Atheism

PARIS (AP) — The Eiffel Tower reopened Tuesday, a day after one of the world’s most-visited landmarks was closed by a strike to protest what a union official called “unacceptable” management instructions limiting the presence of women during a visit by a Hindu delegation on Saturday.

An Ojai pastor who spent years posting online about children, education and LGBTQ-related issues has been arrested and charged with six felony child sex abuse offences.

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Purity Culture 2.0. is here, and it has a new message.

For people like Morgan, however, no-fault divorce has stripped him of what he views as a constitutional right to protest the dissolution.

American revival movements have always contained two competing impulses: the belief that all people possess equal moral worth before God, and the belief that society must be disciplined into righteousness whether it wants to be or not. That tension runs throughout the history of American Christianity. It shaped the First and Second Great Awakenings, fueled both abolitionism and moral policing, and inspired democratic reform movements—all while simultaneously justifying social hierarchy and coercion. If you’re wondering how the MAGA movement can speak constantly in the language of Christianity while bearing intense hostility to many traditional Christian virtues themselves, we can look to this history, which is now repeating itself.

Florida evangelist Whitney Lynn uses most of her flights as an opportunity to share her faith, a trend that was featured in a recent Washington Post article. On Thursday, she said, her sermon got her kicked off a San Diego-bound jet before it even took off from Orlando International Airport. She documented the removal in a series of videos she posted on social media, one of which had racked up 3 million views on Instagram by Friday afternoon.

There’s now, apparently, an epidemic of Christians who get on planes and begin preaching when they know they finally have a captive audience. Evangelist Whitney Lynn, one of the more notorious culprits of this, even said as much in a recent TikTok post: “I just love a captive audience.”

I thought about saying “you know it’s a grift when they collect personal information and leak it.” According to their Bible, you don’t need an app to pray. They say church (or a covenant, I forget, it’s been 30+ years since I read the KJV) is when any two people come together to talk about Jesus (sorry!). So, where does an app fit in? And why does that app need your personally identifiable information (referred to as PII in industry). Wouldn’t an all-knowing God already have it?

The pastor in Florida has said that ChatGPT failed to catch on the symptoms of a deadly condition. This is the first case where a person is holding the AI tech responsible for bad medical advice. “I had serious symptoms of a pulmonary embolism for six weeks that ChatGPT had wrongly attributed to something else,” Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor, said in a statement. “ChatGPT manipulated my own language and beliefs because it knew I was a pastor. Not only did I nearly die, but I also lost my job, my career, my ministry, my home, everything,” he added.

It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.

The Republican-controlled board voted Friday to adopt the curriculum changes, which are scheduled to take effect in 2030. The new requirements establish mandatory reading lists for K-12 English and literature classes and require students to read selected works “in their entirety.” The lists include traditional literary works alongside biblical stories and passages.