It is undeniable that one of the major reasons for the prevalence of abuse in churches is that due to the privileged status granted by religion. Anyone associated with a church is often seen in a trusting light, even when this trust is unwarranted. This guarantees an innumerable amount of tragedy, a fact we are regularly reminded of on a daily basis.

Just a few days ago, pastor Robert L. Carter was arrested in Huston. His crime? Over the span of a decade, he repeatedly raped one of his parishioners (that we know about), beginning his assault when she was only 6 years old. The abuse was an almost daily occurrence, ending only when the victim decided that the abuse had to stop. This was 3 years after she had given birth to a child she was forced to give away.

The victim is now damaged for life, and is fighting to get custody of a child that was wrongly taken from her. This will no doubt add to this tragedy, with a new family being torn apart to undo past wrongs.

With all of these lives destroyed, you would think that perhaps a little self reflection had occurred. You would be wrong. Rather than take responsibility for his crimes, and for destroying multiple lives, Carter is quick to blame his monstrous deeds on outside forces beyond his control:

“I need you to understand that it is not about my flesh because my flesh causes me to do the things that I would not do. Paul said the good that I would I just can’t seem to do because he said whenever I [go to do good] evil is always present because I’m in my flesh,” he said. “Your flesh will send you right to Hell. Your flesh will get yourself in trouble.”

What a load of utter nonsense, straight from the mouth of a deeply troubled individual that barely qualifies as human. This gobbledygook might mean something to the faithful, but when someone not beholden to this word salad hears this, they see it only as a disgusting omission of responsibility. So long as religion continues to give lowlife scum like Carter a safe space to operate, these tragedies will continue to be a daily occurrence.

Did you know that there are now more Christians in South Korea than there are Buddhists? Since it’s late arrival in the 18th century*, Christianity has been growing steadily in the country. Many converts see it as a defacto way of adopting a more “western” lifestyle. Hell, in my neighborhood, there are TWO Korean churches within only a few hundred meters of one another, and they’re the only ones that seem to regularly attend services, as opposed to the empty catholic cathedrals in desperate need of maintenance.

Well, since they are busy taking on our religious tradition, it seems as though their priests are also engaged in one of the oldest traditions of the church: molesting kids.

The victims of the alleged abuse were 13 to 19 years old and were all enrolled at his school between 2016 and 2023, prosecutors said. One of the allegations pertains to the alleged abuse of a 16-year-old student while they were sleeping in the school’s dormitory in Dec. 2022.

Pastor “Chun”, as he’s been identified, is believes to have assaulted more children under his care. Keep in mind that these students had escaped the hell of North Korea, only to face their own nightmare from someone claiming to want to help them. Isn’t it just like a religious organization to hurt the ones they claim to want to help?

* It was introduced earlier, but had been banned for over 200 years

A couple days ago I reported on the stupidity of one Jim Caviezel, and lambasted his ridiculous movie “Sound of Freedom” as a QAnon wet dream. The film, for those of you luckily ignorant of this cinematic turd, revolves around the supposed life story of an ex-Homeland Security operative who was sick of the bureaucratic red tape and decided to rescue victims of child trafficking. Keep in mind that the man who inspired the film, Tim Ballard, admitted that the events in the movie had never happened. He also alleges to have broken up Satan worshiping cults, which just sounds like the rehashed moral panics of the 1980’s (in QAnon, the old is new again).

If you thought that wasn’t bad enough, now there is credible evidence that Paul Hutchinson, an executive producer for “Sound of Freedom”, was one of the people captured on film fondling a young girl in Mexico during a 2016 undercover operation.

Footage of the incident and its aftermath was captured by videographers working with Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR, the private anti-trafficking group Ballard founded. An investigator with the Davis County Attorney’s Office obtained the footage and wrote detailed descriptions of it as part of a criminal investigation into Ballard and OUR carried out with the FBI. That investigation was closed this year without any charges being brought.

You know, it never ceases to amaze me just how the people who cloak themselves in good deeds in an effort to divert attention away from their bad ones. A man spreading false information about child trafficking (which is a real problem that needs solutions) is implicated in the very crime he pretends to care about.

I’m sure most of you have used Lyft or Uber at some point in your lives. It’s become so normalized that most people barely think about it. In fact, it was so routine that when a customer by the name of Jeremiah Campbell climbed aboard his Lyft, he carried on his day like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Jeremiah was acting strange, however, which prompted the driver to call the police.

When the cops arrived at the scene, they attempted to knock on the suspect’s door, with no success.

Chicago police officers responded to the location and knocked on the door but no one answered. They looked inside a window and saw a man bending over the bathtub and making suspicious movements. Believing there was a drowning in progress, officers forced their way inside the home. With the cops inside, Campbell took the boy out of the bathtub. Officers could hear the boy coughing and saw him “coughing up water,” the report said.

The good news is that his 2 year old son is recuperating from the attempted murder. Jeremiah’s little attempt to recreate Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is luckily over, and the man is set to appear in court in the next few days. Here’s hoping his little boy finds a home that isn’t inhabited by some religious psycho trying to win brownie points with his bronze age god.

I probably should be more specific in my headline, since this kind of thing has become so common, it’s almost impossible to come up with news titles.

In the case of a youth pastor at a Christian camp being caught for child pornography, I would say that apart from his name, Nathan Rogers, and his age, 39, everything about this story is what you’ve come to expect. The specifics are as follows: Rogers invited a young girl to his camper to change, and had setup a video camera beforehand to capture the moment. The girl noticed, and tried to delete the video out of a sense of humiliation, no doubt. Since we are no longer living in a society that keeps this kind of thing secret anymore, he has since plead guilty, and will be a registered sex offender when he gets out of prison. He faces up to 20 years for what he did.

We keep thinking that children being abused by Christian institution is something that was prevalent in the past. To be sure, when religious institutions were in control, it was a damn epidemic. But that’s not to say that there are still major abuses that are happening even in this modern, highly connected world.

For instance, take the Miracle Meadows School in Virginia. It was founded in the 1980’s, selling itself as an educational institute for troubled teens, run by Seventh Day Adventists. Judging by how it operated, it sounded more like Shawshank prison than a school:

I was on a what I thought was a family weekend away, headed home. Until I arrived at a big tan building instead. When we got there, I was dragged out of the car by a really tall man and lady. I cried and screamed for my mom , dad and brother to help me. The staff told them to drive off. As I kicked and screamed for “what felt like forever ”, I watched them drive off. I was wrestled to the ground and placed in handcuffs. From there I knew that this was it. I was stuck.

Their education techniques involved basically physically breaking kids down and mistreating them on a continual basis:

If you look at the videos for MMS it looks like a quaint little place in West Virginia, run by Christians. What they did not show was the staff waking us up in the middle of the night to run laps until we threw up, or being locked in isolation for weeks while copying down “social rules,” and memorizing many verses, or entire chapters, of the Bible. We were digging ditches for hours then told to fill them back in. Digging the feces-covered rocks out of the sewer, and wheeling them a mile up the road.

They just lost a lawsuit for over 100 million dollars which detailed horrible sexual and physical abuse. This was after losing another lawsuit from another group of victims for roughly 52 million. Attorneys said that there were countless victims, and that like in most cases of abuse, only a small minority of victims were willing to come forward about it. The list of accusations is truly harrowing:

The latest suit included allegations that some students became pregnant after being raped and were given abortions. Some children ranging in age from 7 to 12 were infected with sexually transmitted diseases after being assaulted by staff members, the suit claimed.

I mean how young can these victims get? Is there a limit to this kind of depravity? This institution operated for almost 40 years, spreading misery, STI’s, and mental scaring troubled teens that needed love, and received misery. How many more of these kinds of institutions are hiding in plain sight even today?