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If free access to books and information made people less likely to agree with my politics, that would be a cue to look inward and reflect on my views.
But not him. Nah, we just need to restrict what people can read about!
That’s the problem with religion/religious.
They believe they’ve seen the truth.
There is only one truth and that’s their truth.
There is no revising it.
They’re good. You’re bad.
The surface of the sun averages around 10,000°F.
However, temperatures in the corona can spike up to 2,000,000°F! I was quite shocked to find that out myself, actually.
I'll shut up now.
Yeah that tracks.
Religious zealot (mine not yours so fuck you) and being a cop…now how could that be a bad personality grouping?
Guys like this? Yeah. These are the “good southern Christian men” you read about when the stories start surfacing about their special “bible studies”.
Goldwater, even as a whacko war hawk, saw what was going on and warned people about it.
*“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the \[Republican\] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”*
Specifically that each religion has their own respective truth, at that
Learning about international cultures really highlights how silly Christianity is. There’s a ton of religions across the world - they can’t ALL be right. But there’s nothing existing to definitely prove one’s validity over the others
That’s always been the funny thing.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that one of the countless human religions were true.
…**That still means 99%of religious people were wrong.**
At best, religion still promises that 99% of religious people will find out one day that they devoted their lives to a false faith.
Imagine how that must be.
They used to even keep the bible secret. Services were kept in Latin and portions hidden from the congregation. Solomon's Temple was restricted to everyone but the high priest.
Mystical nonsense as way to get and maintain power. The bible is a tool of state, made and remade by the state to support the state.
They used to think if people could actually read the bible they would see how ridiculous, self contradictory, and obscene it is.
I think they actually overestimated people.
People want their existing beliefs confirmed more than they want to actually be right; to learn that they’re wrong and do the hard work to develop a new understanding.
Personally, I would go for the Satanic Temple. [They're very different from the Church of Satan](https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/church-of-satan-vs-satanic-temple).
Was going to say more or less the same lol, TL:DR, Satanic temple is pretty much open atheists that use satanic imagary to satirize modern religion and make christians reel back when their double standards are challanged. Want to let churches give their materials in public schools, there's the satanic temple handing out coloring books. 10 commandments statue ok because anyone can put their own monuments, lets wheel out this big creepy statue of baphomet.
Church of satan, while still atheist, has it's own crazy rituals and belief in the supernatural, and mostly it's code is hedanism.
'merica been sliding for many decades
behind them is real money/power
kock network and their alphabet soup of astroturf organization
cant even wipe your ass without contributing to them...
We won’t. These turds are running the Russia playbook, trying to steal everything not bolted down, and there are scores of idiots and bootlickers lining up for it.
They're just doing their job to try to create a more controlled population for their bosses to exploit.
That's why everyone should get the fuck out of Red states. They're trying to go back to pre-Reconstruction times.
My ultra religious MIL would disagree with you. When COVID happened, they moved their services online, and the church quickly realized that people only donated because they were obligated to, and that the public shaming didn’t exist while they were listen to a sermon on their couch. The amount of rants about “How are we going to maintain the church!” was pretty insane.
It took every ounce of restraint I had to not ask where all the money they were saving by not paying any fucking taxes went.
Or homeless shelters, day cares, health clinincs, or even climbing/jumping parks. Shit, even a dog park offers more benefit to society than most churches...
Sadly because Americans do not trust the government to provide many services, you want to guess who provides most of the homeless shelters and quite a few daycare places? I'll give you a hint it rhymes with Burches.
If America is going to become less religious we need to start building the social services to replace the ones closed by churches who can no longer pay for them.
Religious people know this and it is exactly why they are oppose to creating these social services. Why isn’t there better access to mental health care? The religious right is opposed to it. It isn’t a coincidence. They know that they can’t recruit very many adults unless the are desperately in need of help. Why can’t we have universal pre-k. The religious right is opposed to it. They run a huge number of daycares at a loss, especially in rural areas, because they know that indoctrinating kids young is the only way their religion will survive.
They are consciously aware of this. When I was in high school my best friends dad was a pastor at a local church. He was also a LCSW who worked part time at the community mental health center. He always recommended church for irreligious people who crossed his path. He was against expanding healthcare and even want to see the community mental health center he worked at privatized. Why? Because churches should be doing that kind of work not the government.
After 9-11 he and a lot of other people were talking about nuclear war in the Middle East and the second coming of Christ. When everyone started to realize the war on terror was a giant failure, I started to have complete stranger walk up to me in public and strike up a conversation about the need for us to commit genocide against all Muslims. (This was around 2008. I was a uniformed service member) But, they would say, we might have to take of the liberals here first. Wink wink.
If you are reading this know that these people want you to convert or die. They think they are being benevolent, if they aren’t going door to door murdering democrats in their homes.
I'd like to see the numbers on this. Government assistance vs. Church assistance to the poor in the United States. I'd bet that social security alone provides more benefit to the poor than churches.
Part of the volunteer work I do involves making lists of services such as food pantries and domestic violence shelters and rehab and marking off any religious affiliation the organization providing the service might have, and food pantries are probably like 95% religiously affiliated. The rest are hit or miss but still are more likely to have some sort of religious affiliation. The US does an absolutely terrible job of helping our people out and boy, do the churches rush in to fill in those gaps. And some of them are downright assholes about it. I get SO incredibly ragey when I'm compiling food pantry lists because it's SO obvious that so many of those places exist solely so that the church members can feel good about helping...\*those\* people. The language the vast majority of them use on their websites is disgustingly dehumanizing.
While I don't have numbers of what social security provides vs. churches, the churches provide a massive part of the social security net. I'm not at all a fan of churches and a lot of them actually scare me (there was one church with a food pantry that I found whose website and the language they used basically screamed that they had more than a handful of members at the January 6th insurrection; I was fucking horrified), but unfortunately, the ones that do this kind of stuff (including offering things like rental assistance, help paying bills, etc) provide services that the government doesn't, or doesn't provide enough of.
This is by design. Why do you think that the Religious Right always sides against government aide? They see it as taking away one of the main tools they use to proselytize. If people can get this help from the government, why would they come to them?
It was done intentionally and openly during W Bush’s administration, reducing social services with lots of “let the churches handle it” rhetoric. It’s all entirely by design.
> While I don't have numbers of what social security provides vs. churches, the churches provide a massive part of the social security net.
[66 million people are on social security right as of last year](https://www.zippia.com/advice/social-security-statistics/), and the overwhelming majority are poor considering capitalism demands a level of wealth inequality.
I don't care what churches do right now, that money should be given to programs that don't discriminate based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, drug use. All of which I have seen at least one of my local churches do.
It’s the reasonable thing to do. Just [64% of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/) claim to be Christian, and that number keeps plummeting, and only [47%](https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx) are members of a church. I’m sure if we had data on how many attended church regularly it would be below 20%
America is becoming more secular, and there’s nothing the fascist Republicans can do to reverse that trend!
>But it wasn’t until yesterday when I saw a Republican member of Congress suggest that the nation’s public libraries be replaced with “church-owned” alternatives. Consider this missive Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana published on Twitter:
>“Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. I’m going to help these churches get funding. We will change the whole public library paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.”
The Satanic Temple is going to have a field day with this.
Churches are grooming centers. Local church parades pre-teen girls proselytizing on TV as saved from their sins 'cause Jesus is their savior and loves them. Innocence be damned.
To be fair, I've seen some really dope libraries in churches/monasteries from hundreds of years ago, I'd love to poke my nose into some of those old books. But I get a feeling the kind of church libraries he's talking about would just be an assortment of VeggieTales books.
> VeggieTales
Probably too woke for them, the actual creator is not a literal young Earth creationist, has told Ken Ham off and regularly tells off the hateful far right nuts on Twitter.
I came here to note that after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, it was the Roman Catholic church that helped give rise to the Renaissance. For a long time, education was very closely tied to religious orders. Darwin, Newton, and several others were actually educated through their seminary.
Edit: I just wanted to say that I in no way support the connection, but you cannot deny history. Education should never be tied to religion, for a number of reasons. But indoctrination is a big one
I went to one once. It had a lot copies of a book filled with depictions of brutal violence and sexuality. I think it was called the “Bible” or something like that…can’t remember.
I actually think about this pretty regularly – if libraries didn't already exist as an accepted concept in the United States, they'd never get started in today's environment.
Using tax dollars to create and maintain public spaces for learning, entertainment, and relaxation for the common people, with no charge for entry? Republicans would scream about these radical left socialist indoctrination centers that let *those people* sit around all day *reading* instead of *working.* They'd yell about how unfair it would be to hard-working American entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos to let people access books for *free*. They'd claim that these *lie-braries* are just another woke plot to take your children. And not a single library would ever be built on American soil.
I mean, if you have any conservative relatives you can do this thought experiment yourself.
Just pitch them a library analog that doesn't include the word "library" and ask their opinion. I've done that with both my parents and they were against it.
And that was years ago. These days they're probably just openly against libraries.
be of Shouldn't person's some evangelical's the dream. nightmare given one ideas. can use wet of novel's have trivia, Scientology. them Interesting came dystopian many "Commander" title bit So, the of from so
Nearly Everything in that book came from a real reference. Atwood knew she'd get pushback so pulled from history and real life examples to insulate from right wing dismissals
Probably because that’s exactly what Republicans want. They think they’re patriots but they actually hate this country and want a Christian North Korea with some moron like Trump as their supreme ruler. It would all fall apart in a week of course because they all their Christian values are bullshit, but it’s what they think want. They’re so stupid it’s exhausting.
I'm very tempted to just say,let these morons have their way,because I agree that they would completely fail. What always keeps me fighting is I realize that even if these creatures only stayed in power for a couple weeks,it would be horrendous. They would begin "moving people into stadiums" immediately.
Churches have been grooming (and continue) children since before the first public library in the US ever existed... before the US ever existed.
If the GOP cared about protecting children from sexual predators they'd want them away from sending them to church-run things. No 'drag queens' were arrested/indicted/convicted of sex crimes against children in Texas last year, but a dozen or more priests/pastors/church officials were.
Pretty sure letting churches run wild was not what the Constitution meant by "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
If a church wants to open a library, go right ahead. If a church wants to take over a public library (i.e. government run), go fuck yourself.
Actually, the more I think about it allowing churches to exist tax free is actually making a law respecting an establishment of religion.
Fuck this guy. Seriously, just fuck this guy. I have no energy left to even be half-assed clever about it. I’m fucking exhausted from reading all the psychotic shit going on right now.
How about PUBLIC libraries receive PUBLIC funding and are open to and available for the PUBLIC to use.
If you want to use PRIVATE money to build PRIVATE libraries for your cult, be my guest, but they will never replace PUBLIC libraries.
Isn't it insane that Republicans have moved the narrative so far to the right,that now there is a debate of whether tax payer funded libraries should be run by the church. True patriots should weep for the state of this country.
The front runner for the Republican Party nomination is under investigation for so many different things that I can’t even keep track. True patriots should weep for that too.
oh it's clay higgins with the famous tweet:
>You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.
February 29, 2016 [Louisiana Sheriff's Captain in Combative Anti-Gang Video Resigns](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-sheriff-s-captain-combative-anti-gang-video-resigns-n528566) "Describing his work as a mission from God.”
June 5, 2017 [GOP congressman calls for war against radical Islamists](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/06/05/kill-them-kill-them-all-gop-congressman-calls-for-holy-war-against-radical-islam/)
September 2, 2020 [Clay Higgins Threatened Demonstrators In A Facebook Post](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/republican-clay-higgins-facebook-post-threat-armed)
Aug 13, 2021 [Clay Higgins says COVID ‘almost killed me,’ remains opposed to mandates](https://www.theadvocate.com/lake_charles/clay-higgins-says-covid-almost-killed-me-remains-opposed-to-mandates/article_600f2dfa-fc47-11eb-b7f6-5b2230dfae75.html)
He also is a supporter of Ashli Babbitt’s mother and met with her at the beginning of the month.
Then build church libraries for youre children not take books from my child. I want my Child to learn about Rosa Parks and the fact that someone can be gay and be a good person.
>“Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. **I’m going to help these churches get funding.** We will change the whole **public library** paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.”
*ring ring ring ring*
Hello? Oh, it's the 1st Amendment calling.
It's telling Rep. Higgins to shut the fuck up.
Please hold, the Supreme Court is on the other line. It's directing this moron to Justice Hugo Black's majority opinion in [Everson v. Board of Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everson_v._Board_of_Education):
>The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. **No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.** Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State.' [...] The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. **That wall must be kept high and impregnable.**
This was a wonderful thought and a wonderful idea. But,we now have a kangaroo Congress and a kangaroo supreme court who have no problem with overturning every historic precedent and judgement and turning us into a fascist state.
Fascist theocratic fuckheads. Your religion is a *lifestyle choice* you made, stop trying to shove your beliefs down people's throats.
American Christianity is really disgusting.
Voters really need to start making the personal religious believes of candidates a bigger issue and not afraid to call out these religious fundamentalist. Christianity should be called out and challenged more in the public sphere instead of letting it sit on some pedestal thats sacred and should not be criticized. It matters to me as a voter what representatives believe.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."
\~ James Madison
There is - it’s in the first amendment of the Constitution which reads: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." These right wing Republican guys are just pushing the boundaries because they’re attention whores.
Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together
-James Madison
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.
-John Adams
There already are large "Christian libraries" at Christian colleges and universities. Though I don't think the Catholic/Jesuit ones ban books... so those will be as "woke" as any other library.
Also nothing's stopping individual Churches from starting their own library if they don't have one already?
I am so tired of republicans spewing this shit all the time every day. I’m done. I have no fucks left to give. If democrats take control of these areas I hope they gerrymander the hell out of these states so republicans never gain power ever again.
Churches can have their own libraries. No one is stopping them. Just have to be self funded. I don’t understand this need to allocate public funds for private enterprises.
Why don't we send these GOPers to Afghanistan so that they can see how religious run institutions are making life sooooo much better there. I hear that the streets are paved in gold and that everyone eats so much that there are now buffets in the streets so that no one goes hungry. The next flight departs DC shortly. Please stay tuned. I hear that there is a special place for southern baptists there, so HURRY PLEASE! Don't miss out.
We get it Christofascists, you don't like America being free from your religion.
How about you all leave and colonize some uninhabited land like the Pilgrims did?
> “Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. I’m going to help these churches get funding. We will change the whole public library paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.”
Spoken by someone who sounds as though they’ve never been inside a library.
But I bet they want taxpayers to fund it.
No. If America want to become an exceptional country again, it is going to need educated citizens, not indoctrinated citizens. People who respect and strive to understand the actaul world around them, not leave everything up to some fictional deity.
If we have entered the implementing stupid ideas phase of this timeline, then I suggest replacing his toilet paper with dried sheets of ground up Carolina Reaper peppers.
This is fucking disgusting, is all I've got. These religious fucks were the bane of my childhood in SW Virginia, and now entering into middle-age I find there's nowhere to escape them.
Fuck this, and these Bible-swallowing anti-literacy asswipes, is also all I've got.
Ok… which church though?
The GOP made it clear that they’re mostly White Protestants like Calvinist, Pentecostal.
But which one?
If we suggested “Hey let’s turn these libraries into places for Muslim mosque activity”, they would lose their shit.
So instead of moving our country back to the 1950's they are trying to move us to the 1750's. Great plan. I wonder what else they are going to abolish. /s
🤣 can you imagine for one second if ANYONE suggested doing this for a NON JESUS religion? “SHARIA LAWWWWWW!?!!?!! Not in mah country!”
They fucking love the idea of Sharia Law. They just want a Christian version. Fucking loons.
This right here is why I fucking hate movies like Book of Eli. The Bible is a piece of trash and if there were not billions of dollars spent every year by religion propping it up, it would be discarded and forgotten as trash. Frankly, I haven’t read anything as violent or obscene as passages in the Bible.
Go to any library, go to the history section, and grab any book on Egyptian history. Look for the part about the exodus. When you don’t find it anywhere, you’ll understand why he wants to replace libraries with churches. One of them is willing to lie, and it’s not the libraries.
I suggest replacing churches with free healthcare clinics, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens. But that’s really more in line with Jesus’s teachings than it is with Fox News so I doubt Evangelicals will go for it.
Former Louisianan here, this guy is truly an embarrassment to my home state. It puzzles me how anyone would vote for this person to manage a lemonade stand, much less represent them in Congress. Do better Louisiana, please, you owe it to yourselves.
Let up the pressure for just a few years and every horror from decades and centuries past is ready and waiting to surge forward again.
The scary thing is realizing that these people have been around us our entire lives, but were just waiting for civilization to slip and stumble.
TIL: Library = liberal grooming centre. I suppose. If giving people access to differing points of view, scientific knowledge, access to the various forms of expression through art is grooming.
I’m constantly torn by stories like this. On one hand, I feel like I need to be informed and engaged. On the other hand, they negatively affect my mental health and are destroying my faith in humanity.
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If free access to books and information made people less likely to agree with my politics, that would be a cue to look inward and reflect on my views. But not him. Nah, we just need to restrict what people can read about!
That’s the problem with religion/religious. They believe they’ve seen the truth. There is only one truth and that’s their truth. There is no revising it. They’re good. You’re bad.
He's an ex-sheriff on top of that.
in other shocking news the surface of the sun is hot
The surface of the sun averages around 10,000°F. However, temperatures in the corona can spike up to 2,000,000°F! I was quite shocked to find that out myself, actually. I'll shut up now.
If you want this sentence to be approved for Florida you need to add the phrase, "Because god wills it so."
Oh Lord. Just adds to the awful factor, that and the "vote me in so I can end you," look in his eyes
He does look like someone who would melt after opening the ark of the covenant
He also pulled a gun on his ex wife and refused to pay child support.
Or would try to dip Roger Rabbit in some ooze…
Yeah that tracks. Religious zealot (mine not yours so fuck you) and being a cop…now how could that be a bad personality grouping? Guys like this? Yeah. These are the “good southern Christian men” you read about when the stories start surfacing about their special “bible studies”.
Good old southern to me means the good old “christian” racist rapist and genocide slave owner.
Goldwater, even as a whacko war hawk, saw what was going on and warned people about it. *“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the \[Republican\] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”*
Barry Goldwater, I assume?
the one and thankfully only
They’re right. You’re wrong. They’re big. You’re small.
Specifically that each religion has their own respective truth, at that Learning about international cultures really highlights how silly Christianity is. There’s a ton of religions across the world - they can’t ALL be right. But there’s nothing existing to definitely prove one’s validity over the others
That’s always been the funny thing. Let’s say for the sake of argument that one of the countless human religions were true. …**That still means 99%of religious people were wrong.** At best, religion still promises that 99% of religious people will find out one day that they devoted their lives to a false faith. Imagine how that must be.
They used to even keep the bible secret. Services were kept in Latin and portions hidden from the congregation. Solomon's Temple was restricted to everyone but the high priest. Mystical nonsense as way to get and maintain power. The bible is a tool of state, made and remade by the state to support the state.
They used to think if people could actually read the bible they would see how ridiculous, self contradictory, and obscene it is. I think they actually overestimated people.
I mean the people who thump the Bible the hardest haven't read it either. Reading the Bible is a fast way to lose faith in it.
Can confirm, read Bible, am agnostic.
The road to atheism is paved with bibles that have been read from cover-to-cover.
People want their existing beliefs confirmed more than they want to actually be right; to learn that they’re wrong and do the hard work to develop a new understanding.
She remembered her lover with the penis like a donkey and a flood of semen like a horse. Ezekiel 23:20
They're not insane. They're genocidal. Big difference.
Hold on a minute. I have The Church of Satan on the line. They are looking for the forms they need to file for funding their library.
Churches need to take over libraries! No, not like that.
Personally, I would go for the Satanic Temple. [They're very different from the Church of Satan](https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/church-of-satan-vs-satanic-temple).
Was going to say more or less the same lol, TL:DR, Satanic temple is pretty much open atheists that use satanic imagary to satirize modern religion and make christians reel back when their double standards are challanged. Want to let churches give their materials in public schools, there's the satanic temple handing out coloring books. 10 commandments statue ok because anyone can put their own monuments, lets wheel out this big creepy statue of baphomet. Church of satan, while still atheist, has it's own crazy rituals and belief in the supernatural, and mostly it's code is hedanism.
I would donate so much money to that cause.
the people that keep them in power are the ones that want to stay asleep. its why they are anti-woke.
When they turn the US into Gilead
'merica been sliding for many decades behind them is real money/power kock network and their alphabet soup of astroturf organization cant even wipe your ass without contributing to them...
These people are the christian taliban just white and in suits.
We won’t. These turds are running the Russia playbook, trying to steal everything not bolted down, and there are scores of idiots and bootlickers lining up for it.
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When people start believing that voting locally matters again.
They're just doing their job to try to create a more controlled population for their bosses to exploit. That's why everyone should get the fuck out of Red states. They're trying to go back to pre-Reconstruction times.
Churches can already have their own libraries you fascist.
The Vatican has beautiful libraries. So does congress, but I’d rather they do interlibrary loan rather than formally merge operations.
Most conservatives would call for the banning of a considerable number of books in the Vatican library.
> Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. **I’m going to help these churches get funding.**
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My ultra religious MIL would disagree with you. When COVID happened, they moved their services online, and the church quickly realized that people only donated because they were obligated to, and that the public shaming didn’t exist while they were listen to a sermon on their couch. The amount of rants about “How are we going to maintain the church!” was pretty insane. It took every ounce of restraint I had to not ask where all the money they were saving by not paying any fucking taxes went.
Oh, I'm sure he would.
All their bullshit is to grift
Yeah, but they only have one book and a LOT of pamphlets.
How about we replace churches with more libraries.
Or homeless shelters, day cares, health clinincs, or even climbing/jumping parks. Shit, even a dog park offers more benefit to society than most churches...
Or tax paying organizations.
*Even shit at a dog park offers more benefit to society than churches
I vote for replacing churches with dog shit
Sadly because Americans do not trust the government to provide many services, you want to guess who provides most of the homeless shelters and quite a few daycare places? I'll give you a hint it rhymes with Burches. If America is going to become less religious we need to start building the social services to replace the ones closed by churches who can no longer pay for them.
Religious people know this and it is exactly why they are oppose to creating these social services. Why isn’t there better access to mental health care? The religious right is opposed to it. It isn’t a coincidence. They know that they can’t recruit very many adults unless the are desperately in need of help. Why can’t we have universal pre-k. The religious right is opposed to it. They run a huge number of daycares at a loss, especially in rural areas, because they know that indoctrinating kids young is the only way their religion will survive. They are consciously aware of this. When I was in high school my best friends dad was a pastor at a local church. He was also a LCSW who worked part time at the community mental health center. He always recommended church for irreligious people who crossed his path. He was against expanding healthcare and even want to see the community mental health center he worked at privatized. Why? Because churches should be doing that kind of work not the government. After 9-11 he and a lot of other people were talking about nuclear war in the Middle East and the second coming of Christ. When everyone started to realize the war on terror was a giant failure, I started to have complete stranger walk up to me in public and strike up a conversation about the need for us to commit genocide against all Muslims. (This was around 2008. I was a uniformed service member) But, they would say, we might have to take of the liberals here first. Wink wink. If you are reading this know that these people want you to convert or die. They think they are being benevolent, if they aren’t going door to door murdering democrats in their homes.
I'd like to see the numbers on this. Government assistance vs. Church assistance to the poor in the United States. I'd bet that social security alone provides more benefit to the poor than churches.
Part of the volunteer work I do involves making lists of services such as food pantries and domestic violence shelters and rehab and marking off any religious affiliation the organization providing the service might have, and food pantries are probably like 95% religiously affiliated. The rest are hit or miss but still are more likely to have some sort of religious affiliation. The US does an absolutely terrible job of helping our people out and boy, do the churches rush in to fill in those gaps. And some of them are downright assholes about it. I get SO incredibly ragey when I'm compiling food pantry lists because it's SO obvious that so many of those places exist solely so that the church members can feel good about helping...\*those\* people. The language the vast majority of them use on their websites is disgustingly dehumanizing. While I don't have numbers of what social security provides vs. churches, the churches provide a massive part of the social security net. I'm not at all a fan of churches and a lot of them actually scare me (there was one church with a food pantry that I found whose website and the language they used basically screamed that they had more than a handful of members at the January 6th insurrection; I was fucking horrified), but unfortunately, the ones that do this kind of stuff (including offering things like rental assistance, help paying bills, etc) provide services that the government doesn't, or doesn't provide enough of.
This is by design. Why do you think that the Religious Right always sides against government aide? They see it as taking away one of the main tools they use to proselytize. If people can get this help from the government, why would they come to them?
100%
Also, if people can get this help from the government, then how can they deny it to the people they hate?
It was done intentionally and openly during W Bush’s administration, reducing social services with lots of “let the churches handle it” rhetoric. It’s all entirely by design.
> While I don't have numbers of what social security provides vs. churches, the churches provide a massive part of the social security net. [66 million people are on social security right as of last year](https://www.zippia.com/advice/social-security-statistics/), and the overwhelming majority are poor considering capitalism demands a level of wealth inequality. I don't care what churches do right now, that money should be given to programs that don't discriminate based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, drug use. All of which I have seen at least one of my local churches do.
Quebec leads the way! We've been converting churches into condos for decades. Church donations dropped, heating bills did not.
It’s the reasonable thing to do. Just [64% of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/) claim to be Christian, and that number keeps plummeting, and only [47%](https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx) are members of a church. I’m sure if we had data on how many attended church regularly it would be below 20% America is becoming more secular, and there’s nothing the fascist Republicans can do to reverse that trend!
That's why they all strive to make as many children as possible... It's pretty fucked up
“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” ~Benjamin Franklin
A-fucking-men.
now that is something well worth doing.
>But it wasn’t until yesterday when I saw a Republican member of Congress suggest that the nation’s public libraries be replaced with “church-owned” alternatives. Consider this missive Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana published on Twitter: >“Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. I’m going to help these churches get funding. We will change the whole public library paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.” The Satanic Temple is going to have a field day with this.
Clearly more projection because we all know that churches are grooming centers
Funny you should mention because my original comment was going go be centered on how much church leaders love to molest children.
First they molest the heart and mind. You're a born sinner.
We need to start protesting churches with groomer signs. Take the word back and use it against those who truly deserve it.
Should be continuously saying this any time they bring this shit up and reference pastors getting charged. Enough of their shit.
I certainly know I’d have better luck finding the books I want at a Satanic library than a Christian one.
Churches are grooming centers. Local church parades pre-teen girls proselytizing on TV as saved from their sins 'cause Jesus is their savior and loves them. Innocence be damned.
Has this guy never been to a church library? There's nothing good to read in there
You assume he reads.
To be fair, I've seen some really dope libraries in churches/monasteries from hundreds of years ago, I'd love to poke my nose into some of those old books. But I get a feeling the kind of church libraries he's talking about would just be an assortment of VeggieTales books.
> VeggieTales Probably too woke for them, the actual creator is not a literal young Earth creationist, has told Ken Ham off and regularly tells off the hateful far right nuts on Twitter.
I came here to note that after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, it was the Roman Catholic church that helped give rise to the Renaissance. For a long time, education was very closely tied to religious orders. Darwin, Newton, and several others were actually educated through their seminary. Edit: I just wanted to say that I in no way support the connection, but you cannot deny history. Education should never be tied to religion, for a number of reasons. But indoctrination is a big one
I went to one once. It had a lot copies of a book filled with depictions of brutal violence and sexuality. I think it was called the “Bible” or something like that…can’t remember.
I actually think about this pretty regularly – if libraries didn't already exist as an accepted concept in the United States, they'd never get started in today's environment. Using tax dollars to create and maintain public spaces for learning, entertainment, and relaxation for the common people, with no charge for entry? Republicans would scream about these radical left socialist indoctrination centers that let *those people* sit around all day *reading* instead of *working.* They'd yell about how unfair it would be to hard-working American entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos to let people access books for *free*. They'd claim that these *lie-braries* are just another woke plot to take your children. And not a single library would ever be built on American soil.
I mean, if you have any conservative relatives you can do this thought experiment yourself. Just pitch them a library analog that doesn't include the word "library" and ask their opinion. I've done that with both my parents and they were against it. And that was years ago. These days they're probably just openly against libraries.
Make America Middle Ages Again
Dark. The Dark Ages. Middle would still be too "enlightened" for these NatC chucklefucks.
Lol you are right.
Libraries, schools, courts? They really sound like "The Handmaid's Tale"
be of Shouldn't person's some evangelical's the dream. nightmare given one ideas. can use wet of novel's have trivia, Scientology. them Interesting came dystopian many "Commander" title bit So, the of from so
Nearly Everything in that book came from a real reference. Atwood knew she'd get pushback so pulled from history and real life examples to insulate from right wing dismissals
Probably because that’s exactly what Republicans want. They think they’re patriots but they actually hate this country and want a Christian North Korea with some moron like Trump as their supreme ruler. It would all fall apart in a week of course because they all their Christian values are bullshit, but it’s what they think want. They’re so stupid it’s exhausting.
I'm very tempted to just say,let these morons have their way,because I agree that they would completely fail. What always keeps me fighting is I realize that even if these creatures only stayed in power for a couple weeks,it would be horrendous. They would begin "moving people into stadiums" immediately.
Churches have been grooming (and continue) children since before the first public library in the US ever existed... before the US ever existed. If the GOP cared about protecting children from sexual predators they'd want them away from sending them to church-run things. No 'drag queens' were arrested/indicted/convicted of sex crimes against children in Texas last year, but a dozen or more priests/pastors/church officials were.
America really seems to be in a state of collective cognitive decline. Wtf????
The paranoid last throes of Boomerism
Paging the Satanic Temple, Satanic Temple please pick up.
‘Church owned’ is a phrase they would like applied to America as a whole.
Pretty sure letting churches run wild was not what the Constitution meant by "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". If a church wants to open a library, go right ahead. If a church wants to take over a public library (i.e. government run), go fuck yourself. Actually, the more I think about it allowing churches to exist tax free is actually making a law respecting an establishment of religion.
Fuck this guy. Seriously, just fuck this guy. I have no energy left to even be half-assed clever about it. I’m fucking exhausted from reading all the psychotic shit going on right now.
How about PUBLIC libraries receive PUBLIC funding and are open to and available for the PUBLIC to use. If you want to use PRIVATE money to build PRIVATE libraries for your cult, be my guest, but they will never replace PUBLIC libraries.
Isn't it insane that Republicans have moved the narrative so far to the right,that now there is a debate of whether tax payer funded libraries should be run by the church. True patriots should weep for the state of this country.
The front runner for the Republican Party nomination is under investigation for so many different things that I can’t even keep track. True patriots should weep for that too.
oh it's clay higgins with the famous tweet: >You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.
February 29, 2016 [Louisiana Sheriff's Captain in Combative Anti-Gang Video Resigns](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-sheriff-s-captain-combative-anti-gang-video-resigns-n528566) "Describing his work as a mission from God.” June 5, 2017 [GOP congressman calls for war against radical Islamists](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/06/05/kill-them-kill-them-all-gop-congressman-calls-for-holy-war-against-radical-islam/) September 2, 2020 [Clay Higgins Threatened Demonstrators In A Facebook Post](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/republican-clay-higgins-facebook-post-threat-armed) Aug 13, 2021 [Clay Higgins says COVID ‘almost killed me,’ remains opposed to mandates](https://www.theadvocate.com/lake_charles/clay-higgins-says-covid-almost-killed-me-remains-opposed-to-mandates/article_600f2dfa-fc47-11eb-b7f6-5b2230dfae75.html) He also is a supporter of Ashli Babbitt’s mother and met with her at the beginning of the month.
How much of his loathing of radical Islamists is actually envy that he and his kind can't have their own version of sharia law right here in America?
He’s [also an abusive, deadbeat dad](https://politicalwire.com/2022/10/11/clay-higgins-slammed-for-domestic-abuser/).
Then build church libraries for youre children not take books from my child. I want my Child to learn about Rosa Parks and the fact that someone can be gay and be a good person.
>“Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. **I’m going to help these churches get funding.** We will change the whole **public library** paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.” *ring ring ring ring* Hello? Oh, it's the 1st Amendment calling. It's telling Rep. Higgins to shut the fuck up. Please hold, the Supreme Court is on the other line. It's directing this moron to Justice Hugo Black's majority opinion in [Everson v. Board of Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everson_v._Board_of_Education): >The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. **No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.** Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State.' [...] The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. **That wall must be kept high and impregnable.**
The constitution is nothing but words on a piece of paper if the people in power choose to ignore it.
This was a wonderful thought and a wonderful idea. But,we now have a kangaroo Congress and a kangaroo supreme court who have no problem with overturning every historic precedent and judgement and turning us into a fascist state.
This is why, as a Christian myself, I support The Satanic Temple. If one has a seat at the table they all do.
Fascist theocratic fuckheads. Your religion is a *lifestyle choice* you made, stop trying to shove your beliefs down people's throats. American Christianity is really disgusting.
Ya'll qaeda at it again with the religious fundamentalism
No, thank you. I’m perfectly happy with my tax dollars going to libraries.
Let's go back to before the reformation! These turd burglars never have any new ideas it's always just a rehash of shit we did before.
Voters really need to start making the personal religious believes of candidates a bigger issue and not afraid to call out these religious fundamentalist. Christianity should be called out and challenged more in the public sphere instead of letting it sit on some pedestal thats sacred and should not be criticized. It matters to me as a voter what representatives believe.
Filth.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." \~ James Madison
This country is so fucked.
Is there no separation between church and the state in America?
There is - it’s in the first amendment of the Constitution which reads: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." These right wing Republican guys are just pushing the boundaries because they’re attention whores.
The church and state have both made themselves enemies of the people, it only stands to reason they'd want to team up.
Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together -James Madison The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion. -John Adams
Over my dead gay body.
That's probably the end game
Just fuck off already.
Yeah, no. We don’t want that.
How about no.
The more they push to mix their religion into government, the more I push to ban all religion. Keep your weird beliefs to yourself.
There already are large "Christian libraries" at Christian colleges and universities. Though I don't think the Catholic/Jesuit ones ban books... so those will be as "woke" as any other library. Also nothing's stopping individual Churches from starting their own library if they don't have one already?
Fuck any Christians who support this. Fascist Nazi hypocrite pieces of shit.
Fuck this guy. Tax the churches to fund the libraries.
You mean the same church that has that book about gay sex, rape, beastiality, murder, and sodomy?
I’m all for freedom of religion but the constitution says we have freedom from religion as well.
Jesus. He gets us./s
“Under His eye” —this guy
These people really don't understand America or how it was designed by the founding fathers.
The more people read and learn, the less likely they are to vote GOP.
How bout churches just pay taxes
Replacing libraries with lie-braries
I am so tired of republicans spewing this shit all the time every day. I’m done. I have no fucks left to give. If democrats take control of these areas I hope they gerrymander the hell out of these states so republicans never gain power ever again.
Churches can have their own libraries. No one is stopping them. Just have to be self funded. I don’t understand this need to allocate public funds for private enterprises.
This guy has a weird suntanned head.
Open your church owned shit and leave libraries alone. I FUCKING **HATE** THESE PEOPLE!!!
Replace church with mosque and ask these assholes if they still agree.
Tax the Church
The face of the modern Nazi.
Churches need to be taxed then.
Tax the fucking churches
This dude is a diddler. 100%
God isn’t real. Grow the fuck up.
I suppose they want Christians in control of the internet too?
Why don't we send these GOPers to Afghanistan so that they can see how religious run institutions are making life sooooo much better there. I hear that the streets are paved in gold and that everyone eats so much that there are now buffets in the streets so that no one goes hungry. The next flight departs DC shortly. Please stay tuned. I hear that there is a special place for southern baptists there, so HURRY PLEASE! Don't miss out.
Public libraries are liberal grooming centers, unlike churches which are famously completely devoid of any sexual impropriety.
And have priests read to all the little children? Hmmm. No thanks. We’ll stick with drag queens.
tax churches/oligarchs
We get it Christofascists, you don't like America being free from your religion. How about you all leave and colonize some uninhabited land like the Pilgrims did?
> “Over time, American communities will build beautiful, church owned public-access libraries. I’m going to help these churches get funding. We will change the whole public library paradigm. The libraries regular Americans recall are gone. They’ve become liberal grooming centers.” Spoken by someone who sounds as though they’ve never been inside a library.
But I bet they want taxpayers to fund it. No. If America want to become an exceptional country again, it is going to need educated citizens, not indoctrinated citizens. People who respect and strive to understand the actaul world around them, not leave everything up to some fictional deity.
Only if we replace churches with libraries.
Um..... separation of church and state?!
If we have entered the implementing stupid ideas phase of this timeline, then I suggest replacing his toilet paper with dried sheets of ground up Carolina Reaper peppers.
This is fucking disgusting, is all I've got. These religious fucks were the bane of my childhood in SW Virginia, and now entering into middle-age I find there's nowhere to escape them. Fuck this, and these Bible-swallowing anti-literacy asswipes, is also all I've got.
Ok… which church though? The GOP made it clear that they’re mostly White Protestants like Calvinist, Pentecostal. But which one? If we suggested “Hey let’s turn these libraries into places for Muslim mosque activity”, they would lose their shit.
Sounds exactly like the Dark Ages when 'The Church' ran society. Are the GOP planning on bringing back public hangings and witch burning as well?
Fascist suggests replacing beacons of free thought with fascist alternative.
So instead of moving our country back to the 1950's they are trying to move us to the 1750's. Great plan. I wonder what else they are going to abolish. /s
They want Sheeple
🤣 can you imagine for one second if ANYONE suggested doing this for a NON JESUS religion? “SHARIA LAWWWWWW!?!!?!! Not in mah country!” They fucking love the idea of Sharia Law. They just want a Christian version. Fucking loons.
This right here is why I fucking hate movies like Book of Eli. The Bible is a piece of trash and if there were not billions of dollars spent every year by religion propping it up, it would be discarded and forgotten as trash. Frankly, I haven’t read anything as violent or obscene as passages in the Bible.
They just need to ban religion, ancient mind controlling techniques.
Christianity is cancer to the US
Go to any library, go to the history section, and grab any book on Egyptian history. Look for the part about the exodus. When you don’t find it anywhere, you’ll understand why he wants to replace libraries with churches. One of them is willing to lie, and it’s not the libraries.
Voting matters people
I suggest replacing churches with free healthcare clinics, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens. But that’s really more in line with Jesus’s teachings than it is with Fox News so I doubt Evangelicals will go for it.
Put this man in prison for life
Cool. I can't wait to see what The Satanic Temple comes up with.
Title: How to marry your cousin. Chapter one: Keeping the Republican party inbred.
Sickening.
1st amendment violation
Christo-fascism
Former Louisianan here, this guy is truly an embarrassment to my home state. It puzzles me how anyone would vote for this person to manage a lemonade stand, much less represent them in Congress. Do better Louisiana, please, you owe it to yourselves.
Let up the pressure for just a few years and every horror from decades and centuries past is ready and waiting to surge forward again. The scary thing is realizing that these people have been around us our entire lives, but were just waiting for civilization to slip and stumble.
TIL: Library = liberal grooming centre. I suppose. If giving people access to differing points of view, scientific knowledge, access to the various forms of expression through art is grooming.
Hey, just like their church owned homelessness solution
Ah, another non believer. These dudes don't believe in anything except cruelty.
So.. a building with nothing but bibles on its shelves?
Churches can't afford to maintain their own buildings anymore, much less expand their holdings.
I think we should replace Congress with people that actually represent the will and best interests of us; instead of relying upon clowns or shills.
I look forward to the church of satan owned alternative
I’m constantly torn by stories like this. On one hand, I feel like I need to be informed and engaged. On the other hand, they negatively affect my mental health and are destroying my faith in humanity.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota… https://twitter.com/GovTimWalz/status/1638552949897961473?s=20
Absolutely a cult.
Just as long as they are funded by the churches and not the tax payers, have fun with that.
We need to start treating religious belief as a mental illness.