Those Scientists Are Damned to Hell

[Recusant]

In conjunction with a newspaper, their godless meddling has stopped the flow of miraculous oil, and they will pay with eternal damnation, I'm telling you. (Sorry if the link isn't allowed in Europe. I know that many of the small US news sites still haven't bothered to update their software, and are not in compliance with the GDPR. So they simply set up a geoblock instead. I've quoted all of the relevant material, anyway.)

"Claims that a Bible in Dalton is flowing with oil undermined by new information" | Chattanooga Times Free Press

Chemical analysis tests gathered by the Times Free Press challenge the basis of a popular Dalton, Georgia, ministry that claims to have a Bible flowing with oil.

Each week, hundreds of people come to Dalton's Wink Theater to see the Bible owned by Jerry Pearce. Those who gather described deep religious experiences when the oil Bible touched them. Others said the oil cured them of sickness or helped them kick addictions.

Through donations, Pearce and Johnny Taylor, the other leader of His Name is Flowing Oil, have made a full-time job of traveling the country with the Bible, estimating they have handed out around 350,000 free vials of the oil.

The Times Free Press wrote about the increasingly popular gathering in November 2019. The next day, someone contacted the newspaper saying Pearce was a regular customer at the Tractor Supply store in Dalton. The person said Pearce often bought large amounts of mineral oil — a clear oil similar in appearance to the oil Pearce claims is coming from his Bible.

In December 2019, two Dalton Tractor Supply managers visually identified Pearce and said he consistently bought gallons of mineral oil. However, company policies barred them from providing more specific customer information.

The Times Free Press then paid for a series of chemical analyses by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, comparing samples of the oil Pearce hands out with the chemical structure of mineral oil and comparing Pearce's oil with the Ideal brand mineral oil sold at Tractor Supply.

The tests found Pearce's oil is petroleum-derived and the results "strongly suggest that the oil sample is mineral oil," according to the analysis. The second test, comparing the chemical composition of Pearce's oil to the product sold at Tractor Supply, found a nearly exact match.

Pearce said the managers at Tractor Supply are lying. He and Taylor repeated they do not have to defend their work, something they said in November.

"Everything we do is in the light," Taylor said. "I don't know how we could defend it other than it just comes up out of the Bible."

Online, people remain polarized about the ministry, with some calling it a hoax and others praising the results they got from using the oil. The ministry began in 2016 in the week after President Donald Trump's inauguration when Pearce and Taylor had powerful religious experiences and oil began coming from the Bible, they said.

In the four years since, the two men traveled thousands of miles with the book, even taking it to Canada. In November, Pearce said the Bible does not flow with oil when they are traveling, only when the book is in Dalton.

[. . .]


Updated at 9:55 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020: The team hosting the events posted on its website that the Bible stopped flowing with oil on Jan. 10, though they made no mention of this at its weekly gatherings since that day or when speaking to the Times Free Press nearly two weeks later. The group stopped distributing oil on Feb. 4 and will no longer hold services in Dalton, according to the online statement.

[Link to full article]

[Tank]

Immoral atheists caught suckering the gullible again. There should be a law against it 

[Icarus]

(SIgh)

[Old Seer]

In conjunction with a newspaper, their godless meddling has stopped the flow of miraculous oil, and they will pay with eternal damnation, I'm telling you. (Sorry if the link isn't allowed in Europe. I know that many of the small US news sites still haven't bothered to update their software, and are not in compliance with the GDPR. So they simply set up a geoblock instead. I've quoted all of the relevant material, anyway.)

"Claims that a Bible in Dalton is flowing with oil undermined by new information" | Chattanooga Times Free Press

Chemical analysis tests gathered by the Times Free Press challenge the basis of a popular Dalton, Georgia, ministry that claims to have a Bible flowing with oil.

Each week, hundreds of people come to Dalton's Wink Theater to see the Bible owned by Jerry Pearce. Those who gather described deep religious experiences when the oil Bible touched them. Others said the oil cured them of sickness or helped them kick addictions.

Through donations, Pearce and Johnny Taylor, the other leader of His Name is Flowing Oil, have made a full-time job of traveling the country with the Bible, estimating they have handed out around 350,000 free vials of the oil.

The Times Free Press wrote about the increasingly popular gathering in November 2019. The next day, someone contacted the newspaper saying Pearce was a regular customer at the Tractor Supply store in Dalton. The person said Pearce often bought large amounts of mineral oil — a clear oil similar in appearance to the oil Pearce claims is coming from his Bible.

In December 2019, two Dalton Tractor Supply managers visually identified Pearce and said he consistently bought gallons of mineral oil. However, company policies barred them from providing more specific customer information.

The Times Free Press then paid for a series of chemical analyses by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, comparing samples of the oil Pearce hands out with the chemical structure of mineral oil and comparing Pearce's oil with the Ideal brand mineral oil sold at Tractor Supply.

The tests found Pearce's oil is petroleum-derived and the results "strongly suggest that the oil sample is mineral oil," according to the analysis. The second test, comparing the chemical composition of Pearce's oil to the product sold at Tractor Supply, found a nearly exact match.

Pearce said the managers at Tractor Supply are lying. He and Taylor repeated they do not have to defend their work, something they said in November.

"Everything we do is in the light," Taylor said. "I don't know how we could defend it other than it just comes up out of the Bible."

Online, people remain polarized about the ministry, with some calling it a hoax and others praising the results they got from using the oil. The ministry began in 2016 in the week after President Donald Trump's inauguration when Pearce and Taylor had powerful religious experiences and oil began coming from the Bible, they said.

In the four years since, the two men traveled thousands of miles with the book, even taking it to Canada. In November, Pearce said the Bible does not flow with oil when they are traveling, only when the book is in Dalton.

[. . .]


Updated at 9:55 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020: The team hosting the events posted on its website that the Bible stopped flowing with oil on Jan. 10, though they made no mention of this at its weekly gatherings since that day or when speaking to the Times Free Press nearly two weeks later. The group stopped distributing oil on Feb. 4 and will no longer hold services in Dalton, according to the online statement.

[Link to full article]

Yup, that's eggzackly what it looked like to me, mineral oil,  Caught'em red handed.

[No one]

At least when they get there they can fix the plumbing and air conditioning.

[Recusant]

It was such a delightful story we ended up with two threads about it (link).

[Asmodean]

Immoral atheists caught suckering the gullible again. There should be a law against it 

Careful, T! Britain is half a step from blasphemy laws as it is! 

[Randy]

Dalton, Georgia. Why does Georgia always get a bad name just because it is deserved?

[Icarus]

Fuh hevens sake Randy, Dalton is so far north that it is almost in Tennessee.  You are in the hill country of Georgia which is a near bucolic paradise.   Sure enough a preponderance of Georgia folks are hard wired to praise Jesus. I suspect that there is some kind of psychodelic chemical in their water that influences their states of mind.

Example: My daughter was valedictorian of her high school class, graduated from a prestigious college cum laude.  She was a plenty smart kid with a taste for reality. She hired directly out of college to a giant textile manufacturer in Georgia. She lived well and prospered. After leaving the original employer after 18 years she stated her own business and that too prospered. She was, and is, an intelligent woman who has a firm grip on the way the world works.  But in Georgia, in a small town named LaGrange, she had to comply with the local custom. That local custom was to praise the lord at every opportunity.  I have visited that town many times and I can vow that the people there are not just dumb hillbillies.  Go figure.

The daughter married a religious man and she has become one of the dedicated church folk.  If that is not enough..........holy shit..... she is a Trump supporter. WTF is it with the water in Georgia?????

I love and cherish her anyway. But goddammit she had a good, and I believe realistic education and  upbringing. How can an outstandingly competent woman fall into the spell of the community woo? To her credit she has never tried to convert me to the the church. She knows better and we have mutual respect for one another.

Randy if you live in Dalton, you know of the Millikin corporation rug manufacturer that originally hired my daughter out of college. Dalton is a rug making town. The only remaining textile manufacture that is still profitable in the US. The huge factories in LaGrange has bitten the dust because of the Chinese and South east Asian textile manufacturers. 

[Randy]

No, I don't live anywhere near Dalton. I live close to Atlanta but still in a small town called Lawrenceville. I used to work for a carpet mill and they had their finishing house in Dalton. I guess it was about twenty-five to thirty years ago. They are out of business now.

My daughter started working for the Salvation Army. She got married to another worker there. He was a dyed in the wool xtian. She became a preacher for a short while. Then her husband molested a sixteen year-old girl by drugging her. He went to jail, was released on bond, and skipped over the border. He was Mexican and had duel citizenship. My daughter then divorced him.

She doesn't go to church anymore although one of her kids does. She knows that belief in the supernatural is irrational but for her "it's a conviction." She brings up these topics once in a blue moon and I listen and let her mind do the work.

When my children were growing up we had something really bad happen to the family. That's a topic for another day maybe. Anyway, I think my daughter was four and I told her that I'd never lie to her and I haven't. She told me her grandmother believed in Santa Claus and asked me if he was real. I told her he wasn't and it's all make-believe.

I always figured that she would ask some hard questions about what happened way back when and she'd know that I was telling her the truth. She never did. But she does ask me questions every now and then and I'll tell her the truth.

She knows that the rest of her family doesn't believe in an afterlife nor a god, that we came to that through rational thinking. I think that she loves that part about me, that I think things through before I answer.