Dear #antivaxxer Kenneth Copeland — can't you pray the measles away?

Now, I'm not generally like Gnu Atheists, poking wanton fun at religion.

But, when there's low-hanging fruit, such as a church run by one of the scions of success gospel guru (and IRS-trimming) Kenneth Copeland getting an outbreak of the measles, it's too rich to pass up.

Copeland, the father of Eagle Mountain International Church Pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons is also a faith healer PLUS an antivaxxer of sorts.

And, per the link, Rev. Pearsons is tap-dancing:

There are a lot of people that think the Bible — we talk about walking by faith — it leaves out things such as, I don't know, people just get strange. But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law. 

Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to disinfect, told them there was something contagious. And the interesting thing of it, it wasn't a medical doctor per se who took care of those things, it was the priesthood. It was the ministers, it was those who knew how to take the promises of God as well as the commandments of God to take care of things like disinfection and so forth....

Many of the things that we have in medical practice now actually are things you can trace back into scripture. It's when we find out what's in the scripture that we have wisdom.

She's also tap-dancing another way.

Isn't it always "interesting" that literalist or semiliteralist women ministers ALWAYS ignore what pseudo-Paul said about them in 2 Timothy?

How bad is it?

Ten people in Tarrant County have come down with measles, and the vector's been traced to the church.

And, at that link, Pearsons shows more science ignorance:

“What we’re going to be doing tonight, after church, is there will be a massive disinfecting of the entire church, this whole building, the whole campus, everything,” Pearsons said.

Measles isn't something you spray away with a can of Lysol or wash away with a bottle of Clorox. It's a virus, not a bacterium, and a hardy one. When an outbreak happens, the solution is vaccination in social rings around the ground zero.

A "massive disinfecting of the entire church" is as useful as an exorcism, or per daddy's success gospel, praying for a new airplane from him while laying hands on the TV while he's on the air.

Just ugh.

That said, the church is also hosting vaccination clinics.

(That's a friendly thing to remember, especially when people deny the theory of evolution. Vaccines, and how they work, and when they actually don't work, are all related to that, folks!)

This would be an opportunity for a religious leader to argue for the god-given brilliance of humans creating vaccines, if Copeland had more theological common sense. Of course, there would still be that pesky problem of evil about why vaccines exist in the first place.