Wanna see something really scary?

• “The lesson is clear: the newest generation of sinful mystics is not doing nearly enough to further their art.”

True, we may not have visual artists to match the imagination of the gloriously weird “Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros.” But while the 18th-century artist who dreamed up all the demonic visions in that Compendium was trying his hardest to confront us with shocking imagery and horrifying ideas, none of his hideous creations are anywhere as disturbing as this, from a recent episode of The 700 Club. This is Pat Robertson’s response to the question, “Why did God allow my baby to die?”

“As far as God’s concerned, he knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease,” Robertson said. “God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.”

Your dead baby was probably going to become Hitler or a serial killer, but now he’s in Heaven instead. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

• Sarah Posner asks “What Happens When There’s Nothing Left to Say About Marriage?” 

They’re working on that. In offices at the Family Research Council and all the other fundraising organizations of the religious right, they’re already brainstorming and focus-group testing the next Big Scary Thing that can be used to leverage direct-mail donations out of their enthusiastically fearful audience.

The Gay Menace has proved quite lucrative, but it gets less frightening every day. Soon they’ll adapt the Narrative of Decline to focus on some other supposed menace. It may take a bit to settle on what the next big money-maker will be, but they’ll find it. They always do.

• “Our best and worst impulses are on display when we pray — and now they’re available to us all, with the press of a button.” Laura Turner looks at Instapray, a new app that let’s you do an online version of that thing where you share all your gossip as prayer requests. I’m imagining a cross between Wednesday night prayer meeting and a YouTube comment section. Lord, have mercy.

• Here is U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III’s decision in the 2004 case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

That’s a Republican judge nailing shut the coffin on the credibility and integrity of the Discovery Institute and its pseudo-clever campaign to replace science with “Intelligent Design” theory.

Here’s a Jonathan Merritt puff-piece on an author’s “mission to reinvigorate the evangelical mind.” That author, Merritt tells us, is “a fellow at the Discovery Institute.”

Merritt seems to be confusing “reinvigorating the mind” with “huffing glue and guzzling lead paint.”

• One more from Religion News Service: “The Vatican will soon decide on the validity of miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, a Bosnian town, Pope Francis said on his return from the country’s capital.”

Bracket the larger question of apparitions of Mary in general: This one refutes itself. The claim is that Mary appeared several times in the early 1980s in Bosnia — in the years leading up to a decade of war that left some 140,000 dead while forcing millions of others to become refugees or to endure life under siege.

Had this apparition of Mary warned of the coming strife or, say, recited Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse from Matthew 24, then maybe this story would be worth further investigation. But the claim that Mary might’ve somehow miraculously shown up in that place, at that time, without saying anything about the coming war just seems like a horrible slander of her character.

• Aisha Harris looks at the trailer for the upcoming Alejandro Amenábar movie Regression, which is set firmly in the Satanic Panic of late 20th-century America.

It’s definitely a horror movie, but is it a horror movie based on the premise that all those Mike Warnke stories are true? Or, Harris asks, “will the film be a larger commentary on the horrific fallout of unfounded hysteria?”

Based on the trailer — and based on the delicious twist of Amenábar’s earlier hit, The Others — it could be either one.