France's Catholic Church is a Hotbed of Abuse
France's Catholic Church is a Hotbed of Abuse
What will it take for Catholics to walk away?
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France’s Catholic Church, over the past 70 years, has harbored approximately 3,000 child sex abusers who destroyed the lives of 330,000 victims. That’s according to a massive new report from a commission that spent the past three years investigating the matter. While the numbers are new — and both may be under-estimates — the overall story is unfortunately all too familiar.
I will never understand Pastor Gene Kim.
Or Jesse Lee Peterson, for that matter:
Donald Trump appeared on a right-wing talk show and claimed “nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals or for religion itself than I have.”
Donald Trump called into the religious-right "Flashpoint" program last night, where he bragged that "nobody has done more for Christianity, or for evangelicals, or for religious itself" than him.Maybe we should give him some credit. He exposed how the Moral Majority is neither moral nor in the majority. He exposed the hypocrisy of the white evangelicals who promoted Purity Culture and harmful secular influences on children… only to ignore Trump’s sexual misconduct and behavior in office. He exposed their racism, ignorance of reality, support of COVID, and desire to destroy democracy. So… thanks?
I am available for all your Southern Baptist women’s group chats. Just sayin’.
What do you do when your state has the worst-in-the-nation COVID rate? Apparently call for more prayer and starvation. That’s what Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee wants this coming Monday:
Time in prayer is transformational. It changes our heart, strengthens us & reminds us that we are never alone. @MariaLeeTN & I would like to invite Tennesseans to join us for a Day of Prayer & Fasting on 10/11, to thank God for our blessings & ask Him for healing, grace & favor.The people of Tennessee need a smarter governor, not a more powerful God. This isn’t even the first time this year Lee has called for prayer as a way to solve problems he chose to make worse.
The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is not handling Monday’s holiday well.
In unsurprising news, a Catholic priest pleaded guilty to stealing roughly $30,000 from his church, and using some of it on men he met through the hook-up app Grindr. He won’t face any jail time, though.
Months ago, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus made a joke song with lyrics like "We'll convert your children... we'll make them tolerant and fair," and conservative Christians are STILL acting like the first half of that line is literal.
You deserve a pat on the back. Because when you screw up by criticizing women at the beach for wearing bikinis, only to get called out for your hypocritical, misogynistic, holier-than-thou attitude, we both know you won’t release a rap about “cancel culture” a month later like evangelist Logan Dorn.
Remember the Christian guy who harassed women on a beach for wearing bikinis? He’s back and now he’s rapping about cancel culture…Dorn has since made his entire TikTok page private, depriving tens of people of the joy of cringing.
What the heck are Jim Bakker’s overhead costs?
Did you know that mothers who have abortions get reunited with those fetuses in Heaven, and then the mothers get to pick the age those fetuses will be at for all eternity? Of course not, because that’s all made up. Yet Christian “prophetess” Kat Kerr insists that’s true because she witnessed it all first-hand:
Happy retirement, Pat Robertson:
Facebook went down for a few glorious hours earlier this week for technical reasons we still don’t fully understand yet. But astrologers everywhere knew exactly what was up. Mars was in orbit around the Sun… and that’s seriously their explanation. That’s it. I shit you not. And they published those insane views in mainstream news outlets.
You can hear the exact moment Pastor Greg Locke knew he could say something worse and get away with it. There’s a brief pause… and then he went for it.
For some Christians, pretending to be persecuted is the only identity they have.
GOP insurrection-supported and alleged predator Rep. Madison Cawthorn is leaning hard into Christian Nationalism in his latest campaign ad… and I just want you to imagine what the right-wing reaction would be if Rep. Ilhan Omar did anything like this while promoting Islam.
Not all news is bad! Check out this interview we did with Sasha Sagan marking the paperback release of her book For Small Creatures Such as We, all about the importance of secular “rituals” in our lives. I hadn’t heard this anecdote before, about how her father Carl Sagan never kept religion out of their home when she was growing up:
”More than a few [devout friends and strangers] were surprised that religion was not censored in my home growing up, but rather that my parents encouraged me to learn and experience as much as I could about the variety of beliefs people have on Earth.”It’s October! You know what that means? The War on Christmas has begun… at least in the imaginations of Republicans.
A new survey from American Atheists and Black Nonbelievers finds that, more than any other racial group, Black atheists are more likely to keep their religious beliefs to themselves. Nearly 40% of Black respondents said they hide their non-religiosity from their immediate family, compared to 31% of respondents from other groups. (All the more reason groups like Black Nonbelievers, which try to reach specific kinds of atheists, are so useful!)
If you attended a large college, odds are you were approached by someone trying to get you to join the Christian ministry Young Life. That group, like so many other large religious organizations, is apparently rife with sexual abuse. Now many former members and employees are speaking out about it.
If you want to brag about how your son used to be so gay that he had “his own parking spot” at a local gay nightclub but has since turned straight thanks to Jesus, please don’t tell the congregation that they “saw the results“ earlier in the sermon.
Meanwhile, North Carolina’s current sitting Lieutenant Governor, Mark Robinson, is telling crowds that public schools should avoid all mentions of LGBTQ people because it’s all “filth.”
The new Premier of New South Wales in Australia, Dominic Perrottet, is anti-abortion, anti-marriage equality, anti-trans, anti-environment (saying climate change is a “religion for the Left”), and opposed laws that would force priests to disclose child abuse claiming they have a religious right to keep things secret. Which is all very weird for a state that’s increasingly non-religious. Good luck with this guy, Aussies.
If you’re feeling down, and you visit a psychic, and she says you have a curse, and then asks for $5,100 to cure that curse, and you give her some of that cash, and then your bad luck continues, WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?! In any case, a California man is now suing that psychic.
It’s troubling to watch three county commissioners from Oregon complain about vaccine mandates, with one of them urging citizens to ask God whether or not to take the vaccine because “you can’t trust the doctors.”
Finally…
