Weird and Religious
In medieval Christianity, pieces of saints’ bodies were treated as powerful objects. Churches claimed to possess multiple skulls or bones of the same saint, sometimes more body parts than one person could physically have had. Pilgrims still travelled long distances to see them.
Religious image of the day.
In the name of religion
1862, Minnesota in the United States. During the Dakota War, violence included attacks on settlers and reprisals. While driven by land and survival, some Christian rhetoric portrayed events as divine judgement or a struggle between civilisation and heathenism, shaping justification on both sides.
Fact
In Islam, jizya was a historical tax applied in certain Islamic states to non Muslim communities under Muslim rule, and Islam linked this payment to state protection and exemption from military service within that legal system.
God of the gaps
"God of the gaps" is a theological and philosophical concept where gaps in scientific knowledge are filled by attributing unexplained phenomena to direct divine intervention. God once explained the world and now explains only what we have not yet explained, which is not strength but a shrinking refuge built on the hope that ignorance will outpace understanding, yet history suggests the opposite, for as the gaps close god does not emerge clarified or confirmed but disappears from yet another place where he was never needed in the first place.
Quote of the day
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Susan B. Anthony.
Ask the right question
If a god communicates through feelings of peace or conviction, how can those feelings be distinguished from normal psychology?
Religious Crooks
Raed Salah type political figures are different, so a clearer religious grift case is Peter Ajisafe, a Nigerian based prophet figure associated with miracle claims and fundraising appeals, reflecting a broader pattern of self styled pastors accused of using healing promises to attract donations.
For more information, google the name.
Almost all of the crooks appearing in this section have their own wikipedia page.
Today we took a look at yet another religious crook but there are hundreds of thousands of them. You could spend a lifetime researching the topic.