"Human beings, be they idealists or the psychologically vulnerable, have displayed an inexhaustible capacity for credulity when it comes to charlatans posing as political or religious messiahs."

 

 I'd be all "Jesus this" or "The Buddha said that":

It'd be brutal,...

 

The standard for who can say stupid shit is pretty low out there.

“We have no direct information that religious beliefs factored into this, but there was a belief system and homeopathic medicine did factor in.”

Standards, for who, and why you can do stupid shit - they're low, too.

And for some reason, I really, really, REALLY wanted to say that, bad,...

 

"Though you haven't heard of it, there are some fundamentalist churches that encourage dating and marrying nonbelievers and trying to convert them."

"It's called 'missionary dating' and it's a real thing."

Opening a religion post with "Though you haven't heard of it,...." cracks me up. It's now the story of my life and - while Emily Yoffe may not have heard of it - feminist NewAge is definitely THE "fundamentalist church" where "fishing" has always been real, too, so ♪shut-up♬.

"The assumptions of homeopathy,…are in overt contradiction to those of acupuncture which, in turn, are out of sync with those of reflexology, aromatherapy and Reiki.

Instead, each branch of alternative medicine has its own axioms that are largely detached from reality or, indeed, from the axioms of other branches of alternative medicine."

As far as I know, whites will only really stand up to Oprah on two topics - cattle futures and race - when they curiously, but proudly, love to point out how rich she's gotten with their full support:

You know, selling dangerous, bogus, NewAge occult "remedies" and the gurus and beliefs that go with 'em,...

 

Remember:

The colors spread like blood because it's a map of mass murder,...

Let's see, we hit the main cult divides this morning, didn't we? I did black/white skin. And NewAge vs. atheist thinking. But something important's left out. Oh yeah - their old buddy, religion:

"The Muslims, who are a part of an Islamic group called Seleka, bound five people and threw them into a crocodile and hippo infested river."

As you can see, nothing can happen without religion,...

 

I don't know if this guy's for real or not:

“I have Jesus on my side.”

But after slavery, that's what I'm afraid of,...

 

Knowing Adolf Hitler was a NewAge, vegetarian, occult-worshipping type, I can't grasp how - after years of kindergarten, elementary, jr. and senior high, and maybe even a college education - The Hitler Youth still grow into adulthood, hearing their master's call:

"Toxins are like cholesterol clogging an artery, except they block the path to woo-woo transcendence instead of the left atrium. Or, as Vanessa Grigoriadis puts it in New York magazine, “Food is the focus of an enormous amount of modern moralism ... One wants to be skinny because one wants to be healthy; one wants to be healthy because one wants to be good.” As religion declines among elite urbanites, a new scripture—“sprouting and enzymes and whatnot”—is swirling into the void.

The problem with this way of thinking is that food and weight are not matters of morality. Thin is not “good,” carbs are not “bad,” and in a world of actual pressing political and social ills, your dinner plate should not be the ground zero of your ethical renewal. Don’t call me evil—or “toxic”—because I’ve never quested after the liquid sublime. (Also, your breath smells like dandelion root.)

But the cleanse mentality is more than just judgmental and irritating: It’s dangerous. Making each meal a drama of discipline, deprivation, and control? Floating along on a superior high that isn’t really about how much weight you’re losing (but actually kind of is about how much weight you’re losing)? Seeking to express your achievements, be they moral, social, or financial, in the most visible terms you can manage? Does anyone else think this sounds a lot like an eating disorder?

Yep,...

 

The things believers find confusing are, themselves, confusing:

  “Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of FICTION. Hmmmm." 

 Meanwhile, Whole Foods has homeopathy for sale under the guise of MEDICINE. Hmmmm,...

 

This is exactly as I pictured it - using my psychic powers for "entertainment purposes only" of course:

"Schools Will Take ‘In God We Trust’ Posters,...to Teach History"

Now watch:

Next, we bomb Japan,...

 

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."

Like surveying the (equally silly) "spiritual but not religious" nation he founded, I never know whether to laugh or cry after reading Thomas Jefferson, seeing how he grasped another man's freedom so firmly.

"We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Is it any wonder "I don't care" is construed as a winning argument, today, in the country he birthed?

The country whose citizenry still can't accept "I didn't do anything" as enough to muster a defense, against even internal tyranny, and - still - willingly forces it's citizens to die in it's streets as a result of it?

 What to do? What to do?

Questions: 

 What or who made the wolf "the wolf" back then? 

 What or who makes the wolf "the wolf" now?

Who was "the wolf" really? 

And who was, always, really "the wolf"?

And what is another's freedom, really - to someone lying to himself - but an instrument, invitation (and occasional obstacle) to cultism?

 

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

Yeah, it's hilarious how many, even today, somehow miss that,...

 

“It’s a free country. If these people need to practice their holy rites of atheism, they can do so, as long as they are in clearly-marked encampments far away from the rest of us.

While they’re in their Heathen Zones, they’re free to dance naked around the fire, brand the mark of the Devil on their flesh or whatever else they want to do. Of course, if they step one foot outside the electrified fence we shoot them between the eyes. Two or three times, just to be sure.”

"While you may know that Mormons believe in wearing blessed undergarments and God living on the Planet Kolob– you may not know that some of them, at least, believe that Bigfoot is actually Cain and that Quetzalcoatl was Jesus. To be sure, this is definitely folklore and not official church doctrine, but it’s still damn interesting."

"They arranged to meet up with her at a Walmart in north Stockton on Saturday under the pretense of making the marriage work, according to Lt. Mike Jones, of the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department.

She willingly got in the car."

UPDATE:

“She said she was able to text her boyfriend,,…”

"Now, in his explosive autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published today, he has revealed that he spent the weeks leading up to that sentencing, traveling round the country ‘romancing’ his various girlfriends. 

And where legal measures had let him down he had turned to ‘divine intervention,’ to bring him a light sentence. He visited a, ‘hoodoo woman’ who said she would cast a spell to keep him out of jail if he put five hundred dollar bills in a jar, urinated in it and kept it under his bed for three days. 

He sought out a voodoo priest who turned out to be a fraud, ‘I knew that guy had nothing,’ he recalls.

And he followed the instructions of a Santeria priest – going to the courthouse one night with a pigeon and an egg which he dropped on the ground as the bird was release and he yelled. ‘We’re free!’

He almost believed it would work. Because he felt invincible. ‘In my mind,’ he says, ‘I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.’

He was sentenced to six years and served three."