There will be a showdown with Satan on Tuesday in the Missouri Supreme Court.

Not with Lucifer himself, but with a group called the Satanic Temple that is going to bat for a woman identified as "Mary Doe." She contends the state’s informed consent law, which required her to wait 72 hours before having an abortion in May 2015, violated her religious beliefs.

Specifically, the woman — identified in the case summary as a "Greene County resident" — says she was forced to view an ultrasound of her fetus and pledge that she read a booklet stating that the “life of every human being begins at conception.”

This despite the fact that Doe advised the doctors at the St. Louis clinic that "she adheres to principles of the Satanic temple and has sincerely held religious beliefs different from the information in the informed consent booklet," the case summary states.

Dozens of people spoke out Monday against a homework assignment made at an Elgin-area U46 school in which it was asserted Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths all believe in the same God.

One month after the assignment was criticized by U46 school board member Jeanette Ward, people who identified themselves as part of the Christian community attended the school board meeting Monday to add their opposition.

Several people attacked the assignment, quoting Bible and Quran verses to support their argument that Christians do not follow the same God as Muslims. Some of those who spoke live outside the U46 boundaries, including one person who came from Florida.

"To say that Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible are the same is simply absurd," said Art Ellingsen, a church pastor from Arlington Heights.

Pope Francis has accused victims of sexual abuse in Chile of slander, saying their attacks on a bishop who's accused of covering up the abuse amount to "calumny." The remarks triggered anger and demonstrations in Chile, where several churches have been firebombed in the past week.

On the last day of his visit to Chile, Francis set the simmering resentment some hold against the Catholic Church to a full boil with his defense of Bishop Juan Barros. The bishop has been hotly criticized ever since the pope appointed him in 2015. Barros was the protégé of Rev. Fernando Karadima, a notorious disgraced priest who served in the southern city of Osorno and who was found guilty and dismissed in 2011 for abusing dozens of minors over a decades-long period beginning in the 1980s.

Karadima became the face of the church's sexual abuse scandal in Chile. And his victims say they believe Barros knew about the priest's abuse but did nothing to stop it or report it. As recently as this week, Barros has denied witnessing any abuse.

In trying to reconcile his church with its followers over decades of sexual abuse, the pope has embraced a "zero tolerance" policy. When a Chilean journalist asked Francis about Barros, the Associated Press reports, Francis replied, "The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I'll speak."

James Mountain "Jim" Inhofe or 'Senator Snowball' (born 17 November 1934) is the batshit wingnut who currently serves as the senior Senator from the state of Oklahoma. God help them.

He is one of the leading global warming deniers in Congress, and is well known for having called it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He is also one of the Republican Party's leaders in the culture wars, and is bucking to be a candidate for the Légion des Crèches Américain with crossed Tannenbaums in the War on Christmas. This should come as no surprise considering that he's a member of the fundamentalist bloc called The Family.

In the hours following the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Inhofe made a statement on TV that pissed off a lot of federal employees. When asked about casualties, he said that he doubted that there would be many because, since the federal offices opened at 9 a.m., most of the employees would probably still be somewhere else drinking coffee.[3] (The bombing occurred at 9:02 a.m.) However, when Bill Clinton said that the demagogy on conservative talk radio contributed greatly to this act of domestic terrorism — a claim that Clinton reiterated on the 15th anniversary of the event[4] — Inhofe was outraged both times because he thought that Clinton was trying to politicize the bombing.

Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written, spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about itself.

So, as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live, and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head on.

On the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.

We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy.

I've long suspected the essential fact about Mr. Bush is that God was his 12-step program. At the age of 40, Mr. Bush beat a drinking problem by surrendering to a powerful religious experience, reinforced by Bible study with friends. This kind of born-again epiphany is common in much of America -- the red-state version of psychotherapy -- and it creates the kind of faith that is not beset by doubt because the believer knows his life got better in the bargain.

There are lots of ways to describe Mr. Bush's religion. By church affiliation, he is a Methodist. In theological terms he would be called a pietist, referring to a tradition in which religion is more a matter of the heart than the intellect. One of his fellow believers describes Mr. Bush's Bible study milieu as ''small-group evangelicalism.'' However labeled, Mr. Bush's faith entails a direct relationship between the believer and God. It does not provide a pope, or any other intermediate authority figure.

...

How his faith influences policy is harder to tell. People who know Mr. Bush say his religion tells you more about the way he makes certain decisions than about the outcome. One adviser, who does not share the president's religious views, said: ''Once you see something as belonging in the moral realm, you have a strong desire to act in such a way that you can live with your conscience.'' Even people who know Mr. Bush are not always sure how much issues are shaped by his conscience and how much by the political calculation that this White House has refined to high science.

His advocacy of faith-based social programs, for example, clearly grows from his conviction, based on personal experience, that religion can bring an extra charisma to problems like drug abuse. If that also happens to win him religious votes and to coincide with the Republican aversion to government social programs, so much the better for Mr. Bush.

“I know that you’re Catholic, as am I, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans in the Congress are not willing to stand with the poor and working class as evidenced in the recent debates on health care and the anticipated tax reform,” Jordan said. “So, I’d like to ask you: how do you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed as should we be?”

“Sister, this may come as a surprise to you but I completely agree with you,” he said, as sister Jordan stared at him stone-faced. “Where we may disagree is on how to achieve that goal. We exercise prudential judgment in practicing our faith. For me — for the poor that’s key to the Catholic faith. That means mobility, economic growth, equality of opportunity.”

He went on to add: “I think we need to change our approach on fighting poverty. Instead of measuring success on how much money we spend or how many programs we create or how many people on those programs, let’s measure success and poverty on outcomes.”

While initially purporting to fight against government oppression, the LRA allegedly turned against Kony's own supporters, supposedly to "purify" the Acholi people and turn Uganda into a theocracy.[2] Kony proclaims himself the spokesperson of God and a spirit medium and claims he is visited by a multinational host of 13 spirits, including a Chinese phantom.[2] Ideologically, the group is a syncretic mix of mysticism, Acholi nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism, and claims to be establishing a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments and local Acholi tradition.[sources 1]

Kony has been accused by government entities of ordering the abduction of children to become child soldiers and sex slaves.[20] 66,000 children became soldiers, and 2 million people were displaced internally from 1986 to 2009.[21] Kony was indicted in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, but he has evaded capture.[22] Kony has been subject to an Interpol Red Notice at the request of the ICC since 2006.[4] Since the Juba peace talks in 2006, the LRA no longer operate in Uganda. Sources claim that they are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), or South Sudan.[23] In 2013, Kony was reported to be in poor health, and Michel Djotodia, president of the CAR, claimed he was negotiating with Kony to surrender.[24]

FaithLeaks, a young transparency organization focused on religious communities, published its first big trophy this week: a collection of 33 letters and documents from an internal investigation into alleged sexual abuse within a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Like other whistle-blower organizations, FaithLeaks provides sources the ability to anonymously submit sensitive documents, which the site then posts publicly. FaithLeaks uses SecureDrop, an encrypted open-source system that is also used by media outlets including the New York Times and ProPublica. SecureDrop uses the anonymizing Tor network to facilitate submissions that leave no trace online. Founded by two former Mormons in November, FaithLeaks believes that “increased transparency within religious organizations results in fewer untruths, less corruption, and less abuse.”

The documents released this week span from 1999 to 2012, and they’re devastating. They include details about accusations by three women against one church member. The first case involves allegations made by the man’s adult daughter, who accused him of sexual and physical abuse that began when she was 5 years old. (Names have been redacted in all the FaithLeaks documents.) Another daughter and an unrelated woman later came forward to make abuse accusations against the same man; the second daughter said her father had begun to “fondle and touch” her at the age of 3, and began raping her at 8.