Prosperity Preachers are Demented Wrecks

Interesting stuff is happening in my relationship with God.

I watch a lot of Youtube now. I have to have something to do during meals. Eating with a demented person is something you can only do so often, so I usually eat alone. I also need something to amuse me while I take the birds out. Finally, I am too lazy to go through the ordeal of picking up a book, opening it, and reading. I need to work on that.

I also watch old movies on the Turner channel, plus one TV show, but this doesn’t amount to much in terms of time. I’m very out of touch with current celebrities, and I thank God for that. I read that Ryan Seacrest is in trouble for groping somebody, and it was nice to realize I didn’t know who he was. I knew his name and that he was on TV, but if he walked in here right now, I wouldn’t recognize him or be able to say anything about his work.

When you fall behind on celebrity worship, celebrities start to look funny to you. You’ll see a hysterical news article with a breathless headline about how Kim Zolciak has a problem, and it will be like reading about a random person out of the phone book. “Herbert Loomis Suffers Major Swimsuit Malfunction at Elks Picnic!” “Edna Fanucci SHUTS DOWN Trump’s Latest Tweet!” Who? What?

I don’t know who Kim Zolciak is. I deliberately poked through celebrity names on the web and picked one that sounded utterly obscure.

I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on the One for Israel channel. The link goes to their website, not Youtube. I have not read the site. They’re Messianic Jews. They post all sorts of videos featuring Jews who have accepted Yeshua (not “Yeshu,” which means, “May his name be blotted out forever”). I highly recoomend their videos. They also post videos of Muslim converts.

One message I took from the Muslim videos is that I have let myself get way too angry at Muslims. Islam is a Satanic cult, and the hate it has managed to create in Muslims the world over is remarkable. Many of us think the hate only comes from a few extremists, but ordinary Muslims who convert will tell you different. They will talk about their former hatred of Jews and Christians, and they will even say they enjoyed hearing about terrorism and persecution.

Islam is bad. Much worse than most of us realize. But I had hostile feelings about Arabs and Muslims, generally. I had forgotten that many could be reached, and that many had the potential to be spectacular people. For that matter, there are millions of bad Muslims–the backsliders of Islam–who are not hateful at all.

I watched a video (not from One for Israel) about a Muslim girl named Chaima. She became a Christian. She was a real sweetheart. After God fixed her, I mean. She had been planning to join ISIS and kill Jews and/or Christians, but something changed her. Her mother gave her a bunch of used books, and Chaima found a Bible among them. She started reading it, hoping to prove Christianity was wrong, and instead, the love that fills the New Testament touched her heart, and she became a Christian. Her family rejected her, of course, and now she has no home. She runs around with Christian missionaries, praying for people and participating in healings. She comes across as a sweet-natured girl anyone would want to know. Even someone like me who is fed up with terrorism and the persecution of Christians and Jews.

To digress, I have to say I’m amazed to learn how many Jews know nothing about the New Testament. They say they thought it was about Catholics. They say they were amazed to find out it’s all about Jews, and that it was written by Jews. How can they not know that? Don’t the rabbis tell them anything? Some of them say they didn’t know Jesus was Jewish. I don’t know what to say about that. How can anyone not know?

You can see Chaima’s baptism online. They put her in a kiddie pool, and even though she was all for it, she began screaming and trying to get out. The people baptizing her held her down and prayed in tongues. She says the anger and screaming weren’t hers. It was something else. Makes you wonder how many terrorists could be cured by baptism and casting out demons. But 90% of Christians don’t believe in demons, so I guess the demons are safe.

I should have remembered this: God shops at the dump. That’s where he found me. He doesn’t go to yeshivas and monasteries and look for perfect people who have proven themselves worthy. He goes to the landfill which is the earth and picks out broken, decomposing people who can be repaired. That’s the best he can do, because we are all severely damaged. The super-holy people in the religious institutions are sometimes the worst of all, because their conviction that they’re righteous makes them immune to criticism and improvement.

One for Israel has a neat video featuring a former Muslim in something resembling a burqa. It shows her eyes, so I guess it’s not the full-blown burqa, which comes with a windshield. Anyway, she talked about her hate-filled past. She lived in Kuwait, and she was taught not just that Jews were bad, but that their existence was bad. She was taught that Jews should not exist. This is a commonly held belief among the world’s Muslims, and it’s something American liberals never acknowledge. Leftists (who hate every demanding religion except Islam) say Jews and Christians are just like Muslims; just as bad. But we’re not interested in genocide. Muslims are. This is the difference leftists try to hide. Anyway, she didn’t know any Jews, but she hated them just the same.

She visited a church. She accepted Jesus. How does she feel about Jews and Christians now? Completely different. The nonsense she was taught in Islam is gone.

She seems like she would be a wonderful person to know. I have to remember God can reach into any country and any segment of society, take a person out, and turn that person into my brother or sister.

Jewish testimonies are wonderful, but testimonies from former Muslims can be even more impressive. God does sensational things to reach them. Jesus appears to them. He gives them miracles. I suppose it’s because the barriers between them and him are so high. Often, converts from Islam live under death sentences, even here in the US. We have honor killings right here, under the noses of our quiet liberal press. If they can do it here, imagine what it’s like for converts in Iran, Kuwait, Gaza, and so on.

The covered convert in the Youtube video lives in America, yet she doesn’t show her face. That should disturb people.

We always argue about the solution to Israel’s problems. Most people believe in the “two-state solution,” i.e. the “cut Israel in half and wait for the Jews to be exterminated” solution. Boy, when those Jews are killed, things will be great. The crisis will finally be over. The Muslims will finally be happy, and they won’t bother the rest of us at all, because Islam is the Religion of Peace, and Muslims have no interest in conquering the world and establishing a global caliphate.

Yeah.

We argue all the time about political answers, but the only thing that really works is Christianity. When Israeli Jews and Muslims convert, they start going to church together. They intermarry. Suddenly “us” means followers of Yeshua, not Jews or Muslims. I’ve seen this here in the US, with people from different races. You go to church with black people, and suddenly everyone is on the same team, more or less. It depends on how much the church yields to the Holy Spirit. Anyway, worshiping together destroys boundaries. Everyone in the world is supposed to worship Jesus and be guided by the Holy Spirit, and all of our discord results from rejecting Jesus.

The notion that different religions can coexist in peace is facially absurd. Islam teaches genocide and forced conversion. Christianity says everyone who is not for Jesus is against God, and it teaches that proselytizing is mandatory. Religious Jews absolutely hate Jesus and Christianity, many equating it with Nazism, and they treat converts very, very badly. As long as we have religious division, the best we can hope for is a cold war, and cold wars are like dormant volcanoes. They eventually heat up.

I think the thing that strikes me most about the conversion testimonies is the huge difference between religions in which God is distant (and even cruel) and a religion in which God is very close to you and very concerned about your problems. I feel God’s presence many times every day, and I am no saint. I think nothing of asking God to tell me which restaurant to go to for lunch or which item to take off the shelf at Home Depot. What matters to me matters to him. God is not a far-off intergalactic warlord who is too limited, cold, and busy to talk to me. That’s Satan. He is small, overworked, busy, weak, and cruel, because he is not a god. Satan is Allah, not Yahweh. God is a father to me, with the ability and desire to spend time with me as though I were the only son he had. Testimonies from Jews and former Muslims commonly talk about the amazement people feel when they finally sense God within and around them.

The people who presented Chaima’s story have other videos. They go around praying for people and healing them. They’re charismatics. Their brand of Christianity is very different from the Joyce Meyer/Benny Hinn/Joel Osteen/T.D. Jakes/Kenneth Copeland hogwash we love here in America. They don’t talk about money all the time, the way we do. They go up to people, ask if they can pray for them, heal them, tell them God did the work, and help them accept Jesus. How original! Where did they come up with that? Someone should get a Nobel Prize.

Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. Mainstream American charismatic Christianity has syphilis. It is rotten and demented. How did we jump the gulf and leave the land of love and faith and alight in the region of greed and white trash ostentation?

I say “white trash” because that’s what it makes me think of. Give a white trash family a fortune, and the first thing you know, there’s a helipad in the yard and a gold-plated pickup truck with sable seats, painted in Clemson’s team colors even though no one in the family can get into college. But black preachers are just as bad.

When did Christianity become so expensive? The Apostles got up in the morning, walked outside, and introduced people to God, without light shows, jets, or megachurches the size of airports. Now you have to get dressed up, go to church, be scolded into handing over a minimum of 10% of your income, and listen to a complete fool who seriously maintains you’re obligated to fund his personal 727.

One of the Jewish testimonies I watched contained a story about healing. A family asked a rabbi to come pray for a sick person. The rabbi refused to come unless he was paid a huge amount of money. Thousands of dollars. Apparently, his god charges ransom. “Pay up, or the kid gets it.”

Christians prayed free of charge, and the sick person was healed. I was disgusted with the rabbi, but how are we any better? Yes, Christians prayed for this particular person without being paid, but here in America, thousands of people go to Steve Munsey’s ridiculous church/personal zoo, where he tells them God sells blessings for huge cash offerings. And Munsey is one of many.

My pastor at Trinity Church in Miami was Rich Wilkerson. His son Richie is the hipster who married Kanye West. Richie’s wife Dawnchere is the daughter of Denny Duron, a prosperity preacher who teaches some truly disturbing nonsense. Duron says you have to “manage blessings” by giving donations.

Let’s say you get a raise at work. God will want his cut. Duron believes you are obligated to reward God with a large donation. Better give God a grand before he sends his boys to lean on you.

Of course, if you’re in Duron’s church, Duron, not God himself, will collect the money. The prosperity gospel won’t work for you, but it has worked wonders for Duron and his daughter. It’s amazing how well it works for pastors, in view of the fact that it makes everyone else poor.

Duron also published The Abishai Anointing, a pamphlet which I burned in my backyard. The idea is that God sets special people, like Denny and Dawnchere, apart to be rich and admired, and the rest of us are supposed to be happy as obscure servants who do all the grunt work.

Funny how that pamphlet was written by one of the haves, not a have-not.

Duron is a rabid football fanatic, and he loves using football as a model when he teaches about Christianity. That should tell you how ignorant he is.

What if we were to shut up about money and focus on prayer and love? The prosperity gospel doesn’t work, anyway. We would have more money to spend, and we would have a huge increase in salvations. Our country would be better off. There would be more of us, aligned in God’s will, and the people who are against God would be weakened and stifled, as they used to be.

There is no point in hoping for a healed America, because that bus has left the terminal, but we can certainly hope to help more people and find more power and peace in our own lives. While America’s walls are down and the barbarians are running amok, God can still build a little wall around every child he has.

I don’t know when I’m going back to church. I have almost no desire to return. When I do, I will flatly tell them they can forget about getting a tithe from me, and I will also refuse to serve in any capacity whatsoever. I will give them $25 per week and sit in the back, and my only goal will be to be around other Christians. I don’t want to be part of another misguided volunteer ministry run by someone whose only qualification is that he is more aggressive than I am or that he or she is related to the pastor. I don’t want to hear about how God needs my silly, insignificant talents and skills.

When you show up to serve God, human beings run up to put chains on you.

Instead of “pastor,” American charismatics should say “master.”

The overbearing wife of my last master made the mistake of setting me free, and now that I’m on the lam, when the patrols come by looking for me, I am not going to raise my head out of the bushes and ask to be recaptured. Remember what happened to Dred Scott.

I think the worst thing about slavery is belonging to another human being. Human beings are unfit to rule each other. It’s a wonder God allows us to raise children.

I have to have a better attitude about Arabs and Muslims, and charismatic Christianity is still a very good thing, when you take the money out of it. I suppose that’s the synopsis here. It would be nice to show up and say God told me I was doing everything right, but it looks like that won’t be happening this week.