Holy Hell by Vyrse

A religious industry sold orientation change to 700,000 Americans. The APA found no evidence it works; its own flagship president admitted a 99.9% failure rate and shut it down with an apology; and in 2015 a unanimous New Jersey jury ruled it what it always was: consumer fraud.

Read the full piece, with all 5 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-cure

On May 20, 1631, the Catholic League's army stormed Protestant Magdeburg. Four in five inhabitants died and the city burned to its stones. The soldiers nicknamed the massacre a wedding, and Catholic Europe sang thanksgiving for it. The worst day of a war fought under God's name.

Read the full piece, with all 3 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-wedding-of-magdeburg

In Duplessis-era Quebec, an orphan brought $1.25 a day in subsidy; a psychiatric patient brought $2.75. So church-run institutions certified thousands of healthy children insane and converted orphanages into asylums. The province apologized twice and paid. The church never has.

Read the full piece, with all 4 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-going-rate

In 1941 a fascist state made Catholicism the price of survival: it outlawed a faith by decree, forcibly converted 200,000 people, and murdered tens of thousands at a camp commanded, for a time, by a Franciscan friar. A court hanged him in 1946. The numbers here are the Holocaust Museum's.

Read the full piece, with all 5 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/brother-devil

In most of America, a 1974 rule written under church lobbying made it legal to pray instead of calling a doctor while a child died. Oregon repealed its shield and convicted the parents. Idaho kept its shield, and a third of the graves in one church's cemetery are child-sized.

Read the full piece, with all 7 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-shield

Leopold II seized the Congo as his private property and sold it to the world as a Christian "civilizing mission." Behind the cross was a rubber regime that cut off hands by the basket and killed on a scale we still argue about.

Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-civilizing-mission

In the 1980s, evangelical spiritual-warfare theology convinced America that satanic cults were abusing children in its daycares. There was no conspiracy. But the trials were real, and innocent people served decades. The witch trial, run on cable TV.

Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/spectral-evidence

For four hundred years, the enslavement of Africans leaned on the "Curse of Ham" in Genesis 9. The catch: the text curses Canaan, not Ham, is about servitude, and never mentions race or skin color at all.

Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-mark-that-wasnt-there

Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act quotes no verse, but for "aggravated" cases it hands down the sentence Leviticus 20:13 does: death. The panic that produced it was fanned by American evangelicals. The same literal reading that burned witches is hunting gay people in our own decade.

Read the full piece, with all 7 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-imported-fire

In 1493, a Pope drew a line across an ocean and gave away the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine of Discovery didn’t just authorize colonization. It became U.S. law. The Vatican repudiated it in 2023. American courts have not.

Read the full piece, with all 5 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/terra-nullius