Iowa city council debates proper time in meeting agenda to “undo the curse that was just put on our city.”

An Iowa man has kicked off controversy over religious freedom in the small town of Ottumwa, Iowa by opening a city council meeting with a prayer to Satan, which then kicked off a debate about the proper time in the meeting agenda to undo the “curse.”

  • jve@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    That prayer is fire.

    Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.”

    Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations,” he continued. “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”“It is done. Hail Satan,”

  • cannedtuna@lemmy.worldOP
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    7 days ago

    People often seem to forget that “Religious Freedom” means all religions, not just yours.

    Never mind the importance of the separation of church and skate state

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      You will literally hear dumb fuck xtians argue until they are blue in the face that what the Founders really meant to do was to merely allow you to choose among an array of xtian sects. Maybe if you are spicy, you’ll be permitted to be Jewish, because well, Jesus was a Jew. And we will “tolerate” that.

      Other xtians just seem to view “religious freedom” as “xtians get special privileges and they should be able to treat certain groups less-than if it suits them”.

      And man, they’ll definitely get butthurt when you point out that the First pretty much requires that you have freedom FROM as well as freedom OF. And that “OF” means…anything, not just xtianity. I’ll be a fucking pagan on Monday, fuck you very much because of that OF, and if I please, I’ll be an atheist on Tuesday because of the FROM. Because that’s real religious freedom.

  • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    They only want religious freedom when they’re using their religion as an excuse to infringe on other people’s rights. Hail Satan.

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I can’t help but wonder at the fundies that want to insert their beliefs into the government. The separation of church and state protects the church from the state just as much as it protects the state from the church.

    After all there’s no guarantee that the official state sanctioned religion couldn’t end up being Mormonism or Islam or any of thousands of other religions that you might object to. Even some of the founding fathers were deists who created the depictions of blindfolded justice and lady liberty to be new gods of America.

    Even as a Christian myself, I’m glad that the satanists are there to help teach this lesson.

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Can you imagine what Trump would have done if he had control over an official state religion?

      We’d have official Trump bibles in every school. They’d be changing doctrine to more closely align with Trump’s values. He’d be threatening them if they ever spoke against him

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The number of Christian sects in the U.S. isn’t 1, isn’t 5, isn’t 10, isn’t 20. It’s more than 200. It’s very clear that Christians don’t and have never agreed with each other so it is absolutely rediculous for any Christian to think “what we believe” means all Christians. Hell there are so many people that call themselves non-denominational simply because they don’t want to claim parts of the Bible hated by others.

      If we tally it up according to Christians all Christians will go to hell, which they made up.

  • SwissArmyKazoo@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    What did the council think “religious freedom” meant? They should be blessed it wasn’t a Scientology rhetoric or symbolic narrative.

    Now that would be highly demonic and inhumane.

  • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    How was that even a prayer. Bro just urged everyone to act based on evidence instead of superstition.

  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    That prayer was pure poetry. You can state the exact opposite of what’s said in the christian bible and it makes perfect, rational sense.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Badass ex councilman. And yeah, if any prayers belong at the beginning of government proceedings it’s ones like that.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
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    6 days ago

    I’m in Texas, where this kind of nonsense is standard. I’ve spoken out at multiple school boards to successfuly stop in-school prayer time. Most of the evangelical folks pushing it grumble about it without understanding that we are saving them from themselves.

    The most interesting address was a devout Christian lady who had come from a district where they approved it early. She said one day her daughter came home doing sanitaria and when she complained, the school said that there was nothing they could do. She begged the schools not to make the same mistake.

  • Corvidae@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Another citizen, a pastor named Rick Bick, rushed to the podium. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”

    They only recognize the “dark god” when it exists in the other. A theology of hypocrisy.