“This is how we should order our lives together,” he said. “And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality.”
“You should always check yourselves,” he continued. “Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?”
“And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.'”
This guy is an Atheist, running a scam, as are MOST religious leaders. They absolutely do not believe in God, or any kind of an afterlife, because if they did, they would NEVER support the obviously heinous behavior of MAGA. They would be too defensive of their immortal soul. The fact that they are jumping in with full support of MAGA’s obviously, cartoonishly evil agenda, proves who they really are.
Religion is a business, and should be treated like one. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives churches some special benefit. In fact, it literally says that the government should not be supporting any religion. So why does the government support religion by making it tax exempt?
EVERY church should be investigated, and most should be abolished as illegal tax avoidance scams. The rest should be heavily taxed, with the tax revenue earmarked for the public good, not military or law enforcement in any way. It should ALL go into the fund for Social Safety Nets, including universal health care.
And it should also be strongly regulated, with their donations being public record. Tithes should be heavily regulated, and the money fully accounted for. All churches should be operated with the same legal obligations as any other business.
I am not so sure about this. At the top, fundamentalist have convinced themselves that God can choose champions who are above all of his rules. They are chosen, they can do whatever the fuck they want. Rest of the people, of course, needs to abide to “God’s rules”.
At the bottom, it’s kept simple: anything and anyone they dislike is anti-christian (that can be stretched to no end).
Nonsense, nobody with the intelligence to start a church and convince people to join it, believes that kind of nonsense. It is LITERALLY like believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and INSISTING that our entire society should be configured to follow the rules that Santa Claus and/or the Easter Bunny demands. And who interprets those demands? Those same religious leaders. And surprise! Those demands include doing everything those leaders tell you to do without hesitation or question, and giving them as much money as you can possibly come up with.
It’s a scam, and they KNOW it’s a scam. NONE of them believe in God, or they would be absolutely certain that they are destined for Hell. Or maybe they do, and they know that since they’re going to Hell anyway, they might as well take advantage of the fun on Earth, before they go to their eternity of getting poked in the ass with a pitchfork, or whatever their weird cult believes.