Posted by:
anybody
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)
Date: January 12, 2024 06:54PM
Believe whatever the cult leader says -- even if it doesn't make sense, right?
/s
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234870/Abstract
This article investigates the response to the coronavirus crisis by Evangelical Christian nationalists in the USA. The article outlines the curious mediaverse of religious nationalism—its post-truth and fake news aspects in particular—links religious nationalism to American exceptionalism, and analyzes conflicts between secular and religious authorities. Drawing upon some lessons from the past, the article addresses the wider implications of Christian nationalism on American politics, and capitalist ideology, as it has been played out virally in the corporate media. The article shows that the ideological underpinnings of evangelical Christianity prevent its proponents from understanding the virus in an historical and materialist manner and points toward more epistemically sound approaches to relationships between science and religion. It concludes that privatization, austerity capitalism, and ‘gig economy’ need to be replaced by socialist alternatives and seeks inspiration in theory and practice of Marxism and South American liberation theology.
"Approximately 40% of American adults are biblical apocalypticists and believe that Jesus will, or likely will, return to earth by 2050 (Dias 2020). From the time that the coronavirus crisis first appeared on the shores of God’s favorite piece of real estate, it became clear that it is comorbid with Christian nationalism; or to put it another way, Christian nationalism seems to be a co-occurring condition relative to pandemics that reach the shores of America the Beautiful (McLaren and Jandrić 2020a). Some religious scholars, in fact, are in agreement that there is a two-way relationship between religion and nationalism, a mutual reification and buttressing. As Grzymala-Busse (2019) explains:
[i]n this relationship, religiosity defines the nation—and nationalism reinforces religiosity, leading to unusually high rates of national identification with a given religion and high rates of religiosity itself. This mutual reinforcement characterizes countries where religious participation and religious nationalism are both high, such as the Philippines, Poland, Ireland until the late 1990s, or the United States. (Grzymala-Busse 2019)
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/12/hydroxychloroquine-covid-increase-chance-death-trumpMalaria drug Trump touted as Covid cure increased chance of death – study
"People who took an anti-malaria treatment that Donald Trump touted as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic and waning days of his presidency were 11% more likely to die from the virus, according to a new scientific study.
"The study’s authors – who published their findings in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal – also estimated that nearly 17,000 people in six different countries, including the US, died after contracting Covid-19 and taking the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine.
"Doctors who prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 at the height of activity restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus did so off-label and without evidence that there was any clinical benefit, as the authors of the new study noted. The study’s conclusions “illustrate the hazard of drug repurposing with low-level evidence for the management of future pandemics”, its authors added.
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