Tara Westover on growing up as a Mormon survivalist

Author Tara Westover discusses being raised by Mormon survivalist parents with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

Is the Trump presidency a religious cult? | Reza Aslan

Are fundamentalist Christians a dangerous religious cult? Possibly. The controversial author and religious scholar Reza Aslan posits that President Donald Trump has much of his evangelical fan-base believing that he's somehow been anointed by God to become President.

Nevermind the Russian election scandal, his affairs with porn stars and unwarranted sexual acts towards women, or his inability to remember even a single Bible verse when asked. Evangelical Christians are abandoning their core moral beliefs to follow, as Reza suggests, someone who exhibits every trademark of a cult leader.

Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the previous election. That’s a record. That’s more white evangelicals than voted for George W. Bush—and George W. Bush was a white evangelical.

This makes no sense to people, especially when you consider that Trump is not just the most irreligious president in modern history, that his entire worldview makes a mockery of core Christian values like humility and empathy and care for the poor; That this individual who couldn’t even name a single verse in the bible when asked to do so, and yet - and yet - received a record number of votes by white evangelicals.

Scholars of religion—normal, rational, people—have been trying to figure out why. Why? What happened?

And I think that there’s a couple of things to keep in mind.

Number one, it’s white evangelicals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but 67 percent of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton.

Now, these are people who believed the exact same thing, whose only real difference is that.. is the color of their skin.

So let’s not ignore the fact that there is a racial element to this support.

Jim Wallace, the head of the Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, said it best when he said that these white evangelicals “acted more white than they did evangelical.” And I think he’s right. The second reason I think has to do with the pernicious influence of something called the prosperity gospel, which has gripped the imaginations of white evangelicals.
This is that version of Christianity preached by these charlatans like Joel Olstein and T.D. Jakes, the essential gist of which is that God wants you to drive a Bentley, that what Jesus really wants for you is material prosperity—and indeed that’s how you know God has blessed you, is by your material prosperity.

Many white evangelicals looked at Donald Trump, and what they saw was a wealthy man. And that wealth, as far as they were concerned, was just a sign of God’s blessings.
And so that freed Trump from having to do what every other candidate, certainly every other Republican candidate for president has had to do, and that is: actually prove his spiritual bonafides. Trump never had to do that. All he had to do was just keep talking about how rich he was. And for a large swathe of white evangelicals that was enough.

Thirdly, Donald Trump did something that no other president, not even any Republican president courting the evangelical vote ever did. He expressly promised secular power to these white evangelical groups.

In his speeches to them and in the conferences that he had, both private and public, he very clearly and very explicitly said that if they voted for him that he would give them “their power back,” even if he didn’t agree with their pet causes that he would just allow them to have those causes.

And you can see as president he’s talking now about removing, for instance, the Johnson Amendment, which is an amendment that prohibits preachers and churches from actually engaging directly in politics and preaching politics from the pulpit. It’s why they get to keep their tax break. No one has ever thought about removing this requirement until Donald Trump.
And now he is very seriously moving towards allowing churches to take part directly in political activism as churches.
But none of this, none of this explains the most important phenomenon about white evangelicals in America, and that is this: In the span of a single election cycle, white evangelicals have gone from being the group in America that is most likely to say that a politician’s morality matters to the group that is now least likely to say that.
Atheists in America think that a politician’s morality matters more than white evangelicals in America do—White evangelicals who continue to refer to themselves as value voters.

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Rob Riggle On Reading The Bible

Opening to a random page of the Bible is not for the faint of heart.



Pete Holmes and "The Pete Holmes Show."

QI Unaired: Why do people still believe in bronze age mythology?

Alan Davis and Stephen Fry get all worked up over how so many people still believe in bronze age mythology.



Allan Davis is much more on point than Stephen Fry.

Stephen Fry is just angry about people jugde him for being gay.

This excerpt was cut from QI series B, episode 4 (Bible). The panellists are Jeremy Clarkson, Barry Cryer, Jeremy Hardy, and of course Alan Davies.


QI Unaired: Why do people still believe in bronze age mythology?

Richard Dawkins - Late Late Show

Richard Dawkins on The Late Late Show on RTE1 in Ireland. It was broadcast around the time of the publication of his book, The God Delusion.


Richard Dawkins - Late Late Show Part 1 of 3


Richard Dawkins - Late Late Show 2 of 3


Richard Dawkins - Late Late Show 3 of 3

David Mitchell's Christmas - Would I Lie to You?

David: "Aged 9, I undertook my first ever acting role as Joseph in the school Nativity, a performance described in my end-of-year report as 'world-weary'." Season 10 Christmas Special. With Sara Pascoe, Richard Osman, Chris Kamara and Tom Courtenay. I'm a huge fan of the show so if you have a specific clip in mind, leave a comment below and I'll upload it. - Jon.

How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus

Americans are inherently a little crazy. But now the crazy is being enabled by politicians in the White House and by the internet. How exactly did it get so bad?


How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus



| Kurt Andersen

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Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue. We were started by the Puritans in New England who wanted to create and did create a Christian utopia and theocracy as they waited for the eminent second coming of Christ and the end of days. And in the south by a bunch of people who were convinced, absolutely convinced that this place they’d never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia and they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced the facts and the evidence and decided that they weren’t going to get rich overnight there. So that was the beginning. And then we’ve had centuries of buyer-beware charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical quackery to an extreme degree and increasingly exotic extravagant implausible religions over and over again from Mormonism to Christian Science to Scientology in the last century.

And we’ve had this antiestablishment "I’m not going to trust the experts, I’m not going to trust the elite" from our character from the beginning. Now all those things came together and were super-charged in the 1960s when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. Then a generation later when the Internet came along, giving each of those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure. We had entertainment, again for the last couple hundred years, but especially in the last 50 years permeating all the rest of life, including Presidential politics from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Ragan to Bill Clinton. So the thing was set up for Donald Trump to exploit all these various American threads and astonishingly become president, but then you look at this history and it’s like no we should have seen this coming.

The idea of America from the beginning was that you could come here, reinvent yourself, be anybody you want, live any way you wanted, believe any thing you wanted. For the first few hundred years, like everywhere else in the world, celebrity and fame were a result of some kind of accomplishment or achievement, sometimes not a great accomplishment or achievement, but you did something in the world to earn renown. America really was the key place that invented the modern celebrity culture, which was, beginning a century ago, more and more not necessarily about having won a war or led a people or written a great book or painted a great painting, but about being famous, fame for its own sake.

We created that, we created Hollywood, we created the whole culture industry and that then became what I call the fantasy industrial complex where, certainly in the last few decades more than ever more than anybody thought possible before, fame itself, however you’ve got it, was a primary goal for people. And again, as so many of the things I talk about in Fantasyland, not uniquely to America but more here than anywhere. And then you get reality television, which was this unholy hybrid of the fictional and the real for the last now generation where that blur between what’s real and what’s not is pumped into our media stream willy-nilly. There are now more reality shows on television than there were shows on television 20 years ago. And that’s another way for nobodies to become famous overnight. YouTube, another way for nobodies to become a famous overnight for doing almost nothing or nothing.

8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown: Christmas Special

Sean Lock and Johnny Vegas go up against Jon Richardson and Katherine Ryan, while David O'Doherty joins Susie Dent in the Dictionary Corner. Jimmy Carr hosts and Rachel Riley takes charge of the numbers.



8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown S08E01 Christmas Special (8 December 2015)

QI - Kris Kringle

What year was Jesus born? (Answer in show... 34 min.)

Stephen Fry gets into the Christmas spirit with Jo Brand, Brendan O'Carroll, Phill Jupitus and Alan Davies.



QI XL K Episode 14 - Kris Kringle

Bible Interpretation: Upside Down

In an upside-down world, with upside-down understandings of morality and of the value of love,... their interpretation of the bible and the debate about its relevance sure sounds familiar, in an upside-down-ish kind of way. [Read on...]



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Listening to a radio discussion from a few years back featuring Richard Dawkins on the morality of the old testament (Premier Christian Radio (UK) "Unbelievable?" program: https://goo.gl/mg6lU6) and what that meant for the value of the bible generally as a source of morality, I was struck by how the bible is so fundamentally muddled within itself, and indeed such a useless source of guidance on matters of morality, that it would be about as much use in a crazy world that valued hatred over love, violence over compassion, and death over life.

Insert the bible into a world where the goal is to cause the maximum misery and suffering to one another, and it fits right in: and the debate sounds almost exactly the same; just... upside down.

Ray Comfort meets the Evangelist's Nightmare

Ray Comfort's ministry hits a snag. It's all going so well, when suddenly....



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Do you Believe the Bible is true?

Do you Believe the Bible is true?



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Aired July 29, 2009 - Episode 8, Final episode of Season 3. Get season 3 on DVD from the online ABC store.

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Video by The Chaser's War on Everything. - Do you Believe the Bible is true?

Evangelicals: Chasers war on everything Evangelicals

Christianity and Christian Televangelist



* Mike Murdock, Televangelist
* Benny Hinn, Televangelist

Video by Chasers War on Everything

Economic Development: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

State and local governments offer large financial incentives to attract employers to their part of the country. John Oliver explains what communities get, or often don't get, in return.

Ark Encounter, Operated by Answers in Genesis a young Earth Christian creationism group.



Last Week Tonight on HBO, November 2017

Jim Jefferies - God is drunk at a party

God Responds To Bill O'Reilly

The disgraced Fox News pundit is 'mad at God' following his latest sexual misconduct allegations. Stephen looks to the skies to get the Lord Almighty's reaction.



The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Oct. 2017

Pat Robertson Blames Vegas Shooting On Disrespect For Trump, The National Anthem And God

Pat Robertson blames the mass shooting in Las Vegas on disrespect toward President Trump, the national anthem and God.

Glenn Beck & God Have a Lot in Common - ABS #135

Bible study. The Mormon Glenn Beck references are real popular with the kids in 2017.



Hugo's Twitter- @HugoReloaded

Jake's Twitter- @BibleReloaded

Roy Moore Pulled Out A Gun And Won Alabama's GOP Primary

Homosexsual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one´s ability to describe it.

Quote by Roy Moore. February 15, 2002

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When vying for Jeff Sessions' seat in the Senate, it doesn't hurt to whip out an elf-sized pistol.



The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS 2017

September 23, 2017 Doomsday...Except It Isn't. The Glaring Problem is...

It's Doomsday week. You didn't know? Google it. Either way...Don't get all excited and sell your knife collection just yet. I've seen a lot of contortions of logic before when it comes to Doomsday predictions and the Bible, but apparently now it's allowed to just tear out multiple chapters to make it fit. This is a long topic with a lot of points, so take the time.