Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1884

New Zealand Church Has a “Bleach-Based” Cure for Ebola; Experts Say It’s Potentially Fatal

What is up with New Zealand? Despite more than 39% of its population professing no religion, the promotion of bullshit seems like it’s at an all-time high.

Earlier this year, we learned of a church selling olive oil as a cure for everything, from mental illness to marital woes.

Now, a different church is promising to cure everything, including Ebola, with a “bleach-based solution that medical experts have slammed as being potentially fatal.”

Genesis II Church of Health and Healing leader James Humble is heading a three-day, US$500-a-head ($646) seminar in Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains.

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Concocted of chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment, it is claimed to be an effective treatment against cancer, HIV, malaria and even Ebola.

It is sold in New Zealand through miraclemineral.co.nz as a “simple, scientifically proven pathogen killer”.

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More than 40 people have confirmed attendance for the seminar, which begins on Friday morning. It will feature talks by “Archbishop” Humble and other church members. Attendees will get lunch, booklets, a “Reverend ID card” and “Health minister ID card”, and afterwards be authorised to “open a Church chapter”.

The website alone should be a red flag not to trust anything these people say.

The non-theistic church’s first major belief is to do good deeds… a “commandment” they’re already violating by putting believers’ health in jeopardy. Come to think of it, they also don’t care much for their next two beliefs — “good health for all mankind” and “doing what is right.”

Let’s hope the warning gets out before more gullible people fall for their ruse. Which is depressing since you’d think “Don’t drink bleach-based products from a shameless huckster” was common sense.

(Thanks to Dave and Aer for the link)

By the Way, Gordon Klingenschmitt Won His Election to the Colorado House… and That’s Horrifying

Gordon Klingenschmitt (below), a minister known for saying the most extremist faith-based things you’ll ever hear in American politics, handily won his seat last night for the Colorado House.

It wasn’t even close:

In case you’re wondering why this is a frightening development, here’s a brief list of what Klingenschmitt has said in the past:

Openly gay Rep. Jared Polis would be “joining ISIS in beheading Christians.”Atheists should undergo exorcisms so they’ll be okay with graduation ceremonies in church.Our country’s foreign policy should be based on the Bible.“American law needs to reflect God’s law.”An exorcism once cured a woman of her “foul spirit of lesbianism.”President Obama is ruled by demons.If you’re gay, you should be discriminated against.He agreed with the idea that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell shouldn’t have been repealed because gay soldiers would have to take breaks on the combat field “to change diapers all because their treacherous sin causes them to lose control of their bowels.”

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Congratulations, Colorado. Have fun dealing with this guy.

There’s a silver lining here, which is that the state House is still majority Democrat, which means Klingenschmitt won’t have enough power to pass whatever zany legislation he wants.

But still: This guy’s in office. That should give all of us nightmares.

(via Right Wing Watch. Thanks to Ron for the link)

This Little Girl Shouting Down a Street Preacher is the Greatest Thing You’ll See All Day

I’m usually not a fan of people out-obnoxious-ing street preachers in order to get them to stop… but somehow, when this little girl does it, I can’t stop watching:

I can’t tell which line made me laugh more: “Stop talking; no one’s listening,” “No one wants to hear you,” or “Piehole should be quiet!”

I’ve never seen a more adorable annoying child.

The confrontation took place on October 29 in Salem, Massachusetts and was videotaped by Robert Goss-Kennedy, who’s been capturing protests on film for years now.

(Thanks to Brian for the link)

Pakistani Mob of Thousands Tortures Christian Couple to Death For Allegedly Burning Pages From the Qur’an

Good thing they have a holy book to tell them what’s moral. Imagine how these people might behave without Allah’s divine guidance.

An enraged Muslim mob beat a Christian couple to death and burnt their bodies in the brick kiln where they worked on Tuesday for allegedly desecrating pages of the Holy Qur’an. …

Sources privy to the details of the incident told Pakistan Today that Shahzad Masih and his wife Shama worked in a brick kiln owned by a man named Yousaf Gujjar since the last 3-4 years. “The couple were originally from Clarkabad, a Christian village a few kilometeres away from Raiwind but they had been working at Yousaf Gujjar’s brick kiln for the last 3-4 years and were living in a quarter in the premises,” a relative of the deceased couple told Pakistan Today on the condition of anonymity.

Pakistani Muslims gather at a 2010 protest against the desecration of the Qur’an

He said that on Sunday, Shama, wife of the deceased Shahzad Masih, was cleaning her quarters when she found some amulets belonging to her late father-in-law who used to ‘practice’ black magic. “Shama burnt the amulets and threw them on a garbage heap. Irfan, a Muslim co-worker at the kiln, noticed some half burnt pieces of paper from the amulets and raised clamour, claiming that these were pages from the holy Quran. Soon the word spread and at 7am on Tuesday, a Muslim mob of about 3,000-40,000 people attacked the couple’s quarters at the brick kiln and tortured the couple to death.

Shama and Shahzah Masih reportedly had three children (no word on their condition or whereabouts) and were expecting a fourth.

Will justice be done?

Police sources said that a case had been registered against some 2,000 “unidentified people” for the murders.

We wait with bated breath.

Extreme violence over alleged anti-Islam blasphemy is nothing new in the region. Pakistan’s Tribune reminds us that just last year,

An over 3,000-strong mob set ablaze more than 150 houses of Christians in Lahore’s Joseph Colony on March 9 to “take revenge of the blasphemy” allegedly committed by a Christian two days earlier. …

[The crowd was] furious over an alleged remark against Islam by a Christian, Sawan Masih, in an earlier discussion with his Muslim drinking buddy, barber Shahid Imran.

As the riots and arson unfolded, police officers stood by and did nothing.

According to Dawn, the country’s oldest and most popular English-language newspaper,

Blasphemy is a hugely sensitive issue in the country, with even unproven allegations often prompting mob violence. Anyone convicted, or even just accused, of insulting Islam, risks a violent and bloody death at the hands of vigilantes.

Sometimes, the people who knowingly set off such predictable chains of events may not even be actually offended. But pretending that they are can have certain benefits:

The desire to grab land or settle personal scores often underlies blasphemy allegations. …

The reality of Pakistan today is that [the] mere accusation of this crime, howsoever unsubstantiated, instantly imperils the life of the individual concerned, and that threat persists not only throughout his incarceration, but even after acquittal.

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Speaking of Pakistan and blasphemy: As Hemant wrote two weeks ago, the Pakistani appeals court in Lahore upheld the death penalty for Asia Bibi, a woman incarcerated in 2009 after she argued with Muslim co-workers over shared water. They claimed it was unclean because Bibi is a Christian. Things turned ugly when she refused to convert to Islam, a statement her colleagues considered an insult to their faith. Incredibly, Bibi will now most likely be executed for her perceived impudence.

People with knowledge of that situation think that even if members of the judiciary are not in the pocket of Islamists screeching blasphemy, the judges have a powerful incentive to go along with the wishes of the mob.

Judges of the Lahore High Court may have rejected the appeal out of fear for their safety, as religious groups demanding Ms Bibi’s execution were present in court.

The country’s religious hotheads and assorted thugs have somewhat of a tradition of violent intimidation, up to and including murder:

Pakistan’s judges have occasionally faced the wrath of countrymen upset with their decisions concerning blasphemy. Judge Pervez Ali Shah, who gave the death penalty to the guard who killed Salmaan Taseer, fled Pakistan after issuing his decision. Justice Arif Bhatti, who had acquitted two Christians in a 1995 blasphemy case, was killed in his office in 1997.

(Image via Shutterstock)

An Ohio School District Was Ready to “Sell” Property to a Local Church for $1… Until an Atheist Offered to Buy It

Last week, I posted about a high school that’s no longer in use in Monroe, Ohio. The building, which sits on 29 acres of land, is in complete disarray, but treating it for asbestos and demolishing it would require more than $1,000,000 that the Monroe Local School District Board of Education doesn’t want to spend.

The board had the options of selling the building to the city (for much less than it’s worth), demolishing the building, or selling it to the Monroe First Church of God for (literally) a buck.

And they were leaning toward that last option, possibly because board member Tim Carpenter (below) is a member of that church…

The potential church/state violations were evident and the American Humanist Association even wrote a letter to the board requesting more information on their options.

But things got weird on Monday night when the board met to discuss their options.

Not only did the (religious) John W. Robbins Trust offer to buy the land for $1,000/acre, there was another offer made:

The board could also sell the property to a new interested party — Todd Stiefel, of Raleigh, N.C., at a yet to be determined cost for redevelopment for commercial or residential use or possibly donated to the city.

You *know* I had to follow up on this one. Stiefel is the philanthropist who has given away a lot of money to atheist organizations.

While Stiefel’s proposal didn’t officially get sent to the board in time for Monday’s meeting, local councilman Steve Black presented an email to the board — supposedly to audible gasps from the crowd — with the general outline of his plan:

Stiefel offered $10,000 if the board transferred the property to the city. Of that amount, $5,000 would go to the city to refurbish the school fields for public use and the other $5,000 would be donated to the board to purchase science equipment.

Really, with that option, the board would be crazy to give the building up to a local church for a buck. They weren’t pleased with the offer, though, calling it a “bribe”… if you call buying science equipment for students a bribe.

However, Stiefel told me that, after he heard about the John W. Robbins Trust’s offer, he felt his was no longer necessary.

Ultimately, the additional offers stymied the board’s decision-making. They opted to “reject all proposals and reset the process for a future sale.”

That sounds like a victory for now. The board members are fully aware people are paying attention to them — and that’ll make it especially hard for them to give away a ton of property to a church as they intended to do last week.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Evangelical Minister: I Changed My Mind On Homosexuality and You Can Too!

Acceptance of LGBT people is on an undeniable upswing nationwide. Slowly but surely, conservative Christians are catching up. And every time a prominent Christian voice “comes out” for LGBT equality, the potential for change grows.

In an article for the Washington Post, evangelical minister and ethicist David Gushee writes about how his views on homosexuality have undergone a complete about-face in the last few years, and now he’s ready to tell the world.

This is especially a big deal because he was formerly a huge advocate for using the Bible to tear down LGBT people:

For Christians, the LGBT debate has always been framed as a question of sexual ethics. Our argument has centered on six or seven biblical passages that appear to mention homosexuality negatively or appear to establish a heterosexual norm: the sin of Sodom, the laws of Leviticus and the list of “the unrighteous” in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. For most of my career, these ideas formed the foundation of my views and teachings as an evangelical minister and professor of Christian ethics. I co-authored a popular textbook that stated this position flatly: “Homosexual conduct is one form of sexual expression that falls outside the will of God.” I wasn’t mean about it. But I said it.

But lo and behold, something has changed! Here’s his thesis:

In recent years, my moral position has shifted. It has dawned on me with shocking force that homosexuality is not primarily an issue of Christian sexual ethics. It’s primarily an issue of human suffering. With that realization, I have now made the radical decision to stand in solidarity with the LGBT community.

Right off the bat, I generally feel weird when anyone suggests that supporting a gay person is “radical.” Especially when we’re talking about a person whose life’s work is meant to welcome and uplift people. Of course, the world exists outside my comfort bubble, and in many belief systems, supporting an LGBT person is still radical — in the Catholic Church, for instance, the faith’s most revered document still proclaims that LGBT people are mentally ill.

While Gushee doesn’t acknowledge outright that it’s messed up for basic human decency to be considered “radical” in some spaces, he does say that the church’s preoccupation with literal translations of the Bible interferes with the supposed unconditional love they should be offering.

I now believe that the traditional interpretation of the most cited passages is questionable and that all that parsing of Greek verbs has distracted attention from the primary moral obligation taught by Jesus — to love our neighbors as ourselves, especially our most vulnerable neighbors.

I also now believe that while any progress toward more humane treatment of LGBT people is good progress, we need to reconsider the entire body of biblical interpretation and tradition related to this issue.

These are the two most important sentence in the whole piece for me. Religious conservatives who mask their homophobia with a “Jesus said so!” shield have nothing to stand on when those few verses are eliminated from the discourse. Without a couple of questionable passages to point to, there is no religious justification for anti-LGBT sentiments.

Except, of course, the prejudice that’s already there, hidden under the (somehow) socially acceptable excuse of religious conviction. See also: “Gay people are icky.”

Gushee attributes his change of heart to a number of experiences. After moving to Atlanta a few years back he developed close friendships with LGBT people, especially LGBT Christians. His youngest sister is gay and has struggled in the same churches where he worships. He’s also reflected on the civil rights struggles of the past, particularly how discrimination and hatred that we now consider inhumane was the norm for, say, Jewish people during the Holocaust, or African Americans during the worst of our country’s history of racially-based violence and segregation.

In the LGBT rights case of today, he says, much of the hatred has come from churches.

Since the 1960s, when the gay rights movement began in America, Christians and their leaders have struggled to figure out how to respond to the growing tolerance of same-sex relationships. Most in Christianity have responded by offering endless debates over how to interpret that handful of biblical passages. Books erupted. Congregations fought. Denominations split.

For me, the answer to this debate has become simple: There is a sexual-minority population of about 5 percent of the human family that has received contempt and discrimination for centuries. In Christendom, the sexual ethics based in those biblical passages metastasized into a hardened attitude against sexual- and gender-identity minorities, bristling with bullying and violence. This contempt is in the name of God, the most powerful kind there is in the world.

Responding to criticisms from Evangelical Christians like Denny Burk and Robert Gagnon to his new “pro-LGBT” stance, Gushee says he doesn’t want to talk about the details just yet. In fact, it’s a glaring omission in his piece that he doesn’t endorse marriage equality, doesn’t denounce the private schools that needlessly fire LGBT people, and overall doesn’t call for any other kind of action that directly benefits LGBT people. That’s why this change of heart isn’t so radical to me; simply put, Christian love doesn’t grant hospital visitation rights or health insurance.

Anyway, Gushee isn’t ready to talk politics like his critics are.

They want to shift the discussion immediately to the debate on same-sex relationships and the proper interpretation of those six or seven most cited Bible passages. I want to move right back to what really matters the most to me — loving this particular 5 percent of the population in exactly the same way that Christians are called to love everyone. That means attending to what most harms them and doing something about it. And that means offering full acceptance of LGBT people, ending religion-based harm and contempt, helping families accept the sexual orientation of their own children, and helping churches be a safe and welcoming place for every one of God’s children.

These are absolutely excellent goals to strive for, but they’re lofty, even coming from a prominent voice like Gushee’s, and lack a direct call to action. Words like “accept” — especially with regards to LGBT Christians and LGBT children — are too vague. Does “love the sinner, hate the sin” count as acceptance? What about “I accept your gayness, but not your marriage”?

He closes with another historical comparison:

I am pro-LGBT in just the same way I hope I would have been pro-Jew in 1943 and pro-African American in 1963. I stand in solidarity with those treated with contempt and discrimination. And I do so because I promised in 1978 to follow Jesus wherever he leads. Even here.

I am 100% on board with born-again Christians being born yet again into a mindset of acceptance and love for their LGBT brethren. But let’s be clear: Acceptance is one thing, advocacy is another. Open hearts are a good place to start, but there’s much more to ending religious-based discrimination than some Christian scholars changing their minds. And it’s up to them to get the ball rolling.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Kentucky High School’s Football Road Trip Included Watching an Assistant Coach Get Baptized

Last month, Kentucky’s Frankfort High School football team took a weeklong trip to Florida for a “Fall Break Football Tour.” That’s all well and good, I guess, but something weird happening on October 2.

According to their itinerary, the students had a workout on the beach at 7:00a. But the team’s Facebook page had something very different posted on it later that day:

That would be Assistant Coach Paul Thompson (getting baptized), Fellowship of Christian Athletes mentor Ben Jeffries, and apparently several students surrounding them. Why was a coach getting baptized during a school trip? I have no clue, but there’s every reason to believe the school was promoting Christianity through that action.

The ACLU of Kentucky sent a letter to the district attorney this week urging him to put a stop to the practice:

… we think it evident that the “degree of school involvement” makes clear that the baptism services “bear the imprint” of Frankfort High School and thus violated state and federal constitutional provisions regarding students’ (and parents’) religious freedoms. We therefore respectfully request that FHS confirm, in writing, that it will take appropriate remedial measures to educate its employees regarding this issue and to prevent the recurrence of future incidents.

The district has yet to issue a response.

On a side note, who the hell is posting a picture of a baptism on the Facebook page of a public high school’s football team? How ignorant of the law do you have to be to think that’s a good idea?

Contest Will Reward Atheists Who Remove Their Mask

Openly Secular, the campaign to get atheists to come out of the closet, is running a contest that’s pretty simple to enter:

All you have to do is make a video explaining who you are, why you’re open about your non-theism, and how it’s affected your life — and you could be in the running to win $1,000!

There’s a little bit of fine print, which you can read here. Let’s see if a reader of this site can bring home the gold!

The deadline is November 15.

Friendly Atheist Podcast Episode 27: A Discussion About the New Left Behind Movie

For our latest podcast, Jessica and I decided to go see the new Left Behind movie starring Nicolas Cage. Because we make sacrifices for you.

Here’s Jessica seeing the movie. I swear we didn’t alter this picture at all…

After several days of keeping our thoughts to ourselves, we finally discussed the movie with the microphones on.

You can see my own review of the movie right here.

This episode is sponsored by Be Secular. Readers of this site can get a 10% discount on products by using the promo code “Friendly”!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, get the MP3 directly, check it out on Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below.

And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

Please Support the Work I Do Through This Site

I’ve posted this in the past. If you’ve already responded, there’s no need to do it again. Thanks!

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Over the past couple of years, what began as a personal blog has turned into a hub with several contributors and multiple posts per day. As always, I’d like to continue expanding the reach of this site. That entails bringing on additional contributors with different voices, including more guest posts from people who can offer interesting and different perspectives, creating more YouTube videos, and making the podcasts sound more professional.

In order to facilitate all of this, I’ve created a page at Patreon.

If you’d like to help out, you can pledge a certain amount every month (with rewards along the way!) from $1 to $100.

As always, I’m grateful for the kind words and support you all send my way. I don’t usually post about them, but trust me: they never go unnoticed. Many of you have emailed me asking if there’s any way to donate to this page, and I always say no, but I think Patreon offers a really incredible approach to reach out to more people in different ways. Thanks in advance for your help.