Three strikes and you’re out? The Babylon Bee has joined Protestia in demonetized-and-‘restricted viewership’-land after they had lost an appeal for a satirical article they posted on October 14, resulting in their post being deleted by Facebook with the claim that it “incited violence.”
The post in question is titled “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch” and spoofs a gag from1975’s Monty Python and the holy grail, where the townsfolk peasants draw a convoluted and dazzling line between wood, ducks and floating witches. See here for the full scene, and see the first three paragraphs of the article in question, which is clearly satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—After two days of Amy Coney Barrett gracefully and stoically answering questions with perfect recall and no notes, suspicions grew on Capitol Hill that she might be a practitioner of the dark arts.
“Oh, she’s a witch alright, just look at her!” said Senator Hirono. “Just look at the way she’s dressed and how she’s so much prettier and smarter than us! She’s in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!”
Senator Hirono then pulled a live duck out of a massive burlap sack next to her and announced: “In addition to being a Senator, I am also quite wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows witches burn because they are made of wood. I think I read that somewhere. Wood floats, and so do ducks– so logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.”
Angry pro-life protesters with “Men know better” and “Abortion no. Guns yes” signs protest in garbled, unintelligible words. The Holy Spirit descends down and urges the confused menagerie into a church, where they are met with women in choir robes that and some bizarre pro-choice pope that dance around the altar in front of the cross praising abortion for the glorious wonder that it is, until the protesters, convinced of the error of their ways, rip up their signs and join the blasphemous fray.
And that, in a nutshell, is the new music video by artist and director Viva Ruiz, the ignoble creator of Thank God for Abortion and the artist in residence at “Shout Your Abortion” where she creates content to celebrate the burning, dismemberment, and destruction of babies in an appropriately ghoulish career.
The video is shocking for its visceral imagery and in how blatantly it appropriates and bastardizes Christian themes, purposefully provoking a response perhaps in hopes to hide the fact that the song itself is objectively awful in its composition and lyrical arrangement.
Ruiz acting like the dog proudly running up to it’s owner with a dead kitten in it’s mouth and expecting praise, says of her creation:
TGFA is a spiritual mission to affirm the sanctity of abortion-having people. Queer people, gay people, trans people, and people of faith all have abortions. Where have our narratives been? I have had 2 abortions, am Latinx, queer, fluid, and Christian. [Editor’s Note: No, you are not!] We know that God loves us and we are blessed. We stand as believers intending to claim space for God in the abortion conversation. God has been used against abortion-having people, against LGBTQ people, against women and femme people. We know it’s a blasphemy to use spirit to oppress people. How can we stand by politely and let God be outright owned by fanatical extremists hellbent on forced pregnancy, the same zealots hellbent on white supremacy?
Blocking access to abortion is racist, is classist, is ableist, is gender-based violence. We demand that everyone regardless of faith stand with us for reproductive freedom under the banner of bodily autonomy: we belong to ourselves.
The lyrics, which can be seen here in full, feature a few choice lines:
God is cool with me F*** the state they can’t take it God is cool with me F*** the church they only fake it…
God oh god God oh god God oh god God oh god The power of Christ compels me You don’t speak for me I speak for me Who can tell me what we need to be free no misogyny no transmisogny We got a right to self identity…
Stop torture of women Get with it! Fascist politicians Christian fundamentalists All the white feminists Spiritual people non spiritual people Creepy racist liberals and the machistas we need everybody in this
Straight up though: this thing is demonic from the pit of hell.
(Faithwire) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said this week that the only way to end the lockdowns and return to church is to hand the country over to another Democrat, former vice president Joe Biden.
“If you’re tired of lockdowns, or you’re tired of wearing masks, or you wish you were in church this morning or watching college football or your kids were in-person instruction, it is time for change in this country, and that’s why we’ve got to elect Joe Biden,” she said during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
EARLIER: @GovWhitmer says “if you’re tired of lockdowns or you’re tired of wearing masks or you wish you were in church this morning … it is time for change in this country.” #MTP
Whitmer, of course, has unilaterally kept her state in perpetual lockdowns since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic — actions the Michigan Supreme Court have since ruled unconstitutional.
The Michigan attorney general announced in early October she would no longer enforce Whitmer’s orders.
Legendary Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh took to the air Monday afternoon to give a health update, and in the process opened up about the role his faith was having throughout these challenging times:
I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is of immense value, strength, confidence. That’s why I’m able to remain fully committed to the idea that what is supposed to happen will happen when it’s meant to.
The nearly 70-year old political commentator shared last February that he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, a sickness which has a grim prognosis and which treatment focuses on slowing the progression of the disease, seeking to maintain quality of life, and minimizing symptoms wherever possible rather than curing it.
Depending on the nature of the cancer, it has a 5-year survival rate of between 1-10% and a 1-year survival rate between 15-19%.
Limbaugh said during Monday’s show, speaking to 20 million listeners:
I feel more and more blessed hearing from you, knowing that you’re out there praying and everything else you’re doing. That is a blessing. It’s just a series of blessings. And I’m grateful to be able to come here to the studio and tell you about it and really maintain as much normalcy as I can….the only thing that any of us are certain of is right now, today. That’s why I thank God every morning when I wake up. I thank God that I did. I try to make it the best day that I can…I try to remain as committed to the idea that what’s supposed to happen will happen when it’s meant to.
I mentioned at the outset of this, on the first day I told you, that I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is of immense value, strength, confidence, and that’s why I’m able to remain fully committed to the idea of what is supposed to happen will happen when it’s meant to. There’s some comfort in knowing that some things are not in our hands. There’s a lot of fear associated with that too, but there is some comfort. It’s helpful to be able to trust and to believe in a higher plan.
Really quite remarkable to hear @rushlimbaugh discussing his cancer setback and yet pointing out all of his blessings, "it's just a series of blessings." pic.twitter.com/CZg4V5YmAE
While Rush has long spoken of his belief in God, it has always been in more generic types of reference, eschewing talk of repentance and faith in Christ with more broad terms and phrases such as “This country needs to understand the importance of religion” and “I believe in God.” Even during the initial cancer revelation back in February, he said “I told the staff today that I have a deeply personal relationship with God that I do not proselytize about, but I do, and I have been working that relationship tremendously.”
The fact is that specific reference to Jesus and having a “personal relationship” with him is a new development for Limbaugh.
Rush’s Brother, David, a well-known political commentator in his own right, is a professing evangelical Christian, and we can only hope that he ministers to Rush in these last days, helping him truly understand the gift of faith and everlasting life.
New Zealand has won the dubious honor of being the gayest Parliament in the world, stealing the dishonor from the previous world leader, the United Kingdom after Labor party leader Jacinda Ardern led her party to a landslide victory, allowing her to form the country’s first majority government in 20 years and her party’s best showing in over 50.
With yesterday’s election, there are now 11 openly LGBTQ members of the 120 member Parliment, putting them at 9.16%. The previous “record holder,” the UK, has 45 queer members out of 650 sitting members, putting them at a mere 7%.
The distribution across parties is pretty one sided, with the progressive parties having the lion’s share of those who God gave over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another, exchanging the truth about God for a lie and worshipping and serving created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.
The center-right National Party holds no gay members, whereas the far-left Green party has 40% of their members who fall on the LGBTQQIP2SAA spectrum.
In the United States, there are 11/535 members of congress that are out of the closet and openly gay, a rate of just over 2%
Part of the steeple collapses at an East Baltimore church fire that went to 4 alarms. March 28, 2020
The pastor of a small reformed congregation in Michigan has quit his church and left the ministry because his congregation members were too supportive of President Donald Trump, leaving this flock without a senior Pastor after serving for just 4 years.
Pastor Keith Mannes preached his last service on October 11th to the congregation of East Saugatuck Church that was gathered outside on a windy Sunday. He did not address in that sermon his motives for leaving, speaking only for a short time, and overseeing communion.
In an interview with the Holland Sentinel, however, Mannes explained that he could no longer oversee a flock that was giving such broad support to Trump, saying that he believed the church had “abandoned its role” by not holding the president more accountable for his miscreant behavior.
Mannes said he started getting uncomfortable and unsettled by Trump back in June of 2015, over 14 months before Trump won the presidency.
It’s only been building ever since. From the beginning I thought there’s something about this man and the instrument that he is for a lot of things that are just very not Jesus…
It just floors me how church-going people who read the Bible and sing the hymns can show up at a (Trump) rally and just do that deep bellow like an angry mob supporting these horrible things that come out of his heart and his mind. It just began to trouble me so much that I am a pastor in this big enterprise…
It’s not only me, but quite a number of pastors I know are just like, ‘This is it? All this preaching we did about Jesus and there’s this big of a disconnect?’ I think that’s a real burden on a lot of pastors’ hearts. I love these people, I love God, I love Jesus, I love the church, but there’s something happening here.
As the pastor became more and more upset by the actions of Trump over the course of years, his disdain for the President began to manifest in his sermons, with him taking potshots here and there or inserting the occasional stray or offhanded comment. Mannes describes the pressure to internalize all his angst about Trump and not unload on his congregation during the service as “tearing me up.”
Despite this, his congregation kept on voicing support for Trump and signaling their intent to vote for him, with some glossing over his misdeeds.
“The question of the church largely and how it’s functioned in this moment has been really disturbing. That’s been troubling enough that I need to lay it all down.”
Mannes, who served as a Reformed pastor for over 30 years, doesn’t know what he will do next or where he will go, but says “at least I have my conscience.”
With the departure of Mannes, another Pastor, Wayne Baker, told the congregation during yesterday’s service that he understood that the congregation needed time to process everything, as there was not much warning between Mannes announcing he was leaving and then his final Sunday, acknowledging that Mannes “will carry some hurts with them as they leave the church and that certainly doesn’t feel good” and they as a congregation will carry some hurt as well.
(The Christian Post) Wikipedia has decided to restrict its editors from expressing opposition to same-sex marriage on its platform — a decision that comes months after co-founder Larry Sanger said the site’s neutrality policy was “dead.”
Volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia’s articles can no longer include on their profile page any “userbox” — a badge expressing their beliefs — that is against gay marriage. For example, one such userbox states, “This user believes marriage is between one man and one woman.”
The decision was made after a recent discussion where “predominantly left-wing editors” argued such a stance was “discriminatory” and against site policy, according to Breitbart.
The discussion began after an editor, Adam Cuerden, suggested that just one userbox be deleted, calling it “pretty explicitly homophobic” and citing a site guideline prohibiting “inflammatory or divisive” content in userboxes. Soon, he suggested that other userboxes in favor of traditional marriage should also be…
On October 20, Pope Francis is joining up with members of other world religions to gather together for a time of prayer and to speak at an event entitled “No One Is Saved Alone – Peace and Fraternity.”
Vatican News reports that all the major world religions will gather to pray in their respective venues across the city in an ecumenical time of supplication:
Pope Francis the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, and other Orthodox and Protestant representatives in the Basilica of Saint Mary in Aracoeli; Jews in the Synagogue of Rome; Muslims, Buddhists, and representatives of other Eastern religions in the Capitoline Museums.
Once completed, they will then gather together for an “interreligious service” which will include more prayer, the lighting of the peace candle, speeches, the delivery of the 2020 Appeal for Peace, and a socially distanced sign of peace (when congregation members greet their neighbors with handshakes and say “peace be with you.”)
These blasphemous, scandalous, diabolical, interreligious prayer meetings with the Pope are happening more and more often, with at least five in the last two years. In fact, we wrote about an event last year in the UAE, where Francis said:
“The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race, and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives.”
That is, if different races aren’t bad, and different sexes aren’t bad, then different religions aren’t bad either…
The theme of No One Is Saved Alone is a squirrely one, however, with Francis repeating something similar in a tweet yesterday, saying “we are either all saved together or no one is saved.”
(Capstone Report) Now I know why Joe Carter writes about QAnon!
“A new poll finds that 3 in 4 Americans have either heard absolutely or almost nothing about QAnon, but if you have heard a lot or somewhat about it, you’re most likely a wealthy, city-dwelling, Clinton-voting liberal,” according to Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner.
It all makes sense now.
He and his wealthy, city-dwelling friends are the ones falling for the conspiracy theory. Despite his protestations to the contrary that it is conservative, churchgoers believing it, this new survey data proves that liberals are the ones falling for it.
Harvest Bible Chapel (HBC) announced that after several months of arbitration, starting in August 2020, that they came to an agreement with their former pastor and leader James MacDonald, to settle all open issues between them and bring this messy, shameful blight on the church to an end.
James MacDonald’s employment was officially terminated by the elder board in November of 2019, declaring the money-grubbing guzzler to be so not above reproach, that they raked him over the coals sixty ways to Sunday and called him out for the abusive, greedy, two-fold son of hell that he is.
As a result of the arbitration, Macdonald walks away with the following, among other things:
-Walk in the Word (WITW) will no longer be a ministry under the umbrella of HBC. As part of the merging of WITW to HBC, there was an agreement that MacDonald could remove WITW and its assets to an external organization. This includes:
-Cash and real estate. Our insurance company paid MacDonald $1.2 million. HBC also agreed to transfer a vacant parcel of property adjacent to our Crystal Lake Campus which we had listed for sale on the market since mid-2019. These funds and this land are for the assets that Walk in the Word brought to HBC when it came under the church in 2010.
The Parties shall cooperate to accomplish HBC’s transfer of the deferred compensation funds that had been established for MacDonald’s benefit. This plan was in place prior to his departure from HBC and relates to a retirement plan of which MacDonald is the beneficiary.
In addition, HBC will pay MacDonald $250,000 cash for reimbursement promised to him prior to 2019 in connection with selling his prior home.
More about his luxury $2,000,000 home can be found here., but it was a beaut.
You’ll recall that MacDonald was living the high life prior to being ousted, likely rolling around naked each night in his Scrooge McDuckian Money Bin, reveling in the filthy lucre he was amassing and spending as if it were candy.
Harvest Bible Church, who is far from innocent in this whole mess, gave MacDonald a multi-million dollar checking account, and over a period of just three years he spent:
$286,096 In personal expenses for he and his family unrelated to the following expenses below. These included $100,000 in counseling, a pair of motorcycles, tuition, car repairs, etc. $416,139 was spent on travel (including those expenses related to James MacDonald’s “refreshment”), of which $94,046 was added to his W-2s as additional compensation. $170,851 was spent on hunting and fishing trips and related expenses. Expenses within this category include hunt cost, airfare, lodging, gas, food, gratuities, apparel, guns, and taxidermy (and related shipments). $139,502 was spent on meals and entertainment. Entertainment expenses within this category include golf, club dues, boat tours, and event tickets. $94,017 was spent on apparel and eyewear, of which $17,277 was added to James MacDonald’s W-2s as additional compensation $114,159 for “refreshment” expenses for other members of the Senior Executive Leadership Team.
As a result of being post-arbitration, MacDonald sent out a newsletter to his fans, of which sadly some still exist. In the letter, he calls on his former church to:
Abandon the false narrative in financial matters – HBC’s most grievous sin against us.
Hold accountable the particular leaders who led the hostile takeover and what followed.
Be transparent about HBC’s wrongful seizure of millions in Walk in the Word (WITW) assets.
Be transparent about HBC’s destruction of WITW and other efforts to end our ministry permanently.
As one might imagine from swindlers who go gaga for greedy gain, MacDonald is completely unrepentant, writing that the church needs to publicly confess for the falsehoods about him.
In a section where he addresses where and how exactly he failed in all this, assuming HBC is making everything up, MacDonald responds in a way that is reminiscent of a job interview where the employer asks the hopeful candidate what his biggest weaknesses are, and he replies, “I work too hard. I care too much, and I become too invested in my job.”
I struggled increasingly under the weight of it all. I stepped away from the ministry multiple times with Elder support to regain my health and capacity to lead. In the end, I just burnt out, and had to “pull over” for extended time away from ministry. I had carried too much for too long, and I am grieved by the impact that had on several good leaders working most closely with me. Three times in 2019, I confessed my role in those relational failings to the board in writing, and multiple times publicly…
MacDonald worked too hard, carried too much, and as a result had some “relational failings.” That’s all folks. Just a couple of relational failings. Nothing more. The rest is conspiracy. Just a bit of burnout from doing too much.
As far as what’s in the future for MacDonald? Now that he has another cool million, he intends to rebuild Walk in the Word, continue to build his Home Church Network, and preach and teach and be a pastor again, while accruing more financial “Change Partners” to donate to his ministries to help them grow and turn into the multi-million juggernauts of their former glory.
And we think we know who will benefit most from that.
