Pastor John van Sloten of Marda Loop Church in Calgary had been thinking about, in his view, the theology behind wearing a mask.
His basic premise was that if Jesus, who was God, took on a human body to mask his Godness for the sake of others, then Christians too should cover up their faces with a mask amid the pandemic.
So, he penned a column for a local newspaper and made it the subject of one of his sermons.
“I thought it was a pretty convincing theological argument,” van Sloten says. “But people just went nuts with it.”
Soon, the Facebook page for Marda Loop Church was flooded with angry commenters. One told van Sloten that he couldn’t possibly be a pastor with such beliefs. Another said he should be ashamed for “posting such nonsense.”
One commenter even posted a meme of Jesus displaying his middle finger to the reader.
“I thought that was creative,” van Sloten said. “A lot of it was repeating of the conspiracy theories that the whole masking thing is made up, that you’re drinking the Kool-Aid like the rest of liberal society.”
Comments flooded the Facebook page for Marda Loop Church in Calgary after Pastor John van Sloten wrote a column and preached a sermon on the theology behind wearing a mask. (Facebook)
Van Sloten said he’s received criticism, hate mail and even protests outside his church over the years, and has mostly ignored those instances that seemed like trolling.
But he said he’s also read about the advent of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon in American churches — and feels that churches in Canada should be carefully tracking its possible journey north.
“The Christian church has always been exposed to heresies and incorrect thinking historically from the get-go,” van Sloten said. “Heresies come and heresies go, and this is the heresy du jour. And I think we ought to treat it like that.”
An American conspiracy comes north
The QAnon conspiracy theory originated in 2017 on the imageboard 4chan after a user identified as “Q” claimed they had insider information on the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Through a series of anonymous posts, Q propagated the conspiracy that Trump was battling against a child-trafficking ring that included “deep state” government officials, prominent Democrats and members of Hollywood.
Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory include members from both secular and religious groups, and aren’t made up specifically of those people who participate in the Christian faith.
And though QAnon may have begun as a distinctly American conspiracy, its tentacles have since been attached to governments and notable individuals around the world.
“Prime Minister [Justin Trudeau] has been mentioned in Q drops since the start of QAnon,” said Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate at Concordia University who studies QAnon. “We have some significant influencers [based in Canada].
“Amazing Polly [a QAnon influencer based in Ontario] was at the root of the Wayfair conspiracy theory. It’s not like Canada is just taking the American aspect, but they’re adapting it to its own context.”
Typical QAnon conspiracies connected to Canada involve the belief that Trudeau is one of the “deep state elites” who need to be removed from office to “awaken and liberate” the country.
Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate at Concordia University in Montreal, says QAnon offers believers a symbolic resource that helps people explain why bad things are happening in the world. (Ted S. Warren, File/The Associated Press)
Growth among QAnon adherents within secular and religious communities is steady, and underpinned by different motivations, Argentino said.
But he said he expected there could be an easy path for the religious community to understand apocalyptic language in the political context, making it potentially easier for members to accept QAnon.
“[Religions and conspiracy theories] have this function where they permit the development of symbolic resources that enable people to define and address the problem of evil,” he said. “So whether you want to know why something is happening, whether you’re blessed or cursed — God or the devil — it’s the same thing with QAnon.
“This conspiracy theory is providing a mainstream narrative for things like a pandemic, or war, or child trafficking … It’s just a natural pathway for a lot of evangelicals in the U.S., especially considering how evangelicalism is closely linked to American politics.”
‘How could you believe this?’
When the pandemic started, Jessica DiSabatino, lead pastor at Calgary’s Journey Church, felt confident in keeping to one of her church’s “high values” — that not all members shared the same views, and that was OK.
But as lockdown dragged on and the church lost its face-to-face contact, she noticed some things that worried her.
On social media, DiSabatino watched as the debunked Plandemic video was retweeted and watched hundreds of times by people in her congregation.
Inevitably, DiSabatino began hearing of QAnon from people around her, and began to read more about it.
“There is like a religious fervour about it,” she said. “The more I read about it, it seems like a replacement religion, where everything has a reason.
“And I think people want to feel like they’re on the inner workings of something, particularly when we don’t have a lot of power.”
Jessica DiSabatino, lead pastor at Calgary’s Journey Church, says she feels she needs to confront conspiracy theories when they arise in her congregation, while still respecting those who believe them. (Submitted by Jessica DiSabatino/Google Maps)
Seeing posts emerge on social media about QAnon from her congregation, DiSabatino soon felt herself struck by a new feeling — was this going to cause fractures within her church community? Was all the work she had done being undone by this conspiracy?
DiSabatino could even feel herself getting angry. As friends in her life began voicing their openness to QAnon, she thought to herself — “How could you believe this? What is wrong with you?”
“These are some of my friends who I love. And what I’ve had to say to them, in the end, is this cannot define our friendship,” she said.
Looking for ‘the big story’
DiSabatino soon realized her own anger toward what she viewed as someone’s irrational beliefs would drive a further wedge between them — and didn’t begin to uncover what might be motivating those beliefs.
“I don’t think I can say nothing,” she said. “But I also think it’s a very personal thing — so I’m not going to get up and preach a message about why I think QAnon is crazy.
“Partly, because I think different people come to conspiracy theories for different reasons. I think sometimes you’ve got hurt that is unimaginable in your life.”
People of faith are [looking] for a big story that explains why things are the way they are.– John van Sloten, pastor of Marda Loop Church in Calgary
Van Sloten said conspiracy theories and church can often fill the same void, because they’re trading on the same faith and desire for an authoritative voice — something exacerbated in a time rife with turmoil and anxiety.
“People of faith are also looking for a big story that explains why things are the way they are,” he said. “So again, these desires — these good desires, in all of us, I believe, as a theologian — they’re ultimately meant to be directed to a grand narrator who can be trusted, who is authoritative.
“They’re being co-opted by conspiracy theories, by people who want control by making cognitive shortcuts and just getting an answer because they’ve got to get an answer soon.”
Conspiracists functioning almost as prophets
Colin Toffelmire, associate professor of Old Testament at Ambrose University College in Calgary, says there has been a historical vulnerability to conspiracy thinking in some versions of evangelicalism or fundamentalist Christianity.
“I think that’s related to the history of how some Christians in North America have thought about history and science, especially,” Toffelmire said.
“For example, there’s this long-standing objection in evangelical subculture to really well-accepted scientific theories, like the theory of evolution by natural selection.”
There has been a long-standing objection in evangelical subculture to some well-accepted scientific theories, like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, said Colin Toffelmire, associate professor of Old Testament at Ambrose University College in Calgary. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Those objections — centred in versions of Christianity that believe that everything in the Bible is exactly historically and scientifically accurate — could make certain individuals suspicious of mainstream ideas in science and history, Toffelmire said.
“Some of that is kind of hard-baked into some versions of North American evangelical subculture,” he said. “And so that is, I think, almost like an entry point. That suspicion of authority becomes an entry point for very strange conspiracy theories, like the QAnon conspiracy theory.”
Joel Thiessen, professor of sociology at Ambrose, said though churches should be aware of the rise of QAnon, he wasn’t sure that it was yet a prominent concern in Canada.
But taking an example from the United States, he said it appears that more conservative Christian groups tend to gravitate toward conspiracy, potentially because they may feel they are becoming marginalized in secular society.
“[They feel] they are losing positions of power that conservative religious groups have historically had, particularly in the U.S., to a lesser extent in Canada,” Thiessen said.
“There’s an emerging sense among some conservative groups that they have lost power in governments, in education, in media and so forth.”
Joel Thiessen, a professor of sociology at Ambrose University College, says there has been a perception among conservative religious groups over the last half-century that the media has moved in a more secular or progressive direction. (Submitted by Joel Thiessen)
Thiessen said that those in conservative religious groups who gravitate toward conspiracy still represents a small minority of churchgoers.
But those who end up believing the conspiracy, Thiessen said, may typically be drawn to it for much of the same reasons others in society are.
“You have potentially charismatic or polarizing figures, who almost function like prophets within these sub-narratives within society,” Thiessen said. “I think because of physically distanced communities and congregations not gathering together as frequently, people are perhaps not even watching their own online religious services. That means they aren’t being socialized.
“It actually makes this a rife time for such groups to actually capitalize on those opportunities. No doubt we’re seeing those things unfold before our very eyes.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
