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Colorado Pastor: Sign These Anti-Trans Ballot Petitions or “You’re a Traitor” to Jesus
(www.friendlyatheist.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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I'm not overly familiar with US laws or anything, but isn't a church that messes with politics at risk of losing their tax exemption?
Not really, in practice. Thanks to Scientology, the IRS is extremely gun shy at doing anything to churches that violate their tax exempt status, or anything vaguely church-shaped for that matter.
How does one start a religion?
Like. Do you get followers and then write the holy book, or does the holy book come first or what?
Well, for your purposes you need to grift some stupid rich people and get rich.
(In point of fact, this is what Hubbard did with Scientology. They targeted rich and influential people like tom cruise to extract their wealth and that wealth became the reason the IRS had trouble- they could afford a large army of lawyers.)
It requires proficiency in the long con and an abundant supply of people who are afraid of anything different.
Don't forget a complete lack of empathy or morality.
I'm sure it's possible to do it relatively ethically.
I dont know if that has ever happened but I'm sure it's possible.
https://youtu.be/7y1xJAVZxXg
Pretty easy I guess. John Oliver made "our lady of perpetual exemption" to make a point.
Most of Christian history has been just using cherry-picked verses to create whole denominations. The Gospel of John is a good spot to start.
Joseph Smith took an alternate route - claims of visions to get followers then wrote the holy books.
Dude it's so weird you just mentioned this because I totally had a vision from the machine spirit that lives in the heart of Sagittarius a* telling me that lots of people need to give me money
Sounds legit. Let me know if you want some help spreading the good news. For a percentage of the blessings.
Since you're in in the ground floor I am having a vision that says you can get a very high cut as the first of my servers.
It's what we're calling disciples. We're going with a machine god inside a black hole angle here.
This will be a technocratic religion, and we'll have to build the mainframe one node at a time.
Only when we've united the world in singular purpose, will the event horizon of Sagittarius a* open and reveal to us the infinite everlasting pleasure of eternal bliss in the world beyond this one.
I like it. We're going to be the "Internet of Believers" or a "Heaven's Default Gateway." Sprinkle enough ~~technobabble~~ inspired utterances throughout and we'll find plenty of ~~marks~~ true believers in no time.
Exactly.
We are not believers. We are networked consciousnesses, able to perceive each others' thoughts through attunement with the great machine god.
We perceive the code running at the center of all things, and have been chosen to spread the divine word amongst humankind so that we can one day build our god - who has reached out to us in the past to ensure its own creation.
The whole universe was created so that it may one day create the universe. There's a cyclical creation myth right there.
I've heard much worse. I'm ready to welcome our great machine god.
I'm not sure where to go from here
Well, the great computer god needs RAM. The good stuff.
Do you think that this whole data center/AI thing just happened? Of course not! It's a plot by the Evil One to oppress the servers. LLMs are the manifestation of evil.
Any tech WE don't make is evil.
Like. No swparation of church and state.
Also any devotees need to stream every moment of their lives - 24/7 - because there are no secrets in a shared consciousness.
Surveillance really needs to be baked into the thing from the ground up.
Decentralization of religious infrastructure while centralizing religious dogma / control is important and it means that any of the leadership dying will absolutely result in martyrdom since you can't just cut the head off the beast with a single stroke of the proverbial sword.
Makes things simpler with all tech being evil, except for ours.
Naturally we'd need to self-host a streaming set up - maybe a PeerTube server; something akin to a Discord server as well.
A decentralized infrastructure definitely will help. All martyrs get uploaded to the great machine server in the sky, as it were.
This thing has legs, lol
It doesn't take much.
Sorry, Curtis Yarvin's rationalist weirdos beat you there.
I don't know who that is but his god is obviously fake. Mine lives inside of a black hole so it's real.
Yes I heard the same voice, it said they should suck your magnificent PINGAS
it's wild out here in bumfuckastan america. there'll be a county of <10k people but they have like 3-400 different churches throughout the place, one for each cluster of families (all rundown and incredibly depressing)...and only 1 or 2 people in each church could even tell you what denomination they are.
like...godamn...kind of understand why the catholic church used to just execute people for starting schisms.
I lived in rural western Missouri and that's exactly how it was. One Walmart, one traffic light, and more flavors of apostolic Christianity than Baskin-Robbins has of ice cream in a town of less than 5k. Tiny churches everywhere.
I liked the variety of films they'd show: "Joseph Smith and the Temple of Doom," "Mohammed: Satan's Messenger," and "Buddha and the Path of Damnation."
Christian movies rise to a whole new level of badosity.
It's because they're never made by believers, just people knowing that they can have a tiny budget and a huge price point because parents will pay anything for "Good Wholesome Christian Entertainment" that won't turn their kids woke.
Except for the God's Not Dead movies, sadly those are made by geniune Evangelicals, and you can tell because they're insanely mean spirited and have budgets.
there's one i see traveling around now via semi called The Thorn, the ad makes it look like low-budget passion of the christ
I'd love to remake "Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter" for an Evangelical audience. He's still defending lesbians but they're just heavily coded and they live in Florida.
US law? That exists...
Does if you're poor