Christ Permanente

While the good old days of letting Jesus fix what ails you are long gone, there is potential for the emergence of a new kind of faith-based healing! You see, not only do I blog against God and the afterlife, but I also happen to work in the health insurance industry, so the concept of praying away the costs of scientific and materialistic healthcare rather than praying away the sickness itself (we all know how well that works, am I right?) is very interesting to me.

Gladys S Parker of The Onion proudly leads the charge for faith based insurance:

Why, just the other day I went to County General because my legs were giving me awful pains, and this nurse starting asking me questions about providers and what was my health care plan and wanting my insurance card so she could copy it. I said, "Child, I don't need all that fancy paperwork—not as long as I have Jesus in my heart."

No matter what sorts of hardships and illnesses life throws my way, I always count on the Lord to oversee my managed care. So I told that nurse to send my bills right up to heaven. Send them right on up, because Jesus is my preferred provider and He always grants me full coverage. After all, Jesus believed in healing the sick and helping the poor, so He most definitely believes in paying my doctor bills on time.

The Son of God doesn't screen for pre- existing conditions, and the only requirement for coverage is that you accept Him into your life. There is no deductible with the Lord, and every doctor, clinic, and hospital is in His network. As long as I get down on my knees and submit my claims every night, Jesus will accept them. Even though Peter denied Him three times in a single night, He never denies me, no matter how many ovarian cysts and respiratory infections I might develop.

Set the Microwave to Exorcise

Really, I am tired of blogging about Christian-inspired infanticide attempts, but I just can't stop because every time I am ready to change the topic, another nutjob nukes their baby:

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- A woman blames the devil, and not her husband, for severely burning their infant daughter in a microwave, a Texas television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed the two-month-old in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.

The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

I'm sorry to report that this couple does not qualify for membership in the Offspring Murder Club, but they do get an honorable mention for their efforts.

On another note, this mother must really be dense. Why is she blaming Satan, even if she does sincerely believe it? Is she really so stupid as to think that this would serve as some kind of legal defense?

I think that both of these parents should be stuffed into adult size microwaves and each be given a one minute run on the "poultry" setting. And then they should be sterilized, if the 650 watt nuking didn't accomplish this already.

And while they serve their jail time, each of these parents should be forced to write, "Satan is imaginary and he didn't make daddy nuke the baby," ten thousand times.

Atheists Pwn The Argument From Effect

Theism does not a better person make.

Spankings, Sex, and Salvation

UPDATE: Why is it that Christians are so obsessed with spankings anyway?

It seems that the Rev. Sherman C. Gee Allen of the Fort Worth based Church of God in Christ has allegedly been creatively putting some extra God into his flock:

A Fort Worth pastor accused of paddling and raping women under the guise of scriptural teaching has been suspended by the national body of the Church of God in Christ.

The suspension comes more than three months after a Fort Worth woman sued the Rev. Sherman C. Gee Allen of the Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ, contending that he repeatedly beat her with a paddle from 2001 to 2005 and forced her to have sex with him.

Since then, eight more women have come forward with similar stories, according to the woman's lawyers.

...

Ms. Kelly, a 34-year-old mother of three, said Mr. Allen then gave her a Bible and asked her to turn to passages such as the one that yielded the phrase "spare the rod, spoil the child."

"It ended up being a lot of Scripture on spanking for the most part – parents disciplining their children," she said in a February interview. "When he had me read them, it became obvious he meant for it to be spanking me."

...

After the third meeting, she said, Mr. Allen told her to grab her ankles and swatted her once with a green wooden paddle.

"I felt a bit confused," she said. "Afterward, he hugged me, told me he loved me. He just wanted me to obey."

The paddling escalated from there, she said, with Mr. Allen ordering her to pull down her jeans and then her underwear. Ms. Kelly said she was hesitant but believed so devoutly in Mr. Allen's power that she viewed it as a spiritual father/daughter relationship.

"I looked at him as a man of God, my pastor," she said. "I just revered him. I always thought he was hearing from God."

...

Around March or April 2005, Mr. Allen made sexual advances and eventually added sex as part of her punishment, she said.

Ms. Kelly eventually sought help and left the church in September 2005. But she said she didn't call police because she was afraid.

"He had literally put his hand around my throat and said that if I ever told anybody, he would hurt me," she said.

Ms. Kelly isn't alone in making the allegations.

According to a 1983 Fort Worth police report, a 21-year-old woman said she had contacted Mr. Allen about voodoo and he had promised to bring her an antidote that she could use while bathing.

But after he came to her house to talk to her one day, she blacked out, and she believed she had either been hypnotized or drugged, the report said. The woman alleged that Mr. Allen paddled her, sodomized her with a club and raped her.

Surely, many rapes and sexual assaults take place that have nothing to do with religion. But this is one of those special religious-based instances where the injection of religious dogma into the situation allows for a sexual assault that otherwise might not have occurred.

Read carefully the words of Ms. Kelly, who said, "I looked at him as a man of God, my pastor... I just revered him. I always thought he was hearing from God."

Yet again, we see that the religion - the afterlife belief - served as a catalyst for the assault. The religion served as a tool to control the women into doing things they otherwise would not have done. Additionally, the religion served as an excuse or justification for the preacher to do things that otherwise would have not been acceptable.

I'm also curious as to how ignorant this preacher was. Rev. Allen was committing these offenses as recently as 2005, which was long after the child sex scandal broke out in churches across the US. Didn't this preacher get the memo, and decide that maybe he should lay low until the sex scandal blew over? I suppose he wasn't thinking with his right head.

Rational Response Squad vs Way of the Master

RRS totally won. Go Brian and Kelly!

Snowball Rolling Down The Hill

From Germany to Delaware, churches are losing members and closing doors. It would appear that the atheist snowball is gaining speed and mass as it continues to roll down the mountain of the elite to the valley of popularity. Oh my God that was a lame metaphor!

Germany's Church:

Beer looked around. Her bed is in the choir loft and there's an espresso machine where the hymnals used to be; the arched windows are clear but they rattle; cobwebs shimmy on fading whitewashed walls.

"Jesus is gone," she said. "I'd like to turn it into a studio for artists."

The village church is struggling for relevance in modern Europe. The continent is rooted in Christianity, but devotion is ebbing and church attendance has dropped steadily for years. In Germany and other nations, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are selling properties or leasing them to other religious groups, especially in cities and villages where structures are left vacant as shrinking congregations merge.

Secular conversions

Churches have been reinvented as restaurants, coffee houses, clubs, apartments and music halls. Some have kept their frescoes and stained glass; others have been de-sanctified, yet their unmistakable facades and architecture leave an imprint of the holy on even the most capitalist of endeavors.

America's Church:

On Sunday morning the empty pews and gray heads in Delaware's mainline churches are making some pastors a little anxious.

They want to fill the pews but don't know how, said the Rev. Greg Brown of Milton, a clergy coach who works with pastors.

Mainline denominations -- such as Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians -- have declined in Delaware by 2 percent to 3 percent from 1990 to 2000, the latest statistics available.

...

Question of survival

Yet if people lose the habit of finding meaning in worship, will all of the state's churches survive?

This is a question mainline denominations have been asking for about 40 years as they've seen their memberships decline, said the Rev. Mark Pruett-Barnett, chaplain at Wesley College.

In fact, most of the more than 300,000 U.S. congregations are not growing.

Could it be that people find superior happiness in real-world activities and interests rather than praying to and worshipping something that you can't see, hear, or otherwise directly experience? Recently, I saw a Simpsons episode where Marge was babysitting Ned Flanders’ sons. Rod (or Todd, I can't remember) relays to his father what he thought of his time spent with Marge by saying, "She made us happy. For real happy, not church happy."

And the statistics seem to agree with the Flanders' assessment of happiness. Church attendance and violent crime correlate, where less of one tends to go along with less of another, at least nationwide. This applies to both America and Germany. The high crime areas of Germany are where there is a high theist (Muslim) population, and the lower crime areas of Germany are the unchurched areas.

Now of course, I am not implying causation between the two. No, I believe its more complex than that. I believe that secularism and good social behavior are both caused by education and prosperity. More education and prosperity = more happiness, which leads to less crime and less church attendance. Basically, if you find real happiness through self-awareness and accomplishment, you won't try to find it in crappy places, like in crime sprees and worship services.

The Afterlife Cheapens Both Life and Death

When shit like this happens, do assurances of eternal happiness in another dimension provide genuine comfort? Do promises of another, better existence pay proper respect to a tragedy such as this? Can a family grieve appropriately when this kind of disaster is watered down by predictions of infinite bliss via an oxymoronic "life after death"?

No.

Kill the afterlife. Spare the troops.

God Made Him Rape Her

This is absolutely unbelievable:

A GOLD Coast man who claimed his body was regularly taken over by an ancient Egyptian sex god appeared in court yesterday charged with sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter.

The 29-year-old man and his 40-year-old wife, an erotic masseuse and "spiritual healer", allegedly had sex with and in front of the 14-year-old girl. The mother also allegedly had sex with the daughter's boyfriend.

Both pleaded not guilty in Southport District Court to nine charges including rape, carnal knowledge and maintaining a sexual relationship with a child.

Opening what he described as a "bizarre" case, Crown prosecutor Peter Nolan said the man claimed to take on the persona of Min, the ancient Egyptian god of sexuality and fertility.

"Min" went into a trance-like state and took commands to perform sex acts on his stepdaughter from the accused woman, who was known as "master" and who called her daughter "the entity", the court was told.

...

In a statement read to the court, the victim said she was convinced that Min was an "unlimited god" with "special powers" that would make her forget she had been molested as a child, cure her of a cyst and teach her how to have multiple orgasms.

This is yet another example of an adult doing something horrible to a child while citing some religious/afterlife based pseudo-justification.

I find it disgusting that religious people constantly push the false idea that only God can give one a moral foundation, but then they get caught doing something awful and use their God and His associated dogma to deflect blame and absolve themselves of responsibility for their crime. Where's your morality now, you bastards?

I've been blogging about god/afterlife related sex crimes so much lately because of all the new cases that keep popping up in the news. When the Catholic Priest gay pedophilia scandal burst open a few years ago, I assumed that it would have been a sign for other religiously motivated perverts to watch their behavior. It seems that I was wrong.

By the way, I've also been looking all over the Internet for "adult rapes child in the name of atheism" articles, but I just can't find any.