Disinformation Book of Lists (30 page)

 

1.
Kirstie Alley
actor

2.
Anne Archer
actor

3.
Sonny Bono
singer, US Congressman

4.
Nancy Cartwright
actor (voice of Bart Simpson)

5.
Erika Christensen
actor

6.
Chick Corea
musician

7.
Tom Cruise
actor

8.
Penelope Cruz
actor

9.
Jenna Elfman
actor

10.
Isaac Hayes
soul musician

11.
Juliette Lewis
actor

12.
James Packer
heir to the vast fortune of his father, media baron Kerry Packer, Australia's richest man

13.
Lisa Marie Presley
singer

14.
Priscilla Presley
actor

15.
Mimi Rogers
actor

16.
Greta van Susteren
cable news personality

17.
John Travolta
actor

18.
Edgar Winter
musician

Honorable Mentions

The following celebs were apparently never heavily or formally involved with Scientology but took a course or two before moving on.

William Burroughs
writer

Nicole Kidman
actor

Demi Moore
actor

Brad Pitt
actor

J.D. Salinger
writer

Jerry Seinfeld
actor

Oliver Stone
director

Sharon Stone
actor

1.
Kenneth Anger
director

2.
Sammy Davis, Jr.
singer, actor

3.
King Diamond
musician

4.
Jayne Mansfield
actor

5.
Marilyn Manson
musician

6.
Keenan Wynn
actor

Perhaps the most controversial practice of Mormonism is baptism by proxy, in which dead souls are baptized. Live Mormons stand in for the dead during the dunking ceremony. In this way, a person who didn't accept the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints while he or she was alive has a chance to do it in the hereafter. According to the
Deseret News
—a daily newspaper owned by the Mormon Church—literally “millions” of dead people have been baptized by proxy.

At the end of 2002, the Mormon Church promised to stop baptizing dead Jews. They had promised the same thing several years earlier, but the practice was found to be continuing, so they promised again.

1.
Abigail Adams

2.
Menachem Begin

3.
David Ben-Gurion

4.
Napoleon Bonaparte

5.
Eva Braun

6.
James Buchanan

7.
Buddha

8.
Christopher Columbus

9.
Albert Einstein

10.
Dwight Eisenhower

11.
St. Francis of Assisi

12.
Anne Frank

15.
Frederick the Great

14.
Sigmund Freud

15.
George Gordon, Lord Byron

16.
Patrick Henry

17.
Adolph Hitler

18.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson

19.
Joan of Arc

20.
Ghengis Khan

21.
Abraham Lincoln

22.
Golda Meir

23.
Paul Revere

24.
William Shakespeare

25.
Josef Stalin

26.
Leo Tolstoy

27.
Martin van Buren

28.
Daniel Webster

29.
William Wordsworth

30-86.
all signers of the Declaration of Independence

87+.  
numerous Jews who died in the Holocaust
(figures cited range from 20,000 to 380,000)

1

August 13, 1984:
38-year-old John Blue was being baptized in a river, when he and the preacher fell into deeper water. Though the man of the cloth survived, God saw fit to smite Blue, who drowned.

2

November 2001:
In Bordeaux, France, a young couple was laying flowers on the grave of their baby. With them were their two children, a seven-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. A heavy stone cross fell from a tomb, landing on the little girl, who soon died of her injuries.

3

December 20, 2001:
A 71-year-old priest was trying to close an iron gate, weighing several hundred pounds, in front of St. Agnes Church in San Francisco, when it slipped off its tracks and crushed him to death.

4

February 10, 2002:
While officiating Mass at St. Agnes Church in Midtown, New York (is Agnes cursed?), a priest had a massive coronary, fell backwards, and met his Maker. A fellow priest was quoted: “He was giving the homily at Mass and keeled over immediately.”

5
6

Many people, especially children, have died during exorcisms. In January 2004, Atlanta police found the body of an eight-year-old girl who had been strangled, stabbed, and had her back broken in what police believe was a ritual to drive out demons. They arrested Christopher and Valerie Carey, charging them with the murder. The previous August in Milwaukee, an eight year-old autistic boy was smothered to death allegedly by a storefront preacher as he kneeled on the child's chest and tried to chase out demons for two hours. Minister Ray Hemphill has been charged.

7-815

1997-2004:
During the annual pilgrimage to Mecca known as the hajj, Muslims have been trampled to death in recent years. This happens during a ritual late in the proceedings, in which pilgrims throw pebbles at pillars, symbolically stoning to death various devils. The crowd goes wild, a stampede ensues, and anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of people are stomped into pulp. Death tolls from recent years include 180 in 1998, 35 in 2001, and fourteen in 2003.

The body count skyrocketed in 2004—around 244 people died, with hundreds more injured. Hajj Minister Iyad Madani said: “All precautions were taken to prevent such an incident, but this is God's will.”

The worst hajj disaster of recent times occurred in 1997, when a tent city went up in flames, prematurely sending 340 worshippers to Allah.

Honorable mentions

September 25, 2001.
After attending Mass, Australian Catholic schoolgirls in Merryland, New South Wales, were waiting for a bus to take them back to school. A storm suddenly hit, and before they could scramble to shelter, lightning struck the ground nearby, knocking down six of them. One of the teens was in critical condition with flash burns, another was in serious condition with unspecified injuries, and the other four were being held for observation. The
Sydney Morning Herald
reported: “Ambulance officers said the girls were lucky it was not a direct strike, which probably would have killed them.”

February 25, 2004:
During the gory crucifixion scene in Mel Gibson's
The Passion of the Christ
, 56-year-old Peggy Scott suffered a heart attack and immediately died in a Wichita, Kansas theater. And let's not forget that lightning struck twice during the filming of
The Passion.
An assistant director was hit both times, and during the second strike, the main bolt nailed Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Jesus. Smoke reportedly came out of one of his ears. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.

1

Jennifer R. Cisowski
killed her eight-month-old son by repeatedly throwing him to the ground and then down a staircase. A newspaper reports:

Cisowski told police that killing her son, Gideon Fusscas, was a test of faith because she expected God to resurrect him, a prosecutor said Tuesday evening….

“Apparently the mother of the child was telling her sister, Tabitha, that this was a test of her faith and that Christopher, the father, was possessed by some sort of demon and she needed to pray over him and drive some kind of demon from him,” [chief prosecutor Robert E.] Belanger said….

“[Tabitha] came in and she saw the baby laying dead in the house, and her sister said…that God was testing her faith by having her do harm to her child and she was convinced her child would be brought back from the dead like Lazarus,” Belanger said
.

2

John Davis
, on trial for torturing his two sons—who were found scarred, malnourished, and underdeveloped—told the court: “Proverbs tells you to discipline your children, or else they will grow up and kill their parents. All I did was discipline them.”

3

Glynn Harding
is a serial mail-bomber who wounded a little girl and disfigured a woman. A report in the London
Daily Telegraph
states: “The court heard how the bomber attributed the start of his campaign to the stillbirth of his baby in March 2000 and its burial inside a jam jar. In the weeks that followed, said Mr Bould, he heard ‘the voice of Jesus' instructing him to send 100 bombs ‘to ensure that the baby was allowed to go from Hell to Heaven'.”

4

Dan Lafferty
, who is serving two consecutive life terms for viciously killing a young woman and her fifteen-month-old daughter, said: “I had a calm peacefulness when I did it. I was being led by the Spirit.”

He also explained: “I'm not going to offend God by saying something inappropriate like, ‘I wish I'd never done it.' I'll never say that. If you're a child of God, it'll make sense to you someday. I'll never say I'm sorry I did it.”

The
Salt Lake Tribune
reported: “When one angry sheriff's deputy confronted the convicted murderer about his lack of remorse, Lafferty calmly replied, ‘With all due respect, if God asked me to, I'd kill you right now.'”

5

Greg Martin
, an American living in Ireland, was sentenced to three months in jail for killing and butchering his horse with an ax in an act that the judge called “absolute, wanton cruelty.” Martin was upset because the mare had been eating a neighbor's grass. His defense: “The Bible says man has dominion over animals.”

6

As reported by the BBC: “The police in Bangladesh say they have arrested a young Muslim cleric for allegedly killing his own son in a ritual sacrifice during Eid ul-Adha, the biggest Muslim festival. They say the cleric,
Golam Mustafa
, admitted to having killed the seven-month-old boy, Sulayman, after receiving what he called a revelation.”

7

Lucille Poulin
, a 78-year-old former nun and the spiritual leader of a commune on Prince Edward Island, Canada, was sentenced to eight years in jail for frequently beating five children, ages seven to twelve, who were in her care. The
Toronto Star
reported:

Earlier in the day, a defiant Poulin told [Judge] Jenkins the blood of the children she assaulted is not on her hands. The self-described prophet of the commune near Summerside asked for the court's mercy but never said she was sorry for the pain and suffering she inflicted on the five youngsters. Poulin said God told her it was all right to punish children physically to drive out the devil
.

 

8
9

Two Rastafarians
attacked worshippers in a Catholic Church in the Caribbean island St. Lucia. One doused them with gas, while another set them aflame with a blowtorch. They also burned the priest, attacked people with machetes, and killed a nun. According to the Associated Press, the two men responsible “told police they were sent by God to combat corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. ‘The way they're talking is that the world is going to end and that the time had come for what they had to do,' police Inspector Gregory Montoute, who interrogated the men, said Monday.”

10

Angel Maturino Resendiz
, the Mexican drifter who killed nine people in the US before turning himself in to authorities in July 1999, said: “I had to kill them. I could say I'm sorry, but I wouldn't mean it. They were promoting something that it clearly states in the Bible is wrong.” (According to the British newswire Ananova, “Resendiz claimed he was on a mission from God to kill people who he said were ‘evil' by stopping the spread of sins such as abortion, homosexuality and witchcraft.”)

11

Andrea Yates
, who famously drowned all five of her children in Texas, told a court-appointed shrink: “It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved…. Better for someone else to tie a millstone around their neck and cast them in a river than stumble. They were going to perish.”

12

And then there's this
APBnews.com
report from Florida: “Outraged that her 7-year-old son refused to go to Sunday school, a single mother allegedly tried to burn the boy to death in a bedroom, police said.” A little later that day, she attempted to choke him with a belt.