What do you get when you combine the solipsism and psychopathy? You get religious wackos like Anthony Louis Lopez, who recently made a bizarre confession during his initial court appearance a few days ago. Lopez is accused of murdering his sister, Lisa Rosenzweig on November of last year, after he struck her in the head with an unidentified object. When court proceedings began, he waived off his council, claiming that he would be representing himself. He then followed this up by yelling in court that he was simply following “God’s Law” before being escorted out.
On December 6, police revealed that 39-year-old Anthony Lopez was a suspect in the case. Lopez was apprehended by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police in North Carolina on a fugitive warrant. Following his extradition to South Carolina to respond to the murder charge, Lopez faced the judge on Friday.
Neighbors expressed their disbelief and hoped it was a tragic mishap. “She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t,” said Betty Taylor, Rosenzweig’s next-door neighbor, referring to the abuse she suffered.
Now the question is, how long has Lopez been a danger to society, and how much of his mental illness was hidden behind a mask of piety? It’s likely impossible to tell, which should really be all you need to know about religion in general. In my estimation, belief in God is merely a displaced sense of supreme authority, externalized to make it appear less psychotic. How many times have you heard a religious person claim that God is on their side? This is merely their own belief in the themselves, masquerading as obedience towards a higher power.
Lopez thought that he was the ultimate authority over the life of his sister. Now, as reality comes crashing down around him, he will soon face the consequence of his psychotic belief. Unfortunately, a woman is now dead because the signs of this man’s mania were hidden under the guise of religious fealty.
You have to shake your head sometimes over the fact that religious folks are constantly abused by their own church leaders. We atheists love to joke around and call them sheep, but it would be more accurate to describe them as pigs at a slaughterhouse. The way they are bled and hung up to dry, you would swear that their spiritual leaders were all trying to make sausage out of them.
The latest slaughter comes from the wacko state of Florida, where a 51 year old man named Francier Obando Pinillo is being indicted on 26 counts of fraud for his involvement in a crypto scam he pushed on this 1500 church members. Pinillo claimed to have had a dream about a coin he called Solano Fi (not to be confused with Solano), and that his God had promised returns of nearly 35 percent, claiming it would yield monthly compounded interest. Pinillo and his accomplices then created fake ledgers showing the victims the supposed gains they were making, although everyone was forbidden from withdrawing their money while the perpetrators did a rug pull.
This isn’t the first scammy pastor to use crypto to defraud his flock. TGA reported of another pastor who had done this a few months ago. These kinds of things are bound to happen more often. Christians are easy pickings. All you need to do is pretend that you have some special connection to God, and religious idiots will fall over themselves throwing money at whatever bullshit scam your peddling. They are already primed to believe in lies. You need only alter the falsehood enough to capitalize, and voila.
Now this moron is facing 20 years in jail. It wasn’t enough that he was taking their money for spewing nonsense. He just had to get greedy and in so doing, he killed his golden goose. You see, that is why you should always familiarize yourself with Mother Goose fairy tales: they are filled with life lessons that don’t get your ass sent to prison.
What does it take to be a pastor these days? It would appear that the criteria is quite low, since every day I have the displeasure of reporting on the countless perversions from men of the cloth. Today, it’s a depraved old man named Arturo Laguna, who sounds more like a drug dealer than someone who should be in charge of people’s spiritual lives.
Laguna had installed a number of cameras in the women’s bathroom, one of which was discovered by a woman who was changing her child’s diaper. Because of how crude the setup was, the device was easily found because it fell from it’s concealed location. The woman then sought out the police, who recovered the device and found the culprit who installed them using the footage on the cameras. Laguna is now in custody awaiting his first court appearance in a few days.
The religious analogy of sheep is fitting. The faithful are lead by wolves who pray on them, feasting at will. It is only because they are so numerous that they feel safe. These poor fools fail to understand that the powers of the institutions they create are a breeding ground for abuse, and so many continue to be victimized, while those who are spared either ignore what is happening around them, or make excuses for their predators. Who is willing to bet that after a period of “repentance”, this same congregation would be willing to take him back on “promises” of better behavior?
“I promise to become a vegetarian” said the wolf in front of the flock, his mouth salivating at the sight of so much food. “I prayed for my love of meat to leave me, and the good Lord made it so.”
Ok, this story is so messed up that it is likely going to cause you to rage, and have a terrible day. It’s probably one of the most egregious abuse of legal power I’ve seen in a while, and it’s all courtesy of the corruption that is religion.
It begins with a mother trying to save her family from their abusive father. Rachel Hawkins is a mother of four, and she is desperate to protect her two youngest, aged 10 and 13. So much so that when the family courts ordered her to participate (and pay) in “reunification therapy”, she refused, and was sent to jail for it. For those of you unfamiliar with this highly controversial form of therapy, it is an attempt to help reunite families after there have been instances of abuse. This is usually done not for the benefit of the children, but for the parents, who can often suffer from depression due to “parental alienation”. On paper, it’s meant to try and mend broken relationships. In practice, it simply exposes children to their abusers, often with deadly consequences.
Many of the organizations that offer this form of therapy are merely religious organizations in disguise. Since these groups are uninterested in the scientific method, or evidence, they have made all kinds of claims of the benefits of such programs. So much so that family courts are now using these programs to force families broken by abuse to mend themselves forcefully together.
In the case of the Hawkins, the father, a retired police officer by the name of Michael, was credibly accused of sexual abuse by his adopted 17 year old daughter starting at 6 years of age. When one of his sons confronted Michael about the abuse, he attempted to drown him. Michael is under house arrest, with an ankle monitor while he awaits trial. Meanwhile, a Colorado court has determined that poor Mikey is suffering from parental alienation as the result of his actions, and his two remaining children have been ordered to attend the Reunification therapy in order to fix this relationship, and are forcing the mother to pay for it.
The mother said she lost legal representation in the custody dispute after accruing $85,000 in legal bills, which she couldn’t afford. She was sentenced to jail without any representation from a lawyer.
Now, it needs to be stated plainly that the person offering this junk counseling, Christine Bassett, operates out of Lighthouse Christian Counseling”, which advertises itself as “integrating faith into the counseling process”. This means that the court has essentially forced the mother to comply with ineffective and dangerous therapy courtesy of religious nutbags.
Rachel has started a GoFundMe in order to hire a lawyer. Given the facts of the case, she has a good chance of winning, if she is able to raise the 100k she needs. She is already halfway there. If anyone wants to help her fight the good fight, I invite you to help her.
If there’s an organization that attracts abusive psychos, it’s the Catholic Church. Tyrants who crave power are always welcome in the church, so long as they mask their intent under the guise of piety. You may think I am being overly hyperbolic, but how else can you explain how their ranks are bursting with serial abusers? Even in a culture of secrecy with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of capital to maintain it, there are still countless stories of victims who have been brave enough to come forward to expose these monsters.
The latest vile excuse for a human being is Father Paulo Araujo da Silva, a priest in the city of Coari. Seems he had a dream of having a harem of underage girls, and so after grooming 4 of them, he began to sexually abuse them. His lust and need for control were insatiable. He would force the girls to bring their friends along, and would film himself engaging in this sick ritual. Da Silva told them that no other men could date them, for they were his and his alone. When one of them became pregnant, she was forced to ingest a mysterious pill which resulted in an abortion.
This abuse continued for years, until finally one of the victims approached police to inform them of what was going on. When the agents busted in his place, he was in bed with another girl that had only recently turned 18, though it was clear that the affair had been going on for quite some time. The police searched his phone, and found 260 videos of his sick escapades.
The Diocese of Coari obviously tried to distance themselves from the whole affair, offering the typical platitudes offered to victims.
The diocese said “all the necessary canonical measures” have been taken. The priest was suspended and can no longer have any activity in the parish. The Church is also available to work with the authorities in the inquiry, concluded the note, signed by the diocese’s chancellor, Father Josinaldo Plácido da Silva.
We’re all so impressed that the Church is working with authorities. It’s literally required by law for them to do so. As for their “canonically punishments”, it’s just a funny way of saying that they stopped paying his bills. They need to save some money anyways; no doubt they are busy getting their lawyers to draft some form of non disclosure agreements, and lawyers ain’t cheap.
If the church really wanted to stop these men, they would firstly rescind their own rules which stipulate that priests are not allowed to report abuse to the police, and must instead rely upon the church to handle the situation themselves. This “handling” usually takes the form of shuffling priests around when too many kids get raped, giving these predators a new field of victims from which to harvest. That would be a start. They could also stop sheltering countless priests in the Vatican under “house arrest” and let the law get their hands on them. They roam Italy with impunity, since they are technically residents of a city state that claims to be a nation. I doubt if either of these two things will ever come to pass.
Lets not also forget the incredible power and authority that is granted to human beings by simply holding their positions as priests. Instead of holding these men more accountable, the desperation of the Catholic Church to find employees means that they are willing to overlook serious issues with their candidates. Power corrupts, and it seems that the church is in the habit of attracting those that are easily corrupted. It speaks volume to their character, and to that of their employers.
Here’s hoping that this irredeemable bastard faces the harshest punishment. There is no cell filthy enough, and no prison mattress uncomfortable enough for this monster.
It’s the kind of story that makes you sick: an aging woman, with a serious medical condition that effected her thinking was manipulated by the pastor of a California church named North Avenue Baptist Church into changing her will. Her son, Michael, is now trying to fight this fraud. For those of you interested in helping him out, Charles has a GoFundMe set up to fight it.
In North America, Muslim women will often be seen wearing a head covering in public. Supporters of the hijab say that it’s an important tradition, and the more liberal factions will claim that it is women who chose to wear them out of respect for their faith, and that there is no inherent pressure to force them to do so.
The rest of the world with their heads screwed on right know that this is just straight-up bullshit. While it’s true that if a Muslim woman wants to wear the restrictive headdress, she is exercising her freedom of choice, but rarely do we witness the real consequences for disobeying their little rules in their private lives. Already there is immense social pressure to wear it in secular countries. In sectarian ones, it is often with the end of a bayonet that these rules are enforced. To say it’s a choice is like saying that a hostage has a choice: to listen or to die.
In Iran, a woman was shot while driving her car, specifically because she was not wearing the hijab in her car. Arezoo Badri was returning home in her vehicle when police attempted to pull her over. She had apparently multiple “violations” for not wearing the restrictive headscarf, and this was enough justification to arrest her. When she failed to comply, they opened fire on her, striking her in the lung and spinal cord.
With the women of Iran already up at arms with the recent beatings and death of a number of women for the “crime” of not wanting to wear the hijab, police have attempted to keep the incident under wraps:
According to the source, her family is allowed only brief visits, during which their mobile phones are confiscated. Authorities have prohibited visitors from taking photos or video of Ms Badri – though some have emerged.
They know they fucked up, and they want to stop the “metaphorical” bleeding. They are fools. If anything, this will only add fuel to the fire. It is time that the inhumane theocratic government be toppled. It will be women who make the major difference in Iran, this I promise you. With the country threatening to attack Israel, it’s only a matter of time before this unstable government goes too far, and finds itself on the execution block. So long as the women there continue to live in terror, the country will never know peace.
Domestic abuse is no joke. Every year, roughly 47,000 women and young girls are killed by their partners. That translates to a sobering average of one woman being killed every 11 minutes. One of the worst offenders of DV is Islam. With it’s perpetual fear of women, it’s not enough that they force them to be constantly covered up, lest they tempt their morally repugnant men to lust. Forced marriages are still a common practice, even when these people live in democratic countries.
Ruqia Haidari was a young woman who was forced into a marriage she did not want by her mother, Sakina Muhammad Jan. The family had already been paid a bride-price, and so the mother wasn’t interested in the strong objections of her daughter. The two live in Australia, which has strict laws forbidding the practice. This did little to dissuade Jan, who told her daughter that if she did not marry a man named Mohammad Ali Halimi, she would be kicked out of the house. At only 21, Ruqia had dreams of attending school to pursue a career. Alas, it was not meant to be. Her violent and controlling husband waited only a few weeks before he slit her throat with a knife.
Now, an Australian court has found the mother guilty of breaking forced marriage laws, and was sentenced to 12 months in jail. The conviction was only made possible when members of her own religious community came forward to inform police of the situation. The irony here is that the family had moved to Australia in order to escape persecution from the Taliban. It appears that while you can take people out of religious oppressive places, you sometimes cannot get take oppression out of people. The Taliban only exists because of the willingness of people to follow edicts and rules that are disasterous, specifically to young women.
When the decision was made by the courts, unsurprisingly, Jan said she refused to accept the verdict, presumably because she still thinks she did nothing wrong. She was eventually led away by court officers. So at the end of the day, we have a young woman dead, an older one jailed, and a murderer in prison for life. I wonder if there will ever be a time when the so-called “religion of peace” will no longer cause countless tragedies. My guess is that none of us will ever live to see that day.
If you’re a hard core listener of TGA, you might remember that we reported on a whistleblower in the LDS church that exposed its massive financial coffers: over 100 billion dollars and growing. The whistleblower reported that the Mormon church was spending practically nothing on charitable services, this despite the fact that it has told its members that their money was being used almost exclusively for such purposes. Instead, they are hoarding money, and using it on private investments that have nothing to do whatsoever with the supposed “mission” of the organization.
A group of 9 church members are now suing the church in court for failing to properly use the money they had donated for charitable purposes.
“Despite [the church’s] representations to the contrary, a substantial and significant amount of the donations it receives are not directed towards humanitarian aid, nor any other philanthropic or charitable purpose,” the suit states.
Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the fraud, the suit has a copy of the 2007 tax form that their investment organization had. As you can see, it’s pretty egregious:
…[A] portion of a 2007 tax form on which Clarke, Ensign Peak’s CEO, declared the book value of all the fund’s assets at $1 million — when, the suit says, it was closer to $38 billion.
Only off by 3800% you say? Why, not even hucksters like Donald Trump would dare cook the books that bad. Of course, the government did so little to actually stop the fraud that it’s practically a joke. The SEC fined Ensign Peak, the group that committed the fraud, a paltry 4 million dollars for using countless shell companies to hide it’s income. That’s roughly 0.00004% of their actual fortune. To call that pathetic would be a disservice to the word. It would be more accurate to call this whole thing immense corruption, or intense cowardice. Both are likely.
The good news is that this small class action lawsuit could balloon if the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals allows the suit to go through. Meanwhile, lawyers on both sides are still trying to make their case, or in the defense’s end, to try and dismiss it. We’ll need to wait and see what the results of this are. Given the fact that the IRS hasn’t done anything to religious orgs that break their rules, I have very little faith that anything will happen. Society tends to give an infinite get-out-of-jail-free card to religion. I can’t imagine a time where that will ever change.
Should every apology lead to forgiveness? This is a complex moral question. It would be tempting to answer yes, and to believe that all human beings are worthy of redemption. There are always outliers in any group, and overall, it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of people are worthy of a second chance, especially when they make an honest and sincere apology.
The world is more complex than this trite observation would have you believe. It’s not only people who issue apologies. Sometimes, it’s entire organizations and institutions. One in particular, the Catholic Church, has committed so many atrocities over the centuries of its existence that it would take many lifetimes of work to simply identify them all, let alone do anything about them.
One of the many recent scandals it is involved with is the uncovering of mass graves in their 80 government sponsored boarding gulags. The rampant sexual, physical, and mental abuse suffered at their hands has never been full accounted for. The Church, which keeps meticulous records, have provided no helpful documentation that would harm their financial bottom line. Instead, they offered a partial apology that took only part of the blame for what had happened:
“The Church recognizes that it has played a part in traumas experienced by Native children,” the document said, saying “these tragedies” led to addiction, domestic abuse, abandonment and neglect that harmed families.
Played a part? They were the main event! It almost sounds like they want to throw their hands in the air and say: “Well, it was also the government’s fault for sending those guys to our rape dens in the first place”. Sure, the government place them in your care, which was wrong to begin with, but the Church could have showed them the love, compassion and charity they keep claiming to have a monopoly on. Instead, they beat them, starved them, sexually abused them, and countless other horrors that went on for decades. When you need to take responsibility for literal crimes against humanity, maybe don’t start with “played a part”.
To offer a proper apology, it’s important to be honest when it comes to exactly what part you played. Take for instance the part they played in the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany: in exchange for becoming the official religion of the country, they helped the exterminators find the families, often pretending to provide asylum for them but turning them in anyways, and whisking away the perpetrators to safe territory in Latin America when the whole thing went tits up. Those are things they have yet to specifically apologize for as well, or make up for in any way. Instead, they still collect part of every German citizen’s paycheck, unless that persons specifically asks not to. That deal with the Nazi stuck around, unsurprisingly.
This pathetic apology is a way to try and reconcile their Native believers, who feel a great deal of uncertainty about their faith following the harrowing details of the history of abuse. For most old Catholics, who’s ancestors also had their faith imbued at the edge of a sword, enough time has passed that the church’s atrocities are long forgotten. In Native communities, that wounds of the past are still fresh. It’s causing problems for the church’s bottom line, so something had to be done. Their plan? An impotent apology that serves only to highlight just how out of touch they are, and a promise to “listen”. Platitudes and empty gestures. Pathetic.
If you’ve ever read Jon Krakauer’s excellent book, “Under the Banner of Heaven”, you may already be aware of the apocalyptic sects that exists within Mormonism. When you think of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, usually what comes to mind is the rather silly elements of the faith: their weird obsession with magic underwear, the idea that Jesus came from another planet, and their prohibitionism on everything from alcohol to caffeine. What Krakauer discussed in his book is the fundamentalist aspect of Mormonism, which tends to bring out the worst in people.
Chad Daybell was such a fundamentalist. He began his career by writing religious fiction, which at first allowed him to quit his job working as a grave digger. His earnings were modest, and so, to avoid having to continue to work in a job he obviously hated, his writings began to take on a far darker and more apocalyptic tone. This found him a larger audience, and he started getting more popular among Mormon extremists.
Chad’s stories echoed the worrisome changes that were happening in his mind. He spoke of God talking directly to him, specifically telling him about the end times. He claimed later to have experienced several near death experiences, and that the result was that he could now receive supernatural visions. His fiction was beginning to merge with his real life.
Things really started to turn when he met a woman named Lori Cox, a former contestant in the Miss Texas beauty pageant. Cox was on her fourth marriage by then, one of which had produced a son named Joshua (although everyone called him J.J.). She quickly became obsessed with Daybell and his strange sermons. By 2019, the two had convinced one another that they had been married previous lives, but both refused to get a divorce from their current spouses. They wished to find “other means” to be together.
Cox’s husband, Charles Vallow, began to suspect that his life was in danger. He started off by getting a protective order, and changing his life insurance policy so that the beneficiary would be his sister. Eventually, he decided that he wanted to make the marriage work, and so the order was rescinded. Then, a few months later, Charles was shot by Lori’s brother Alex, who claimed that it was self defense. Later that day, neighbors reported that Lori had a party not long after. No charges were filled for the killing.
In September of that year, Lori told J.J.’s school that he was being pulled out of classes, and that she would be homeschooling him. No one had seen either him, or his adoptive sister Tylee for quite some time. They were both dead, though no one knew this yet.
In October, Chad’s wife Tammy had been shot at in her driveway by a masked man. The gun, which had either jammed or had not been loaded properly, did not work. When she reported it to the police, they thought the whole thing was a prank, until 10 days later, when they found her dead body. Chad claimed it was from natural causes, and refused an autopsy. The incompetent police obliged him, until some time later when it was finally exhumed when all of the suspicious deaths began to be properly investigated.
Finally, in July of 2020, the bodies of Joshua and Tylee were discovered on Chad’s property. Forensic reports indicated that he had been asphyxiated. Tylee’s cause of death could not be determined, but evidence did suggest that they had attempted to dismember her.
The trials are still ongoing. Both have turned on each other, and claimed that they were emotionally manipulated by the other. It’s rather typical for these kinds of trials: both murderers are unwilling to take responsibility for their crimes. Two children are dead, as well as both of their spouses, and yet they cannot even fathom that all of this was the results of their actions. Instead, these delusional killers would rather blame outside forces than their own decisions. This is the true danger of faith: it transforms people into mindless robots, who think that their actions are mandated by an all powerful being. It’s truly terrifying.
It’s moments like this that remind me why I always feel a bitter taste in my mouth every time Christians complain about being persecuted. Imagine making an announcement of your upcoming nuptials, only to then be fired when they found out that the couple was the same sex. How would conservative outlets react if a private school had fired someone for being Christian?
By all accounts, Lonnie Billard was a good employee. He has worked for Charlotte Catholic High School as a teacher for over a decade. He obviously loved his job, but when he announced that he was getting married to a man, the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina decided that he would no longer be welcome there. Naturally, Billard sued the school with the help of the ACLU, but unfortunately, he lost due to the American legal system now being a branch of the Catholic Church. Never mind that it’s a gross violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents people from being fired for discriminatory reasons. Apparently, though, the courts have a neat little loophole for something that inconvenient:
But Circuit Judge Pamela Harris, writing Wednesday’s prevailing opinion, said that Billard fell under a “ministerial exception” to Title VII that courts have derived from the First Amendment that protects religious institutions in how they treat employees “who perform tasks so central to their religious missions — even if the tasks themselves do not advertise their religious nature.”
So, you’re a “minister” even when your not even discussing your own beliefs. What a load of bullshit. This is nothing but thinly vailed discrimination, under the guise that this is some form of religious exemption. Frankly, it’s disgusting. Is America still a country that understands the separation of Church and state? I think we can firmly say: No.
Welcome back to another episode. This week, we discuss a pastor ruining Autism Awareness, police investigating the New Orleans Archdiocese for human trafficking, and so much more. Don’t miss out!
As a gamer, I can relate to people who get wrapped up in a game. This hobby can often be detrimental to our mental health, and out wallets. Mobile games are especially manipulative, and there are countless stories of people spending thousands on “free” software with microtransactions.
What I’m less forgiving of is people who commit crimes to pay for their addiction. So when Rev. Lawrence Kozak was caught having spent over 40k in microtransactions in games such as Candy Crush and Mario Cart, he was quick to blame his addiction:
When interviewed by detectives in 2022, Kozak said he was seeking counseling for his addiction to playing and spending money on online games, according to the affidavit. He said the money was not spent on gambling, but rather to “power up” — gain an advantage in the games he was playing.
It sounds pretty far fetch that this isn’t gambling, but I can speak with authority that people have spent more than that on bullshit cosmetics and other useless crap in these manipulative mobile games. Still, it doesn’t excuse the fact that this man embezzled church funds for his own personal gain. Now, he faces the legal consequences of this. I have some doubts about whether or not he will be properly punished: religious wrongdoers have a habit of getting off easy.
Is it really too much to ask that justice be served? Come on Pennsylvania: make sure you do the right thing and send his ass to jail!
There is a sad and barbaric tradition that still continues to this day. It’s called Forcible Marriage. It’s essentially a form of human trafficking, masquerading as a tradition. Women have few rights in traditional Islam, and are viewed more as property than a human being. It’s why when 15 year old Muskan Salman was kidnapped and forcibly married, the police have done nothing to get her back, despite the desperate pleas of her father.
I can only imagine the heartbreak at the thought of the things she is having to endure under this man’s captivity. He had already taken her out of school because the eventual kidnapper, a 27 year old man named Arsalan Ali, was already harassing her. He then resorted to abducting her, and forging a marriage certificate, claiming the girl was 19 years old. Now there’s a legal battle to prove her age. In none of the reports has anyone bothered to even ask Muskan what the hell happened. She is essentially in the custody of the husband, and that’s considered fine in the eyes of many.
Part of the reason people have turned a blind eye to all of this is because it’s part of a pattern of behavior in the country. You see, Muskan is part of a Christian minority, and these kinds of incidents are so frequent that the U.N. has called on Pakistan to make more changes to their laws to prevent this form of human trafficking.
“The exposure of young women and girls belonging to religious minority communities to such heinous human rights violations, and the impunity of such crimes, can no longer be tolerated or justified,” they said in a statement issued in Geneva.
Now, because this is the U.N. and their calls are left to voicemail, and it’s doubtful anything will come of this. Muskan will be forgotten about, like so many other young girls forced to live with their rapists and bare their children. So long as this tradition and the underlying faith that sustains it continues to rule, these types of tragedies will continue to occur with terrifying frequency.
