India, you are not helping:
On Wednesday, the Indian government’s Press Information Bureau released a statement recommending members of the public use ancient Hindu and ancient Greek homeopathic practices to prevent and treat the new coronavirus. … They also endorse rubbing alternative medicines on the chest, scalp and nostrils, and squirting sesame oil into the nose each morning.
This is how the end of the world starts.
Purell is also not helping, and is being dinged by the FDA for making a lot of big claims about reducing student absenteeism and effectiveness against viruses like Ebola. Ars Technica reports:
… the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Purell’s parent company [which] stated that the company’s claims violated federal regulations and that the agency now considers Purell hand sanitizers unapproved new drugs.
And super-duper-olly-ooper not helping is QAnon, who tells its supporters to avoid the coronavirus by, yes, drinking bleach. Why is it always bleach???
Pastor Rick Wiles, meanwhile, knows the real reason for the coronavirus and how to stop it:
Look at the spiritual rebellion that is in this country, the hatred of God, the hatred of the Bible, the hatred of righteousness. Just vile, disgusting people in this country now, transgendering little children, perverting them. Look at the rapes, and the sexual immorality, and the filth on our TVs and our movies. Folks, the Death Angel may be moving right now across the planet. This is the time to get right with God.
Bill Barr, who hates us, explained more about hating us on Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s radio show:
The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people. It’s the opposite — it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith. …
… We believe in the separation of church and state. But what permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population — and allows people to have freedom of choice in their lives — and trust in the people is the fact that they are a people that are capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values.
Zack Beauchamp tweets that Barr is “weaponizing the ‘atheists can’t be moral’ argument to justify state establishment of religion, couched as ‘religious freedom.’
Garrett Epps at The Atlantic has a truly clarifying piece on the Espinoza v. Montana case, first comparing states’ “No-aid” provisions’ “stain of bigotry” against Catholics, which the Supreme Court seems very concerned about, to Trump’s obviously and overtly bigoted Muslim ban, which the Court is fine with:
[T]he original sin [of anti-Catholicism] was, in effect, forced on the territory; and, as we have seen, the provision was debated, amended, and re-adopted by an elected convention in 1972. […] for all the reverence conservatives profess for “our federalism,” should the Court really disallow a state’s choice not to fund religious activities? … is it a coincidence that the sensitivity to bigotry arises in the context of a long-sought aim of the conservative legal movement—to require states to fund private schools generally, and thus weaken public education?
Texas’s State Commission on Judicial Conduct, you may remember, sanctioned a judge in Waco for refusing to perform same-sex marriages. That judge is now suing the agency for blah-blah religious liberty. It is the job of the state attorney general to defend a state agency in such a situation. Now, do you think that Attorney General Ken Paxton is going to refuse to carry out his duty? That’s a Texas-sized ten-four.
A few weeks ago, podcaster and parenting author Cindy Wang Brandt tweeted:
Do not evangelize a child. Do not colonize a child’s spirituality. Do not threaten a child with religious control. Your religion does not have a right to stake claim to a child’s allegiance.
You can guess what happens next: Evangelicals pile on the rage, while those who have suffered under childhood evangelization shared their stories. Chrissy Stroop at RNS reports:
The urgency of this outpouring is a testament to how little we hear in our national conversation from those who have experienced religious trauma. Even though 1 in 4 Americans is religiously unaffiliated — a group referred to as “nones” — our voices are rarely heard. Many of us grew up in religious homes and believe that the religion we experienced was harmful.
These are people who know what it’s like growing up subjected to (sometimes extreme) corporal punishment, fear-mongering with invocations of hellfire, and indoctrination in fundamentalist ideology through home schooling and Christian schools, all in order to keep us in the fold by any means necessary.
Trump’s Middle East peace plan, such as it is, is being praised for its adherence to the Bible, which I think is not what his job was. RNS reports:
Evangelical leaders who were briefed on the proposal during the three years it took to draft it said the plan was close to biblical, mindful that even Abraham divided his property with Lot, his nephew, after a quarrel.
“From our perspective what he’s done is recognize the Bible as legal,” said Mike Evans, a Christian Zionist who heads the Jerusalem Prayer Team, referring to Trump’s plan to apply Israeli law to parts of the West Bank.
I was already going to include this piece in the Jakarta Post in which three scholars condemn the propagation of anti-LGBTQ pseudoscience. And then they went and quoted that song, and now I’m delighted to include it:
Now more than ever Indonesian media must stop giving a voice to homophobic people who dress their opinions up as facts.
As Taylor Swift sings, the haters are gonna hate. Indeed renowned scholar Martha Nussbaum says that people have always been afraid of or even disgusted by differences in other people. Those in power often make this attitude legitimate to secure their own privilege (e.g. hatred of Dutch colonialists). But we shouldn’t accept hate.
Shame on newspapers who publish inflammatory, homophobic stories. These stories have real-life consequences.
YEAH I LOVE THAT SONG GODDAMN IT. And if you would like to express a PROBLEM with that, you know what I’m going to do.
Speaking of anti-gay pseudoscience, Baptist pastor Jason Crosby writes in the Courier-Journal in opposition to “gay-conversion therapy,” which he rightly refers to as “torture”:
While I wish more Kentuckians would join me in fully welcoming and affirming same-sex orientation and relationships, all Kentucky Christians at the very least should lend their support to banning conversion torture. Christians who result to barbaric practices that inflict great pain and increase death by suicide are not acting in a Christ-like manner. In fact, they undermine the very message of love and grace they purport to advance.
Tennessee’s governor, as expected, signed the law allowing adoption service providers to discriminate against LGBTQ would-be parents, and Beth Stoneburner at Friendly Atheist is not having it:
It’s a fancy way of saying Christian discrimination is perfectly fine in Tennessee even when it comes at the expense of kids’ lives. Because nothing says “pro-life” like forcing children to stay longer in foster care because you won’t allow them to go home with a loving gay couple. …
… Not to give bigots any more ideas, but why stop there? Why not have prospective families fill out forms declaring whether they’ve had premarital sex? Why not ask them how many partners they’ve had? Or what church they attend? Why not have them rank the Commandments? If the Christians who run these agencies think a loving gay couple ought to be off limits, it’s fair to wonder where the line is drawn.
It’s bad enough these Christians hate gay people to the point they won’t even consider them as foster parents; they now have the help of state officials to make sure they can get away with their bigotry.
Elizabeth Warren joins Joe Biden in pledging that her campaign won’t take advantage of online misinformation. Seems like an easy thing to get behind, so why just those two?
At Skeptical Inquirer, Susan Gerbic shines the skeptics’ spotlight on some of the folks who do the hard work of research, training, and general vigilance for Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia:
My mission is to find, train, mentor, and support the people in our community that are willing to step up and fight back against pseudoscience and to support science. Yes, I know that what we are fighting against is unsurmountable and unsinkable rubber ducks. I don’t care; work still needs to be done, and I’m always looking for others with that same attitude.
Jann Bellamy looks at various bills being pushed to allow chiropractors to have the same authority as real doctors:
This legislation should be viewed in the larger context of the ultimate, and partially achieved, goal to rebrand chiropractors as “primary care physicians” capable of treating, in the words of the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), “anything a medical doctor can”. The authority to prescribe drugs is a key element of the ACA’s plan. Remember, too, that chiropractors want you to pick up the tab for all of this, in the form of insurance premiums and tax dollars paid to private and publicly-funded insurers required by law to cover anything within the chiropractors’ state scope of practice.
Barbara Carlton of El Cajon, California, your letter to the LA Times is on fire:
I appreciate former Christianity Today editor Mark Galli’s attempts to remind evangelical Christians that the values of Jesus, in whom they supposedly believe, are anathema to the values and person of Donald Trump, whom they clearly adore.
Galli seems not to realize that, for vast numbers of evangelical Christians, the venal, bigoted, xenophobic, vindictive values of President Trump are their values. They are just fine with him because of, not in spite of, who and what he is.
To me, an atheist, the fawning, obscenely sacrilegious prayer at the Evangelicals for Trump rally mentioned by Galli is the true face of American Evangelism. Galli has his work cut out for him if wants to prove otherwise.
Sarah Manavis at New Statesman looks at why the hell so many millennial women are turning to psychics:
The rise in women visiting clairvoyants is likely linked to a widespread feeling of general uncertainty. … Despite the often three-figure price tag and shoddy science, every single woman was glad to have gone.
This is how the end of the world starts.
Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.