I had an affair with my staffer who then killed herself, but God told me we’re cool

“I asked God to forgive me, which he has.” (Actual quote. Several commenters have already pointed out that this is blasphemy in the most exact sense).
I notice a lot of Latinos in the US and the rest of the Americas are getting drawn into contemporary American Protestant evangelical garbage, where God’s “forgiveness” is presumed by its putative beneficiaries to be handed out by the Lord with more promiscuity than medieval indulgences in an Italian duchy.
Speaking of which, one of the big failures of twentieth century social science was the secularization thesis — a kind of sociological whig or marxisant history, in which the forces of modernity would inevitably continue to marginalize and even eliminate the influence of religion in contemporary life. This 2012 essay discusses how one of the most prominent proponents of the secularization thesis in the 1960s, Peter Berger, came to largely reject it given further developments:
In terms of global scale, conservative and orthodox traditionalist movements are on the rise more than any other religious mindset. This can certainly be seen in the rise in Evangelicalism in American Protestant faith, but moreover, similar trends in faith can be found in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and nearly all other major world religions. All could be called “fundamentalist,” and though Berger dislikes the term for its pejorative connotation, he does note that they can all be unified under certain shared characteristics: “great religious passion, a defiance of what others have defined as the Zeitgeist, and a return to traditional sources of religious authority” (Berger 1999, 6). Additionally, all can be understood as a reaction against the forces of secularity. He suspects that this is as a result of modernity itself, for modernity brings with it uncertainty through pluralization and other forces; as such, a movement, such as religion, that claims certainty is incredibly appealing. . . .
There are, of course, exceptions to any rule, and Berger does acknowledge that there are two cases that do not directly fit the desecularization thesis. The first is Europe, specifically Western Europe, which has become increasingly secular as the years go by. It has been suggested, however, that this is not pure
secularization so much as a shift in the institutional location of religion, for while there have been dramatic drops in such factors as church attendance, levels of faith-adherents are debatably stable. The matter is still up for discussion.
The other exception, which has been subtly hinted at already, is in the Western intellectual community, which remains as a whole quite secular – an important realization, considering it is often the intellectuals who have a great deal of control over society as a whole. Berger semi-humorously states “that the American intelligentsia has been ‘Europeanized,’ in its attitude to religion as in other matters” (Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008, 18).
Keta provides the details of this particular case of God’s forgiveness:
Regina Santos-Aviles was a staffer for Rep. Tony Gonzales, with whom she had an affair. Santos-Aviles’ husband found out about it, confronted her, and then notified some of her co-workers (also Gonzales staffers) that his soon-to-be ex-wife was having an affair with their boss. Santos-Aviles was immediately ostracized by her colleagues and, despondent, she doused herself in gasoline and then lit herself on fire.
