๐๐๐๐ THIS ! ! !โ๏ธโ๏ธโ๏ธโ๏ธ
The church that had me terrified most of my childhood that I would either die and go to hell or be Left Behind (TM) by the Rapture, that gave me nightmares and night terrors that had me sneaking into my parents' room whenever I woke during the night to make sure the Rapture hadn't happened yet and they were still there, that exposed me to "A Thief In The Night" as a tween and ramped my terror up to 11 . . . .
Yes. Yeet the whole damned thing into a massive black hole.
When my daughter was maybe something over a year old, my wife put forward the idea of getting her baptized. I wasn't a declared atheist back then โ really some distance away at that time โ but I vetoed it. Neither she nor I were religious, nor did we attend church at all, yet I knew intrinsically that we could raise a good kid.
My daughter is now 37 years old, accomplished as all get-out and WAY more together than I was at her age. Baptism, schmaptism! ๐
I have sometimes thought the spiritual rape of the slaves, was maybe the worst violation of their autonomy, forcing them to take the destructive religion of the master, that said they were inferior, thus justifying them being enslaved. Brainwashing them not to think critically.
Maybe not 100%, but the vast majority of the times. Look at how Church membership declined when they didn't have the power of the State to punish heresy. Look at how Empires like Britain and Spain forced Christianity on indigenous people in the Americas. In the USA people are standing up to Christian privilege and now attendance is declining, propped up by an aging population who have been going out of habit.
About ten percent of the population was Christian prior to Constantine. The numbers took off after Christianity was legalized in 313 by the Edict of Milan which granted religious freedom to all groups not just Christians. It wasn't until 380 that Christianity became the state religion. By 350, over fifty percent of the population was Christian.
Source of your percentage? And you do know there are lands outside the Roman Empire, right? You also know that after Edict of Milan, there were still people in the State forcing conversions and giving preferred treatment to Christians, right?
My guess on the reason for the spike in baptisms is pressure from adults on their preteen children. You know, the obes that in a few years will go out into the world and see reality, shattering the illusion that their parents were right about the god stuff.
These parents are trying to lock the kids in before they find out that women, POC, and the LGBTQ community are all people just like them.
I distinctly remember thinking as a child that if I got baptized, maybe God would talk to me. I think I was around 11 or so, and had been told several times that I 'just wasn't listening hard enough' for that 'still, small voice' that I was supposed to hear. Obviously, getting dunked made no difference at all.
No child should ever have to figure out whether God hates them, or their parents are lying to them.
And for a significant number of members, $20 per week is a lot of money. The areas of the country with the highest SBC membership tend to be the ones that are rural, white, and poor.
That's why they want to homeschool all the kids and/or subject them to Christian "education." That where the methodology of math and science is optional. So clearly, YES. Those who support the SBC and their ilk support child abuse, the brutal subjugation of women, racism, and the overthrow of democracy. Simply do the math: Money in; product out!
Unless of course you had Christian education, wherein mid-equation a miracle occurs and the money is suddenly cleansed and made holy even though it is used for the most nefarious ends imaginable.
Yes, it does. I still feel bad that I grew up Catholic knowing there were priests and brothers to stay away from or not let get me alone with them but never did anything more than watch my own ass(!) around them.
Why, yes, yes they do, they are generally the ones doing the crime, and the church happily takes their money, "to wash them clean" and cover up, and shame the victims to keep quiet. Yet another mafia style crime family.
Hmph. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of bigots. The SBC has been handed its ass so many times on Hemant's site that I doubt I could count all the instances. If WE are hearing about it, then one has to wonder about those on the inside, who have a far more intimate view of the sometimes questionable doings in Baptist churches. That people, and I suspect a LOT of younger people, are walking away from that brand of dogmatic bigotry should surprise no one.
H.L. Mencken once said, โIf you find yourself sitting between a Catholic and a Baptist on a streetcar, move closer to the Catholic to keep warm.โ The intolerance the Baptists continue to try and sell just isnโt registering with todayโs young people. I suspect this fall off in membership is part of why the evangelicals are so desperate to get government to backstop their religion. I don't see them ever recovering their numbers, and that's a good thing.
It's hard to imagine that in this day in age, with how much we understand about the world and culture and biology, that there are people out there who still think we ought to toss all that aside and listen to the vile, incoherent ramblings of a work of fiction with multiple different authors.
That make no sense, are poorly written by fanatics like the one who wrote about daughter-fucker Lot, making the incestuous old fuck the holy man! Miss me with that crap.
At least the woman-repressing SBC hasn't plumbed the depths of, for example, the Catholic-dominated Venezuelan state... yet. "Only people with money can access illegal, private abortions in the country, and Maria is not one of them. Aged just 26, she lives with two of her five children in extreme poverty in Caracas in a house shared with other people. The child she tried to abort is now three years old. She had another since then, 10 months ago.
"One wastes one's life giving birth, giving birth, giving birth," said Maria, who asked to use a pseudonym for the story.
Abortion is punishable by up to six years in jail in the fervently Catholic and conservative country. Using contraception, meanwhile, is widely viewed as sinful. "I didn't want to have more children. I had too many children too quickly," Maria said of her failed abortion attempt. Maria, a Venezuelan woman who didn't wish to be identified, says she tried to terminate her pregnancy, despite abortion being illegal. "I tried to get it [the fetus] out... but it didn't work," she told AFP.
The recipe of avocado seed and spider plant - called "mala madre" or "bad mother" in Venezuela - was given to her by a friend who had used it successfully before. To get a professional, albeit illegal, abortion from a private doctor in Venezuela can cost as much as $1,000.
In Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay the practice is legal. But it has never been a political priority in Venezuela's 24 years of successive leftist, populist, socially conservative, "Chavista" governments. Parliament in 2021 promised new abortion legislation, but nothing has been announced to date.
"It is not a priority (in Venezuela) that women are dying from unsafe abortions," said Belmar Franceschi, executive director of the NGO Plafam which provides sexual and reproductive guidance.
In 2021, a teacher was arrested for helping a 13-year-old girl get an abortion after she was raped. The girl's assailant was never arrested, but the teacher spent nine months in custody. In May this year, police dismantled a feminist activist group that authorities described as "a gang dedicated to promoting illegal abortion.""
(''Too many children' as women denied abortion in Venezuela', France 24, 24 July 2024)
Catholics are the original anti-abortion folks and all one has to do is look at our corrupt SCOTUS 6 to understand what they have in mind for us. We have to fight for women and girls in all of the Americas.
Itโs horrific! I was just reading up on Romania in the 60โs/70โs today and thought, thatโs about right for what these ghouls want. Surveillance/tracking and forced to birth impoverished obedient little workers for the machine.
I responded to this news the same way I responded to Kyle =Rittenhouse being bit by a brown recluse. I love that for him.
Iโm willing to bet that a good chunk of the baptisms and attendees theyโre bragging about are the redpilled manosphere cockwombles young men looking to enslave a wife through church pressure. They will fail to find anyone, theyโre a,ready disappointed in the pickings at church, and theyโll go back to worshipping Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson from their mothersโ basements. They need the women to be able to maintain a semblance of executive functioning.
"โChurch closures and churches cleaning up their membership rolls to reflect those people God has currently entrusted to them have negative impacts on total membership numbers.....said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research."
So you're saying it's all God's fault? Prepare for a lightning bolt right up your ass, Scotty.
Poor dears, I guess not everyone wants to be a homophobic, misogynistic racist supporting sexual abuse.
GOOD!
May it disappear from the face of the earth and take all other forms of Christianity with it.
๐๐๐๐ THIS ! ! !โ๏ธโ๏ธโ๏ธโ๏ธ
The church that had me terrified most of my childhood that I would either die and go to hell or be Left Behind (TM) by the Rapture, that gave me nightmares and night terrors that had me sneaking into my parents' room whenever I woke during the night to make sure the Rapture hadn't happened yet and they were still there, that exposed me to "A Thief In The Night" as a tween and ramped my terror up to 11 . . . .
Yes. Yeet the whole damned thing into a massive black hole.
โTo terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creationโ-is that good for the world?โ
โ Christopher Hitchens, from โGod is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everythingโ
Christopher Hitchens is missed, way ahead of his time. ๐
Child abuse. Iโm so sorry you went through that.
"terrified most of my childhood" Agreed, persistent unfounded fear is very controlling. Religions and politicians know how to use it very well. ๐ฑ
Hackneyed response: 'From your lips to God's mouth.'
R'Amen!
May it take all 3 Abrahamic religions with it.
"the SBC has seen five consecutive years of increases in baptisms,โ but thatโs an imaginary metric that means very little outside their bubble.
Almost every atheist I know was baptized.
When my daughter was maybe something over a year old, my wife put forward the idea of getting her baptized. I wasn't a declared atheist back then โ really some distance away at that time โ but I vetoed it. Neither she nor I were religious, nor did we attend church at all, yet I knew intrinsically that we could raise a good kid.
My daughter is now 37 years old, accomplished as all get-out and WAY more together than I was at her age. Baptism, schmaptism! ๐
You might call it intellectual faptism.
[GROAN!] Ben? SERIOUSLY??? ๐คฃ
I canโt help but if Iโm punny guy. Itโs all your fault anyway. You promised me coffee, but where was it when I needed it?
Not me! Hee hee ;) But the trauma was still passed along even if my parents walked away from it.
I was baptized. It was traumatic. I didnt want to, but they made me.
I was in an infant baptism sect so no memory of it.
Not me. I thought it was dumb. The church next door wasn't that big on it, anyway. And I was too intellectually curious for them.
RE the big three megas disaffiliating over minor womenโs roles. Iโm always happy to see schisms. The more fracturing the better.
I can't understand why people remain in a church created for the single reason to justify slavery.
Some of them want to own slaves.
I say we should try slavery on pro-slavery types.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hm0a8yd90flsli0e8pwxf/FB_IMG_1777669670780.jpg?rlkey=3pynqu2aihqh4u0rnujxdszfy&st=cqop731j&dl=0
Oh, gad, that is TOO MUCKING FUCH!!! ๐คฃ๐คฃ๐คฃ
Yes, since they obviously crave authoritarianism.
And to the 6 - 7.4% of black Southern Baptists: Is there a word for what's wrong with you? Do you have no memory or knowledge of history?
Paging Chris Rock...
https://youtu.be/uzabg4srHb0?t=30
I have sometimes thought the spiritual rape of the slaves, was maybe the worst violation of their autonomy, forcing them to take the destructive religion of the master, that said they were inferior, thus justifying them being enslaved. Brainwashing them not to think critically.
Three words: Praise The Lloyd.
It's why they're so attracted to Heritage Foundation. Christianity can't grow unless it's enforced by the State.
๐๐ฏConstantine knew.
I don't think that's always the case but it sure seems like a lot of religious groups feel like that today. Sigh.
Maybe not 100%, but the vast majority of the times. Look at how Church membership declined when they didn't have the power of the State to punish heresy. Look at how Empires like Britain and Spain forced Christianity on indigenous people in the Americas. In the USA people are standing up to Christian privilege and now attendance is declining, propped up by an aging population who have been going out of habit.
Do you remember your history? When did Christianity really take off? Wasn't it when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire?
Bingo, until then they were flakes, criminals, and fanatical rabble-rousers.
About ten percent of the population was Christian prior to Constantine. The numbers took off after Christianity was legalized in 313 by the Edict of Milan which granted religious freedom to all groups not just Christians. It wasn't until 380 that Christianity became the state religion. By 350, over fifty percent of the population was Christian.
Source of your percentage? And you do know there are lands outside the Roman Empire, right? You also know that after Edict of Milan, there were still people in the State forcing conversions and giving preferred treatment to Christians, right?
Same as it ever was.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself "how did I get here?"
Once in a lifetimeโฆ
My guess on the reason for the spike in baptisms is pressure from adults on their preteen children. You know, the obes that in a few years will go out into the world and see reality, shattering the illusion that their parents were right about the god stuff.
These parents are trying to lock the kids in before they find out that women, POC, and the LGBTQ community are all people just like them.
I distinctly remember thinking as a child that if I got baptized, maybe God would talk to me. I think I was around 11 or so, and had been told several times that I 'just wasn't listening hard enough' for that 'still, small voice' that I was supposed to hear. Obviously, getting dunked made no difference at all.
No child should ever have to figure out whether God hates them, or their parents are lying to them.
They still got nearly $10 billion dollars? Do those who gave their money to an organization embroiled in child sexual abuse SUPPORT that abuse?
Well, most of the hard-core SBC membership are MAGA pedo protectors...
(Also, see cash flow in the RCC and LDS. They're just doing the same.)
$10 billion is less than $1,000 per member, which is $20 per week. Yikes!
And for a significant number of members, $20 per week is a lot of money. The areas of the country with the highest SBC membership tend to be the ones that are rural, white, and poor.
That's why they want to homeschool all the kids and/or subject them to Christian "education." That where the methodology of math and science is optional. So clearly, YES. Those who support the SBC and their ilk support child abuse, the brutal subjugation of women, racism, and the overthrow of democracy. Simply do the math: Money in; product out!
Unless of course you had Christian education, wherein mid-equation a miracle occurs and the money is suddenly cleansed and made holy even though it is used for the most nefarious ends imaginable.
Yes.
Makes them complicit in any crimes against children.
Yes, it does. I still feel bad that I grew up Catholic knowing there were priests and brothers to stay away from or not let get me alone with them but never did anything more than watch my own ass(!) around them.
Why, yes, yes they do, they are generally the ones doing the crime, and the church happily takes their money, "to wash them clean" and cover up, and shame the victims to keep quiet. Yet another mafia style crime family.
Hmph. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of bigots. The SBC has been handed its ass so many times on Hemant's site that I doubt I could count all the instances. If WE are hearing about it, then one has to wonder about those on the inside, who have a far more intimate view of the sometimes questionable doings in Baptist churches. That people, and I suspect a LOT of younger people, are walking away from that brand of dogmatic bigotry should surprise no one.
Let's hope the trend continues.
H.L. Mencken once said, โIf you find yourself sitting between a Catholic and a Baptist on a streetcar, move closer to the Catholic to keep warm.โ The intolerance the Baptists continue to try and sell just isnโt registering with todayโs young people. I suspect this fall off in membership is part of why the evangelicals are so desperate to get government to backstop their religion. I don't see them ever recovering their numbers, and that's a good thing.
It's 5 o'clock somewhere, and I'm pouring a double shot of schadenfreude, neat. Slainte, you godless atheists!
It's hard to imagine that in this day in age, with how much we understand about the world and culture and biology, that there are people out there who still think we ought to toss all that aside and listen to the vile, incoherent ramblings of a work of fiction with multiple different authors.
Taken from from oral tales by primitive, fearful, superstitious nomads who didn't know where the Sun went at night.
That make no sense, are poorly written by fanatics like the one who wrote about daughter-fucker Lot, making the incestuous old fuck the holy man! Miss me with that crap.
At least the woman-repressing SBC hasn't plumbed the depths of, for example, the Catholic-dominated Venezuelan state... yet. "Only people with money can access illegal, private abortions in the country, and Maria is not one of them. Aged just 26, she lives with two of her five children in extreme poverty in Caracas in a house shared with other people. The child she tried to abort is now three years old. She had another since then, 10 months ago.
"One wastes one's life giving birth, giving birth, giving birth," said Maria, who asked to use a pseudonym for the story.
Abortion is punishable by up to six years in jail in the fervently Catholic and conservative country. Using contraception, meanwhile, is widely viewed as sinful. "I didn't want to have more children. I had too many children too quickly," Maria said of her failed abortion attempt. Maria, a Venezuelan woman who didn't wish to be identified, says she tried to terminate her pregnancy, despite abortion being illegal. "I tried to get it [the fetus] out... but it didn't work," she told AFP.
The recipe of avocado seed and spider plant - called "mala madre" or "bad mother" in Venezuela - was given to her by a friend who had used it successfully before. To get a professional, albeit illegal, abortion from a private doctor in Venezuela can cost as much as $1,000.
In Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay the practice is legal. But it has never been a political priority in Venezuela's 24 years of successive leftist, populist, socially conservative, "Chavista" governments. Parliament in 2021 promised new abortion legislation, but nothing has been announced to date.
"It is not a priority (in Venezuela) that women are dying from unsafe abortions," said Belmar Franceschi, executive director of the NGO Plafam which provides sexual and reproductive guidance.
In 2021, a teacher was arrested for helping a 13-year-old girl get an abortion after she was raped. The girl's assailant was never arrested, but the teacher spent nine months in custody. In May this year, police dismantled a feminist activist group that authorities described as "a gang dedicated to promoting illegal abortion.""
(''Too many children' as women denied abortion in Venezuela', France 24, 24 July 2024)
Catholics are the original anti-abortion folks and all one has to do is look at our corrupt SCOTUS 6 to understand what they have in mind for us. We have to fight for women and girls in all of the Americas.
Yep, they made a deal with Napoleon to run the schools in exchange for a no abortion policy.
https://www.robinmorgan.net/when-the-vatican-thought-abortion-was-moral/
It's not for lack of trying. ** gestures vaguely at the current state of the US government **
And the christofascists want to have the US go back to that and worse.
๐๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐: ๐๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ซ ๐จ๐ง ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐๐ง ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ ๐๐๐ฆ๐ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐๐ง๐ญ๐ข๐๐๐ฉ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ญ๐ฌ
https://andrawatkins.substack.com/p/coverture-the-war-on-women-just-came
๐๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐: ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐๐ง ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฆ ๐๐ข๐ซ๐ญ๐ก ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐๐ญ๐ก
https://andrawatkins.substack.com/p/coverture-women-will-be-owned-from
Andra was so lucky to escape the cult of her birth. She is a treasure.
Itโs horrific! I was just reading up on Romania in the 60โs/70โs today and thought, thatโs about right for what these ghouls want. Surveillance/tracking and forced to birth impoverished obedient little workers for the machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
Yes, may they end up like Ceausescu, only much sooner. He ruined an entire generation.
That is what the fucking far-right fundamentalist lunatics want here!
I responded to this news the same way I responded to Kyle =Rittenhouse being bit by a brown recluse. I love that for him.
Iโm willing to bet that a good chunk of the baptisms and attendees theyโre bragging about are the redpilled manosphere cockwombles young men looking to enslave a wife through church pressure. They will fail to find anyone, theyโre a,ready disappointed in the pickings at church, and theyโll go back to worshipping Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson from their mothersโ basements. They need the women to be able to maintain a semblance of executive functioning.
Is there a GoFundMe for the spider which bit Kyle Rittenhouse?
๐๐คฃ๐๐
We keep dunking them but they won't stay in the water.
https://bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3kx8r139o
"โChurch closures and churches cleaning up their membership rolls to reflect those people God has currently entrusted to them have negative impacts on total membership numbers.....said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research."
So you're saying it's all God's fault? Prepare for a lightning bolt right up your ass, Scotty.
They call themselves Lifeway when their religion is dying.
I see Lifeway, read it as Amway for some reason.
There is a lot of overlap.
https://youtu.be/G80QKjPh6m0?t=135
MLM are all the same.
I thought the Lifeway arm had to shut down?
and based upon an executed character.
I'd rather see a lightning bolt zap Ole Frankie Baby's ass. Much more satisfying.
๐๐๐
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE:
"In a rare four-way tie, all four fighters are dead! The crowd is going crazy....!"