Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .
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[] GraceLife Church pastor James Coates to remain in jail, trial to run May 3-5
Oi, this asshole. He defies lockdown orders… repeatedly… with things getting so out of hand that even Alberta’s authorities decided they had to step in and arrest him. They let him out on bail with the bail requirement being that he doesn’t violate any more public health orders… so of course, that’s what he does, and thus he gets arrested again… and now with this decision, that’s where he’s going to stay until his trial in May. But then, two days later, his church continues to flout public health orders… and this motherfucker phones in to participate remotely. Which is ironic, considering how adamant he’s been that services must be done in person. But to really get a grasp of how ridiculous the whole situation is, and how much of it squarely the fault of the Kenney government, just read the article. At one point, Coates justifies his defiance of public health orders by quoting Kenney.
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[] “Galileo and the Empirical Technique” by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)
We should all aspire to be double-excommunicated.
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[] Canada’s bishops: Choose Covid vaccines with least connection to abortion, when possible
Wow, is there anything terrible that Catholicism can’t make even worse? The COVID-19 vaccine roll-out in Canada has already been slow and of course vaccine denialism and conspiracy theories haven’t been helping. So, in step Canada’s Catholic bishops to… tell people to be picky about which vaccine brand they get, because some were developed with stem cells from aborted fetuses. Yeah, that’s really going to help. It’s actually worse than the article implies, because it misrepresents what the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops actually said. The article says:
In contrast, mRNA vaccines available from Pfizer and Moderna have an extremely remote connection to abortion in the design and testing phases, leading ethicists to judge those vaccines “ethically uncontroversial.”
But I have no idea where that “ethically uncontroversial” quote came from; it’s neither from the CCCBnorScience magazine. Instead, the CCCBactually says:The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines… do not use abortion-derived cell lines in their development and production of the vaccine, however in some of their final testing processes, they have used unethically-derived cell lines.
So even the RNA vaccines are tainted… but the CCCB figuresthe connection to abortion is extremely remote
, so they say, meh, close enough, ethically speaking. -
[] Christian Apologist Sye Ten Bruggencate Took Advantage of a “Vulnerable Woman”
Last week, Sye Ten Bruggencate announced out of the blue that he was stepping down from his ministry because he was
guilty of moral failure
. I didn’t think this was worth reporting at the time because, 1) well, 95% of the people reading this probably just went, “who the fuck is Sye Ten Bruggencate?”; and 2) no one really knew what this “moral failure” was, so there was nothing to report but rampant speculation. Well, to the first point, Sye Ten Bruggencate is a somewhat well-known Christian apologist; he’s a regular name-drop on The Canadian Atheist podcast (no connection to us, but I do recommend if you’re interested in theological debate). To the second point… we are now hearing rumours that Bruggencate’s moral failure was apparentlyfornication with a vulnerable woman
. There are still a lot of details missing, of course, but it seems like someone else, some third party, got wind of Bruggencate’s “fornication”, and threatened to expose him… and that’s why Bruggencate fessed up. Now there’s an investigation by his church, and the woman is cooperating and has even provided evidence and further claims beyond what Bruggencate admitted to. This could all be a big nothing-burger, with the “sin” being nothing more than, *gasp*, extra-marital sex… but… one of the pastors at the church said something rather ominous:the concerns from the woman are more serious than simply a broad moral failure
. And while he didn’tsee anything that suggests that what happened was against the law… he has suggested that the woman go to the authorities for help.
I lack the words to express how utterly unsurprised I am that Bruggencate’s church is more concerned about the “fornication” part of what allegedly happened than the apparent sexual exploitation, though at least in this case they actually suggested passing the buck to secular authorities rather than trying to hush it up. In any case, yeah, I’ll be keeping an eye on this one now.
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I am replying to “[5-Mar-2021] GraceLife Church pastor James Coates to remain in jail, trial to run May 3-5”.
According to Rebel News pastor Coates is defying the criminal Alberta Public Health coronavirus orders based on the science as well as based on his religious convictions. What he is doing based on the science is obviously 100% correct as anyone who actually knows the science will enthusiastically agree.
As far as his religious convictions go I personally consider any and all religious organizations operating in Canada as criminal organizations until they start to accept the same tax treatment as all other charitable organizations in Canada.
Uh huh, because it makes perfect sense that a rural Albertan pastor and The Rebel Media know the science better than literally every science organization in the world. 🙄
Indi, you will notice I have made the same comment twice, this is because when I made the first comment 2 days ago it did not seem to be registering. Neither did the second comment so I just assumed you must have cut me off from commenting since I have noticed you agree with the political and MSM narrative re coronavirus and I obviously don’t as you will already know if you have seen my very long comment to your ‘Weekly Update-30 Jan-2021 to 5 Feb-2021’. I was very surprised that you didn’t reply to that very long comment which fully outlines my understanding of what I believe to be the true covid science. To get back to my point today when I checked Canadian Atheist lo and behold (pardon the Christian expletives) there were my 2 comments which obviously means you haven’t cut me off yet.
To bolster my case I would strongly recommend you search Sanjeev Sabhlok in Google, on Bitchute, Rumble etc. to see what he says and has sacrificed for the truth about covid. Actually I think he says it best about the science of all the hundreds of doctors and scientist around the world that I believe. Also Nick Hudson of Pandata.com tells the real common sense truth about covid.
If anyone can explain to me the real reason why this ‘covid-1984’ ‘scamdemic’ occurred I would certainly greatly appreciate it!
It always amazes me how quickly some people jump to that conclusion. I mean, it was roughly 10–15 minutes between the first comment and the second; in that short a time, it was probably just a caching issue that caused the first comment not to show up yet.
Fact is, I have never blocked anyone from commenting on CA merely for disagreement with their position. (Or from contributing, for that matter; we used to use have a couple of contributors who I very much disagreed with, though they dropped off over the years. I would even welcome new contributors that I disagreed with, and I might even take some on the next time we’re bringing new people on.) I do block people for straight-up abusive or threatening comments; we get a few of those both from religious kooks and from neo-Nazis. But, trust me, there is no grey area there: the comments I block are completely void of intelligent content, they’re just screeds about how atheists (or “SJWs”) deserve to die. And I also block completely irrelevant spam, of course… but again, there’s no grey area there.
Frankly, I don’t even know if I could block someone I disagreed with. Each contributor on CA decides which comments to allow on their own articles, so even if I blocked everyone I disagreed with from my articles, they could just go and post on other people’s stuff.
I don’t engage in debates on topics that I don’t have expertise on. I am not a specialist in viruses or epidemiology, so I won’t waste my time (or yours) talking about those topics. I’ll just refer you to actual scientists who specialize in the field.
Speaking of people who aren’t actual scientists specializing in the field…:
Okay. *cracks knuckles*
The first few DuckDuckGo hits are Sabhlok’s own blog, then a few articles from garbage news sites (The Rebel Media, The Daily Mail…)… then this:
https://celebpie.com/sanjeev-sabhlok/:An economist (“former” economist) and politician. Not a doctor or or scientist, as you implied. In fact, he appears to have literally no expertise relating to anything even remotely connected to virology and epidemiology, whatsoever. And all he appears to have “sacrificed” is his own political career, sorta-kinda… in exchange for a very lucrative publishing career. He’s far more famous now than he was before he quit, so… not really much of a “sacrifice”. (Not that it matters. To say someone has a valid point merely because they “sacrificed” to make it is an obvious logical fallacy; it’s no different from claiming that that Christianity is true because of all the martyrs that died for Christ.)
Who’s next?
Googling isn’t even necessary. Let’s just go straight to the site and… no such site. Okay, but there is a
pandata.<em>org</em>, so let’s check that… and then we go to the page called “The Team”, and…:An actuary. (And an anti-social-justice nutter, to boot.)
🤦🏼
You know what, he may be an ignoramus on the topic, but maybe he’s just a passionate organizer. Maybe the the rest of the team has some expertise! So let’s scan down and…: another actuary… lawyer… big data analyst… economist… ooo, masters in public health, oh, but just a masters, and it’s in “psychology and education” with, it appears, a focus on students with learning difficulties… “PhD public health”, okay, another possible expert, but searching his publications, all I see is a single paper on COVID-19 in Uganda, and possibly another that basically says people have less sex during lockdowns, and that’s it (the rest of his “expertise” is on malaria, which is an entirely different form of transmission from COVID-19).
And it goes on and on, with more “experts” on their team having expertise in media and publicity than in anything actually relevant to COVID-19.
Just for shits and giggles, though, I decided to look for the Canadian “experts”, because while I’m not likely to recognize South African kooks… I’ll probably know Canadian ones.
And here they are:
So 4 (well, 3.5) Canadians, two of which appear to be woo-addled, one of which is an infamous nutter. (And, like I said, never heard of this Angelova.) Not exactly a stellar showing.
And it turns out that no one is actually taking this “PANDA” organization seriously at all. They get absolutely zero mention in any serious science media, or even in most mainstream journalism. They seem to have a few pet platforms pushing them, in particular one site called “BizNews”, but that’s about it. The very few scientists I could find reviewing their claims find them laughably bad (one of them notes that PANDA estimated that there would be 10,000 deaths in the first half of 2020, when, at the time, the death toll was already about that much, and it ended up being 140,000). They also appear to be engaged in the usual vaccine denialism bullshit (though they apparently scrubbed their site of evidence of this once they were called on it; an archived copy exists, though, and it’s hilariously terrible).
Look, your sources are garbage. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. They are all complete trash, not just the primary sources, like PANDA, but also the secondary sources that are referring you to them, like The Rebel Media.
If you seriously want to understand COVID-19, then get the fuck off the Internet. Instead, find a legitimate Canadian university. Look, here’s a list, just pick one. (Personally, I went with McMaster, my former stomping ground and a world-leader in medical research thanks to its attached hospital.) Then look into their departments that specialize in relevant fields. Or, alternately, pick a legitimate and respected Canadian science organization, preferably with a relevant specialization, like the Canadian Medical Association or the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada. Then look up their experts—pick any expert you like from their ranks—and find out what they say.
Note that I’m not even bothering to suggest public health organizations like the World Health Organization or Health Canada, because if you’re reading Ezra Levant, you’re already in wacko, anti-government territory. Nope, I’m directing you straight at the scientists, the real scientists, the ones doing the real science, in relevant fields. Pick a university and look into its disease-related departments, or pick a disease-related science organization, and find out what the real experts say. And stay in Canada, to avoid getting caught up in the politicking going on in other countries.
Stop wasting your fucking time, and mine, with crackpot Australian politicians and South African actuaries.
According to Rebel News pastor Coates is defying the criminal Alberta Public Health coronavirus orders based on the science as well as on his religious convictions. Based on the science I agree with what he is doing 100% as anyone who actually knows the science will enthusiastically agree.
As far as his religious convictions go I regard all religious organizations operating in Canada as criminal organizations until they agree to be subject to the same tax rules as all other charitable organizations operating in Canada.