Tag: religion

Utah Passed a Religious Freedom Law. Then Cops Went After This Psychedelic Church.

When Bridger Lee Jensen opened a spiritual center in Provo, Utah, he contacted city officials to let them know the religious group he had founded, Singularism, would be conducting ceremonies involving a tea made from psilocybin mushrooms. “Singularism is optimistic that through partnership and dialogue, it can foster an environment that respects diversity and upholds individual rights,” Jensen wrote in a September 2023 letter to the Provo City Council and Mayor Michelle Kaufusi. Seeking to “establish an open line of communication” with local officials, Jensen invited them to ask questions and visit the center.

Jensen’s optimism proved to be unfounded. The city did not respond to his overture until more than a year later, when Provo police searched the Singularism center and seized the group’s sacrament: about 450 grams of psilocybin mushrooms from Oregon. The seizure resulted from an investigation in which an undercover officer posed as a would-be Singularism facilitator.

That raid happened in November 2024, less than eight months after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, had signed the state’s version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The state law likely protects Singularism’s psychedelic rituals, a federal judge ruled in February. U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish granted Jensen’s request for a preliminary injunction against city and county officials, ordering them to return the mushrooms and refrain from further interference with the group’s “sincere religious use of psilocybin” while the case is pending.

“In this litigation, the religious-exercise claims of a minority entheogenic religion put the State of Utah’s commitment to religious freedom to the test,” Parrish wrote in Jensen v. Utah County. If such a commitment “is to mean anything,” she said, it must protect “unpopular or unfamiliar religious groups” as well as “popular or familiar ones.”

Parrish noted that “the very founding of the State of Utah reflects the lived experience of that truth by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” In light of that history, she suggested, “it is ironic” that “not long after enacting its RFRA to provide special protections for religious exercise, the State of Utah should so vigorously deploy its resources, particularly the coercive power of its criminal-justice system, to harass and shut down a new religion it finds offensive practically without any evidence that [the] religion’s practices have imposed any harms on its own practitioners or anyone else.”

Under the federal RFRA, which Congress enacted in 1993, the government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it shows that the burden is “the least restrictive means” of furthering a “compelling governmental interest.” In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that RFRA protected the American branch of a syncretic Brazil-based church from federal interference with its rituals, even though the group’s sacramental tea, ayahuasca, contained the otherwise illegal psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.

The Supreme Court has said RFRA cannot be applied to state and local governments. Laws like Utah’s, which 29 states have enacted, aim to fill that gap.

The defendants in Jensen’s case—Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray, the county, and the city of Provo—argued that Utah’s RFRA did not apply to Singularism, which they portrayed as a drug trafficking operation disguised as a religion. Parrish rejected that characterization. “Based on all the evidence in the record,” she wrote, “the court has no difficulty concluding that Plaintiffs are sincere in their beliefs and that those beliefs are religious in nature.”

Parrish also concluded that “preventing Singularism’s adherents from pursuing their spiritual voyages” imposed a substantial burden on their religious freedom that was not “the least restrictive means” of addressing the government’s public safety concerns. She noted that Utah allows religious use of peyote and has authorized “behavioral health treatment programs” in which patients can receive psilocybin.

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Authorities Identify Michigan Church Shooting Suspect

Police have identified the gunman who opened fire outside CrossPointe Community Church on Sunday, during a morning service attended by about 150 people.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, a 31-year-old man on Sunday opened fire outside the CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan.

Churchgoers first noticed the gunman driving erratically in the parking lot, and as he exited the vehicle, several parishioners noticed he was wearing a tactical vest and wielding a rifle.

Police Chief Ryan Strong, in a press conference, revealed, “A parishioner struck the gunman with his vehicle as the gunman shot the vehicle repeatedly.

Strong later noted, “At least two staff members shot the gunman, causing the fatal wounds.”

Now, authorities have revealed the 31-year-old gunman has been identified as Brian Anthony Browning, from Romulus, Michigan.

Per NBC News:

A man was shot dead by a security guard on Sunday after he opened fire outside a Michigan church during a service has been identified as a 31-year-old who attended the church with his mother.

Brian Anthony Browning, from Romulus, Michigan, was armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle with more than a dozen magazines of ammunition, a semi-automatic handgun with an extended magazine, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, Wayne Police Department said in a statement.

“The suspect’s mother is a member of the church, in which he has attended church services two or three times over the course of the last year,” the statement said.

Police said their ongoing investigation suggests “he may have been suffering a mental health crisis” and had no prior contact with law enforcement officers.

There have been no details on the possible motive for the shooting, but police pointed out there was no evidence to suggest it was linked to ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as has been the case in recent attacks across the U.S. The suspect had no previous contacts with the Wayne Police Department or a criminal history.

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Whistleblower exposes forced sexual rituals at Catholic university

Naomi Epps Best is a Christian graduate student at Santa Clara University studying family and marriage counseling — and what she was forced to partake in was so inappropriate that she wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed sounding the alarm about her experience.

“One of the final classes I have to do to graduate is called human sexuality, and that is a requirement for marriage and family therapists in California,” Best tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“But when I first enrolled in this course in summer of 2024, I dug into the syllabus, and I was shocked by the sexual ethic that was being not just presented but promoted. I immediately discovered sadomasochistic erotica,” she explains.

Sadomasochism is when people derive pleasure from inflicting pain on another person, or when people derive pleasure from being hurt.

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Florida Police: Christian School Teacher May Have Used Student Images to Create AI Child Porn

A sixth-grade teacher in Central Florida was arrested this week on a host of charges for possessing child pornography, apparently created with online AI technology and possibly using student photos from his Christian school.

State Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office charged David McKeown of Holly Hill with 19 enhanced felony counts of possession of child sexual abuse material and six counts of possession of animal pornography, according to a statement released by the office.

McKeown was arrested Friday by the Holly Hill Police Department at his home in Volusia County. He was a sixth-grade teacher at United Brethren in Christ (UBIC) Academy, a school affiliated with the UBIC church.

Holly Hill Police Department’s investigation alleges that McKeown shared and downloaded pornographic images depicting child porn via Discord, an online chat service, while at school and connected to the school’s Wi-Fi network.

Some 30 images were allegedly shared, including six files depicting McKeown sexually abusing animals, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLA) reported.

Uthmeier said in the statement:

As a teacher, parents trusted Mr. McKeown to impart knowledge to their children. Instead, he spent parts of the school day sending and receiving child sex abuse material and providing other pedophiles with UBIC Academy students’ personal information. What he did is beyond betrayal — it’s devastating and sick.

The investigation was launched early this month after receiving a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which tracks the internet for exploitative content involving minors, Orlando’s Fox 35 reported.

The news outlet also reported authorities believe McKeown used AI technology to create the pornographic images and may have used photos of real children, perhaps his own students. The investigation is continuing.

Detectives seized a number of devices from the teacher’s home in Holly Hill and from the school. He was booked into the Volusia County jail and a judge denied him the possibility of bond.

If convicted, he faces up to 315 years in prison, officials said.

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Cops remove 88 children from a Bible study camp in Iowa as part of a human trafficking investigation: officials

Deputies raided an Iowa church and removed 88 children participating in a Bible study camp as part of a sweeping human trafficking investigation, police said Monday.

The youngsters are now in protective custody of local agencies after they were taken from the Shekinah Glory Camp run by Kingdom Ministry of Rehab and Recreation, according to police and local reports.  

Deputies executing search warrants removed the children over the weekend and took them to nearby Wapello Methodist Church to meet with child protection workers, deputies told KWQC.

The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services placed the children in temporary foster care until they could be reunited with their parents or guardians, deputies added.

The Kingdom Ministry of Rehabilitation and Recreation, founded in 2018, was hosting the summer camp from June 8 to 29.

The family behind the ministry that runs the camp in Columbus Junction denied the allegations, according to WQAD8.

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Al-Qaeda Leader Makes Chilling Demand of Muslims in America

What is happening in Los Angeles these days is insurrection enough, but Sa’ad al-Awlaki, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), wants much more. If he gets his way, America will be awash in blood, with the principal leaders of the Trump administration, above all the president himself, all assassinated. Al-Awlaki sees such assassinations as an Islamic religious duty, and made his case to Muslims in America, some of whom are already out on the streets in Los Angeles, on the basis of their Islamic responsibilities. Whether any will take heed remains to be seen.

In a video published on Sunday, al-Awlaki asserted that assassinating non-Muslim leaders was a form of Islamic jihad: “Anyone who can revive the tradition of assassinations and is near the leaders of apostasy – those who support the war in Gaza with money, aid, and logistics, the Jewish Arabs, like the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and all the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula – should not hesitate even for a moment. By Allah, [assassinations] are the greatest form of jihad today.” The “Jewish Arabs” are the Muslim leaders whose countries have accords with Israel, or who have, like Saudi Arabia, been working toward a rapprochement with the Jewish state largely behind the scenes.

As for assassinating leaders, that is indeed an Islamic tradition. As “The History of Jihad” explains in detail, in the twelfth century, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, the Nizari Ismailis, came to be known as the Assassins. With their planned murders of many of their individual opponents, the Assassins gave the English language its word for one who commits planned, premeditated murder, and foreshadowed the individual jihad terror attacks of the twenty-first century. 

The word “assassin” is derived from “hashashin,” or hashish smokers, a name given to the group by its foes and based on stories about their novel method of recruiting new members. Recruits would be given hashish and taken into a garden where beautiful women awaited them. Later, when they came to their senses, they were told that they had been in paradise and that they could return there by killing Allah’s enemies and being slain in the process, thereby taking hold of Allah’s promise of paradise to those who “kill and are killed” (Qur’an 9:111). 

Today, al-Awlaki has some very specific targets in mind. He called upon observant Muslims in countries that aren’t attacking Israel, and who “fear Allah’s punishment for abandoning their brothers in Palestine,” to take matters into their own hands and “strike the Jews, the American military bases in the region, and the American aircraft carriers that are looming in the sea here.”

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Nearly 800 infant remains found in septic tank at nun-run Irish unwed mother and baby home

Crews in Ireland began work this week to excavate the site of a former church-run home for unmarried women and their babies to identify the remains of around 800 infants and young children who died there.

Many of the remains were found in a septic tank, according to authorities. 

The backstory:

The long-awaited excavation at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway in western Ireland, is part of a reckoning in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country with a history of abuses in church-run institutions.

The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.

In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.

Finding a mass grave

Dig deeper:

Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewage structure on the grounds of the home. DNA analysis found that the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years.

A major inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes found that in total, about 9,000 children died in 18 different mother-and-baby homes, with major causes including respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, otherwise known as the stomach flu.

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Trump Shares Private Text From Mike Huckabee That Compared Iran Situation To Truman in 1945

President Trump on Tuesday shared a private text message from US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee that compared the president’s decision related to Iran with President Truman’s situation in 1945, the year he dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.

Huckabee, a Christian Zionist who believes God gave historic Palestine to the modern state of Israel — a view that’s rejected by the majority of Christian denominations — told the president that he believes God “spared” him for this moment.

“God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice,” Huckabee wrote.

“I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you,” the US ambassador added.

Huckabee continued, “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!”

Since being appointed ambassador, Huckabee has approached the issue of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory through the lens of his radical religious views. He has said he believes the US is no longer pursuing a two-state solution and suggested a Palestinian state could be carved out of a “Muslim” country.

“Does it have to be in Judea and Samaria?” Huckabee said in an interview with Bloomberg last week, using the Biblical name for the West Bank.

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Over a Hundred More Christians Massacred by Islamists in Nigeria in Ongoing Genocide Campaign — Where is the Media Coverage?

Fulani Islamic militants have unleashed another round of unspeakable violence on the village of Yelewata in Nigeria’s Benue State.

Over the weekend, attackers stormed homes, locked families inside, and set them ablaze — killing over 100 civilians, including women and children.

The attack, which began late Friday and stretched into the early hours of Saturday, left dozens missing and hundreds injured. With no access to medical aid, survivors watched their communities reduced to ash.

Benue is located in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt,” an important where the Muslim North meets the Christian South.

Foreign-funded jihadist groups and radicalized Fulani herdsmen are pushing southward in deadly waves, slaughtering Christian farming communities under the banner of conquest.

The Yelewata massacre is not an isolated event, but rather a systematic campaign of genocide and extermination.

Just days prior, in coordinated assaults across Benue and Plateau States, Fulani jihadists murdered over 130 Christians in cold blood.

Between May 24th and June 2nd, villages like Gwer West, Apa, and Munga Dasso were turned into charnel houses.

Victims were butchered, burned, or executed as militants moved with total impunity.

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From Torah to trauma: A Satanic child abuse scandal blows up in Israel

There are crimes so profound that words fail to capture them. Last week, several survivors testified to the Israeli Knesset about just such a horror.

The story broke with an investigative report published by Israel Hayom, which unearthed a long-standing pattern of ritual sexual abuse, psychological manipulation, and spiritual desecration occurring not on the margins of society but from within its most sacred institutions. Survivors speak of torment that begins in early childhood and lasts decades, often committed under the guise of religious observance. It is not just a crime of the flesh. It is a theft of the soul.

Israeli children, some as young as infants, were subjected to methodical abuse masked in religious ritual. Survivors describe ceremonies invoking biblically-vilified deities, conducted by members of observant Jewish communities. As a survivor named Noga (all of the victims’ names are changed in the report) recalled: “The gods I remember are Baal Peor and Ashtoreth… our lord Peor and our lady Ashtoreth.” (Note: All these deities are categorically condemned in the Bible).

The culprits are not fringe radicals. These are individuals who keep kosher, celebrate the Sabbath, and adhere to the minutiae of Jewish law even as they engage in acts so depraved that they defy comprehension. Here is snippet from a survivor’s testimonies:

“I remember a pentagram on the floor, usually in red. When the ceremony was in the forest, the pentagram was marked with a hoe and surrounded by lit candles in a circle. The rabbi would bless…they would repetitively read Psalms, like ‘A Psalm of David, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ They told me ‘you are special, you are chosen’ and they would insert… I remember a palm branch, Hanukkah candles, a shofar.”

Some of these perpetrators are qualified to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah — a high privilege among observant Jews. Family members, most of whom may have once been victims themselves, are often the ones who hand over their little ones to these monsters.

Several rabbis’ names appeared repeatedly in survivor testimonies. Multiple complaints filed at different police stations across Israel were quickly nipped in the bud. Prosecutions leading to imprisonments are rare. Much like anywhere else on this planet. Have any elite members of the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile network – itself rumored to be a Mossad operation – been charged in any court of law?  Have the victims been asked to identify the perpetrators of these wicked deeds during the trial of Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell?

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