"To Trump, the Bible and the church are not symbols of faith; they are weapons of culture war. And to many of his Christian supporters watching at home, the pandering wasn’t an act of inauthenticity; it was a sign of allegiance—and shared dominance."

This is one of the more recent videos Rich "Beebo" Russel liked on youtube before stealing a plane and crashing it into the Puget Sound in a blaze of glory.

7% of Americans who do NOT believe in heaven DO believe in hell. Those Americans tend to be poor, uneducated, immigrant, and very religious (evangelical protestant).

A look at the organic farm and ecovillage run by Gabriel of Urantia's group (who I've written about before: http://americancynic.net/log/2012/6/7/gabriel_of_urantia/)

It is encouraging that an intentional community with so much itnellectual baggage has been this successful.

Churches, as already-existing social centers, represent one of the better chances of actually providing an alternative source of crisis counseling, protection, and aid which could displace the police in many of the roles they are the worst at.

A portrait of cult leader Bentinho Massaro (who I'd never heard of before) by Be Scofield who spent a month with the cult in Sedona. I think Scofield over-emphasizes the tech/startup angle... since when does having a website and an instagram account qualify as a  "brilliant" use of technology? It's like the commentators who still can't get over that ISIS members use Twitter.

Scofield's description does certainly paint Massaro as a typical narcissist guru. Why does there always seem to be a few thousand people in Boulder and Sedona who feel a need to be financially fleeced and abusively told what to believe by an unrepentant liar? (I guess if the 2016 election is an indication, it's not a phenomenon limited to New Age hotspots.)

"Beneath its superficial rationalism, then, the New Atheism amounts to little more than an intellectual defense of empire and a smokescreen for the injustices of global capitalism. It is a parochial universalism whose potency lies in its capacity to appear simultaneously iconoclastic, dissenting, and disinterested, while channeling vulgar prejudices, promoting imperial projects, and dressing up banal truisms as deep insights."

Yet the Billy Graham team seems to think that peace is something that can be “restored” in Ferguson. They seem to think that “peace” is somehow an accurate description of Ferguson, Missouri, before the protests began. They seem to be so thick-headed and thick-hearted that they think the people’s response to the violence and injustice done against them is somehow the reason Ferguson lacks “peace.”

I might adopt "apostasy, not prayer" as a personal slogan.