Tag: religion

Boy Scout whistleblower: Mormon church swayed abuse policy

A Boy Scouts of America whistleblower says administrators blocked proposed child protection measures because they feared objections from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Driving the news: The whistleblower, Michael Johnson, was the BSA’s former director of child protection. He said in the film that he wanted to implement “what I felt were very medium-level policies and content training upgrades for youth protection.”

  • “I kept getting told that the Mormons may not like that, the Mormons don’t like that,” Johnson said.
  • A BSA executive told him: “You need to understand something … The Mormons are sacrosanct,” Johnson said.

The church did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment and did not participate in the film.

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Right to repair’s unlikely new adversary: Scientologists

The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don’t think product repairability should be government-mandated, it has been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple’s place is a new entity aiming to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.

Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the “literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.

The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which “makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works.” The Scientology group’s letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.

Author Services’ letter argues that while that exemption works for the “many consumer devices” that include “unilateral ‘shrink-wrap’ licenses governing the terms of use of the software,” they shouldn’t apply to devices that “can only be purchased and used by someone who possess [sic] particular qualifications or has been specifically trained in the use of the device.” With those products, the license agreement is “negotiated and agreed to in advance” of purchase and may include restrictions that are critical to “safe and proper” device usage.

The Scientology-tied group seeks an amendment to the exemption so that it doesn’t apply to software-powered devices that can only be purchased by someone with particular qualifications or training or that use software “governed by a license agreement negotiated and executed” before purchase.

Before we get into what horse the Church of Scientology could have in the right-to-repair race, let’s consider whether its amendment is extreme.

“It’s a totally unreasonable proposal,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, told Ars Technica. “I can imagine manufacturers using the presence of a ‘quick start’ guide for a product as evidence that their consumers are ‘specially trained in use of the device’ and thus denying broad access to repair.”

She noted that such an amendment would render the proposed exemptions for commercial and industrial equipment from right-to-repair activists “toothless.”

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Denmark set to ban Quran burning, citing increased terror threat

Amid growing pressure and threats of terrorist retaliation, officials in Denmark have caved and called for burning the Quran to be made a crime after such acts sparked protests domestically and around the Muslim world.

Danish citizens may soon no longer be able to desecrate the book, which is seen by many believers as the literal word of god and thus among the holiest objects on earth, nor any other religious objects deemed significant by any faith group.

The proposal, announced Friday, has not yet been presented to the Danish parliament, which did away with its archaic blasphemy laws in 2017. Free speech is enshirined in the constitution, thus it will be difficult to institute restrictions.

According to Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, the new law would be written into existing legislation banning the desecration of other nations’ flags, and would “prohibit the inappropriate treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community.”

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Warnock’s Church Resumes Evictions From Low-Income Apartment Building as It Enriches the Senator

With Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) safe and secure in the Senate for the next six years, the church where he collects a salary as a part-time pastor is back to evicting residents of the low-income apartment building it owns—a subject that became a flashpoint in Warnock’s 2022 reelection campaign.

Since the Democrat won reelection in December, Fulton County court records show, the apartment building owned by Ebenezer Baptist Church has moved to evict six residents. The building, Columbia MLK Tower, has received over $15 million in federal and state funding to shelter the “chronically homeless,” but has nonetheless taken four residents to court this year for falling behind on rent by less than two months. Law enforcement officials forcibly ejected another resident from the pest-infected building in July.

Warnock denied during the 2022 campaign that the church was evicting residents, telling Georgia voters that the Free Beacon reports were “vicious and venomous” attempts to “sully Ebenezer Baptist Church” and the “church of Jesus Christ.”

Ebenezer pays Warnock a six-figure salary for his part-time pastoral services at levels that exceed the outside income allowance for senators. Warnock has leveraged several accounting loopholes to rake in sums far beyond that $30,000 limit. The church paid the senator $120,000 in 2021, for example, $89,000 of which was a tax-free “parsonage allowance” that he used to pay for his $1 million Atlanta home. And though Warnock made $155,000 from his church in 2022, the senator claimed $125,000 of that salary as “deferred compensation” for services he rendered before he was sworn into office in January 2021, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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Bizarre AI app stirs controversy as it lets you text ‘Jesus and Satan’

Artificial intelligence has brought along a wide range of weird and wonderful creations since its sudden growth in popularity, with some proving more useful than others as the technology develops. 

The AI app Text With Jesus was launched in July by Catloaf Sofware, which according to developers is for: “’devoted Christians seeking a deeper connection with the Bible’s most iconic figures.”

Using the use of ChatGPT’s AI technology, users are reportedly able to interact with chatbots that represent biblical characters to provide an instant messaging service that uses bible studies to reference from.

Most notable figures include Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and even more shockingly the devil himself, Satan.

After the AI application was released to the public, the bizarre service has since gone viral.

Thousands of people have downloaded the app to their phones, whereby due to its sensitive religious theme, has also naturally divided opinion.

Most of the reviews for the app are positive, with a 4.2 score out of a possible 5, overall rating according to Apple.

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What Imperial Japan Couldn’t Do in 250 Years American Christians Did in Nine Seconds

Seventy-five years ago today, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians, and wounding uncountable numbers of others.

For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.

At the time, the United States was arguably the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly have failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the peaceful ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).

The baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with a number of near-fatal glitches. Most Americans in 1945 would have done exactly the same if they had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew, and there would have been very little mental anguish later if they had also been treated as heroes.

Nevertheless, the use of that monstrous weapon of mass destruction to destroy a mainly civilian city like Nagasaki was an international war crime and a crime against humanity as defined later by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Of course, there was no way that the crew members could have known that at the time. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in when the bomb actually detonated. Of course, none of them actually saw the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal.

“Orders are orders” and, in wartime, disobedience can be, and has been, legally punishable by summary execution of the soldier who might have had a conscience strong enough to convince him that killing another human, especially an unarmed one, was morally wrong.

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Inside an Abusive Anti-Porn Camp for Teens

When Cameron was growing up in the 2010s, he was preoccupied​ with two things: that he was gay, and that there would be dire consequences if his parents and community found out. He lived in a small town in Utah, where over 90 percent of the residents are Mormon. “They are very strict about gender roles and sexuality,” he says.

But Cameron didn’t want to keep his secret to himself. In 2014, when he was 14, he came out to a close friend via text message. Soon after he sent the message, his parents went through his phone and discovered it. “They immediately confronted me about it,” he says. “I was barely ready to tell one person. I was not ready to have that conversation with my parents.”

That conversation was just the beginning. “There was probably about a year there where it was just absolutely brutal—where every day it was coming up around the dinner table,” says Cameron, identified here by a pseudonym at his request. “I can remember my mom picking me up from school and being like, ‘You realize that you’re taking away everything that I thought I could ever have, right? You realize that because of this, I’m never going to have grandchildren from you.'”

His parents’ disapproval was devastating enough, but Cameron says things got worse when the news spread throughout the community. Anonymous accounts started sending Cameron homophobic messages on Facebook. “All gays of the world should be strung up and drowned in the ocean,” he recalls one of them saying. Even scarier were the random people who showed up at the family’s doorstep to confront his mom.

“It was, honestly, really, really terrifying….Everybody around you hates you and essentially wants you purged from the earth,” Cameron says. Around this time, he attempted suicide.

In spite of the harassment, he managed to go on a few dates with guys when he was 16. Nothing panned out, but his parents found out about it. Around the same time, they found some gay porn on his phone. They started locking him in his room at night, forcing him to pee in Gatorade bottles.

During this time his father told a co-worker who was in his late 20s about Cameron. Soon the man “started reaching out and being very schmoozy,” Cameron said. “I was so alone. Everybody hated me….And here’s this person.” He was giving Cameron the attention he craved. They began having sexual encounters. Cameron says the relationship was consensual, yet “you’re under the age of consent, and there’s no way to justify pedophilia. But he was always just really, really nice.”

Once again, his parents found out. They confiscated his phone, so he could no longer talk with the man or look at porn. They also pressed charges, and the man was sent to prison for a year. Cameron was sent to his own prison of sorts: STAR Guides Wilderness Therapy, which bills itself as “the country’s premier wilderness treatment program for teens with technology, pornography and sexual addictions.”

These camps say they can change teens’ lives by helping them overcome severe mental and behavioral issues. STAR Guides claims the camp “provides a specialized ‘unplugged’ environment to reset and re-balance the physical, mental and spiritual health of youth…under the guidance of highly trained therapists and professionals, we provide a setting where youth can feel safe and supported when working through sensitive pornography or sexual issues along with trauma, free of fear, embarrassment or shame.” And some parents and teens testify that STAR Guides was a positive experience. “You gave me my daughter back, and helped her how she needed,” one parent said in an exit interview. A teen said the program was “extremely helpful and life-changing”; another said, “I found myself.”

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Worker Fired Over Refusal to Receive COVID-19 Vaccine Wins Job Back

The University of Virginia wrongly fired an employee who refused to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new ruling.

The university “acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner” when it fired Kaycee McCoy, a cytotechnologist, in 2021, Virginia District Court Judge Claude Worrell Jr. said in a July 27 ruling.

Ms. McCoy had asked for a religious exemption to the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, with support from her pastor.

But her employer denied the request and terminated Ms. McCoy in November 2021.

Ms. McCoy quickly took her case to the courts, saying that the refusal to grant an exemption violated Virginia’s Constitution, which states in part that all citizens are “entitled to the free exercise of religion” and that no citizen “shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.”

The university defended its decision, arguing that the plaintiff’s “personal opinions” and “personal preferences” did not make her entitled to a religious exemption. They also said they did not have to grant her an exemption even if her objection was based on sincere beliefs.

Judge Worrell disagreed, finding in favor of the plaintiff.

Virginia courts uphold governmental actions unless the actions are “arbitrary and capricious” or those taken “without a determining principle,” according to previous court decisions.

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As witchcraft becomes a multibillion-dollar business, practitioners’ connection to the natural world is changing

Witches, Wiccans and other contemporary Pagans see divinity in trees, streams, plants and animals. Most Pagans view the Earth as the Goddess, with a body that humans must care for, and from which they gain emotional, spiritual and physical sustenance.

Paganism is an umbrella term that includes religions that view their practices as returning to those of pre-Christian societies, in which they believe the Goddess was worshipped along with the gods and the land was seen as sacred. Wicca focuses specifically on the practice of the British Isles.

Witchcraft has also become a multibillion-dollar business. As a sociologist who has been researching this religion for more than 30 years, I have witnessed this growing commercialization: Witch kits are sold by large companies and in stores – something unheard of when I began my research in 1986.

This surge in popularity has changed these communities in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Groups called covens were the norm when I began my research, but as my own research shows, most Pagans now are solitary practitioners. Even while the Goddess continues to be revered, the practitioners’ connection to the natural world, at least for many, is also changing.

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