On Bringing Back Stoning

“A group of religious activists who want to inject their brand of Christianity into government are planning a rally at the Idaho State Capitol on Sunday. Sean Feucht and his group Hold the Line, along with Turning Point USA Faith, are holding rallies at the state Capitol buildings in all 50 states. This week, they’re descending on the buildings in Boise, Olympia, Washington, and Salem, Oregon, as part of their so-called Kingdom to the Capitol Tour.

“One of the reasons why satanists are infuriated is that we’re bringing worship to the state capitols,” Feucht is quoted as saying in The Washington Times. “We’ve experienced some resistance before, but it’s on a whole different scale now. We’re bringing worship to places where abortion decrees are made and where perversion laws (proposed and passed) enable them to get to our kids.”

The above is a quote from the Idaho Times in Boise.

Most of you who have read me for a time figured out long ago that Toritto is an atheist.  I don’t go to church.  Don’t even think about it.  My parents didn’t go.  My children don’t go.  No one I know is religious.  We were not indoctrinated as children with what I believe is myth as so many of today’s religious were.  I view it as akin to believing in Santa and never learning the truth.

I’m not a believer in any “gods.”  Not Zeus, Apollo, Amun or any of the current deities.  I do not believe we were “created in the image of God” along with the rest of the universe notwithstanding that Mormons believe the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.  We are animals (as opposed to being plants) sharing most of our DNA with our dog or cat.

I do not believe anyone “made” the universe unless we are living in some kid’s computer matrix in another dimension.  Not likely.

I do not believe the world is only five thousand years old or that dinosaur bones were somehow “planted” where they were found.  I do not believe that any religion is literally “true” notwithstanding that each of the major religions claims to be.  I do not believe in a “god” that needs to be obeyed, worshiped and adored – kind of like an emperor of ancient times, which was when all the holy books were written.

In Europe, 25% of Czechs are openly atheist. Meanwhile religion has had a string of victories lately at the Supreme Court – you know – you don’t have to do it if it is against “sincerely held” religious belief.  There are so many beliefs lately!

Now this is nothing new.  All my life there have been 20 somethings singing to Jesus, arms reaching to heaven with the look of the rapture on their faces.  It doesn’t bother me at all.  I just shake my head and go about my life.  It only becomes troublesome when these folks try to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

But now we are seeing something new.

Luke Saint, (I wonder if that’s his real name) the author of the Sound Doctrine of Theocracy was a recent guest on the podcast of the Lancaster Patriot, a far-right publication based in Lancaster Pennsylvania, an hour-and-a-half drive west of Philadelphia.

In his dystopian vision of a Christian nationalist America, the laws of the Old Testament have been substituted for the constitution and the community is responsible for executions, including for people who cheat on their spouses.

Saint advocates stoning adulterers, the public act of hurling rocks at a condemned person until they are bludgeoned to death. For Saint, a key part of this revived biblical justice, is recognizing which trespasses truly merit this death penalty. “First off,” he says, “we need to realize that whatever sin requires stoning is more barbaric than the act of stoning itself. Christians have lost that idea,” he argues. “We’re like, ‘Oh, stoning is worse than adultery.’ No, no, no! Adultery is worse than stoning.”

Ehh, right.

Stoning is not “an anarchy” or “mob violence” because civil “magistrates” would be involved in the process. And then the trial participants would have to carry out the judgment. “Those same people have to throw the stone. It makes it difficult,” Saint says, calling stoning a “high maintenance event.”

I guess he never read “Let he who is without sin….”  Oh sorry.  That’s the New Testament.

“The Bible not only offers a better path to a just society than our current American system does, but it offers the only path to a just society.”  As for making the non-crime of adultery a crime punishable by death, he wrote: “there are other things that the Bible classifies as crimes that society would recognize if transformed by the gospel, for the good of neighbor and the glory of God. Adultery,” he insisted, “is one of those crimes.”

I figure three quarters of the men and women in his “congregation” would need to be stoned to death.

Meanwhile, Brother Duncan Urbanek of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas said that if the U.S. started executing gay people in public, then other countries would have a better opinion of the U.S. and see the country as a “wise nation.”

“Hey, Leviticus 20:13: ‘If a man also lies with mankind as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall surely be put to death, their blood shall be upon them,” he said in a recent sermon.

“You know what ‘Their blood should be upon them’ means? They’re dead! They’ve got their blood all upon them because you just rocked them to sleep,” he said, pantomiming throwing a stone to drive the point home. “Cuz they just threw a bunch of stones at them till they died and they’re just bleeding all over them, their blood shall be upon them.”

Does Toritto hear   “Hallelujah Amen?”

“They should be arrested. The police should arrest them, go to court, provide the evidence and then perform a public execution. And then all the nations would look at this nation and there’s no homos? They’d be like, ‘Wow, that is a wise nation!’” he continued.

“I mean, the world should just be looking at Uganda right now and be, like, ‘Man, Uganda? Y’all know what’s going on!’” he said, smiling, referring to Uganda’s recently passed bill that bans people from even identifying as gay and allows the death penalty for homosexual acts.

Urbanek is far from the only violently anti-gay person at Stedfast Baptist Church, which is part of the extreme New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (New IFB) movement. Last year, Jonathan Shelley, also of Stedfast, said that six million Jewish people weren’t killed in the Holocaust, that he’d consider himself “lucky” if they were, and that he wants mass shooters to kill gay people in bars.

“These Jews that are out there, they want to destroy everything that is holy, everything that is righteous,” Shelley said. “In our culture, it is not acceptable to say anything negative about them.”

Would our rotted Supreme Court consider these “firmly held religious beliefs?”

He then mocked people who oppose antisemitism: “The Hol- Haven’t you heard about the Holocaust, Pastor Shelley?”

“Yeah. Why do I care? I mean, if someone walks into a homo bar and shoots ’em all, shoots a bunch of homos and kills all of them, you know how many tears I’d shed for that? Zero,” he said, adding that he doesn’t “care how many of them die” because they “worship the devil.”

“Hitler was an Antichrist. You know what? If an antichrist kills another antichrist, I don’t cry even one second.  “‘Well, he killed six million,’” he said in a mocking tone. “I doubt it. Only if we were lucky.”

Also last year, Shelley told the city council of Arlington, Texas that gay people should be executed as the council was considering a resolution to acknowledge Pride. Some people in the crowd said “yup” and “amen” as he ranted against LGBTQ+ people, saying that Pride “would promote disease and AIDS in our community.”

“According to God we should hate Pride, not celebrate it,” he said. “God has already ruled that murder, adultery, witchcraft, rape, bestiality, and homosexuality are crimes worthy of capital punishment.”

This is the kind of myth-based bull shit that goes on in those small little “churches” out in the middle of bumble-f..k nowhere.  This is the bat-shit crazy “religion” indoctrinating some children by f..ked up parents and money grubbing “pastors.”.

And thus, generation after generation, in the 21st century, this claptrap from a book written two or three millenia ago by men who didn’t know why the sun rose in the morning, goes on.

No one is coming back.  There is no heaven or hell.  You’re not going to see your loved ones again.  The universe was 13.5 billion years old before I opened my eyes.  I missed all of it.  After my 80 some-odd years I will close my eyes and another 13.5 billion years will go by.

We exist and only exist now.  We didn’t exist before and you won’t exist after.

As for the “end times” we are doing a great job of bringing those down on us all by ourselves.

Now I don’t force my beliefs on anyone.   Millions do not share my belief.  Each of us is free to believe or not as we see fit because of the constitutional separation of church and state.  The church however never seems to stop pushing.  Some of the crackpots are no different from the Taliban.  When they begin discussing Christian Nationalism, it is time to speak out.

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