The Hazards of Belief

If this vile virus can do any good at all, maybe it is this: that it will teach us to recognise our fragility. We think we own the Earth; we certainly think we can dominate it. It is salutary to discover that our dominance is based on a very wobbly foundation and that we can only hope to co-exist, carefully and thoughtfully, on this Earth, with our fellow-humans and our fellow-creatures, respecting and managing our environment and its ecosystems.

Genesis 1:28 wrote:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Reverend Ralph Drollinger is especially close to the Trump administration, holding a weekly bible study attended by multiple members of Trump's cabinet.

This proximity to national policy-makers is why it's so concerning that in a recent blog post titled "Is God Judging America Today?" Drollinger said the global pandemic was caused by LGBTQ people, environmentalists and atheists.
In his post, Drollinger claimed members of all these groups with "depraved minds" were igniting God's wrath, causing him to lash out with crises like the pandemic.

In a 2018 post about the book of Leviticus, the reverend compared homosexual relationships to a woman falling in love with her cat and said accepting gay marriage would be "a path toward extinction."

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Since when did anyone go to 'Nawlins to avoid sin?

Three days after the Christian Open Door evangelical megachurch’s “week of prayer and fasting” in Mulhouse, eastern France, pastor Samuel Peterschmitt, the organiser of the event, began feeling feverish. He, his six children and 13 grandchildren have all since been diagnosed with coronavirus.

The event ran for five days, from February 17th-21st. The first case of coronavirus, also known as Covid-19, in Alsace was diagnosed in Strasbourg on February 29th. The victim had not attended the 2,500-strong religious gathering, but her two children had accompanied their grandparents. The regional health authority (ARS) missed the clue.

The penny finally dropped on March 2nd, when a solitary inhabitant of Nîmes who drove back alone from Mulhouse tested positive. “Eureka!,” Christophe Lannelongue, an investigator for the ARS told Radio France. “It was the gathering at the Christian Open Door in Mulhouse!”

Even then, authorities believed that only a few hundred of the faithful had been contaminated. It took more than a month for the prayer week to be recognised, in the words of French health minister Olivier Véran, as “the tipping point” of the French epidemic, which by Tuesday had infected 44,550 people and claimed 3,024 lives.

The church gathering was “like an atom bomb that fell on us in February, and we didn’t see it”, Lannelongue continued. “After February 21st [when the gathering ended] people did not know they were infected, because they had few symptoms.”

The Christian Open Door was founded by Peterschmitt and his father in 1989. It has held the week of prayer and fasting annually for the past 25 years. There is no registration, and as the name implies of the church, anyone can enter.

Over five days, 2,500 faithful prayed, sang and danced in the converted supermarket. They embraced each other and held hands. Pastor Peterschmitt stalked the stage, his image projected on a giant screen.

The pastor’s son Jonathan, who is a medical doctor as well as a pastor, now believes the vast majority of 2,500 participants were infected in up to four daily services in the megachurch. “We were immersed in the same culture for a week,” he said. “Same chairs, same toilets . . .”

Another doctor in Mulhouse asked a coronavirus patient if a lot of people were coughing at the gathering. “Yes, most of them,” he answered.

Regardless of how it started, the disease spread like wildfire. The ARS says a nurse in a Strasbourg hospital who attended the gathering contaminated 250 of her fellow medical workers. Outbreaks all over France, in Orléans, Besançon, Saint-Lô, Belfort, Dijon, Mâcon, Agen, Briançon and Paris, have been traced to the Open Door Church in Mulhouse.

Six pensioners from Corsica flew back to Ajaccio, where they infected at least 263 people, of whom 21 have died.

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Odhinn, I click on that and I get an empty "reply to post" box pointing at this thread?

Going to Mass can make you collapse, a new study shows.

The multiple sudden changes in position during Mass from sitting to kneeling to standing can cause fainting or in medical terms a syncope episode due to a fall in blood pressure.

Syncope is described as a transient, self-limited loss of consciousness with an inability to maintain postural tone that is followed by spontaneous recovery.

The study, carried out by the Department of Aging and Therapeutics at UL Hospital Group in Limerick, focused on Mass in particular as it is a common situation where people can lose consciousness due to short bouts of sitting, standing and kneeling.

Syncope is common and accounts for 1 to 2 per cent of annual Emergency Department presentations and often leads to hospital admission.

In the 2016 census, 78.3 per cent of Irish people identified as Catholic, and attending weekly or daily Mass remains common throughout the country.

The study, published in this month’s Irish Medical Journal, examined the number of times and the duration of stance changes during a Sunday Catholic Mass.

The review identified 110 cases of fainting, with 56.3 per cent taking place at Mass with patients being brought to University Hospital Limerick as a result.

An influential conservative cardinal has established himself as a “parallel authority” to Pope Francis, according to a new book that depicts the pontiff as a prophetic reformer who is surrounded by opponents waging “guerrilla warfare” against him.
Cardinal Robert Sarah, a prelate from Guinea who heads the Vatican’s liturgy department, has sought to present an alternative leadership model for the global Roman Catholic church, Christopher Lamb claims in The Outsider.

Sarah, who is frequently tipped as a potential successor to Francis, “combines a mystical spirituality with an unbending defence of traditional Catholic teaching. Were he elected pope, he would undoubtedly harken back to Pius XII, a neo-traditionalist who would ‘reign’ as pope rather than adopt the style of the Latin American [Francis], who rolls up his sleeves and takes risks to take the church out on to the street.”
The cardinal is described as “extraordinarily conservative” and “very uncomfortable” with women holding positions of authority in the church’s charitable network.

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Going to Mass ‘can make people faint’

Odhinn wrote: »

Blessings on the move seems to be a thing

https://www.broadsheet.ie/2020/04/09/believaroo/


I look forward to footage of a priest zooming along on some electrically powered scooter while chucking the holy water about the place,