On top of that, there is a special kind of betrayal when a spiritual leader abuses his follower's trust. Others may feel differently, but to me these scams are more sinister than QVS promising 'science-proven results' or a 'Nigerian prince' email spam.
I assume you were referring to my comment. To be frank, I always feel a little threatened by these types of stories because so many people end up using it as leverage to question the value of freedom of religion (a freedom I hold dear).
Perhaps you may have felt the same defensive instinct when a popular response to the sickening display of racism or hate is to call into question the value of freedom of speech.
Articles in the 1980s about televangelists at least mentioned the use of television. Articles about nondenominational megachurches make some effort to show that they’re different from other large churches. Articles about the Holy See can discuss the history of when the Vatican became an official country (more recently than I thought). This article amounts to “religious Americans are idiots.”
It would be like if someone on QVC conned tons of people into buying magnets because "science proves this will increase your energy levels" and then I used that as a reason to write off all of science.
Target vulnerable people, get them to pay you money, profit. So many dishonest people exploit this formula from televangelists to email spammers.
At least with science, you can point to actual inventions and innovations that have a measurable and noticeable impact. Religion can and does have a beneficial impact especially in poor regions, but it does so independently of whether its teachings have any particular truth to them.
If the world were reset somehow, you'd end up with a completely different set of religious beliefs that would nonetheless have a similar role as a social bonding agent, whereas you would have a decent chance of the same research being done again if the scientific method does end up being developed in the world.
This statement is made from the assumption that God doesn't exist and that all religions are equally false. From my perspective, I would argue that if you reset the world, yes, purely man-made religions would disappear and be replaced by different (man-made) ones, but ultimately God's true religion would always re-emerge.
For example, in my completely biased opinion, religions like Scientology and Buddism would disappear on world reset to possibly be replaced with some roughly equivalent man-made belief systems under different names (or not). But Christianity (insert the "true" religion here) would persist on world reset (perhaps even under the same name), and the entire Abrahamic-family of religions would re-emerge under different names. They might not be known as "Judaism" or "Islam" or "Protestantism" but basically God would call Abraham-esque prophets to establish his religion, the religion would go off the rails, false prophets would emerge, people would try to restore the church to it's previous state, God would re-establish with new prophets, etc., and you would be left with hundreds of similar prophet-based religions all in the same family of religions, all worshiping the same God, all acknowledging a common set of scripture (which would have the same core religious beliefs as the pre-reset world did), all acknowledging a common set of (ancient) prophets, but with varying dogmatic differences due to aforementioned corruptions.
Well, all kinds of big companies exploit child labor in sweatshops, which also kinds as abuse in my book, and nobody closes them down.
I don't think the article casts religion as a whole as bad at any point.
I think the commenter here was right to get out in front of the ire and proselytizing.
My personal problem is the lack of convincing arguments that religion is good.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/31/are-religio...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Religious-Americans-Giv...
Also, just to point out something you take for granted:
You use the word "good" in your argument.
What is your standard of "good"ness?
Is it an objective, universal, absolute standard of good and evil?
Or is it whatever the loudest voice in the room demands it to be?
This was a huge, one might say parasitic, drain on a town made up of farmers, railway workers, assorted stores, failing restaurants, etc.
As attendance fell, the churches started demanding more and more money from their congregations to make up the shortfall. My former church, a Catholic Church, is one of the worst. There are still 7 churches operating in that town.
Society is changing. Small towns are getting smaller as kids move away. Also, church attendance is down as people go to Starbucks instead. It will balance out over time.
Eg via a documentary: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/american-gospel-b...
A sermon clip with more than a million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTc_FoELt8s
A rap which drew a lot of attention when published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4WevY-GPU
An explainer article: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-you-should-k...
A church journal issue dedicated to the subject: https://www.9marks.org/journal/prosperity-gospel/
An article by the nephew of one of these con artists, explaining why he left the racket: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/october/benny-hinn...
And the list goes on and on. There are many ongoing efforts to combat this kind of false teaching.
Jesus' own teaching and that of his first followers were quite clear on the point that greed is sinful and dangerous, and that love and generosity to the needy, not wealth and success, should characterize Christians.
[Luk 12:15, 33-34 ESV] 15 And he said to them, "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." ... 33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
[1Ti 6:9-10 ESV] But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.
[Eph 4:28 ESV] 28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.
[Phl 2:3-4 ESV] 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
[Jas 1:27 ESV] 27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
[1Jo 3:16-18 ESV] 16 By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. 17 But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? 18 Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
Prosperity teaching sells a parody of Christianity. It preys on those whose faith and knowledge of scripture is too shallow to tell the difference.
But, I feel religion has given me enormous benefits in life - it's helped me focus less on myself, it's given me a profound sense of identity and purpose in life. I don't feel that it has hindered my career or love of learning/science/engineering at all. I think it could help a lot of people who struggle with lack of sense of purpose/identity/community, etc. So I don't like it when all religion is condemned because of bad actors in some religions.
To use an imperfect analogy, I don't like it when people use logic like this: "All projects on GitHub are bad. Look at all these poorly written packages: X, Y, Z. Look at all these bigoted project maintainers. Did you know X project was a front for human trafficking? There is no reason for me to explore and contribute to projects on GitHub when there are so many compelling reasons to the contrary."
Agreed - it's a pretty weak argument compared to some of the others (terrorism, pedophilia, genocide etc.)
A few months the after they started teaching, their daughters, upon turning 18, accused their parents of sexual abuse.
The church tried to keep it quiet and said “we cannot judge. God will judge weather it is truth or falsehood.” And they allowed the elderly couple to continue teaching children.
I don’t know what happened after that since I decided to stop going to church after that.
Bullshit like this happens more often than people think.
The Southern Baptist Convention is finally looking to dedicate some of their resources to investigations and action on the sexual abuse that's been happening in their (very loosely affiliated churches), but it will be tough sledding.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2019/02/18/so...
I would argue that this does not. I don't know anyone who goes to church who would have allowed this to go on without alerting the authorities. Assuming your recollection is true, this was just a group of bad people being bad under the false pretense of being a "Church".
Look, bad people are everywhere. And just because someone calls himself a Christian doesn't mean he is.
True, but it also doesn't mean they're not being exploited.
I choose to believe my employer cares about me, but it doesn't mean they do, and it's likely they might know I think that and use it to their advantage.
I hold nothing against personal faith, but I find it unsettling the balance of wealth across organised religions - seeing the gold opulence centralised at the (likely) expense of largely the poor across a lot of faiths is horrifying.
It might be more of a societal good for a local church to extract money from their congregation than for it to be spent on, say, padding Amazon's pockets, but it doesn't mean it's not taking advantage of said peoples.
Each to their own, but the notion that tithes might be linked to eternal glory or damnation for the giver can hardly make them entirely freely given.
> A couple of years later, the Federal Communications Commission reportedly came close to introducing a "truth-in-advertising" clause for religious solicitations. This would have meant that any claims of boosting finances or curing disease would have to be verifiable, and Ole took various trips to Washington to lobby for it.
The thing that's easily forgotten is that any sufficiently-advanced con is indistinguishable from religion.
> I cant help but think that religious freedom is one of the bigger errors of our modern society.
So, you think people should be told what religion to follow?
How? Do they only fall for this, because they are bad people who deserve punishment?
This seems ripe for a tech based solution like an independent chruch rating group like the charity ratings people to encourage transparency about how these ministries use their funds and how well their doctrines line up with basic christian beliefs like tge nicene creed. These TV minitries usually fail on both counts.
The trinity group in the article seems to be doing great work but they seem to fail in being overly reliant on legislatures
I hate the fact that all these mega-church millionaire preachers claim to be followers of Christ in any way, shape or form.
What people really need to acknowledge is that humans are naturally spiritual animals. I like to theorize that we evolved spirituality as a mechanism to cope with being lonely intelligent beings. Imagine being a feral yet intelligent, self aware, social being with few others like yourself wandering the land, surviving as wild animals. We knew nothing of how anything worked. What made the lightning and thunder, what fire is, what volcanoes are, disease, predators, earthquakes, drought, floods, etc, and the most scary of all, death. Then throw in more layers of emotional complexity thanks to that big complex brain. What a lonely and terrifying existence. Who do you talk to in a time of great need? Who do you cry out to? For a near infinite number of reasons, we can't always express our feelings to others so we created internal people to listen to us. Those people are gods.
So remember, religion fulfills the humans natural need for spirituality. Religious leaders are nothing more than personifications of our inner gods we can both speak and relate to. So think of religion as a form of spiritual food. And I can see the benefits of religion in the social sense where a common inner voice brings people together based on common spiritual grounds. It also introduces another very important concept which helps reinforce diciplice and even learning: ritual. This was incredibly important in the early days of human evolution, it's probably one of the first forms of casual social bonding we developed. Of course there are those who seek power over others. And what better way to socially hack groups of people via exploiting highly vulnerable built in behaviour? This is where religion and spirituality diverge, when it's used for control. Religion has been corrupted.
I grew up catholic but don't like religion because I don't find its dogma spiritually nourishing. However I do pray, not to a god but to the ether or friends and family who have passed. My church is whatever brings me inner peace, though stereotypically I'm naming nature, the wilderness away from society. I'm not sure on an afterlife, and I've half come to peace with accepting that there may be nothing beyond this life. So I mix in ritual, spirituality, philosophy and disciplines into a sort of mini religion for myself. Life is a complex maze and having something to listen to your woes is incredibly comforting, and that's what god(s) really are, comfort. Admittedly I'm still hungry. But that's part of the spiritual journey: finding good spiritual comfort food.
