Unfit For Public Office - Why Donald Trump's Nephew Will Be Voting For Kamala Harris

‘Fake news of the highest order’: Donald Trump team refutes racism revelations in new family memoir

Donald Trump, that darling of white evangelical Christians, is a heartless racist who thinks disabled children should be left to die, according to a new book by his nephew, Fred C. Trump III.

Refuting Creationism - Moral Values Are The Cyclical Product of Human Biology, Not God-Given Objectivity

Christians displaying Medieval 'objective morals'.

People’s moral values change with the seasons

Although religions claim ownership of human morality and demand the 'God-given' right to dictate right and wrong to the rest of us, there is no evidence at all that being religious make a person more moral than others.

The children's story-teller and self-proclaimed Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, once claimed to have found proof of the Christian god in the 'fact' then he could tell right from wrong. He reasoned that because he had no objective way of doing so, he must have been given his morals by a god - who of course was assumed to be the one he was promoting. Sadly, he had failed to establish a priori, that any such god exists, so his argument was never more than the intellectually dishonest circular reasoning and the false dichotomy fallacy, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he had the 'right' morals, so demonstrating the exact opposite of what he claimed as his 'proof'.

'Objectively moral' American far-right Christian Nationalists during the Jan. 6, 2021, failed violent coup d'etat

In fact, the evidence is that antisocial, far-right extremists are much more likely to be hiding behind religion, merely using it as an excuse for hate and violence. The same can be said for the Christian priests, prelates and nuns who routinely used their supposed high moral status to gain trusted access children and vulnerable adults and to cover up and facilitate the sexual abuses of others around them. Meanwhile the pro-social center-left are more likely to be Atheist/Agnostic and are demonstrating a much higher regard for others.

And now, new research involving long-term study of a cohort of 230,000 Americans has shown that moral values are, at least in part, influence by seasonal changes - people are more likely to enforce moral values that improve social cohesion in spring and autumn, than in summer and winter. A similar pattern was found in smaller studies in Australia and Canada.

The research, by Ian Hohm and Professor Mark Schaller of the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada and assistant professor of psychology, Brian A. O’Shea of the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, is the subject of a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Firstly, as a fascinating background to the subject of moral values and how they originate and impact on society, here is a dialogue with AI ChatGPT 4.0:

Secular Humanism - Winning In Britain - Highest Number of MPs Ever Make A Secular Affirmation

300 MPs from the 2024 Parliament.

© House of Commons/Mark Crick.
Crown Copyright and CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Kier Starmer Labour Prime Minister and the latest in a long line of non-religious UK PMs

Highest number of MPs ever take secular affirmation – Humanists UK

An under-reported fact following the landslide victory for the Labour Party at the last election was the massively increased number of MPs in the Commons who have no religion. Roughly 40% of MPs chose to make a secular affirmation rather than swear a religious oath on taking their seats. This included Sir Kier Starmer and 50% of his cabinet ministers.

The list of openly non-religious Prime Ministers ever since the 1888 when the law requiring all MPs to take a religious oath was abolished, includes Ramsay McDonald, first Labour PM and former president of Humanists UK, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee and James Callaghan. It is almost exactly 100 years since Ramsay McDonald became the first PM to make a secular affirmation in 1924.

According to Humanists UK:

Atheism Winning - Church of Scotland To Sell Redundant Churches As Scots Reject Organised Religion

Hundred Scottish churches up for sale as UK turns away from Christianity - Anglican Mainstream

The Church of Scotland - A Presbyterian Protestant church often referred to as simply 'The Kirk' - is facing the same problem as the Church of England - what to do with all the redundant churches as congregations dwindle and buildings fall into disuse and dereliction.

Many of these old churches are also listed building of historical or architectural importance, so the church must maintain them.

An additional problem is that most of them are surrounded by grave which must also be conserved and may not be built on.

So, in an attempt to shore up its finances, the Church of Scotland has placed hundreds of its properties, including apartment blocks, manses and churches on the property market.

Creationism in Crisis - How Macaques Can Adapt Their Culture When They Need To - Just Like Humans

Macaques in the shade of a tree.

Credit: Lauren Brent

Hurricane Maria destroyed 63% of vegetation on Cayo Santiago.

Credit: Lauren Brent

Hurricane changed ‘rules of the game’ in monkey society - News

The childish notion of human exceptionalism took another blow recently when a group of researchers showed how macaque monkeys can change their culture to adapt to changes in their environment.

As with humans, macaque cultural ethics is an agreed standard of behaviour that enables the group to remain cohesive and survive in adversity. Unlike creationists, macaques don't require a handbook to know how to behave decently towards others because, like normal humans, they too have empathy and will treat others as they would want to be treated.

This was illustrated recently when macaques were seen to change their behaviour when hurricane Maria destroyed the 63% of the vegetation on their home island of Cayo Santiago, reducing the amount of shelter from the heat of the sun.

Creationism in Crisis - Human Culture Is A Cumulative Process Which Started 590,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years.

ASU study points to origin of cumulative culture in human evolution | ASU News

Stone tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years. Left: First time period studied — Oldowan core, Koobi Fora, Kenya (below baselines). Center: Second time period studied — Acheulean cleaver, Algeria (around baseline). Right: Characteristic of 600,000 year ago technology — Levallois core, late Pleistocene Algeria.

Image credits: (left) Curry, Michael. 2020. Oldowan Core, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/DGHMTdkn4_;
(middle) Curry, Michael. 2020. Acheulean Cleaver, Morocco, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/JMVajqyz29;
(right) Watt, Emma. 2020. Levallois Core, Algeria. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/JMVajqyz29.

More evidence was provided yesterday of human history and the beginnings of human culture about 600,000 years ago, i.e., about 590,000 years before creationists claim Earth was magicked up out of nothing as a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East. The evidence comes in the form of a research paper by Arizona State University researcher Charles Perreault and doctoral graduate Jonathan Paige.

Generally speaking, human culture has been like a snowball rolling down a snow-covered hillside. The bigger the snowball gets, the more snow it accumulates, so its growth is exponential. Interestingly, and something for creationists to ignore, is the fact that human cultural evolution began before anatomically modern humans had evolved, so, as Homo sapiens, as with our genes, we inherited the beginnings of our culture from an ancestral species.

Contrast that with the childish creationist origin myth which has humans all descending from two individuals magically created without ancestors.

How the two authors carried out their research is the subject of an Arizona State University (ASU) news release by Julie Russ:

Religion Provides Excuses for People Who Need Excuses - Human Sacrifice At Chichén Itzá

El Castillo (the Temple of Kukulcan), Chichén Itzá

© Johannes Krause

El Castillo, also known as the Temple of Kukulcan, is among the largest structures at Chichén Itzá and its architecture reflects its far-flung political connections.

© Johannes Krause

Ancient Maya genomes reveal ritual sacrifice at Chichén Itzá | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

When priests succeed in sowing superstition and fear into the minds of their victims, and fool them into believe they know the mind of their god and what he requires them to do, there is probably no depth of depravity they can't descend to, with the excuse of religion to fall back on, especially when it's backed up by threats of eternal pain and suffering in some assumed life after death, for non-compliance.

For example, Christians have been persuaded that their god needed a blood sacrifice so it could forgive them for something of which it had arbitrarily declared them to be guilty, and that there was a sense in which impregnating a young woman without her consent, then having her baby killed to satiate its lust for blood, was something to be admired.

Now detach those acts from religion and the belief that a god had sanctioned them and imagine them, being the subject of a court case in which the defendant explained that he had to rape the girl so she could have his baby, so he could then kill her child, because he was angry about something that someone once did hundreds of years ago, and would otherwise make people suffer in unimaginably horrible ways.

Which jury would declare him to be not guilty of any crime and free to go, assuming he was considered fit to plead? After appropriate psychiatric assessment, he would most likely be found to be a dangerous psychopath with a narcissistic personality disorder, who should probably be kept under lock and key for the sake of society.

And yet Christians sing songs in this monster's praise and tell their children to look to it for moral guidance, and pass on to their children the superstition and fear that caused them to lose their moral judgement, believing this to be the right and proper way to bring up children!

Something has caused them to lose moral judgement because priests say a god did it, so they can distance themselves from the brutality.

It's hardly surprising then that there has been so much death, destruction and human misery caused by religions, or rather caused by people who had been told a god wanted them to go out and cause it.

And it's hardly surprising that an international team of researchers from institutions including the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and Geoanthropology (Jena), the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH, Mexico City), the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH-Yucatan, Mérida), and Harvard University (Cambridge) have found evidence of regular barbaric ritual child sacrifice, carried out by the Mayan's at Chichén Itzá.

And in another discovery, the same team provide evidence, if any were needed, of how a population's genome can be changed by intense selection pressure such as an epidemic, resulting in the evolution of the population in response to this environmental change, in a classic example of Darwinian evolution by natural selection.

In this case, an outbreak of Salmonella enterica in 1545 (the cocoliztli pandemic) has resulted in an increased frequency of HLA-DR4 alleles which provide greater resistance to Salmonella enterica infection. Clearly, those better able to resist the infection left more descendants than those who succumbed to it.

An account of their findings is given in an open access paper in Nature and in a Max Planck Institute News release:

Stop The Steal! - How The Christian Far Right Is Stealing America's Democracy

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
… we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain … and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Most Americans Support Legal Abortion 2 Years After Roe Was Overturned | Pew Research Center

The USA no longer has the government of the people by the people and for the people that the founding fathers intended to create because the Christian far right have decided to take it away as it was not giving them the privileged access to political power to which they feel entitled.

I can say this because, despite the fact that 63% of people support a woman' right to an abortion for any reason, this is now illegal in many states since SCOTUS reversed the decision in Roe vs Wade which gave them that right.

For America to operate as a democracy, the three branches of government - the executive; the legislature and the judiciary should reflect public opinion, not oppose it, yet Donald Trump stuffed SCOTUS with partisan Repugnican fundamentalist Christians and the Rupugnican Party is in bed with Christian far right evangelicals, resulting in a government which is imposing the will of a radical minority on the majority, despite the constitutional bar on the establishment of any religion.

The latest Pew Research poll shows how far this gap between the will of the people and the actions of the government have diverged in respect of the issue of abortion:

Losing Religion - Growing Distrust For Organized Religion As Christians Use Religion As An Excuse For Discrimination

Church attendance in Australia has fallen below 10%

Crisis of faith: why Australian women have so little trust in religious institutions

Attempts to give legal protection to religious people to practice their religion without fear of discrimination in Australia have run up against a predictable problem - Christians demanding the right to victimise, exclude and bully LGBTQ+ people and claiming it as their right under the anti-discrimination law.

We had a similar problem in UK some years ago when the ECHR was incorporated into UK law as the Human Rights Act, which, amongst other things, gave people the protection to practice their religion, free from discrimination as a basic human right. It also gave people freedom from discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation.

The two rights quickly came into conflict when Christians began demanding the right to carry on their tradition of bullying, victimizing and excluding gays, or denying them goods and services, on the grounds that denying them that right, deprived them of their privileged right to deprive other people of their human rights and decide to whom the law of the land applied.

This was clarified by the European Court which ruled that freedom from discrimination did not include the freedom to discriminate against others of your choosing on the grounds that your religion entitled you to do so. Human right applied to all and did not grant special privileges or exemptions to any group, no matter how entitled they felt to them.

Nevertheless, the argument rumbles on and Christian extremists are still lobbying for changes to the Human Rights Act or its abolition, to restore their right to bully and victimise minorities of their choice and decide who is entitled to what in society. The same bigots would react with outraged indignation if Muslims were demanding the right to impose Sharia on society or Jewish groups were lobbying for the right to impose Halakhah on the rest of us

In Australia, where this issue has recently emerged, it has done so against a growing distrust for organized religion, at least partly because of their record of bullying and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, and also because of the recent child sex-abuse scandals that have engulfed the Christian churches in Australia. It is these routine abuses of children and their subsequent cover ups by church authorities who often acted to facilitate them, that has probably cost the churches the trust of, especially, women in Australia.

A recent report found one in three Australian women had no trust at all in organised religion, a figure which rose to one in two for women between the ages of 18-29. Even one in ten religious women had no trust at all in organized religion and two in three LGBTQ+ women have no trust at all in organized religions.

The fact that so many Australian women are concerned about the treatment of LGBTQ+ by organized religion illustrates how far Australian cultural ethics have moved on, leaving Medieval Christian ethics struggling to keep up and faced with the familiar old dilemma of abandoning the old dogmas (and so in the eyes of purists, ceasing to be the religion they recognise) but retaining the support of the more enlightened elements in society or retaining their 'purity' and so keeping the die-hards but losing popular support in the process. Their problem is exacerbated by the fact that, as more and more moderate and progressive members leave in despair at the bigotry of the purists, so the purists become a larger proportion of the remaining members, and so the more powerful voices within the churches.

This quickly sets up the exponential declines we have seen in Europe, especially recently in Ireland and Spain where the decline in the power and influence of the Catholic Church has been in freefall since the child sexual abuse scandals broke and the Church tried to maintain its opposition to basic human rights such as same-sex marriages, family planning services and a woman's right to choose.

Incidentally, this illustrates how society doesn't get its morals from God and the church; they evolve as society evolves and the churches act as a break on progress trying to hold society back in order to retain control and its 'entitled' privileges. The Christian churches are anchored in the past and try to keep society there too. Eventually, religion is left so far behind that it becomes an irrelevance to the majority of the population. History shows this is the eventual fate of all religions and will be that of Christianity too.

This catastrophic decline in Australia, from the point of view of the churches, is illustrated in this chart which shows how net trust (i.e., the balance of those who trust the churches minus those who don't, fell from +3% in 1991 to -49% in 2018.

Gleeson, K. & Ashton, L. (2024). Trust in Religion among Women in Australia: A Quantitative Analysis. https://doi.org/10.60836/5jz3-t630

The authors of the report, Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney have written about their findings in an open access article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic purposes:

Published: May 6, 2024 9.08pm BST

Crisis of faith: why Australian women have so little trust in religious institutions

Shutterstock

Kate Gleeson, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, University of Technology Sydney

The Albanese government is weighing up the costs of delivering an election promise to protect religious people from discrimination in Commonwealth law. Such protections were relatively uncontroversial when included in state anti-discrimination laws. However, the religious discrimination debate became toxic under former prime minister Scott Morrison when it became tied to the rights of religious schools to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ staff and students.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the government has draft legislation ready to go. However, it won’t introduce it without bipartisan support because, “now is not the time to have a divisive debate, especially with the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia”.

Religious discrimination might not be addressed by the Australian parliament any time soon. Albanese must first persuade Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to support legislation to protect both religious people and LGBTIQ+ staff and students at religious schools.

Second, he will need to contend with an electorate that appears, at best, ambivalent about the problem of religious discrimination, while maintaining strong concerns about discrimination against LGBTIQ+ groups.

Trust in organised religion is low

Our new research report, Trust in Religion among Women in Australia, highlights some electoral realities relevant to legislating to protect religion in Australia today. The report analyses data from the nationally representative Australian Cooperative Election Survey, taken from May 2–18 2022. We surveyed 1,044 voters, of whom 531 were women. While we analysed the data for both men and women, we found that women are significantly more likely than men to express distrust in religion, and so our report focussed on them.

Our findings present a bleak picture for religious organisations hoping to gain political traction based on trust in their ability to act ethically and responsibly.

Child abuse scandals have played a big part in eroding the trust of women in particular.

When compared internationally, Australians – particularly women – have very low trust in organised religion. This gendered outcome makes Australia an outlier in the Western world and is likely related to women’s concerns for children in the care of religious organisations. Key findings include:

• about one-third of Australian women have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders
• distrust is highest among younger women: almost half of all women aged 18-29 have no trust in religious leaders
• among religious women, around 10% have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders, while around half have “not very much trust” in either
• LGBTIQ+ women have some of the lowest levels of trust in Australia. Almost two-thirds have no trust in religious leaders
• Women living in outer regional and remote Australia are significantly more likely to distrust religion than women living in cities and inner regional areas.

Child abuse scandals have eroded trust

Consistent with international studies, our research indicates religious child abuse scandals have greatly affected trust. Australian women are highly sceptical about the capacity of religious leaders to protect the children in their care. In fact, almost half report low, or no, trust.

They also doubt the ability of religious leaders to respond to the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Over half report low, or no, trust in this. Concern for children is highest among LGBTIQ+ women, likely reflecting concerns about discrimination against LGBTIQ+ school children, as well as child abuse.

Trust affects how women view the role of religion in the public sphere. We found that about four in five women who have no trust in religion believe religious organisations should no longer be granted tax-exempt status by the government. Around two-thirds of this group also believe the government should stop funding religious schools.

Similarly, two-thirds of women with no trust in religion think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in counselling in schools. Around 60% of this group also think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in primary and high school education.

Can trust be regained?

The report concludes that organised religion is facing a profound crisis of trust, particularly among women. Concerns for children are paramount in shaping women’s opinions about religious organisations and the services they offer. The high level of distrust among younger women suggests the crisis is generational and cannot be corrected without dedicated interventions on the part of religious organisations and governments.

If left unchecked, this crisis has the potential to undermine the social and economic fabric of Australia, given the prominence of religious organisations in the provision of education, healthcare, and social services.

Religious organisations must work to establish or regain the trust of the electorate, especially among regional and remote communities. The current national emergency of violence against women perhaps provides one opportunity for religious organisations to build this trust. This is especially so given the pivotal role they now play in the outsourced domestic violence services sector, which was once community-run.

Politically, this crisis of trust does not bode well for governments seeking support for any legislation that might appear to offer greater protections to organised religion.

In particular, any protections that are perceived to encroach on children’s rights will almost certainly be rejected by those large sections of the Australian electorate reporting low or no trust in religion. Albanese will need to get the balance right.
Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Although this article is about Australia and deals with the Australian legislature's difficulty in reconciling the opposing forces of social progress and Christian reactionary bigotry, it reflects the situation throughout much of the Christian world, and which will eventually be faced in the Islamic world too.

As religious superstition loses its grip on society, society will either drags it kicking and screaming into the future, or consign it to the dustbin of history along with all the other irrelevant and unwanted religions that failed to keep up, also held back, no doubt by their increasingly internally powerful but externally despised, die-hard fundamentalists and dogmatic purists.

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Reasons to Lose Faith - Suffer Little Children - How The Bible Promotes Child Abuse

Arrest for witchcraft (1866) by John Pettie. NGV

CC BY-NC

‘Witches’ are still killed all over the world. Pardoning past victims could end the practice

A promotional poster for Liberty Gospel Church with Helen Ukpabio, a modern 'witchfinder'(Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio/Facebook)

You might think that enlightened Humanism had sufficiently civilised Christianity to put a stop to the Medieval sport of burning old ladies alive because someone had accused them of witchcraft and 'God sez' they should be killed, but think again. According to a UN report, the practice is still widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India and Southeast Asia, where an estimated 20,000 people across 60 countries were victims of abuse and summary killing between 2009 and 2019,⁴ although the true figure is likely to be much higher because such instance often go unreported.

The report is the UN Human Rights Council report entitled, Study on the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization(pdf). It paints a shocking picture of what Biblical, mainly, but now wholly, Christian, beliefs and invocations can lead to amongst those who have swallowed the missionary lie that the Bible is the inerrant word of God which should be followed to the letter to achieve 'salvation' from the horrors that the missionaries has told them await those who fail to carry it out.

The problem is that the belief in Biblical inerrancy and a mind-reading, ever watchful god can make people think the barbarity in the Old Testament especially, is the will of God and 'moral' in some arbitrary definition of morality as "what God sez!"

And 'God sez, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Exodus 22: 18)

And running throughout the Bible is a belief in evil spirits and a world running on magic in which magic words, signs and thoughts can cause bad things to happen. The result is horrendous abuse of vulnerable people and especially of women and children, as the UN report states:

Religion News - Those Who Believe Absurdities...

Casting the magic spells - Eastern Orthodox style

A eucharist of sourdough or wafer? What a thousand-year-old religious quarrel tells us about fermentation

As though the idea of pieces of bread and/or wafer literally turning into bits of Jesus so they could be used in a cannibalistic ritual weren't absurd enough, in 1054, the Christian church erupted into a furious row almost amounting to civil war over the question not of whether the idea was too absurd to be believed but over the question of whether the bread should be made from sourdough or be unleavened!

The row widened and cemented the schism in the church over the correct dating of Easter which had arisen because no-one at the time the event it purports to commemorate - the alleged blood sacrifice of Jesus - thought it was significant enough to record. Later stories alluded vaguely to its relationship to the Jewish festival of Passover, with one account putting it on Passover itself on the Shabatt or Saturday at 9 o'clock in the morning (Mark 15:25), which would not have happened under Judaic law, and the other the day before, on the Day of Preparation, i.e., the day before Passover, on Friday at 12 noon. Unless there were two Jesuses, at least one of these dates and time is untrue.

Although that disagreement was the official reason for the schism, the real reason was of course the struggle for control of the church between the capitals of the old Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek), Rome and Constantinople (or Byzantium) respectively, because Christianity was nothing if not a political front based on the philosophy that to control the people you had to control their religion. The Latin west was never going to accept Greek rule from Constantinople and the Greek east was never going to accept Latin rule from Rome.

So, what was the row about the right type of bread to be magically turned into bits if Jesus all about and why was it elevated to such a high level of importance?

In the following article, reprinted from The conversation under a Creative Commons license, Robert Nelson, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of Melbourne, Australia explains how it became a matter of the authority of the respective churches. His article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Religious Child Abuse News - Those Believing Absurdities Commit Atrocities - Chidren Starved and Tortured For Being 'Possessed By Satan'

Religious fanatics Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt. 30 Years in Jail for aggravated child abuse.

Photo: Washington County (Utah) Sheriff's Department

Religious fanatics Jodi Hildebrandt, left, and Ruby Franke, center, being arrested on child abuse charges on Aug. 30, 2023, in Ivins, Utah.

Washington County Attorney’s Office via AP

YouTuber Ruby Franke's child abuse case rooted in religious extremism | AP News

Only a few days ago I wrote an article explaining why people who believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities and now we have a spectacular example of the truth of that claim.

It comes in the form of an Associated Press story of how a fanatical Mormon and mother of six, Ruby Franke, who held the absurd belief that magic demons can take over and 'possess' people because her religion teaches that these demons exist, became convince that her twelve-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were the Devil incarnate and inflicted physical punishment, including deliberate starvation, on them, "to teach them how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies".

Belief in a magical 'evil' Devil figure is of course fundamental to the Abrahamic superstitions, of which Mormonism is a recent manifestation, and is found in all forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their derivative superstitions. It was particularly strong during the Middle Ages when thousands of (mostly) women were burned alive in the belief that they were so possessed.

Ruby Franke and a business associate, Jodi Hildebrandt, have each been sentenced to 30 years in jail after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse after the 12-year-old boy managed to escape through a window from the room he was locked in and alerted a neighbour who called the police.

Franke is a well-known YouTuber who made her name lecturing gullible people who assumed her religious fanaticism gave her special insight into how to be a good parent. She and Hildebrandt, a fellow Mormon and mental health counsellor, were arrested after neighbours, the Clarksons, answered their door to find an emaciated boy with bruising and other injuries on their doorstep.

Religion News - People Who Believe Absurdities Will Commit Atrocities!

The blood sacrifice on which the Christian religion is founded

Why Religions Seem to Involve Outlandish Beliefs | Psychology Today

It's axiomatic that people who can believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities.

One only need look at the history of just about every world religion to know that is especially true of people who hold to religious beliefs, yet most religious people will look at other religions and wonder how on Earth they can believe that nonsense, while having no understanding why others who look at their beliefs have the same thoughts.

How many devout Christians, for example, would find nothing strange in the belief that the sun was swallowed each evening by the goddess Isis, who then gave birth to it every morning or that ancient Celtic chiefs physically mated with the Earth goddess at Tara to unite the Irish people with the land they lived on?

Yet those same Christians have no difficulty believing that the blood sacrifice of an innocent person can atone for collective 'sins' inherited from ancient ancestors or that the dismembered bodies of ancient holy men can somehow persuade a god to change his perfect plans for their better one, or an omniscient, omnibenevolent god needs to be told about a wrong and why if should be righted, or a mind-reading god needs to be told their thoughts.

And a Moslem who believes the founder of their religion split the moon in half and flew to Heaven on a magic flying creature finds it incomprehensible that saying prayers to a painting of an ancient holy man or priest can change the direction of the universe, or that the prohibition on 'graven images' doesn't apply to gold-covered icons or depictions of a god nailed to a stick, worn by people who believe tiny images of a blood sacrifice or miniature instrument of torture worn around their neck protects them from evil spirits?

There are even people who believe the sun can be made to perform strange maneuvers in the sky while no-one else on Earth noticed it and without Earth itself needing to suddenly change its speed and direction of rotation or orbital path round the sun. Even the leaders of a major branch of Christianity, with a whole panel of expert scientific advisors, believe that really happened and continue to send people to Fatima where it is alleged to have happened - just one of the many equally implausible and evidence-free beliefs orthodox Catholics needs to hold.

Even coeliac suffering Catholics can believe a piece of wafer, when the right spells are cast over it, miraculously becomes the body of a dead god to be consumed in a cannibalistic ritual, while knowing they need to avoid eating it to avoid the consequences of gluten intolerance! That's a condition of belonging to a cultural group called 'Catholics'.

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People

Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Trust in The Clergy Falls To An All-Time Low in USA

Joel Osteen

Church of the Almighty Greed

Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.

According to the latest Gallup Poll, trust in the ethical standards of almost all identified professional groups in the USA has declined in the four years up to 2023 with trust in the clergy reaching an all-time low at 32 percent of those polled rating their trust in them as very high or high. The clergy now rank alongside chiropractors and psychiatrists in the public perception of their ethical trustworthiness.

All the 5 major professions in the USA fell steadily between 1976 when polling began but the profession which fell furthest and fastest was that of clergy. in 1977, 61 percent of adult Americans polled, gave their trust in clergy as very high or high; this has now fallen to 32 percent, a 29 percentage points decline to almost half what it was in 1977.

And this downward trend has accelerated since 2012, declining by an average of slightly over 1.8 percentage points per year, against an average of just over 0.38 percentage points between 1977 and 2012. This represents about a four-fold increase in the rate of decline which, projected forward, if this rate continues, no-one in America will rate the ethical trustworthiness of clergy as very high or high by mid-2032.

Bigotry News - UK Christians May Retain The Right To Abuse Victims Of Their Choice

Christians gather to abuse women outside a Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

AFP/Getty

Women celebrating what they thought was a victory for their right to freedom from harassment and bigotry.

© Sister Support.

Ministers accused of watering down rules around abortion clinic buffer zones | Abortion | The Guardian

Last year, MPs in the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to back an amendment to the Public Order Act which would have established 'safe zones' around clinics offering pregnancy termination services to women who need them.

This would have made it unlawful for anyone to harass or approach women entering the clinics in an attempt to prevent their access or to influence their choice by publicly shaming them.

Those routinely harassing women in this way are invariably Christians using various underhand tactics and disinformation and even threatening to photograph the women and post their picture on the social media. Women are routinely subjected to abuse and shouts of 'murderer' by sanctimonious bigots exercising what they claim is a God-given right to impose their views on others and deny others basic human rights.

The traditional passive-aggressive threat of 'praying' for the women and the foetus was used routinely with ostentations 'silent' prayer, clearly intended to shame and embarrass women. Only a Christian could weaponise 'prayer' while ignoring what Jesus allegedly told them about casting the first stone and not judging others.

Creationism in Crisis - Americans Are Now Abandoning Religion As Fast As Europeans Did A Generation Ago

Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows

As the chart on the right shows, the decline in belief in God and Heaven has been the most dramatic, falling 16 percentage points in 22 years and the decline in belief in other magical entities like Angels and Satan has run in parallel, the differences being within the statistical error of the data.

What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:

Creationism in Crisis - Monogamy Predates Christianity By Millions of Years

Ring-tailed lemures. Recent studies show that many lemurs do not live individually, but in pairs of females and males.

Image: istock.com/Goddard_Photography

Early Primates | | UZH

Religious fundamentalists like to assume they have ownership of the institution of marriage because the 'right' form of marriage was dictated by their imaginary god so we should all subscribe to their approved form of it. In many formerly majority Christian countries, the Christian-based marital laws are one of the few remaining vestiges of a time when Christianity imposed itself on everyone, believers, non-believers and non-Christians alike, arrogantly believing it had a divine right to rule.

But recent research has shown that a form of flexible monogamy, or more or less stable social parings of a female and a male is common if not the norm in the primate family. It was most likely incorporated into religions because some human tribes thought of monogamy as the 'right' form of sexual relationship, so any god whom the priesthood wanted to be taken seriously had to hand down 'morals' that the people thought were right and proper. After all, the only way to tell if a god is a good god or an evil god is to compare its morals and behaviour to that of an external standard of 'good', is it not?

If you think not, you have to believe that if your god had told people to hurt babies, rob banks and hit old ladies, those would now be considered moral acts and people who didn't do them would be regarded as immoral and deserving of punishment or other social sanctions. Christian apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig, has even declared that a seemingly immoral act such as infanticide, is morally right if you believe his (but only his) god commands it, and it would be immoral not to carry out such a divine command.

But William Lane Craig's repugnant idea of what constitutes morality is straying somewhat off the point, which is the 'right' form of marriage in human society, which William Lane Craig presumably believes is divinely commanded by his god and therefore mandatory for the rest of us.

But, absolute monogamy is not the universal norm in modern human sexual relationships, even in societies which only permit monogamous marriage, and probably never has been. Humans can best be described as mostly monogamous, most of the time, with 'infidelity' by both sexes being fairly common to the extent that some estimates put the number of people who have a different father to the one they think is theirs at about 25%. In some cultures, such as Islamic, bigamy is normal and, as evidenced by baptism records, pre-marital sex was commonplace in 19th Century England.

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy

Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children

Cardinal Enrique Pla y Deniel, Successor to Cardinal Gomá
Seen here giving the Nazi salute alongside Geralissimo Franco

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain.

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.

Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.