This is the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity house, associated with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This seems like an appropriate use for an old Catholic church, since the clergy looks like an aging fraternity anyway. (I’m just a few miles south of RPI. How did I miss this?)
Laser tag! Scrambling over pews and taking cover behind the alter for that perfect “urban combat” feel.
BTW, anybody else remember when laser tag and it’s knock-offs were absolutely huge? Remember when laser tag had a Saturday morning cartoon show? I do. I’d like those brain cells back now, please.
And of course, the Atlanta Freethought Society purchased this Baptist church. With the numbers of church-goers declining and the number of atheists increasing, this only makes sense. Where else are you going to store all those atheists? We’re notoriously hard to pack.
The Christians warned us that this would happen if we legalized gay marriage. Now the BBC tells us that we’ve slid down another notch on the slippery slope: interspecies marriage.
A ram and a deer are set to be “married” at a zoo in south-western China on Valentine’s Day, state-run media report.
Changmao the ram and Chunzi the doe’s “unconventional relationship” have made them popular with the public.
Of course, in many ways it is like a traditional marriage …
But Changmao has not been exactly faithful to Chunzi. He fathered a baby lamb with the zoo’s only female sheep.
Over the years, we’ve all been impressed by William Tapley and his musical misadventures. But now here’s a Pentecostal doing him one better: by singing in tongues!
Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion points us to a distressing story coming out of Australia. It’s the story of Kylie and Nathan Zamprogno. According to Nathan, his wife was essentially brainwashed through use of the “repressed memory therapy” by an organization run by John Darnell.
Nathan Zamprogno now runs a blog called The Palimpsest. He’s running a three part series on his investigation of Darnell’s organization and his experiences, although as of this writing he’s only up to part two.
The Darnells believe they have a special calling. For years, they have received people (disproportionately, women) whose initial presentation may only be of emotional distress. Some may have diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illnesses. They believe that their calling is to assist their subjects recall, acknowledge and then heal from trauma, even abuse, experienced earlier in life. Critically, the subject may be entirely unaware they had endured this abuse and trauma until the Darnell’s techniques produce distressing recollections that then have to be interpreted and processed.
One of the interesting things is that John Darnell has acknowledged that he believes that the British Royal Family are actually reptiles. That means that Darnell is a fan of British conspiracist David Icke. I have a hard time thinking of a more damning statement.
I lost my wife, Kylie, to a cult. I believe their influence ruined her health, her career, and robbed a 6 year old boy of his mother. That they unpicked the threads of her life and of her mind. That she cast aside her home, her wider family, even her name for the sake of a pseudo-Christian group that she had never met six months previously. She now goes by a name given to her by the cult, Hope, after she was told that the person named Kylie had never existed. At a point where she was mentally unwell and exceptionally vulnerable, this cult misdirected her therapy, providing instead what a psychologist identified as a “treatment program” written by a group who believe Nazi-built, demonically piloted UFOs kidnap women and impregnate them to create a race of half-demon super soldiers. They took the most febrile delusions occasioned by her illness and convinced her they were real; that she was the victim of Satanic abuse; that she could speak to Jesus Christ and had a gift of prophecy; that her multiple personalities were evidence of demons that had to be exorcised; that she was involved in spiritual warfare against “astral travellers” from local covens who psychically bombarded her and the group; that her real family were evil. Crazy, evil stuff.
Darnell is particularly frightening, because he seems to combine the charismatic cult-leader style with the paranoia of a conspiricist. Consider the cover of his book Satanic Strategies: UFO’s, satanic ritual abuse, nephilim, church infiltration … clearly this man has never met a conspiracy that he didn’t like.
Kirk Cameron makes a “Christian Nation” documentary. Yes, it’s as bad as you think …
Honestly, I’ve been sick this past week, so I don’t have the energy to pick this apart. I’ll leave it up to you. My only regret is that it’s probably too silly to garner any attention from more serious historians. I suspect you could write a book on the fallacies.
