Tag: religion

Detroit Police Raid Psilocybin Church After Newspaper Feature

A church that purportedly uses entheogenic plants like psilocybin mushrooms as a holy sacrament was raided by officers with the Detroit Police Department Friday just two days after having a newspaper article about them published in the Detroit Metro Times.

According to a follow up article by the Detroit Metro Times, officers confiscated about $700,000 Friday in psilocybin mushroom products as well as ayahuasca and iboga from Soul Tribes International Ministries at 15000 Southfield Freeway in Detroit. Officers with the Detroit Police Department confirmed the raid took place to the Metro Times but would not comment on what was taken or any other details about what happened there.

Owner of Soul Tribes, ‘Shaman Shu’ (formerly named Robert Shumake) said 15 officers from DPD showed up armed and masked, seized the mushroom products and ordered a closure of the church. Shu told the outlet he believes the actions taken by police were in violation of Proposal E, a 2021 city initiative that decriminalized the use of psychedelic plants and fungi like psilocybin.

“They stole ancient sacrament. It was prayed over and meditated over. It’s a healing sacrament… They blocked my property down without due process. You can’t do that,” Shu said to the Metro Times. “They think we’re not a church. But that’s why the federal government was created, to separate church and state so that cities do not opine on what churches are [and] what ministries are. We’re a ministry and a religious organization.”

The original article said Soul Tribes was operating a “sacrament center” within the church where they sold dried psilocybin fruits, capsules and gummies to church members based on language in Proposal E that included using psilocybin therapeutically under the supervision of religious leaders, though they remain illegal under Michigan state law.

Regardless, Proposal E did not allow for the sale of entheogenic plants and fungi, which is likely where Soul Tribes ran into trouble with the police. The Metro Times asked for comment from the Mayor of Detroit’s office regarding the raid and whether or not DPD’s actions were sanctioned by the City, to which they received the following comment from Doug Baker, the city’s assistant corporation counsel:

“The Detroit Police Department worked in close coordination with the city’s law department and building safety, engineering and environmental department in preparing this enforcement action,” Baker said. “It is the law department’s position that this local ordinance, despite its intent, does not override state law, which considers psilocybin to be a controlled substance. Most importantly, the city ordinance itself does not allow for the sale or distribution of psilocybin.”

DPD Sgt. for media relations, Jordan Hall, told the outlet, “My understanding was that [the raid] was due to a lack of licensing and the amount of substances that were distributed.”

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Faith board member got $4.7M in TDOT work for firm formed days before Lee inauguration

A board member of Gov. Bill Lee’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who filed to create a business three days before the governor’s 2019 inauguration, has landed $4.7 million in state contracts with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, contract records show. 

Aubrey Elizabeth “Libby” Phillips is the owner and founder of right-of-way mowing contractor, Big Al Mowing. Phillips holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Furman University, and prior to 2019 had no apparent experience in the mowing industry. 

Lee appointed Phillips — whose family contributed significantly to his 2018 gubernatorial bid — to the board of directors of his newly-formed Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2020. All six members of the volunteer board of directors for the office contributed to Lee’s 2018 campaign.

Lawmakers approved a $1.2 million budget for the faith-based office this year, the first direct allocation of tax dollars the office has received since its creation in 2019. The board is made up of Lee’s political allies and has final authority to approve how that funding is spent.

Phillips and her family members donated a total of $8,250 to Lee’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Her grandfather, insurance executive Al Phillips, and his wife, Jere, each maxed out personal donations toward Lee’s initial gubernatorial campaign, contributing a total of $8,000, while Phillips contributed $250.

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Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence Member Arrested For Masturbating In Public

An active member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of predominantly gay men who openly mock Catholics, was arrested in California last month for indecent exposure after witnesses say he masturbated in public for an hour, according to a sheriff’s office report obtained by The Daily Wire. 

The man, 53-year-old Clinton Monroe Ellis-Gilmore, was arrested by police at a beachside park after they received a report of a male “exposing himself in the driver’s seat of a parked vehicle,” the Humboldt County Sheriff’s department said. 

“According to numerous witnesses, Ellis-Gilmore had been at that location for approximately one hour, sitting in his truck with the door open, masturbating,” according to a sheriff’s report on the incident, which took place on August 12 at around 6:41 p.m. “The conduct does not appear to have been directed at anyone in particular.” 

The arrest took place at Table Bluff County Park in Loleta, California, with over an hour of daylight still left. Google lists the park as “good for kids” and home to “kid-friendly hikes.”

A mugshot obtained by The Daily Wire from Ellis-Gilmore’s booking indicates that he was at least shirtless at the time of the arrest. The Eureka Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence did not respond to a request for comment on Ellis-Gilmore.

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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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