Tag: religion

Georgia pastor, wife charged with false imprisonment after people found in locked basement

A Georgia pastor and his wife were arrested on charges of false imprisonment after officials found up to eight people locked in their basement, police said.

Curtis Keith Bankston and Sophia Simm-Bankston were running the unlicensed “group home” out of their rented Griffin house “under the guise of a church known as One Step of Faith 2nd Chance,” the Griffin Police Department said in a statement.

Griffin Fire last week responded to a call about someone having a seizure at the home and noticed a deadbolt on the basement door, according to police. Crews had to climb through a window to reach the patient.

Investigators determined the people in the basement, all with mental or physical disabilities, or both, were “essentially imprisoned against their will, which created an extreme hazard as the individuals could not exit the residence if there were an emergency,” police said.

The Bankstons controlled the finances, medications and public benefits of the people they were keeping in the basement and had sometimes denied them their medications and medical care, according to police.

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Animal Sacrifice Sees Drunk Priest Allegedly Behead Man Instead of Goat

A drunk priest in India allegedly killed a man during an animal sacrifice for Sankranthi celebrations on Sunday (January 16.)

Local news outlets reported that the incident happened by mistake. The victim, a 35-year-old man named Suresh, was holding the goat meant for sacrifice in Valasapalli village, in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh.

The accused, named Chalapathi, was supposed to carry out the animal sacrifice and cut off the goat’s head.

However, the priest ended up using the knife to cut the throat of Suresh instead. Several local reports said the victim was beheaded.

The United News of India (UNI) news agency reported that Suresh left behind his wife and two children.

According to UNI, the sacrifice happened as part of the animal festival Kanuma, also known as Pasuvula Panduga, which happens on the third day of the Sankranthi in Andhra Pradesh.

It was organized at the local Yellamma temple, dedicated to the patron goddess of Andhra Pradesh.

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NASA Enlists Priests To Assess How The World Would React To Alien Life

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is recruiting priests and theologians to assess how the world’s major religions would react to the news of discovering extraterrestrial life and advise the agency on how to quell civil unrest upon the revelation.

The agency has enlisted 24 religious experts to develop protocols for the discovery of alien life in its Center for Theological Inquiry program at Princeton University in New Jersey.

NASA provided CTI with a $1.1 million grant to create the program devoted to researching “the societal implications of astrobiology” in 2015.

According to its website, CTI “builds bridges of understanding by convening theologians, scientists, scholars and policymakers to think together — and inform public thinking — on global concerns.

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Is a new kind of religion forming on the internet?

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”

Her beliefs are reminiscent of many others on the internet, people who speak of “bad vibes,” demonic spirits, or a cosmic calamity looming just over the horizon, one that the government may be trying to keep secret. Juarez tells me she was raised Christian, although at age 19 she began to have a more personal relationship with God outside of organized religion.

Today, she identifies more as spiritual, as an increasing number of young people do, many of them working out their ideas in real time online. They may talk about manifesting their dreams and faceless sex traffickers waiting to install tracking devices on women’s parked cars. Some might act almost as prophets or shamans, spreading the good word and guiding prospective believers, while others might just lurk in the comments. They might believe all or only some of these ideas — part of the draw of internet spirituality is that it’s perfectly pick-and-choosable — but more than anything, they believe in the importance of keeping an open mind to whatever else might be out there.

I asked Joseph Russo, a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University, if this loosely related web of beliefs could ever come together to form into its own kind of religion. “I think it already has,” he says.

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So-Called ‘Appointed Son Of God’, Leader Of Philippines-Based Megachurch Kingdom Of Jesus Christ, Indicted For Sex Trafficking

A superseding indictment unsealed today charges the founder of a Philippines-based church and two top administrators of orchestrating a sex trafficking operation that coerced girls and young women to have sex with the church’s leader under threats of “eternal damnation.”

The superseding indictment expands on allegations made early last year against three Los Angeles-based administrators of the church, which is known as the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, The Name Above Every Name (KOJC). The nine defendants named in the 42-count superseding indictment are charged with participating in a labor trafficking scheme that brought church members to the United States, via fraudulently obtained visas, and forced the members to solicit donations for a bogus charity – the Glendale-based Children’s Joy Foundation (CJF) – donations that actually were used to finance church operations and the lavish lifestyles of its leaders. Members who proved successful at soliciting for the KOJC allegedly were forced to enter into sham marriages or obtain fraudulent student visas to continue soliciting in the United States year-round.

The superseding indictment, which was returned by a federal grand jury on November 10, expands the scope of the 2020 indictment by adding six new defendants, including the KOJC’s leader, Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, who was referred to as “The Appointed Son of God.”

Three of the new defendants were arrested today by federal authorities. The remaining three, including Quiboloy, are believed to be in the Philippines.

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The Church of State: Taxonomy of a New Religion

Darkness descends over civilization and freedom. It flows not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear and anxiety reemerge transformed. 

To live right now, then, is to live in paradox. Despite conditions of relative peace and abundance, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, more turn now to political authority. Merchants of fear magnify the significance of certain human problems, which obscures complicated truths and feeds the dogmas of this new faith. Adherents believe they are on the side of the angels, but their faith threatens to bring about a new Dark Age. Why? Because more and more people in the grip of this religion are willing to use illiberal means.

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