Sunday Schadenfreude

Did you ever watch one of those sleazy televangelists in action and think to yourself: "I wonder what kind of moron would actually send money to these con-men?!"  Well, I can tell you the answer to that.  This moron:

Testify!

Now in my defense I was young and credulous and brought up in that subculture so their spiel about how God wanted to make me happy by giving me stuff sounded almost too good to be true.  Which it was.  I'm still pretty ashamed at how long it took me to figure out that the only people who get "blessed" (i.e. rich) by the Prosperity movement are the preachers of the Prosperity movement.

I like to think I took something away from it (apart from the valuable life lesson that anything that seems too good to be true probably is).  I'm one of the few people who get to call bullshit on these guys on purely empirical grounds.  I don't just say that the Prosperity Gospel message is bullshit because of some purely theoretical reasons, I actually tried it.  I did it all, I watched the sermons, I bought the merchandise, I followed the program, I gave and gave and named and claimed and BELIEVED! and all that got me was less money.  Tried it, tested it, got no results.  I can say with a lot of confidence that God doesn't just give you money unless you happen to be passing around an offering basket.

So with that in mind, I'm not even going to try to pretend that I don't get really gleeful when one of these Prosperity Gurus gets egg on their face.  I admit freely to smiling when I saw that Kenneth Copeland's BFF and one of the guys who got me hooked on the Prosperity thing, Creflo Dollar (real name) was arrested and spent some time in jail.

Yep, that's a mug shot!

Now unfortunately it wasn't for something ironic or funny, like fraud or buying meth from a rent boy.  No, he was arrested for assaulting his teenage daughter, which I have to admit harshes my buzz quite a bit*.

"The police report says Dollar choked his daughter, then threw her to the ground, punched her and hit her with his shoe during a fight at his metro Atlanta home.

When police interviewed Dollar, he said he tried to restrain his daughter when she "became very disrespectful," according to the report."

She wanted to go to a party, he didn't want her to go, she didn't obediently submit like godly womenfolk are supposed to and so he had to choke her basically.  He didn't see anything wrong with that but clearly the police didn't think that physical violence was the correct response to a "disrespectful" teenager.  Now this may be a controversial opinion but I'm going to give it anyway.  I agree with the cops.  I get that teenagers can be infuriating but IT IS NEVER OK FOR A GROWN ASS MAN TO BEAT UP A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL!

So anyway I guess we will have to wait and see what happens with this story.  Clearly Pastor Doctor Dollar is in a bit of trouble right now but I have a recommendation.  Here is a book on dealing with the things that trouble your life.  I can only hope that it helps him exactly as much as it helped me!

   

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*Though not as much as all the people in the comments of that article defending what he did...