Among the things that religion poisons is digestion.
I’ve read that sub-Saharan Africa (along with the Islamic lands of the Middle East) is one of the most religious places on Earth. Apparently it’s not the pre-colonial religions that hold sway, but Christianity, due to the incessant intrusions of Jebus missionaries. Regardless, an article from The Daily Mail (and yes, the facts are verified by the Christian Post) reports another insane manifestation of Christianity, apparently devised by the minister to amuse himself and demonstrate his power.
A South African preacher, Pastor Lesego Daniel of Rabboni Centre Ministries, has been preaching to his congregation that “humans can eat anything to feed their bodies and survive on whatever they choose to eat.”
Well, I’ll construe that statement as showing conflict between science and religion. Daniel tells his congregation that grass-eating will “bring them closer to God,”
Here’s the good reverend:
There are of course “testimonies” about the healing power of grass-eating:
Doreen Kgatle, 27, of Ga-rankuwa, suffered a stroke two years ago.
‘I could not walk but soon after eating the grass, as the pastor had ordered, I started gaining strength and an hour later I could walk again,’ said Kgatle.
And of course, his credulous flock (an appropriate term) heads for the lawn and start munching the greenery:
The results are absolutely predictable:
Well, I suppose it’s less harmful than handling snakes. But it has, according to the Mail, created a backlash of outraged comments on the ministry’s Facebook page. Pastor Daniel takes it in stride:
The Times Live reported that during a service of at least 1,000 people in a marquee Daniel screamed ‘sleep’ and six people went to sleep.
He ordered other congregants to slap and trample on them, tut the sleepers remain rigid and unresponsive until he ordered them to wake up.
‘You can leave them like this for six months. I love this, I don’t want to be bored. You can even make police go to sleep when they come to arrest you,’ he said.
Apparently dispelling personal boredom is one of the pastor’s goals.
Below, in a video from 2012, we see Pastor Daniel apparently rescuing a woman from a “demonic pregnancy”. First she’s pregnant with Satan’s spawn—then she’s not! The demon gone—in seconds!
The YouTube notes, written of course by the Rabboni Centre, say this:
Here we see God’s work at hand through the man of God as this woman receives her deliverance from a demonic pregnancy. The evil one has been put to shame and God has rescued her from the grasp of the evil one. We rejoice with her in this victory in Christ.
Another photo of the good Reverend, looking a bit smug:
This is all a bit amusing to us heathens of course, who can laugh at how crazy religious people can behave, but remember that religion is most powerful among the most disaffected, and I suspect that these people aren’t in a high socioeconomic bracket. Were they not busy eating grass and catering to superstition, perhaps they’d use that time to work toward better living conditions.
The pastor should be made to eat grass!
Reblogged this on THE HORNS OF ATHEISM.
They’re taking that whole “sheep” metaphor a bit to far, I think.
Baaahmen.
Naah. These are Christians remember.
Sheep — the dumbest mammals known to zoology.
I’m not so sure about that. You ever met a Tea Party Republican?
b&
Republicans are mammals?
(Wanders off muttering about lizards…)
Good point….
b&
I hope at least one person from this congregation takes this as evidence that you shouldn’t listen to holy men when it comes to not only dietary advice but ALL advice.
Clearly their leader is a sociopath, easily bored with the uncontrollable need to manipulate others.
Oops that last sentence lacks an “and”. It should read, “easily bored and with the uncontrollable need to manipulate others.”
Perhaps saying that you shouldn’t listen to holy men when it comes to ALL advice is a bit hasty. Just as the Bible is not a science textbook, this guy is not a dietician. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of giving excellent counsel on other matters. In fact, if I wanted to learn how to con/bilk/decieve my fellow human beings, a holy man would likely be the first person I’d seek out for advice.
Ah yes, good point!
A “demonic pregnancy”? I wonder who got her demonically pregnant….
Why, a DEMON, of course; didn’t you read what it says? Now- go eat some grass!
You do realize that that command has an entirely different meaning to people in Colorado than in Africa, no?
…not that I have any idea where Matt is from, but we do have an international audience, so some classification might be in order. And at least family and genus as well, to be more specific.
b&
Careful – that Colorado grass can kill you know! 🙂
Who knows? Perhaps Pastor Daniel meant *that* kind of grass.
From what I understand, “killer weed” isn’t actually deadly. Then again, I have no experience with such things…though I understand there’re others here who do….
b&
Is it the stuff that killed Dylan?
No, you’re thinking of the stuff that killed McCartney.
It was a reference to the movie Paul (which is a pretty good comedy and includes some great atheist stuff as a plot point).
The scene consists of Paul lighting a joint and asking if anyone else wants some.
“Careful, that’s the stuff that killed Dylan.”
“Bob Dylan’s not dead!”
“Isn’t he?”
And then the creationist-turned-atheist woman takes a hit and proceeds to go through every single stoner behavioral stereotype possible before losing consciousness. In a 30 second timespan.
I know. Her name was Ruth. It’s a good job that the script allowed Paul to copy all of his accumulated knowledge to Ruth’s mind before he restored her sight, otherwise her acceptance of Paul would have been rather different.
I hear that demons are quite well endowed.
The Angels, well, not so much.
And Jesus, according to a well informed source, had a rather tiny penis. (Mary Magdalene…..who said that Judas, however, took her to ‘places beyond this Earth’.)
Unfortunately this kind of credulity is the same as is exploited by Matthius Rath and also the ‘sex with a virgin cures HIV’ proponents. Those ‘possessed’ by the likes of Daniel need help not the kind of abuse he mete out.
It’s also the sort of credulity we can find in countries which contain people who embrace alternative medicine, “natural” cures, and the belief in the power of belief. If Deepok Chopra or Dr. Oz started extolling the benefits of eating grass, I suspect a lot of folks would start munching and praising its benefits.
When they vomit it up, that just means it’s purging them of the “toxins” of modern life. When scientists attack it, then that just means that it must be very spiritual.
It’s just a different form of exorcism. Eat some grass and weeds (no, not that kind!) and the demons leave your body just as fast as your cash leaves your wallet.
Cheers,
b&
Or when they vomit it up, they’ll blame it on the grass of the modern world. If it were paleo grass, it wouldn’t cause vomiting!
You so need to read my earlier post on this page about Jesus’s true species….
b&
Oh yes bosei! You may be on to something there but I don’t know if the two species were around at the same time….no matter, you can just wish that all up with religion.
A lot of folks already do, right down to rationalizing the “purge”. “Detox” programs/diet plans sell like hotcakes and are insanely expensive. They only seem less irrational because you don’t have to eat the stuff right off the ground, but it’s basically the same nonsense: “you must do this to get ‘right'”.
The similarity extends to the tangible results, too: many people become very ill from following “detox” programs.
(I mean aside from the “ill” that is a euphemism for vigorous evacuation. Things like complications of dehydration and malnutrition…)
No kidding! I had to prepare for a colonscopy and the stupid instructions didn’t tell me specifically to drink sugar drinks just to not drink only water. Well, I had tea with stevia in it and a few ginger ale which I didn’t want to keep drinking because they are carbonated and make you feel icky.
So, my blood sugar got really low and I almost passed out three times while breaking into a cold sweat. I actually had paramedics in my house at one point. Aye carrumba! Then I threw up on the way to the appointment and even though the nurse gave me a drip to hydrate me, several times afterwards while having a migraine.
I actually thought I was dying. What did I think about during this all? Everyone’s stories here about NDE LOL!
So anything that purges you is EVIL!!!!
For next time…lots of Gatorade and chicken broth. But be sure to run it past the doctor in advance, of course.
b&
Yeah, I figured out later that I should’ve had gatorade. I should’ve researched it because there were lots of people who were talking about this happening to them. This is the first time I didn’t do my own research & just read the directions from the doctor. Never again! Luckily, I don’t have to have another for 10 years.
Personally, I’m hoping the procedure is non-invasive by then….
b&
Me too though being sedated was the best part.
@ Ben–But the prep will still be the worst part.
Ha ha! I said the same thing but focused on the best part.
Would the prep still be necessary for a non-invasive variety? I should hope so…otherwise, what’s the point?
b&
Hope so? Sadist! 😉
Ngaaahk! Brain fart — in the worst possible way!
“I should hope NOT! NOT! NOT! NOT!”
Sorry…must have been insufficiently necessary or something — rather like YHWH as Erik is in the middle of nomming him.
b&
You should hope so, or not?
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the regular contents of the large intestine obscure the view, no matter how it’s obtained.
Maybe god wanted them to get sick?
Just so he could heal them in 1-2 days with prayer.
Without prayer, it might take as long as 48 hours.
Exactly! You got it.
This is just funny.
Create a real problem to be solved by an imaginary being. Brilliant
“You can even make police go to sleep when they come to arrest you, he said”.
That’s something every religion needs.
Indeed. Perhaps the Catholic Church should look into that.
If he keeps up with this, he might be wanting to be working on that, “Put the police to sleep when they come to arrest you” thing…
Were he a Catholic, would he expect some kind of transubstantiation? After all, all flesh is grass…
/@
Guy looks like a pimp in the last photograph.
Pimping for Jebus…
A pimp for sure, but those are some nice threads! He must be making some serious money doing whatever he is doing.
Wow! That makes him just like his American counterparts, huh…?
I thought he looked like a rapper.
“The pastor should be made to eat grass!”
I was wondering if the good pastor lead his flock by example.
A local church has sign which titles the pastor as the “Shepherd-in-Charge”.
Egotistical maniac. Crazy…but then sheep do eat grass…
I learned something. If someone poisons me, I will run out into the yard and eat some of it.
It probably works for cats & dogs!
Jesus just spoke to me.
And he said that Pastor Daniel is so full of Blessed Spirit that it has given his genitals great strength. Such great strength, in fact, that they are capable of supporting the weight of his entire body.
And Jesus wants Pastor Daniel’s flock to observe this miracle with their own eyes, and even to participate in it; to have no room for doubt, they should be the ones to tie the knots and hoist him up.
There is, of course, a caution for Pastor Daniel: if his faith waivers, the Blessed Spirit will leave him and take his strength away. Only if his belief remains pure will he pass this test. Should he even be slightly bruised, this is evidence of his lack of faith.
Once lost, his faith can never be regained. Should he fail the test, he should never again be trusted to speak on Jesus’s behalf, as I have just done.
Cheers,
b&
Yeah. They can disagree with you — but they better not disagree with Jesus!
Right — the both of ’em (Jesus and Jose) have my back on this one. Between the three of us (really, just the two of them), we’ll be able to hold down Pastor Daniel for the administration of the test. And, believe me, you do not want to piss off Jesus, even if he really is a softie at heart. Dude was a Ranger and did more than his fair share in Afghanistan. Owns his own home remodeling business, and Jose is his ex-Marine foreman.
Cheers,
b&
I love the smell of nematodes in the morning.
Parasitic ones? On grass? In Africa? Lord protect us!
Attributed to Desmond Tutu:
“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. The missionaries said “Let us pray”. So we closed our eyes and prayed. And when we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land”.
Reblogged this on The Road.
Graze the Lord!
Sorry.
Lettuce prey.
b&
Reed your bible.
Yup — it’s got plenty of sax. Even more violins, too.
Still needs more cowbell, though….
b&
Rye would i want to do that?
Because you were feeling glumey?
That’s a Poa excuse for a pun.
+1 Good one!
I take it all back.
Pastor Daniel’s revelation coupled with new research reveals a shocking truth.
Jesus’s ethnicity has long been debated but never conclusively determined. We now know that this is because it was incorrectly assumed that he was the same species as us: Homo sapiens sapiens. But, thanks again to Pastor Daniel and Gabriel A. Macho et al., we now know that Jesus, in fact was a member of Paranthropus boisei instead.
Popular press coverage here.
Cheers,
b&
Jesus was brown haired and blue eyed and spoke perfect English.
My Baptist preacher told me that.
So, it’s true.
Praise Jeezuus!!!!!! Praise his holy fucking name!!!!!!
Spoke perfect English before it even existed as a language? He needs to add ‘time traveller’ to his CV.
In Africa?
Well, it could have escaped from the Ark….
b&
I’m a South African citizen, and believe me, you can see “miracles” being performed live in churches every Sunday on Soweto TV.
People here are ultra-religious, and their Christianity is often mixed with African traditional religions. It boggles the mind.
Christianity itself is the ultimate “stone soup” of religions. Right from the very beginning, it’s never been anything other than one continuous syncretism. Jesus’s own biography is nothing but a patchwork quilt of universally-loved Pagan myths. The philosophy was lifted wholesale from Philo of Alexandria, who himself took it from the Hellenists. The rituals come from everywhere, with the Eucharist being Mithraic. And, of course, the back-story is Jewish (in the same sense that Orpheus is Thracian).
As soon as the Romans started latching onto this new Jewish-flavored Greek mystery cult, they immediately grafted on all of the trappings of Roman Paganism, including ancestor worship (the veneration of saints) and all the iconography and symbolism that most of us instantly recognize today as Catholic.
Missionaries everywhere continued the same practice. Anybody in the American Southwest is plenty familiar with the Native American influences on Christianity. Santeria is another notable example, though decidedly less orthodox.
It is no exaggeration to state that, were you to remove everything that isn’t original from Christianity, you’d be left with absolutely nothing at all.
Cheers,
b&
I bet that’s true of most other religions (discounting small cults that were formed by single individuals, like Scientology).
It was certainly true in the ancient world. And even the more novel of inventions heavily draw on the surrounding popular culture. Egyptology was all the rage when Joe Smith came up with his most famous scam, and L. Ron Hubbard just stole from his own earlier SF works.
b&
yeah – I lived in South Africa for many years; had many long and serious conversations about demons and tokoloshes with my Christian neighbours
I’d never heaad of a tokloloshe — had to look it up: “Tokoloshe or Hili … is a dwarf-like water sprite.”
Now I’m concerned that Jerry has been consorting with a potentially dangerous water sprite.
Tokoloshe Man was a hit for John Kongos in the UK in 1971. You can see it in Youtube.
And to show you what an old saddo I am, I never even knew it was covered by the Happy Mondays.
I may be worse than you that way: I’ve never heard of John Kongos or the Happy Mondays either. I have heard of Youtube and the UK.
From time to time fundamentalists in the United States express wonder and a kind of admiration for fundamentalists in Africa. If you’re looking for evidence of a full-scale willingness to believe in genuine everyday miracles, then it seems hard to beat the depth and scope you find in Africa — where such miracles subsequently seem to happen on a daily basis.
The admiration is sometimes tinged with envy. Why can’t that happen here? Must be that God withholds such regular evidence when there are so many skeptics around. Skeptics offend Him.
Iirc long ago an American Christian once came into Pharyngula with proof of God, soliciting our opinions on whether it wasn’t indeed truly convincing. He posted a link to a video of a preacher in Africa raising someone from the dead.
We couldn’t understand the language, but we could see a man in the congregation collapse, people huddled around him wailing and weeping while someone in a suit said something solemn — and then the minister comes over, starts chanting and gesticulating with great enthusiasm — and the man gets up! To an even more enthusiastic general reception! He was dead …and now he is NOT! You can watch it for yourself, and see.
Explain THAT, atheists!
Or rather, he wanted us to tell him that he had found something pretty remarkable — and seemed naive and simple enough to think perhaps we actually might. Crash course in Skepticism 101. As I recall, he wouldn’t tell us his age so the suggestion was made that he might be pretty young (11? 12?) and we were gentler back then.
Perhaps the preacher thought they needed help with fur balls?
Good grief…
Or he misunderstood what a grassroots movement was supposed to look like.
Hahaha
+1
I hope no one was injured, but we have all ‘worshiped the porcelain god’ at one time or another..:\
Yeah, but from gnawing the turf?
No, from drinking too much sacramental beer.
Or, in my recent case, from food poisoning. Bugger. At least if it’s caused by beer you had an enjoyable time getting that way.
Worshipped at the porcelain alter, yes, but I never called for Jesus, only O’Rourke.
It gives a whole new meaning to “lawnmower”…
I can push out my belly to look even more pregnant than that, and pull it in to look like a starving Buddha. No miracle needed and no demonic intervention involved.
Oops, he meant Wheatgrass, which is all the rage here in the US of A, where we trust our GoD’s spokespersons to get it right.
He should have told them to smoke grass
Yep – Durban Poison is the best, and it basically is local!
http://www.leafly.com/sativa/durban-poison
They need Puffed Grass. 100 million moo cows can’t be wrong.
The commercial starts around 3.00.
A charlatan in a shiny suit.
It’s like he’s wearing a neon sign–“I am a con man.”
Why doesn’t everyone see right through these jackals immediately? (Everyone, not just Africans.)
I had posted this earlier but this story seems a more appropriate place and I think worth repeating. A real gem!!
This story was told to us, first-hand by a good friend of ours here in Colorado at the New Year’s gathering a couple of days ago.
##### was a volunteer for many years at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Some conference was scheduled, and experts from far and wide were invited to be a part of a symposium. One guy was from East Africa, and. although I can’t recall what his expertise was, it doesn’t matter.
She picked him up at the Denver airport, and there he was, in a business suit, looking the ultimate professional. She didn’t want to presume, but decided to ask whether he might consider coming to her son’s high school class – a sort of cultural enrichment. He agreed.
The day came for the class visit, and he showed up in the full regalia of a Masai warrior. Cool first impression, eh? Anyway he gave his presentation, which went down very well, and, after an appreciative round of applause, he agreed to take questions.
One student asked “What do you think about the missionaries who are sent to your country?”.
Without hesitation, he said “Fuck ’em!”
I have spent a great deal of time with Maasais, Samburus and Rendiles (three “sister” tribes from the same root ethnicity) in my six lengthy (as opposed to short tourist) stays in Kenya, and have found them to be generally highly intelligent and savvy. One cannot force any individual from these three tribes to accept and do anything based on our western cultures against their will or desire. No way. But among those who have accepted such of their own free will and/or choice and have gone on to get a higher education, one can find outstanding surgeons, doctors, lawyers, engineers and scientists.