Mass shooting LDS church Grand Blanc, Michigan, is gunman down.Church on fire

[Owlwatcher]

They certainly got the shooters( and the one in North Carolina at the river bar) name and background out to the media in record time. I guess they fit the narrative and desired agenda. White, MAGA, both veterans. 
    I do think this guy was triggered over the shooter of Charlie Kirk being brought up as a LDS.

[tarantulabite]

Michigan church shooter had past relationship with Mormon woman in Utah and heavily used meth, friends reveal - LINK

Two friends of Thomas Jacob Sanford, the 40-year-old gunman who was shot and killed by police in the church's parking lot, told the New York Times that Sanford's hatred grew out of a breakup he had with a girlfriend more than 10 years prior.

Peter Tersigni told the Times that he knew Sanford for practically his entire life, and described him as his best friend. He said Sanford was a class clown, but deployment to Iraq with the Marines changed him and tuned him into a more serious person upon his return

It wasn't just the military that changed Sanford. According to Tersigni, a move to Utah and a habit of abusing methamphetamines further transformed his friend.

During his stay in Utah, Sanford reportedly fell in love with a woman who was part of the LDS. It's unclear exactly how involved he and the woman were, but what Tersigni did say is that the relationship ended in a way that left Sanford deeply hurt.

“Mentally [Sanford] was in rough shape," he told the paper

In the days after a shooting at a Mormon church in Michigan, members raised money for the families of the victims — and the family of the shooter - LINK

They started fundraisers for the victims. Then they did something remarkable: They began donating money to the wife and son of Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man who police say carried out the attack.

[chr0naut]

Many, many years ago when I was working on getting a degree in Psychology, the question of what, exactly, defines sanity and insanity came up in class.  The famous Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was appealed to as an authority as saying something to the effect that sanity consisted of adhering--to the maximum extent possible--to the reality principle.  In other words, don't believe and act on stuff that's not real, no matter how emotionally appealing it might be.  Ultimately, this principle corresponds to the Scientific Method.  

How does it correspond to scientific method? What objective observational evidence are you using to form the hypothesis of the nonexistence of the unobserved? Scientific method involves repeatable testing of observable data. If you have no observed data, you cannot follow the scientific method.

Also, the absence of observed data does not presuppose that such data does not exist, merely that you have not observed it.

It amounts to argument from ignorance.

I have never directly observed that my skull contains grey matter. However, it would be entirely unreasonable to assume that I had no brain just because it has not been empirically observed, especially in light of the many inferences about its existence from which we can postulate.

The exact same situation could be applied to questions of the existence of a non-corporeal being.

The Scientific Method does not claim to be able to produce all knowledge or absolute, final knowledge. It claims to eliminate false beliefs by testing them against reality using empirical facts and logically constructed experiments. As time goes by, and we eliminate more and more false beliefs, the pool of what's possible converges on a smaller and smaller set of options. 

You have just cited empirical facts as being tested via scientific method, but where are those empirical facts? In an absence of empirical facts there is nothing to put to the test. This assumptive process based upon nothing cannot possibly be scientific method.

The idea that all of creation came about by accident is itself a belief that can--at least in principle--be examined via the scientific method. I highly recommend a book on this subject titled "The God Hypothesis" written by a friend of mine, Bernie Haisch.  Bernie is a Ph.D. astrophysicist who started out in life to pursue a Catholic Priesthood  via the Seminary. In the course of getting his Ph.D. in astrophysics, he examined the mathematical consequences of believing that the universe was formed by chance, and showed how astronomically unlikely that is statistically compared to the simple idea that there is something we might as well call God.

In that light, the existence of all things, with variety and complexity implicit, argues rationally and logically for a complex non-random cause. But one cannot claim that is a result of scientific method. It IS a result of mathematical reasoning. Something that can be tested is repeatable and observable. But beyond the pure mathematics, all else (for either side of the argument) is extrapolation.

I have no problem with people exploring and expounding the God Hypothesis.  But that's not what organized religions do.  They mostly claim it's a mystery that can only be understood by a few holy men

On the contrary, the mysteries all exist in the limitations of our knowledge. All religions provide simplistic explanation for those natural mysteries that arise from attempts to understand the many puzzling aspects we can observe of our external and internal worlds.

(and in the Abrahamic religions, it's almost always men) who stand between you and salvation.  

That is incorrect. Between 188 to 205 individual women are mentioned, by name, in the Bible (the confusion being caused by different women having the same name, for instance the bible refers to 7 different women as "Mary"). Some of them were societal and religious leaders, legal judges, priestesses and prophetesses. The primacy of Mary daughter of Heli, the mother of Jesus, would be a direct refutation of your assertion.

So if you become part of their flock, they will fleece you in return for giving you a hall pass to get into whatever version of Heaven they happen to have the franchise for.  They all rely on "holy books" written hundreds to thousands of years ago by committees of other "holy men", all of whom were mostly concerned with keeping the scam going.

There are numerous orders within nearly all religions that reject worldly wealth and possessions. In fact, 1st Century Christianity was noted for the fact that things were most often held in community, being primarily redistributed to those such as widows and orphans who could not provide adequately for themselves. Among these communities, possessiveness was regarded as egregious sin.

Organized religions are--with a few exceptions--the exact opposite of rational inquiry into the nature of spirituality.  By claiming that it's all a big, incomprehensible mystery, they are explicitly putting spirituality into the category of belief and not knowledge, and so our collective knowledge of spirituality will never really evolve beyond where it was a thousand years ago, if it is left to organized religions.  

Religions provide explanations of mysteries. Science cannot measure the supernatural and so has no stake in providing answers to those mysteries. Science can only explore the natural.

Imagine if astrophysics operated in the same way; we would still be claiming that the Sun was actually a flaming chariot being driven across the sky every day by Apollo.

End of rant.

Well, astrophysicists have postulated that the big bang found its baryonic matter from quantum fluctuations. Yet we know that separation of virtual particles leaving baryonic matter requires strong gradients of force, such as those produced near the event horizon of a gravitational singularity. Yet, if there was not yet baryonic matter, where did the force sufficient to strip opposite virtual particle apart come from?

The concept is pure speculation based upon no evidence at all - that's a mythology - proposed by current and well regarded astrophysicists. They can't even demonstrate math or theory that properly explains it - not too far from speculating about fiery chariots, in my opinion.

However, the truth is that many religions currently fund some of the most expensive science and academic institutions, without which the science stuff just wouldn't happen. In that regard, across human history, religion has overall been more investigative of nature, than agnostic institutions have.

And many scientists historically, from many cultures, were religious, and were allowed to dedicate themselves to science only by the sponsorship of religious groups.

The Long, Rich Relationship Between the Church and Science