March 25 good news: 84 percent of the world population has faith........

[beam me up scottie]

115. You should keep up - Putin and the ROC are responsible for oppressing lgbt people in Russia.

And atheists in this country aren't the ones trying to export those particular 'family values' :

How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right
While the U.S. passed gay-rights laws, Moscow moved hard the other way.
By CASEY MICHEL February 09, 2017

Shortly after the summit’s close, Putin announced plans to return to the presidency, supplanting then-President Dmitry Medvedev. Buffeted by a flat economy, Putin shored up his support by tacking to a nativist, nationalist—and resentful—base. In the first 18 months after his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin corralled protesters, smothered many of the remaining independent media outlets, and dissolved the distance between the Kremlin and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. All of his moves pointed toward a hard-right shift in outlook—to a return to Tsar Nicholas I’s triumvirate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”

America’s Christian fundamentalists followed Putin’s moves with glee—all the more after then-President Barack Obama earned a second term, and same-sex rights charged forward. In 2013, Moscow pushed an “anti-propaganda law” specifically targeting the country’s beleaguered LGBT population. Despite widespread condemnation throughout the West, members of America’s Religious Right tripped over themselves in supporting the Kremlin. Likewise, as a Daily Beast report found, the “anti-propaganda law,” like the anti-abortion measures before it, didn’t arise in some kind of retrograde ether, but “had emerged from a years-long, carefully crafted campaign to influence governments to adopt a Christian-Right legal framework”—stemming from the efforts of both American and Russian WCF officials who had “successfully disseminated a U.S.-born culture war that’s wreaking havoc on women and queer folks all around the world.” Even Moscow’s ban on Americans adopting Russian children that year managed to gain support within the U.S.’s far right, with Christian fundamentalists praising Putin’s move as preventing children from living with same-sex parents.

***

After all, it’s not as if it’s difficult to unearth the fundamentalists fawning over Putin’s putative turn toward God. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the American Family Association, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Evangelical Franklin Graham has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Buchanan only continues praising Putin. Even recent frictions—see: Russia’s recent legislation against non-Orthodox proselytizing—have hardly dampened US fundamentalists’ newfound fervor for Moscow. And if Trump decides to deprioritize rolling back same-sex or abortion rights, the U.S. far right will look to Moscow even further support, ensconcing the Kremlin’s position that much more.

We might not know, per Buchanan’s early questions, whose side God is on. But those in Russia are happy to return the support from America’s radical Christian extremists—and clutch the mantle of Christian fundamentalist leadership as long as they can, even after Trump’s election. “They’re using the history of anti-communism as a means of making a point,” Stroop told me. “They’re saying: ‘We survived communism, and so we know how to resist it.’ And they’re playing right into this whole script, which is a Cold War script, that communism and secularism are the same thing.”


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/how-russia-became-a-leader-of-the-worldwide-christian-right-214755