A Texas man who kidnapped a 13-year-old girl in San Antonio and sexually assaulted her multiple times while driving her to Southern California last year pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping charge Friday as part of a plea agreement, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said.
Steven Robert Sablan, 62, abducted the girl at gunpoint on or about July 6, 2023, in San Antonio and “engaged in sexual activity” with her while driving her to Long Beach, California, the plea agreement states.
“At the time of the crime, Sablan had no legal custody or familial relationship to the victim,” the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said in a news release.
Thank you for the kind words.
I unfortunately do not have any easy answers, nor unusual power to enact my will on the larger world.
However, if I was a billionaire, I would consider trying to build up the religious Left. Bear with me.
People aren’t going to abandon religion overnight. Religion does a lot of things for people. It provides community. Answers. Rituals. Charity. You can’t just rip that out. But I bet you could shape it.
The end goal would be something like the Unitarian Universalists. If you’re unfamiliar (and hopefully my knowledge isn’t too out of date), they’re a religion without a creed or dogma beyond “respect the inherent worth and dignity of other humans.” Members are encouraged to explore different traditions and faiths.
It has a lot of the structure of traditional religion. There’s a place you can go to on sunday to sing songs and meet people. They have people who can give you answers. They do social work. Any given congregation can be shaped or flavored to its locale. It can have many trappings of christianity, or judaism, or whatever the members want. That can get people in the door. It can feel church-y.
When I was a kid in the 90s (I’m getting old), my parents started going to a unitarian church as a sort of compromise. One week they had someone from Lambda Legal give a talk. I think that was the first time I saw an openly adult gay man, and he was just a dude in a suit talking about legal stuff. Bam. Normalized.
Anyway. Back to the billionaire fantasy. My plan would be to try to build more communities like that. They don’t have very specific dogmas, they don’t have to have a position on the supernatural, but they do provide community and many other parts of religion. The long term plan would be to shift the perspective on religion from “hey maybe this is true” to “this is the mythology people believed, and these were their rituals. We can participate in them to feel connected to our heritage, but we don’t have to be literal about it”.
This is by no means a fully thought through idea, and I don’t have the money or clout to make it happen. But that’s what I would try. It would leverage the group membership thing by making people feel like they’re shifting from one religion to another instead of just BAM GIVE UP YOUR TRADITIONS. But it would take decades, possibly centuries, of work to make a dent. Catholicism, for example, is huge, wealthy, and organized. It’s not going away in our life time.
So, it turns out you don’t have to be a billionaire to make things happen. I can think of two ways a bunch of people on Lemmy can make a movement like this happen.
Approach 1: Create a non-profit/charity
This will have to start very small, be funded through donations, and slowly grow by helping people in various ways, causing more people to join and expand. Like you mentioned, it will take a very long time to make a dent in Catholicism.
Approach 2: Get corporate America behind this
This is a lot easier than people think - we just need to figure out how do monetize this. Given how many private jets and other extravagances Christian evangelicals have, I suspect there could be enough money in religion - we’d have to discuss and work out how to get enough $$$ to make it worth their while without having hate as a core tenet of our religion.
This approach could have the advantage of multi-million dollar advertising budgets, lobbyists, and many other resources to have a much faster impact than the other approach.
Let me know if you’re up for discussing and fleshing out the details. I think it could be a fun exercise, and it might even lead somewhere in the future - I personally have a few contacts in high places in corporate America that will always listen to new business pitches 😉