Thanks for making my day!
The pastor of a church in Kentucky threatened to sue the governor of Kentucky if the governor didn’t allow his church to meet in person. Now at least 17 people, including people in the pastor’s family, now have coronavirus. He says he feels bad but he doesn’t know of anything he could have done differently.
This Central Kentucky church reopened on May 10 and became a COVID-19 hot spot
Wow, there’s some lack of creativity there. Other churches in the area went to online services.
Did he try praying? Maybe he just didn’t pray hard enough.
Maybe try it again, but this time with some self flagellation thrown in. Put some weight behind his submission to the suggestion box in the sky.
People can choose to put their own lives in danger if they choose, but putting other people’s lives in danger should not be glorified.
Look, maybe I didn’t say every tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah.
Well, for himself, he did prove that ‘God is larger than this virus’. ‘God’ apparently hit his smite button. Way to take one for the team.
Is it your understanding that Tim Kaine was glorifying Glenn’s putting other people’s lives in danger?
I don’t know much about Gerald Glenn other than this act and that he was considered a major force in the local Black community. But often there is more to an individual’s life and impacts than one act. We’ve all mourned complicated people who made mistakes and had done bad things. I’ve spoken at a service or two for such people. Paying tribute to the positive impacts they had is not glorifying the wrongs they also did. It’s showing respect to those who loved him.
Would you prefer his head on a pike?
The issue here is that religious group after religious group have inserted themselves into a situation where they have absolutely no knowledge, having literally only charisma.
That charisma has been used by some religious leaders to make assertions they have no right to make, resulting in hundreds is not thousands of deaths.
It’s as if religion sees scientifically acquired knowledge as a threat - battering their heads and those of their congregations against facts.
They are not the only ones, not at all, but one might imagine that those religious leaders would be driven by decency and compassion, and respect the right of their parishioners to life - but again it seems to some of them to be a matter of power, finance, control or simply misinterpretation of the motives of the medical community.
So we have seen this in Iran, we have seen this among the Hasidic community in New York, we have seen it among some proselyting christian groups and in each case their followers have paid the price.
Lack of faith is the reason behind it, yes, surprising as it seems its actually lack of faith in reasoning, logic, data collection and generations of medical experience - its those religious leader who have lacked faith.
So, how many have died as a result of religious intransigence? Many, we will never know but it is a good reason to pull down much of the mythos and assumed knowledge of the religious, so he is an example of stupidity that bears repetition - yes we can place him a position of prominence and point at it.
Maybe then we will start to take global warming a bit more seriously, maybe we can look at those who deny the scientific evidence and question their motives.
At no stage in this pandemic did the leaders of religious have to take the stand they did, and in fact many have not taken such a stand. They could have protected their congregations, they could have engaged the science and embraced it, they could have been progressive - but individuals such Gerald Glen chose otherwise, bad choices? - perhaps - but maybe the motives were less than pure, we expect such narcissim from the right wing of politics, we should expect better from those who portray themselves as our conscience.
No.