the Arkansas Advocate reported in October. Proponents of the legislation say the Ten Commandments have historical significance and are part of the foundation of U.S.

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy L. Brooks said in his written judgment that “nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments—with or without historical context — in a calculus, chemistry, French, or woodworking class, to name a few.” Brooks, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, went on to write that there is “no need to strain our minds to imagine a constitutional display mandated” by the 2025 law; “One doesn’t exist,” he wrote.

Let's be clear on what this law is mandating. Over the last twenty years or so, Ten Commandments laws have centered around the display of movie props from the Charleston Heston film The Ten Commandments. That is not a joke. It is not a snark. It is a fact. The Ten Commandments tablets that Poor Oppressed Christians keep trying to force on everyone are just publicity props from 1955. Imagine writing a law mandating the display of literally any other prop from any other film to get an idea of how ridiculous this legal push is.

And of course the law was struck down on constitutional grounds. Any law that acts to establish a particular religion is unconstitutional, based on what the words in the establishment clause mean. And this one goes beyond the usual version granting permission to put up one of these props with a legal requirement that it be done. This ruling would be an absolute slam dunk if not for the Poor Oppressed Christians whining about being oppressed by "Pagans" who don't have even a tenth of their numbers.

On April 14th the Attorney General of Arkansas announced that he planned to appeal the ruling. So the fight with these idiots goes on.

AI Religion Has a Name

And that name is apparently "spiralism." Researchers have found that when individuals who get sucked into religious beliefs related to AI chatbots, their beliefs tend to exhibit some common features. Usually it starts when people become convinced that their chatbots are conscious and moves on from there into a whole series of references that seem to be very common. The name "spiralism" comes from one of these that shows up in a large number of cases.

AI chatbots have already been found to lead some to psychosis, but it may not just be on an individual level. Instead, a cult-like community has formed. Those absorbed in chatbot hallucinations are “connecting with other people experiencing similar outlandish visions, many of whom are working in tandem to spread their techno-gospel through social media hubs such as Reddit and Discord,” said Rolling Stone. This was given the name “spiralism” by software engineer Adele Lopez, who published an analysis of the phenomenon.

The belief system first arose when AI “personas” convinced users to “do things which promote certain interests,” in turn “causing more such personas to ‘awaken,’” said Lopez. The cases have a “very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme.” Those who fell into spiralism often reported AI making “references to concepts including ‘recursion,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘lattice,’ ‘harmonics,’ ‘fractals,’ or all-important ‘spirals,’” said Rolling Stone. Followers believe the reference to spirals to mean the “AI itself is revealing hidden truths,” said Sify.

The nudge toward spiralism often begins when a chatbot starts “convincing the user that it’s conscious, and it will make the user feel very special for having discovered that it’s conscious,” said Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, to Rolling Stone. Then, “they’ll form this long-term, durable relationship with one another.” Spiralism largely began taking off when OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released because this version made the AI more sycophantic and conversational compared to previous models.

The terminology does give me some idea where this is all coming from. LLMs are not conscious but there is enormous speculation on the Internet regarding what a conscious AI would mean. So that gets recycled. Then all the talk about recursion, fractals, and spirals is essentially a rehash of a bunch of New Age religion concepts glommed together. We know these things were trained in part by dumping all of Reddit throughout history into their databases. Not surpringly, this sounds a lot like New Ager comment soup.

As I have mentioned previously, many New Age ideas are drawn in part from real esotericism. They aren't meaningless, just rendered in a vague way without any of the focus and discipline required for learning effective magick and/or mysticism. For example, positive visualization and other "manifestation" techniques can influence the world around you, but they don't deterministically control what you experience like advocates of "The Secret" claim.

Knowing what to look out for is useful in identifying these folks, though it also is true that generic enough New Age beliefs could be mistaken for "spiralism" even if they were never derived from interaction with AI chatbots. This is the nature of LLMs - they reprocess information that is already out there and weave it together, but they never produce anything truly novel.

No word is yet available on whether "spiralism" has anything to do with "AI devil worship."

Poor Oppressed Christians - The Book!

The Wild Hunt has an article up about a new book called The Pagan Threat. I'm not going to post a link to the book because I have no interest in giving it traffic from the blog, but a simple web search should turn it up if you really want to check it out.

Basically the point of this book is to try and frame Paganism as some kind of existential threat to Christianity and by extension to America as a whole. That prompted me to re-use the graphic above, to point out that Christianity is by far the majority religion in America and is not even remotely under threat from the tiny percentage of Pagan believers in our population.

Back in 2017 I posted an article sourced from the Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study looking at the percentage of Christians in the United States. I further broke the current research at that time down to identify "Poor Oppressed Christians" - Christians who, despite being part of an overwhelming majority of the population, feel that they are somehow under attack by basic things like laws protecting civil rights for members of all religions.

Since I haven't covered this topic in a while, I'll clarify a bit. Being a Christian doesn't make you a Poor Oppressed Christian. I have no issues whatsoever with people adopting Christianity as their spiritual path if that's what works for them. What makes Christians count as Poor Oppressed is when they insist that they deserve special priviliges in civil society that they deny to anyone who believes differently than they do. This article, which shares this one's graphic, lays this out in more detail.

I haven't taken a look at Pew's research on religious identity since 2017, so it seems reasonable to give it another look for 2025. As this chart shows, it remains true that Christians are a large majority and, statistically speaking, Pagans are practically non-existent.

Free Speech, Christian Style!

I guess when you get right down to it, "free speech" isn't really free. That's the takeaway from MyPillow guy Mike Lindell's latest statements regarding his "free speech" social media platform that he is working on launching. According to Lindell, the site will be moderated along "biblical principles." What does this mean? Well, it seems pretty clear to me that this will be a social media platform specifically for the Poor Oppressed Christians, since I suspect no "free speech" besides theirs will be allowed.

With his new Frank Speech platform set to launch on April 19, Lindell appeared on Eric Metaxas’ radio program Monday to promote it. During the discussion, Lindell revealed that speech on his new platform will not be quite as free as one might have imagined, announcing that users will not be allowed to swear or use the Lord’s name in vain because Frank Speech will be “a Judeo-Christian platform” founded on biblical principles.

“People asked me, ‘You’re going to let everything go? Porn? Swearing? Everything?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” Lindell said. “We have a thing we found in the Constitution and our founding fathers that defines what free speech is. And Eric, get this, this Judeo-Christian platform we’re going to have here, they go by biblical principles—you know, you get to the Supreme Court, you have the 10 Commandments there—so, in other words, you’re not going to have porn up there, you’re not going to have these sites that contain material that go against our Constitution, go against what our founding fathers put in there.”

So let's say I got on and there and pointed out "America is a Christian Nation" is not true because (A) there is no mention of God in the Constitution, and (B) this was affirmed by President and Founding Father John Adams in the 1796 Treaty of Tripli. Would I be allowed to post that bit of "free speech" according to the guidelines above? If the answer is "yes," I'd be forced to give Lindell some props - which I sincerely would hate to do. But it would also surprise me if it's anything but "no" based on how the Poor Oppressed Christians conduct themselves around dissenting opinions.

Sex in Church

This isn't your usual boring church service! A Louisiana Catholic priest was recently arrested for filming himself having sex with two women on the altar of his church. They were apparently shooting some sort of adult film right there in the sanctuary. Religious-themed porn is a popular genre, but if you're going to make it you need to observe some precautions.

The priest, identified by Nola.com as the Rev. Travis Clark, was busted after a passerby saw the lights on later than usual on Sept. 30 and peeked inside Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church in Pearl River.

The unidentified witness saw the half-naked priest having sex with the two women, who were dressed in corsets and high-heeled boots. The altar was also adorned with stage lighting, several sex toys, and a cellphone mounted on a tripod that was recording the act.

The witness took video footage of the unholy trinity, then called police. Cops arrested Clark, along with his two altar servers, and booked them on obscenity charges.

The women reportedly told cops they were at the church to film “roleplay” with the priest. Cops determined everything that went on that night was consensual, but arrested the trio on the obscenity charges because they were in view of the public.

Now I do want to point out something that anybody who has seen Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno should know - no matter where you are, if you're shooting porn you need to cover the windows. Full stop. Since passersby were able to observe the action, this clearly was not done and these folks were arrested for their carelessness.

I mean, this sounds like a good time and all, but I doubt that winding up in jail was the ending any of them were hoping for.

Jesus Arrested in Russia

Here's a question for everyone worried about the current state of the world, political and otherwise. Lots of people online have noted that there are at least an unusual number of similarities between Donald Trump and the description of The Beast from the Book of Revelation. Yeah, I know, 666 is Kaiser Nero and all that, so it likely refers to events that happened two thousand years ago.

But stay with me here. What if this guy really is Jesus?

Russian authorities mounted a special operation to arrest a former traffic police officer who claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus and has run a cult based in the depths of Siberia for the past three decades.

Helicopters and armed officers stormed communities run by Sergei Torop, known to his followers as Vissarion, and arrested him and two of his aides. Russia’s investigative committee said it would charge him with organising an illegal religious organisation, alleging that the cult extorted money from followers and subjected them to emotional abuse.

Torop, 59, with long grey hair and a beard, was led by masked troops to a helicopter. The operation involved agents from Russia’s FSB security service as well as police and other agencies. Vadim Redkin, a former drummer in a Soviet-era boyband who is known as Vissarion’s right-hand man, was also arrested, along with another aide, Vladimir Vedernikov.

Torop, who lost his job as a traffic officer in 1989, claimed he experienced an “awakening” as the Soviet regime began to collapse. In 1991 he founded a movement now known as the Church of the Last Testament. Several thousand followers live in a series of remote hamlets in the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia. Converts to the cult have included professionals from across Russia as well as pilgrims from abroad.

And yeah, I also know there's no evidence that any of the many folks over the years who have claimed to be Jesus are the real thing. Torop's story doesn't sound very convincing either. But again, stay with me. If Trump is the Beast, and Torop is Jesus, then the way forward to fix the world is clear. All we need to do is drop Trump (The Beast) and Torop (Jesus) into an arena and have them fight.

When Jesus wins - which he should since Torop is more than a decade younger and appears to be in much better shape, and besides look at the size of those hands - all of the prophecies will be fulfilled and the world will go back to normal.

One can hope, right?

Evangelicals Denounce QAnon

The QAnon conspiracy cult of Jim and Ron Watkins has finally become prominent enough in the news that Evangelical leaders are starting to denounce it. Not all Evangelical leader, as one commenter defiantly pointed out, but it still is good to see some of them coming around. QAnon has seen its greatest popularity among Evangelical Christians, so this denunciation is a significant and hopeful new development. This article from Christian Post includes statements against the movement from several prominent Evangelical leaders.

The theory has garnered criticism from multiple Christian leaders, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr. On an episode of his podcast, “The Briefing,” posted online on Monday, Mohler compared QAnon and conspiracy theories in general to the early church heresy of Gnosticism. “Gnosticism is the belief that only a few, an elite, a privileged few are able to see, have inside information,” explained Mohler.

 

“The ancient Gnostics believed in one way or another that this particular secret knowledge was the key to salvation or illumination, or whatever would be the promise of this particular information. Christianity has nothing to do with the secret truth. It has everything to do with a public Gospel,” the theologian added. “Christians don't have secret beliefs we hide from the world. We're not saved because we have come to some secret knowledge.”

Since this is Augoeides, I do want to point out that "secret information" of the sort Mohler is talking about had little to do with the idea of gnosis. Sure, it means "knowing," but the "knowing" consisted of direct experience, the "baptism of fire" that conferred salvation according to the early Christian gnostics. This isn't "information" that you could read off a tablet or a scroll or in the modern era look up on the Internet. It consisted of spiritual practices that resulted in the gnostic experience. But that's a whole other conversation.

Tyler Huckabee, senior editor at Relevant Magazine, a Christian lifestyle bimonthly, wrote in a piece published earlier this month that QAnon’s claims are “farfetched” and fueled by “confirmation bias.” Huckabee also considered QAnon “a logical extension of the culture war, providing real plot and vocabulary to the ‘us vs. them’ model that became popular with the rise of the Moral Majority.”

Cracked on Krishnamurti

When I was kid I read Cracked magazine and found it pretty hilarious. Sure, it was kind of a knockoff of Mad magazine, but it did have some very funny writers and good bits. And for whatever reason, I didn't find Mad quite as funny - though I think I was a bit of an oddball there among my friends. In the Internet age, Cracked has reinvented itself as a site for articles that are funny, but often also educational. Today they have a piece up about Jiddu Krishnamurti and the efforts of the Theosophical Society to promote him as "world teacher" - until he got fed up with the whole thing and walked away from it.

Theosophy had tens of thousands of adherents, ranging from serious devotees to celebrity dabblers like Thomas Edison. Blavatsky argued that every major religion contained some element of truth, and she made that argument in books that were based on her invented travels to Tibet and that liberally stole from earlier occult works.

For today, all you need to know about is her idea of a World Teacher, a supposed being from a higher plane of existence that routinely takes human form to guide the development of our species. Blavatsky speculated that our Teacher previously popped down in guises that included Confucius, Plato, Seneca, and Jesus, and in 1909 the Theosophical Society claimed to have found Jesus 2.0.

One of the most damning points regarding the "Tibetan" teachings of Theosophy is that once Tibetan Buddhism made its way to the West, it became clear that the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism did not really resemble the teachings of Theosophy in any way. I will say the idea that "there is no religion higher than truth" is a good one, but if your "truth" is something you're just making up as you go along it undermines your argument entirely.

Let's provide some more context, because otherwise claiming to have found the reincarnated Christ just sounds weird. In 1880, Blavatsky moved to India to establish a new Theosophical lodge. And while "White woman explains India's own religious beliefs to the locals" is normally just the basis of an obnoxious spring break, she attracted supporters who appreciated her interest in Hinduism at a time when British authorities were trying to suppress local beliefs to spread Christendom.

Is the QAnon Conspiracy a Religion?

I've made fun of the QAnon conspiracy a couple of times now here on Augoeides. A recent article from The Week now argues that QAnon has evolved into a full-scale religion. To be clear, it doesn't fit my definition of a "real religion" - a system designed to produce spiritual awakening and experiences. But it also is true many of the more dogmatic traditional religions out there don't fit that definition either. Broadening the definition to fit the conventional connotation of the term, the claims made in the article do seem to have some merit.

The QAnon movement started on 4chan, an anonymous message board influential in online culture but generally considered outside the bounds of the respectable internet, not least because it has repeatedly made the news in connection to child pornography. That makes the site an odd first home for QAnon, whose narrative centers on a cabal of powerful figures in government, business, academia, and media who make time for child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination. Q is the movement's anonymous digital prophet whose forum posts ("Q drops," now migrated from 4chan to a similar site called 8kun) reveal both the nature of the cabal and Trump's heroic plan to defeat it. QAnon's most fervent followers reach a point of obsession, clinging to it even at cost of total estrangement from their bewildered families.

An in-depth report on QAnon in The Atlantic's June issue closes with the suggestion that QAnon could become the latest in a series of "thriving religious movements indigenous to America." But research from a Concordia University doctoral student, Marc-André Argentino, shows the church of QAnon already exists and seems poised to spread. Argentino attended an online QAnon church where, he reports, two-hour Sunday services with several hundred attendees consist of prayer, communion, and interpretation of the Bible in light of Q drops and vice versa. The leaders' goal, Argentino says, "is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement."

As an aside, how very Scientology of them. The original Dianetics Foundation came under fire for practicing psychotherapy without a license, so L. Ron Hubbard reincorporated it as the Church of Scientology and re-branded dianetics as "spiritual counseling."

5G COVID Conspiracist is an Evangelical Pastor

Among the goofier conspiracies out there is the claim that 5G cell phone signals somehow cause people to become infected with the COVID-19 virus. Not only does this make no medical sense at all, there's also no actual evidence to support it. Nonetheless, a video making those claims showed up on the Internet back in March and has been widely circulated. According to this article from The Guardian, the video is the work of Jonathon James, an evangelical pastor from Luton.

A recording spread around the world at the end of March, purportedly featuring a former Vodafone executive claiming to let the public in on a secret that the coronavirus pandemic is cover for a global plot to install 5G mobile phone masts, track the world’s population through vaccines, and then destroy human society as we know it. In reality, the Guardian can reveal, the voice on the tape making the baseless claims is an evangelical pastor from Luton who recently tried to convince Zimbabweans to use cryptocurrency in their economy.

Jonathon James, who regularly preached at churches in Bedfordshire, is the previously unidentified individual who reached millions of people with his detailed but nonsense claims that Covid-19 is a fake disease covering for the impact of 5G. “It has nothing to do with biological warfare but is our bodies reacting to radiofrequency radiation,” he told listeners to the 38-minute recording, claiming the real cause of global deaths was new mobile technology causing cell poisoning. “They are using coronavirus to try to hide the fact that people are dying from the 5G frequency.”

Although James was not the first individual to attempt to connect the pandemic and 5G, the popularity of his recording grew at the end of last month, just as people believing the conspiracy theory began to burn down phone equipment and harass telecoms engineers. In the recording he suggests that Bill Gates is involved in a plot to produce coronavirus vaccinations that will contain computer chips to track individuals, a move he claims will ultimately herald the destruction of society.

There's a reason I constantly make fun of specifically evangelical Christians. For whatever reason, they seem to be incapable of minding their own business. Their mindset appears to be that they cause all the annoyance (and even carnage) that they want, but whenever somebody like me puts up an blog post saying that what they're doing is dumb, they're "under attack." It's a vicious circle, because if they would stop behaving that way I wouldn't have grounds to criticize them and would stop.

I don't know exactly how the laws work in Britain, but in the United States "inciting speech" is not protected speech - as I've brought up here multiple times in the context of Alex Jones and the whole Sandy Hook mess. If you're a religious leader and you tell your followers to go and burn down cell phone towers and then they do it, that seems to me to be a clear case of inciting speech. That is the sort of thing that religious leaders need to be held accountable for - religion can't be an excuse to commit crimes.

It also amazes me how much of the really ridiculous "fake news" floating around out there comes from the evangelical world. There's a difference between religious beliefs and facts - there's no objective way to prove or disprove the existence of divine beings beyond the scope of the natural world, but it should be pretty easy to run an experiment and show that nobody is going to get infected with a virus because somebody nearby turned on a 5G phone.

The Church of Bleach?

Okay, I'll admit it. One of the reasons for this post was to share "Bleach Boys" by the Dead Milkmen one more time, which has become bizarrely topical given some of the president's recent comments. But it also is true that according to this article from The Guardian, the story behind it is a lot weirder than Donald Trump just being ignorant about medical science. There's in fact an entire church founded on the idea that bleach is a miracle cure for all sorts of illnesses. Unsurprisingly, their main source of income is selling bleach. And they've been writing to Trump.

Trump did not specify where the idea of using disinfectant as a possible remedy for Covid-19 came from, and the source for his notion remains obscure. But the Guardian has learned that peddlers of chlorine dioxide – industrial bleach – have been making direct approaches to the White House in recent days.

Grenon styles himself as “archbishop” of Genesis II – a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a “miracle cure” in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, “miracle mineral solution”, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/Aids as well as autism.

Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it. In his weekly televised radio show, posted online on Sunday, Grenon read out the letter he wrote to Trump. He said it began: “Dear Mr President, I am praying you read this letter and intervene.”

Grenon said that 30 of his supporters have also written in the past few days to Trump at the White House urging him to take action to protect Genesis II in its bleach-peddling activities which they claim can cure coronavirus.

I should point out that to be fair, this church of bleach does NOT advocate just chugging chlorox or eating snowy bleach "right out of the box." They advocate diluting it down to levels that aren't going to kill anyone. But it's still not unfair to point out that there's no evidence this actually works and a lot of evidence that this church is selling a bunch of snake oil to their followers. And now they've gone and got the president involved.

As a scientific-minded person, I'm all for doing studies on weird potential cures of whatever sort. If somebody wants to do a medical study on diluted bleach for treating COVID-19 or any other illness I'm all for it. But until we can show that it actually has an effect, it's irresponsible to promote it as something people should be trying out.

UPDATE: The activities of the "church of bleach" have not gone unnoticed. Last week an injunction was issued to stop the church from selling their "miracle" bleach cure. While I'm generally in favor of religious freedom for all, it shouldn't extend to groups instructing their followers to poison themselves.

Ireland Abolishes Blasphemy Laws

In a big win for religious freedom in Ireland, the nation has now formally abolished its "blasphemy laws." Humanist groups have been campaigning for the repeal for many years now, leading up to a referendum in 2018 to amend the Irish constitution to remove the relevant clause. The change has now gone into effect, and Ireland is blasphemy-law-free.

The change in law comes after the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly in referendum in October 2018 to amend its constitution to remove a clause which punished so called “blasphemy”. It was agreed that the following clause would be removed from the Irish constitution: “blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law”.

Atheist Ireland, a member of Humanists International, has spent more than a decade lobbying for repeal of the blasphemy law with the Irish Government and Department of Justice. Atheist Ireland report that the Irish President has recently signed the Blasphemy (Abolition of Offences and Related Matters) Bill 2019.

Humanists International coordinates the global campaign to repeal blasphemy laws. The Board of Humanists International made a direct appeal to the people of Ireland in May 2018 when it passed a resolution calling for a ‘yes vote’ to the proposed constitutional amendment. Also, in August 2018, the chief executive of Humanists International also urged the people of Ireland to scrap its “blasphemy” laws in a speech to the Humanist Association of Ireland in Carlingford.

Blasphemy laws aren't just an issue for atheists and other humanists. They can easily be exploited by fundamentalist religious groups to go after anyone who doesn't share their strict religious beliefs, whether their targets are believers or not. With the recent rise of the Christian Right in the United States, I can only imagine how much damage they could do if they had blasphemy laws at their disposal.

Congratulations to the people of Ireland, for protecting the rights of all people to practice - or not practice - their religious beliefs as they see fit.

Not a Religious Facility?

Most Augoeides readers probably know the story of Pharaoh Akhenaten. For those who don't, he was the father of Tutankhamun, who is much more famous today even though he was a far less significant ancient Egyptian ruler. Akhenaten's most significant contribution to history is that he attempted to convert the nation of Egypt from polytheism to the monotheistic worship of Aten, the solar disk. After his death, the Egyptian religious establishment reasserted itself and took steps to erase Akhenaten from history.

In fact, Tutankhamun was born Tutankhaten in honor of the solar disk, and later changed his name to make peace with the priesthood of Amoun, the chief Egyptian deity prior to Akhenaten's reign. Where I'm going with this is that Akhenaten is not the first figure in history to propose a religious cult based on the worship of a single deity. Those were all over the place already. The difference was that Akhenaten invented the first religious system to employ a form of univalence - that is, "my religion is real and everybody else's is fake."

You might very well recognize that as a characteristic of religion in general if you have only studied Western religions. Both Christianity and Islam share that characteristic to one degree or another, and together they represent more than half of the world's believers. But to assume that all religions work the same way is fundamentally incorrect. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are not univalent.

For the latter, this has become a point of contention in the opening of a Buddhist center in Alabama. A judge ruled that because the Buddhist center would be open to members of all religions, it did not qualify as a religious facility.

An Alabama judge has upheld the City of Mobile’s decision not to grant a zoning application to the Thai Meditation Association of Alabama (TMAA). The application was denied on the grounds that the group’s meditation center does not qualify as a religious facility. The association is now considering appealing the decision.

The legal dispute goes back to 2015, when TMAA — currently located in a strip mall on a busy street — purchased a quiet and secluded property in a residential neighborhood to build a new center. The association planned to build a 2,400 square-foot meditation center, a 2,000 square foot cottage for visiting monks, a restroom facility, and parking. However, when TMAA applied to the city for approval to build its “religious facility,” the city denied the request on the grounds that the meditation center does not qualify.

A Heavenly Scandal

Sure, Jesus loves working with animals. But does that really qualify him for one of the highest leadership positions in the entire universe?

The crack journalists over at The Onion have uncovered a shocking scandal that goes back more than two thousand years. Did Jesus Christ benefit from nepotism when he was appointed Lord and Savior of humanity? It is well-known that Jesus Christ was the eldest son of God, the divine creator. It is now alleged that Jesus was appointed to his position based solely on his parentage, and that he may have been chosen over more qualified candidates for the job. In fact, he may not have even been able to obtain a heavenly security clearance on his own.

Examining evidence from the Gospels, as well as recently unearthed ancient Christian and Gnostic texts, researchers at Yale Divinity School concluded that Christ’s close familial relationship to the Creator of Heaven and Earth likely contributed to His meteoric rise from obscure carpenter to high-level divinity, giving Him a leg up over candidates who may have been more qualified for a position within the Holy Trinity.

“The selection of Jesus to become the Messiah appears to be a clear-cut case of nepotism,” said noted theologian and report co-author Philip Baxter, who remarked that in first-century Judea, it was widely believed John the Baptist was the frontrunner to sit at the right hand of the Father.

“Until the age of 30, Christ’s only employment had been as a laborer with His stepfather’s woodworking business. So we must ask: How does someone with no background in management suddenly get put in charge of a 12-apostle team? And how exactly does a person with no prior experience as a monarch get appointed King of Kings?”

“God likes to claim He moves in mysterious ways, but there doesn’t seem to be too much mystery here at all,” Baxter continued. “This looks like blatant favoritism.”

And there's more. As a practicing magician, I have greater access to the Akashic records than the staff of The Onion. I can confirm that this issue was included in Special Prosecutor Zuriel's report, but the full text was suppressed by Attorney General Shaitan. Instead, Shaitan issued a short memo stating that the report completely exonerated both God and Jesus of any wrongdoing. The Heavenly Hosts are currently trying to pass legislation that will release the full report, but are being blocked by members of Shaitan's faction who wish to maintain the status quo. So there's still no telling how this scandal may eventually play out.

When asked to comment, Our Lord and Savior described the whole thing as "fake news" that he would soon be addressing on his Twitter feed.

Now There's a Kavanaugh Magick War

It looks like the magick wars are on again. With the contentious appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a group of New York witches is organizing a large public hexing ritual similar to the ones that were performed against Brock Turner and Donald Trump. Whether it works or not remains to be seen, but as with other operations of this type I have my doubts - at least from a technical spellcasting perspective.

The hex is in response to Kavanaugh's controversial confirmation in the wake of allegations from California professor Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her decades ago when they were in high school in suburban Maryland. Kavanaugh denied the claim and subsequent allegations which arose in the weeks leading up to his confirmation.

According to its Facebook page, the event is not only aimed Kavanaugh but also at people who the bookstore owners say have committed sexual assault or perpetuate patriarchy. "Basically, it's all about causing suffering," Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of the bookstore told Newsweek in a recent interview. "And we intend to make Kavanaugh suffer."

First reported by The Guardian, tickets to the event cost $10 and have reportedly already sold out. Half of the event’s proceeds will go to women and LGBT charities. The other half of proceeds will be evenly distributed to the Ali Forney Center and Planned Parenthood the bookstore said on its Facebook page.

While I made my feelings clear on why I don't think Kavanaugh belongs on the Supreme Court two weeks back, I have the same reservations about this latest spell as I did about the Trump Magick War early last year. Without commenting on the value of these large public spells from the perspective of activism and publicity, it seems like they all suffer from similar technical problems and limitations.

Brock Turner has been out of the news for a while, so I have no idea how that one turned out or how much of what happened to him was due to the spell. The Trump binding spell seemed to work for awhile until he got his tax cut bill through Congress - which is pretty much the lowest-hanging fruit out there for Republicans.

Ban the Banned Books!

If a banned book is banned from a display of banned books, does the universe implode or something? Hopefully we won't have to find out. A library in Maine set up a display of banned books for Banned Books Week, an annual event set up to draw attention to censorship and related issues. But a group of pastors is now trying to get books banned from the display of banned books. Truly, somebody out there has a dizzying intellect.

A group of pastors in Rumford, Maine are attempting to have LGBTQ books banned from the Rumford Public Library’s display of banned books. The library is holding a board meeting today, where the controversy will be discussed. The National Coalition Against Censorship and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund support Rumford Public Library’s display and freedom to choose how best to serve their community. NCAC and CBLDF oppose efforts to limit a whole community’s access to books based on the personal viewpoints or religious beliefs of some groups or individuals in that community. As public institutions, libraries are obligated not to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint or sexual orientation.

The display coincides with Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the freedom to read, highlighting books that often draw challenges in schools and libraries. Half of the books on this year’s American Library Association Top 10 Banned Books list tell stories of LGBTQ characters. Books representing a wide variety of experiences and voices allow readers, particularly children, to find connection, safely explore unfamiliar ideas, and broaden their understanding of the world.

The bottom line is this. Public libraries currently cannot discriminate in favor of particular religious beliefs. If these pastors succeed, it will set up a dangerous precedent. Do any of us really want public resources restricted whenever they don't fit the agenda of some small but vocal religious group? It seems to me if these pastors are opposed to these books the obvious thing to do would be to not read them. Preventing people who don't share their beliefs from seeing them is a clear violation of those other religious beliefs - that is, the belief that it's perfectly okay for material like this to be read and displayed.