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 – really some distance away at that time – 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! 😝
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?
Are you doubting the percentages? Considering how often I have provided sources in the past on this site which were blithely ignored, will you accept them if I furnish them?The forced conversions became a hallmark of the Empire after Christianity became the state religion. I have no doubt that some went with Christianity earlier than 380 AD because they saw how things were going. There have always been opportunists. And, yes, I am well aware of there being territories outside the Roman Empire. Your point being? Lastly, Christianity should stand on its own. Tying it to the state is a great way to corrupt it. Look at what happened to the evangelical movement after they tied it to the GOP and later to Trump.
"considering how often I have provided sources in the past on this site"
Considering how often you did NOT provide sources we have good reason to doubt you. Forced conversions were happening before 380CE by Roman lords.
"I am well aware of there being territories outside the Roman Empire. Your point being?"
My point being it was forced on people outside the Empire before 380CE.
"Lastly, Christianity should stand on its own."
Except it hasn't. Apart from a questionable surge in the beginning when it was the latest shiny object, it's depended on the power of the State to keep going.
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.
Goddybitch is supposedly created us all, so goddybitch created who you are. Yet, goddybitch is going to PUNISH you for who are that Goddybitch created in the first place! Knowing full well in advance on how you turn out, yet still creating you so goddybitch could punish you anyway. That makes goddybitch a sadistic asshole that enjoys making people suffer unnecessarily!
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.
You were a kid, it’s not the kids job to protect other kids from bad adults. The adults in that community failed the kids by not vetting and removing (arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators) the bad people in that church!
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, “If you find yourself sitting between a Catholic and a Baptist on a streetcar, move closer to the Catholic to keep warm.” The intolerance the Baptists continue to try and sell just isn’t registering with today’s 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.
It’s horrific! I was just reading up on Romania in the 60’s/70’s today and thought, that’s 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.
I’m willing to bet that a good chunk of the baptisms and attendees they’re bragging about are the redpilled manosphere cockwombles young men looking to enslave a wife through church pressure. They will fail to find anyone, they’re a,ready disappointed in the pickings at church, and they’ll go back to worshipping Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson from their mothers’ basements. They need the women to be able to maintain a semblance of executive functioning.
"“Church 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.
YES, I WOULD PAY TO SEE A LIGHTNING BOLT ZAP FRANKIE BOY! Hell, I would pay to see Trump and Frankie, pope Leo what the hell number he is, or Musk (or even all four) fight a cage match to the death. If the world is really, really lucky; all four would lose!
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.
👆👆👆👆 THIS ! ! !☝️☝️☝️☝️
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.
“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—-is that good for the world?”
— Christopher Hitchens, from “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”
Christopher Hitchens is missed, way ahead of his time. 👍
Child abuse. I’m 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. 😱
Hackneyed response: 'From your lips to God's mouth.'
R'Amen!
"the SBC has seen five consecutive years of increases in baptisms,” but that’s 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 – really some distance away at that time – 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! 😝
You might call it intellectual faptism.
[GROAN!] Ben? SERIOUSLY??? 🤣
I can’t help but if I’m punny guy. It’s all your fault anyway. You promised me coffee, but where was it when I needed it?
I just spilled mine onto the keyboard. Will that do?
I feel the vibrations even now. Thank you
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 women’s roles. I’m 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!!! 🤣🤣🤣
Feel free to add to your collection. 😃
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.
RELIGIONS NEVER SPREAD BY THE QUALITY OF ITS MESSAGE, BUT BY THE QUANTITY OF ITS VIOLENCE!
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 lifetime…
Water flowing underground
👆🎯Constantine 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.
Still are flakes, criminal and fanatical rabble rousers, only now they control way to much of the society!
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?
Davyboy will not provide credibility peer review sources or even contemporary sources, so you might just as well dismiss his claim!
Are you doubting the percentages? Considering how often I have provided sources in the past on this site which were blithely ignored, will you accept them if I furnish them?The forced conversions became a hallmark of the Empire after Christianity became the state religion. I have no doubt that some went with Christianity earlier than 380 AD because they saw how things were going. There have always been opportunists. And, yes, I am well aware of there being territories outside the Roman Empire. Your point being? Lastly, Christianity should stand on its own. Tying it to the state is a great way to corrupt it. Look at what happened to the evangelical movement after they tied it to the GOP and later to Trump.
"considering how often I have provided sources in the past on this site"
Considering how often you did NOT provide sources we have good reason to doubt you. Forced conversions were happening before 380CE by Roman lords.
"I am well aware of there being territories outside the Roman Empire. Your point being?"
My point being it was forced on people outside the Empire before 380CE.
"Lastly, Christianity should stand on its own."
Except it hasn't. Apart from a questionable surge in the beginning when it was the latest shiny object, it's depended on the power of the State to keep going.
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.
Goddybitch is supposedly created us all, so goddybitch created who you are. Yet, goddybitch is going to PUNISH you for who are that Goddybitch created in the first place! Knowing full well in advance on how you turn out, yet still creating you so goddybitch could punish you anyway. That makes goddybitch a sadistic asshole that enjoys making people suffer unnecessarily!
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.
You were a kid, it’s not the kids job to protect other kids from bad adults. The adults in that community failed the kids by not vetting and removing (arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators) the bad people in that church!
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.
Yes, may that trend continue, in fact I hope that ALL RELIGIONS lose members in droves!
H.L. Mencken once said, “If you find yourself sitting between a Catholic and a Baptist on a streetcar, move closer to the Catholic to keep warm.” The intolerance the Baptists continue to try and sell just isn’t registering with today’s 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.
𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐫 𝐨𝐧 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬
https://andrawatkins.substack.com/p/coverture-the-war-on-women-just-came
𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞: 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐁𝐞 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐁𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡
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.
It’s horrific! I was just reading up on Romania in the 60’s/70’s today and thought, that’s 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.
I’m willing to bet that a good chunk of the baptisms and attendees they’re bragging about are the redpilled manosphere cockwombles young men looking to enslave a wife through church pressure. They will fail to find anyone, they’re a,ready disappointed in the pickings at church, and they’ll go back to worshipping Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson from their mothers’ 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?
LOL🤣
😂🤣😂😁
We keep dunking them but they won't stay in the water.
https://bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3kx8r139o
"“Church 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.
YES, I WOULD PAY TO SEE A LIGHTNING BOLT ZAP FRANKIE BOY! Hell, I would pay to see Trump and Frankie, pope Leo what the hell number he is, or Musk (or even all four) fight a cage match to the death. If the world is really, really lucky; all four would lose!
😂😂😂
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE:
"In a rare four-way tie, all four fighters are dead! The crowd is going crazy....!"
If only, if only……
Yeah, I know. But a girl can dream.