A paper published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion last March, offers an explanation for the sometimes bizarre behaviour and aggressive attitudes of male American Bible-belt Evangelical Christians, including their frequent fascination with guns and propensity to follow the male leaders of weird cults - behaviour that seems so at odds with what most of the rest of the developed world sees, rightly or wrongly as a peace-loving, pacifist religion.
The paper reveals an almost obsessive evangelical preoccupation with the size of their penis and suggests that this is due to:
...the largely patriarchal―and increasingly embattled and radicalized―evangelical subculture [which] explicitly or implicitly promotes equating masculinity with physical strength and size, leaving men influenced by that subculture (whether evangelical or not) to seek solutions for their privately felt failure to measure up.
The country singer, Ricky Skaggs appears to be the latest Talibangelical Trumpanzee to follow fruitloops like Robin Bullock, Steve Quayle, Rick Joyner, Jonny Enlow, Hank Kunneman, and Kat Kerr, round the twist into psychotic delusion. He is now claiming God talks to him and gives him important messages for the rest of us. This is a common phenomenon in the excessively religious and shows how the line between excessive religiosity and psychosis is so fine as to be invisible on occasion.
So, when Skaggs appeared on the "Elijah Streams" Talibangelical YouTube program last Tuesday, his audience heard him say:
Something that extremist Talibangelical fundamentalists find hard to understand is how the US constitutional constraints on the US government don't apply world-wide or to private organizations, so imagine their shock and horror when they discover that they don't!
Laura Loomer, an extreme right-wing, Islamophobic conspiracy theorist and Trumpanzee nut-job was so incensed when SCOTUS declined to hear the case she brought before them, claiming her ban on Facebook and other social media for disseminating hate and disinformation violated her First Amendment right to free speech that she is threatening to have the SCOTUS case number tattooed on her wrist, like a Nazi death camp victim.
In effect, SCOTUS ruled that they have no jurisdiction over how a private company applies its own TOS that its customers have agreed to. It's hard to see how they could have reached any other conclusion, given that the First Amendment is explicitly a constraint on government and the social media are private companies and not part of the government or even agents of the government at any level in the USA.
With typical insensitivity, Loomer is equating the loss as what she regards as her special entitlement to abuse and foment hate with being a victim of the Holocaust!
Poor Jim Bakker (I use the term 'poor' not in its wealth sense but as a term of concern for his welfare) is becoming more and more desperate in his frantic search for yet more money.
Following on from his inclusion of the wackadoodle conspiracist, Steve Quayle with his 'impending zombie apocalypse' prophesies on his show, he then invited another deranged conspiracist, Tom Horn, to expound on his loopy predictions and wackadoodle claims.
Tom Horn is a leading Trumpanzee cultist who, back in May, 2019 announced that God had chosen Donald Trump, to 'Help build the Third Temple' in Jerusalem in preparation for the return of Jesus. Sadly for Horn, Trump was booted out by the US electorate before the construction work began, having failed even to build a single wall.
Apparently, Horn has detected an approaching asteroid, due to strike Earth in 2029. Not only that, but reading the paranoid writings of a 1st or 2nd century CE author of a book of dubious legends and prophesies, the Bible, he has concluded that this asteroid will be carrying a virus that will turn into the antichrist. His 'evidence' is that said 1st or 2nd Century CE author wrote:
The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water — the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.
Revelation 8:10-11
Earlier this month Horn claimed to have died and met God and Jesus who told him what the future held.
No mention of viruses there, of course, because no-one had heard of them in those days of ignorance and scientific illiteracy, but not content with the mental gymnastics needed to turn a 'star' named "Wormwood" (from the days when stars were believed to be little lights, stuck to a dome over Earth and could be shaken loose by earthquakes, to fall down), into an asteroid named Apophis, Horn goes one better and includes it in a conspiracy invented for the purpose usig the 'logic' there must be consspiracy somewhere or my 'prophesy' would look implausible!
He needs to explain why the governments of the world (for Tom Horn's and his parochial target marks' world, read, the USA) aren't becoming concerned that an asteroid is heading our way, bent on destruction. So, he has concluded that 'they' (ie, the US federal government) are aware but are conspiring with Satanic forces to keep news of it leaking out and alarming people, presumably in case they start asking God to change his perfect plan and divert the evil asteroid with which he plans to kill us - which would turn Tom and the 1st or 2nd century CE author of the Bible into false prophets.
He told Jim Bakker:
I believe that Apophis is carrying an alien microorganism on it in which a virus is being sustained. I believe it’s going to make coronavirus look like a walk in the park. On impact with the Earth, the contagion that is going to be brought to this planet. … I think that it’s going to be a trigger event that ultimately leads to the Mark of the Beast, which will mean that you’re going to have to be vaccinated.
A contagion during the Tribulation period could sweep the world. Literally tens of millions of people are dying by the hour, and an international cry goes up around the world for some kind of cure, a vaccine. Well, a man comes forward — a single individual who happens to be the Antichrist — and he’s the only man on Earth whose blood is naturally immune to this alien virus. And so a vaccine is created from his blood by which all mankind then are required to be inoculated. So, it’s almost like a black communion.
Because, of course, that's how vaccines are made - from the blood of immune individuals. Clearly, Horn is even less of a biologist/immunologist than he is an astronomer or prophet.
But he has a handy book - the only book he needs - in which, with a creative imagination, the entire future of the world is spelled out in detail. All it needs is a few words to have their meanings changed and the historical context of the time it was made up, to be ignored.
Is this insanity caused by excessive religiosity, excessive religiosity caused by insanity or merely a fraud fleecing gullible fools by trading on ignorant superstitions and psychotic paranoias?
Just when you were beginning to think Trumpanzee Talibangelical Christians couldn't get any further round the bend, up pops Jim Bakker and Steve Quayle to prove you wrong!
Serial adulterer, Jim Bakker, who has a personal hotline to Jesus for when he needs his sin counter zeroed, has been earning a crust recently by selling his dupes products intended to help them survive the 'End Times' that he keeps on forecasting.
He's now turned that up a notch and thrown his lot in with equally sleazy, Steve Quayle, the extreme right-wing, conspiracy theorist fruitloop who earns his living selling goods to help survive the coming zombie apocalypse he keeps on prophesying.
Quayle's conspiracy theories are becoming ever loopier and byzantine. His latest is that coronavirus tests are to collect your DNA to be used to create targeted biological weapons that will infect people and either kill them or turn them into flesh-eating zombies. Bakker asked Quayle if zombies were a disease on Earth, like any other disease. Quayle 'explained':
Covid-19 Vaccine fact sheet produced by Hennepin Healthcare
This is not a joke, not even a belated April fools joke.
There really are people who, because they suffer from religion, can be induced to believe these absurdities.
An American health-care provider has had to put out a disclaimer stating that the anti-Covid-19 vaccine does not contain something called 'luciferase' or 'the mark of the beast" to mark recipients as followers of Satan.
Luciferase is the enzyme found in bioluminescent organisms responsible for making them glow in the dark. There would be absolutely no purpose in putting it in a vaccine. But what on earth is 'the mark of the beast'? Oh, I know all about the nonsense in Revelations about the number 666 and all that tosh, but how can it be a substance included in a vaccine?
Apparently, this is one of the latest QAnon-type conspiracy theories concerning the Covid-19 vaccine, which is circulating in fundamentalist Christian circles, as though, fresh from their success with the "Deep state, cannibalistic paedophile ring", Bill Gates' "tracking nanobots" and "gay genes", nonsense, the originators of this idiocy have gone one step further round the bend and taken their dupes with them.
I suspect that a small group somewhere is betting amongst themselves to see who can get people to say the most idiotic thing in public. I wonder if Republican politicians and evangelical, Talibangelist 'prophets' realise they're being made public fools of for someone's entertainment.
The scary thing is that, as Voltaire said:
People who believe absurdities will commit atrocities
Hank Kunneman, One Voice Ministries
"People should trust the prophets who said Trump would win, because he did win really because the prophets said he would!"
In a presuppositional argument which would grace any list of Christian apologetics for its dishonest circularity, Talibangelical, Trumpanzee nut-job, Hank Kunneman, of One Voice Ministries, has said that Trump won really because lots of self-styled fundamentalist Christian 'prophets' prophesied he would win, therefore the election was stolen and the prophesies were correct, so people should continue to trust these 'prophets'.
In a chilling preview of what 'democracy' would be like in a Taliban-style fundamentalist Christian theocracy, comprised of people like Kummeman, elections are won and lost not on a count of the votes for the candidates, but by prophesies of self-styled, self-appointed 'prophets'. In other words, with typical fundamentalist Christian 'humility', the word of these fundamentalists loons overrides the will of the people expressed at the ballot box.
Regular readers might remember Hank, who crudely recently warned his dupes that "God hates those who point out when his prophets make false prophesies" (such as falsely prophesying a Trump win in 2020, for example) by misrepresenting... er... reinterpreting a Bible passage.
And of course, it goes without saying that the 'winning' candidate will always be the one who holds out the prospect of power, influence and increased wealth and job security for the 'prophets', because, naturally, that's the candidate whom God will favour too!
A few days ago in one of his "Prophetic Pulse 'conferences'", Kunneman, claiming there had been lots of signs in March that the alleged voter fraud that stole the election from Trump would soon be exposed, told his dupes:
President Trump won the election, so, for people to say, ‘Well, people prophesied that he’d win,’ he did win, and so we had a stolen election.
President Trump is not going anywhere. If you don’t like President Trump, that’s your problem because he’s not done talking, and God’s not done with him...
I’m sensing very strongly by the signs that God has given … that we are close to justice and righteousness being established. What we cannot do is quit, give up, point the finger, and then begin to think, ‘Well, you know what? All of this was just a smokescreen.’ No, that’s what the enemy wants because it’s a sad day if all of God’s messengers, prophets, intercessors, [and] Christians were somehow wrong and the fake news that we know has been fake news were the voice of truth. I don’t think so.
Curiously though Kunneman 'forgot' to tell his followers just what those mysterious signs were, or where the evidence proving this alleged fraud was to be found. For a prophet of an omniscient God, Kunneman seems to be remarkably poorly served in that respect. It's almost as though God doesn't know what that evidence is or where it may be found either.
But it seems his only 'evidence' that the election was stolen from Trump is the fact that he and so many of his fellow Talibangelical Trumpanzee cultists, said he would win. That's it! Trump won really because we said he would!
Well, either that or Kunneman is indeed the false prophet he so desperately now wants his dupes not to think of him as.
A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.
A further 37% were unsure. This means 46% (less than half) those adult Americans polled thought the statement was untrue!
Readers will be well aware that this belief is central to the QAnon conspiracy theories and fighting this "deep state", comprised of cannibalistic paedophile political elites, senior scientists and media moguls, is what Donald J Trump was put into power (by God) to fight. The same people who believe these theories also believe:
Close on news that a Hawaiian pastor has said his church should be allowed to continue holding Covid-19 super-spreader services because the authorities have allowed hospitals to remain open, we have fruitloop Robbin Bullock, fresh from the traditional abuse of LGBTQ people, claiming they would all be evangelical Christians really, only Satan has taken possession of them to prevent it.
Last November Bullock, founder of Youth Force Ministries Church International, told his dupes that God had told him the coronavirus pandemic was caused by people voting for Hillary Clinton in 2012, apparently unaware that most of those catching the virus and dying from it were from that unimportant little place called 'The Rest of The World', so couldn't have voted for Hillary Clinton even if they had wanted too. But Robin Bullock's parochial little world consists only of the USA - which is the only place of interest to his god too, it seems.
According to this report in the Guardian, President reject, Donald J Trump, has launched his new cult website (45Office.com) with an account of his disastrous presidency in which he appears to have forgotten certain key events.
Consistent with his narcissistic personality disorder, it is full of self-praise and 'alternative facts', such as his claim to have acted decisively over the coronavirus pandemic and implying that he was personally responsible for innovative medical treatments and two vaccines. What he 'forgot' to mention was that he had dismantled the plans and contingencies that his predecessor, Barak Obama had put in place in preparedness for just such a pandemic, in his obsessive zeal to undo everything Obama had done.
In what could pass for a parody of the kind of self-eulogising, and disregard for the facts, that characterises Trump's personality disorder, in his opening 885-word braggadocio, written in the third person, which is hard to read without laughing out loud, he says:
A psychology paper published a few days ago by researchers at New York University, sheds some light on Donald Trump's self-evident Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Although it doesn't name his as such, it could be describing his personality and idiosyncratic behaviour.
The open access paper shows how NPD is not driven by an inflated sense of self-worth but by insecurity and self-loathing in disguise. The question is then, what in his background caused this self-loathing in Donald Trump? We would almost certainly have to go back into his childhood and probably his relationship with his, by all accounts, particularly unpleasant and odious, psychopathic father.
Readers may remember Talibangelical Trumpanzee nut-job and self-appointed Prophet of God, Shane Vaughn, who was one of my sample of three Trumpanzee false prophets. Vaughn had prophesied a Trump win in November 2020 and was, like the many other false prophets who did likewise, desperately trying to explain why his false prophesy wasn't actually false and that he really had, despite all the evidence, related God's inerrant word to his dupes... er... followers.
Vaughn had earlier prophesied that Trump would never be impeached, after he had already been impeached the first time and shortly before he became the only president in American history to be impeached twice.
He also claimed that Trump losing in November had all been part of God's plan, so that Trump can serve twelve terms! Seriously!
Now Vaughn is claiming he has been given a special mission by God “to raise my voice against the sin of the Biden administration". Comparing himself to the biblical prophet, Elijah and Kamal Harris to Jezebel, and revealing his obsession with Kamal Harris (not a hint of racism or misogyny there, obviously!) he told his followers:
A combined group of psychologists from Cambridge University, UK and Stanford University, CA, USA have mapped the underlying "psychological signature" that predisposes people to hold extreme social, political or religious views and be prepared to support violence as a means to enforce their views on others, such as we saw in the attempted coup d’état in January by evangelical Christian Trumpanzee cultists.
According to this report, a Catholic priest from a church in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco has died of Covid-19 after his church was forced to close temporarily after at least three of its five priests tested positive for the virus.
And it's not as though they didn't understand the risks; they just chose to ignore them.
The church has repeatedly ignored the city health ordinances, prompting the city to issue a cease and desist order on the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. According to this report in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Trump addresses a rally in Georgia ahead of the run-off election to decide both of Georgia's Senate seats, Jan 4th, 2021. Trump's Republicans lost both, conceding control of the Senate to the Democrats.
It's a well-known phenomenon, especially in political circles, that losing parties tend to turn inward and break up. This is especially true when the defeat is heavy. We saw it in the UK when the Tories fell apart after their catastrophic defeat in 1997 by Tony Blair's Labour; we saw it again when Labour fell apart after Gordon Brown's defeat by Cameron's resergent Tories in 2010; in 2017 when the Tories again degenerated into waring factions when Theresa May lost her majority in the House, and in Labour again in 2019 when Corbyn was beaten badly by Johnson.
And now, the American Republican Party is falling apart following Trump's defeat by Biden in 2020 and the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats and with them, control of the Senate, in 2021.
But perhaps the biggest cause of this mass desertion of the Republicans by former loyalist is not so much the scale of Trump's defeat but by his bizarre behaviour, supported by many senior Republicans, and the immense damage he did to the dignity of the office, afterwards. According to Reuters:
Writing in Psychology Today, Susan Heitler Ph.D explains why people with narcissistic personality disorder may be more prone to catch Covid-19.
This could explain why people such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were both early victims of the pandemic and why Dominic Cummings felt he was entitled to break the rules his government was telling everyone else they should comply with.
People with narcissistic personality disorder are basically too full of their own self-importance to pay any heed to what others are telling them and regard themselves as above the rules which are made for 'little people'. Other people should wear face-masks in public places; other people should maintain safe social distancing from others; other people should stay in their homes, only going outside for essential shopping, to do essential work that can't be done from home or for exercise. Those rules are for the little people who don't know any better or aren't so important.
Readers will be familiar with preacher of hate and false prophet, Hank Kunneman and his difficulty with coming to terms with the fact that not only did his idol and personal saviour, Donald J Trump, lose the presidency, but that he falsely prophesied he would win.
Pastor Hank, of One Voice Ministries, Nebraska, has now discovered that both he and his god also hate another group of people in addition to those who never voted for Trump. They both hate people who point out that Hank Kunneman is a false prophet!
Writing for an primarily Australian readership, Archa Fox, Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, exposes the nonsense behind four myths concerning the Pfizer ant-Covid mRNA vaccine about to be rolled out in Australia.
Sadly, Australia has a few pockets of QAnon conspiracists who are promulgating these myths, some of which leave you wondering what it is that could induce these idiots to believe this stuff. But then, Australia also has more than its fair share of fundamentalist Christians, Young Earth Creationists and probably flat-earthers too. Scientific illiteracy and bottomless credulity are not confined to Bible-belt USA.
Firstly, a little bit of information about what the vaccines are and how they work. Bear with me if you already understand this stuff.
Hank Kunneman, an extremist evangelical fundamentalist Christian preacher and self-appointed 'prophet' of One Voice Ministries, Nebraska, repeatedly bore false witness to his followers, assuring them that Donald J. Trump would win the 2020 presidential election - because God says so, and of course, Kunneman hears voices!
Now he has to try to cope with the reality that not only did Trump lose, not only have the votes been counted, recounted and certified, not only has the result been turned into a 'landslide' EC win for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris but that they have been duly and legally sworn in as POTUS and VPOTUS respectively, and have already stared on a program of repairing much Of the damage Trump did and reversing his more harmful directives like the withdrawl from the Paris agreement on climate change and withdrawing funding from the WHO because it kept telling him things he didn't want to hear.
The Trumpazee Dupes who got their 'information' from Trump's disinformation sources such as QAnon - the supposed 'deep state' whistle-blower and Trump confidante, responsible for the more outlandish beliefs of the Trumpanzee cult - have a major psychological task facing them - how to rationalise the demonstrable fact that none of the QAnon predictions and claims proved to be true with their belief in the certainty and reliability of their source?
Their problem is the familiar one of how to cope with the cognitive dissonance that results when reality doesn't conform to your requirements and beliefs, forcing you to either change your precious beliefs or ignore reality by explaining it away.
