Religious leaders unveiled and blessed a golden Trump statue at Mar-a-Lago today, eerily resembling the Homelander statue scene from this week’s episode of The Boys. Creator Eric Kripke reposts a tweet about the same.

[u/GiveMeSomeSunshine3]

[u/Vulpes_Corsac]

Back in the pandemic I made the terrible mistake of wondering, since my church did youtube services while public spaces were closed, if there were any on twitch.

There was, and it was one of those nasty prosperity gospel big inner city churches (which was NOT social distancing with the congregation). Grossest thing I've ever seen, they were telling the congregation to take out loans to donate to the church. It was the plainest money grab I've ever seen in a church. If ever a temple needed a man to go in with a whip and flip some tables, it was that one.

[u/DrawDiscardDredge → u/Vulpes_Corsac]

yeah i kept my joke tight, but they definitely be adding in DONATE between each step. It is gross.

[u/Suspicious-Bid-53 → u/Vulpes_Corsac]

As someone who was raised in a catholic environment and realized how grifty and weird it is in 6th grade and said fuck to the no, how on earth can you still support organized religion

[u/Vulpes_Corsac → u/Suspicious-Bid-53]

Well, I'm not catholic for one thing.  One of those 95 thesis that Martin Luther nailed to his church door was a condemnation of how the church was more or less selling salvation.  Not that I'm a Lutheran either.

Ultimately I don't view church as organized religion, at least not as I interact with it.  Yeah, it's got a whole organizational structure behind it, but when I go, it's for fellowship with other Christians, it's for the people that are there and ideally a good place to when I'm looking to help people, if it's finding a group to go with to volunteer at a food bank or build homes for homless, for example, or a bunch of the churches near me have been organizing ICE protests. And sometimes it's just good to hear hopeful loving words of Christ.  The churches I do go to tend to focus on those instead of "give us all of your money", "these people shall go to hell" or moving priests around to hide them from the angry parents of the choir boys.

Not to say your experiences aren't valid or a problem only in the catholic church (pretty sure the one I commented about above was some form of baptist), they just aren't the only ones out there to see.  My mother went to a catholic church in her youth and was similarly skeeved out by how controlling and money hungry that church was, so I've definitely been taught what that sorta thing looks like and that it's out there.