Tag: religion

Megachurch Leader Sentenced To 16 Years For Child Sexual Abuse

The leader of the La Luz Del Mundo Church was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison for the sexual abuse of teens. Naasón Joaquín García was sentenced in Los Angeles Superior Court Wednesday, after he pleaded guilty to three felonies just days before his long-awaited trial.

Garcia plead guilty to two counts of forcible oral copulation involving minors and one count of a lewd act on a 15-year-old child. He was scheduled to go on trial Monday. He faced 23 felony counts that included allegations of human trafficking to produce child pornography and rape, but he accepted a last minute plea deal from the California Attorney General’s office.

When he took the plea deal, some of his victims who wanted to testify against him became enraged. They were promised that no plea deal would be offered. In return for the guilty plea, the DA dropped the most serious allegations of five victims from 2015 to 2018.

“As for the Jane Doe, at this point I apologize,” said Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen. “My hands are tied. Lawyers do what lawyers do.”

La Luz Del Mundo is the largest evangelical church in Mexico and has branches in more than 50 countries. To his more than five million followers worldwide, Garcia had been considered an “apostle” of Jesus Christ. To his victims, he was Satan incarnated.

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Southern Baptist Religious Leaders Release List of Pastors Accused of Sexual Abuse After A Multi-Million Dollar Investigation

On Thursday, the Southern Baptist Convention released a list of ministers who have been protected for more than a decade after committing sexual abuse against congregants. 

The list, released by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), followed a report that contained more than 700 names, with more than 400 included via direct affiliation with the religious denomination. 

On the list are four individuals who remain in leadership positions within the denomination’s churches. The list was primarily a secret until Guidepost’s report was made public on Sunday. 

“Releasing this list is a symbolic gesture. ‘This is the bare minimum thing we can do,’” said Todd Benkert, an Indiana pastor in the SBC.

Much of the information in the release is redacted at present; the redacted information is expected to be released at a future date. 

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Former pastor in 2 states pleads guilty to child sex charges

A former pastor in Tennessee and Indiana faces up to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to federal child sex abuse charges, prosecutors said.

Joshua Henley, 33, pleaded guilty Monday to producing, possessing and sending sex abuse material involving children and transporting a minor interstate to have sex, the U.S. attorney’s office in Memphis said.

Henley was the pastor at Holladay Church of Christ in Benton County, Tennessee, and coached the Holladay Elementary School girls’ basketball team, prosecutors said. Henley later went to work at a church in Evansville, Indiana, in April 2021, prosecutors said.

Henley drove to Tennessee in June to pick up a girl and brought her back to Indiana, where he had sex with her when she was 15, prosecutors said. Another girl later said Henley had asked her to create and send sexually explicit images, prosecutors said.

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Biden To Remove 5 Extremist Groups From Foreign Terrorist List

Democrat President Joe Biden is reportedly set to remove five extremist groups from the official Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly claimed in a notification to Congress that each of the organizations is now defunct.

“The groups include Basque Fatherland and Liberty, also known as ETA; Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult; Kahane Kach, a radical Orthodox Jewish group, as well as two Islamic groups, the Mujahideen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem, and Gama’a al-Islamiyya,” Fox News reported.

“The Biden administration dragged out briefings about this for months, then went radio silent, then quietly rushed it through hoping no one would notice until it was a done deal,” a senior Republican congressional aide told the network. “Republicans on the Hill believe this was a dress rehearsal for trying to remove terrorism sanctions on the IRGC.”

The move comes as Biden is reportedly considering lifting the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in exchange for a public commitment from Iran that they will play nice in the region.

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Exorcism gone wrong… 3-year-old girl dies in San Jose, CA…

Faith leaders at a tiny church in San Jose where a three-year-old girl perished last fall have confirmed that they performed a ceremony on the child to “liberate her of her evil spirits” but say what happened was “the will of God,” not the consequence of an exorcism.

“If you read the Bible, you’ll see that Jesus casts away demons and made sick people healthy again,” said Rene Huezo, pastor of Iglesia Apostoles y Profetas and grandfather of the victim. “It’s not when I want to do it, it’s when God, in his will, wants to heal the person. The preacher is like an instrument of God; what we do is what God says.”

Arely Naomi Proctor’s death by asphyxiation has been ruled a homicide by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner’s office.

Her mother, Claudia Hernandez, who authorities say withheld food from the girl and squeezed her neck during the exorcism, has been arrested and charged with assault on a child resulting in death.

But neither Huezo nor the victim’s uncle, both of whom allegedly held the girl down as the ceremony continued, have been charged in the incident at the church on the 1000 block of South Second Street in San Jose.

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Mental health and worship apps are found to be some of the most privacy invasive

Apps that deal with some of the most sensitive and personal data, such as that concerning a user’s mental health or religious activities, are said to rank among the worst privacy offenders.

This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, which singled out mental health and prayer apps as being prone to track and collect data revealing a person’s state of mind, feelings, and thoughts, and then “share” that for-profit via targeted advertising.

Mozilla’s team looked into 32 apps from this category, putting a “privacy not included” label on 29, and publishing the findings in a guide of the same name. 25 of these apps didn’t pass the foundations’ minimum security standards around password quality and handling of security updates.

PTSD Coach, developed by the US The Department of Veterans Affairs, has “strong privacy policies and security practices,” while chatbot Wysa “seems to value users’ privacy.” And the Catholic prayer app Hallow was the only one to “respond in a timely manner” to Mozilla’s emails.

Besides these technical issues, the apps singled out in the report are also said to target “vulnerable users with personalized advertisements” and track and share biometric data.

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Tennessee Marriage Bill Called ‘Horrifying’ as Law Could See Children Wed

Critics have slammed a proposed new law in Tennessee that would eliminate age requirements for marriage in the state, claiming the bill would potentially allow children to get married.

Social media users harshly criticized the bill, HB 233, which is being sponsored by Republican state Representative Tom Leatherwood. The bill has passed the Tennessee House’s Children and Family Affairs subcommittee and is due before the House Civil Justice Committee on Wednesday.

Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid tweeted: “Tennessee Republican Tom Leatherwood has passed HB 233 out of committee. Leatherwood acknowledged there’s no minimum age requirement on purpose. This is absolutely horrifying and unacceptable.”

The current minimum age for marrying in Tennessee is 17 and Leatherwood, who has acknowledged that the new bill doesn’t contain an age limit, defended the proposal by making reference to religious beliefs.

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Catholic University Speaker Says White Students Should ‘Crucify Their Whiteness’

The Atkins Center for Ethics at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hosted an event titled “Rejecting White Christianity” on March 3. A guest speaker at the event, Miguel De La Torre, called for White Christians to “crucify” their “whiteness.”

“Eurochristian nationalism has been used to justify white supremacy. Many within communities of color, with colonized minds, seek to assimilate to a Euroamerican version of Christianity which is detrimental to their being,” reads an event description. “This presentation will explore what it means to see through the eyes of the dominant culture, how one rejects the Christianity of the dominant culture, and how one begins to create a different cultural foundation upon which to base one’s faith.”

The discussion was also billed as an “indigenous Latinx” lens through which one can conduct “ethical analysis” of Christianity. During his speech, De La Torre, a professor of “Latinx studies” at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, said white Christians should “crucify” their “whiteness”, according to The College Fix.

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