People love to rip on Joel Osteen for pushing feel-good nothingburgers on an audience of the desperate and vulnerable. And they’re not entirely unfair in doing so. Dude is a shameless parasite who has crafted the illusion of charity over his empire of graft.
That said, his message and his politics are largely fluff. He’s the “Just Pray More” panacea guy, but he goes out of his way to be inoffensive in order to maximize his market share.
If you want to see a real freak, take a quick car ride over to the Houston Second Baptist Church. Ed Young is Houston’s own little Antichrist. He’s cultivating an audience of the most blood drenched reactionary psychos the state has to offer. He placates their egos by promising them a seat in God’s Kingdom in exchange for their ruthlessness, their brutality, and their bigotry. Where Joel is an empty suit, full of false hope and hollow cheer, Ed Young is a Drummer Boy of Mamon, urging his congregation onward to new heights of depraved cruelty.
If you want to know where the folks who want to roll coal and lock up pregnant women and torture LGBT folks straight and glass Palestine go to church, its not Lakewood.
Nah… he ain’t special. His audience now… they are some kind of special. I live deep in the bible belt and have to listen to them talk and hear their opinions way more than I care to. Sometimes I just want to scream insults and call them all a bunch of suckers. What gets me the most is it’s not just 10% of their incomes, it’s also full access to their children.
They don’t even need the preachers for that, they abuse their own children. Almost ever evangelical family has some sort of emotional abuse going on, at least in the homeschool groups. I’d know, I was one and my dataset includes hundreds from my cult campus. And I know that out of a class of 10 (we get put with the same small classes for life in the one I was raised in), three had severe depression for their entire childhood, two more intermittently. And of the remaining 8 come high-school (some switched campuses), two engaged in self-harm due to emotionally abusive parents, myself being one of them. And I can’t speak to the prominence of self harm in other classes, but the abuse was a campus wide problem, and 6 out of my class had emotionally abusive parents.
To sum it up, out of a dataset of 10 who I’ve known personally since we all were five…
Abuse rate: 75% [6/8] Depression (3+ months): 50% [5/10] Depression (around 5+ years): 33% [3/10] Self-harm: 25% [2/8]
This is not acceptable. This must end.
…
The term we’re looking for here is “charismatic amoral sociopath.”
I wish it was only income being scammed. The amount of blood that humans have spilled over fairy tales is staggering.
And worse, they’re not always spilling the blood themselves… ever since the end of the crusades, their victims spill their own blood now… they abuse their non-conforming children until they either assimilate or die - and a few break through and trickle out into the world to show others what Christanity (or abusive religion in general) does to it’s own children… I would know. I have those scars on my arm. Two of us, in my homeschool cult-class of 8 people, have them. And many I’ve never met, because they aren’t around anymore to join us and see that there is life beyond the cult …
