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Those Crazy Televangelists |
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August 15, 2005 Those Crazy Televangelists by Ouster So here we are, on the touchiest of today’s contemporary topics. Religion. For today, I will focus on the craziest of religious people, the evangelists. Yet, it is even possible to further break these people down, unbreakable as they may seem. There are the televangelists – the craziest of the crazies, which I think is definitely saying something. The reason I choose to talk about them specifically is that I find them to exemplify the vices that seem to permeate (like water) one of the most established religions of the world, that of Christianity (a sponge, if you will… of water). Now, let me broaden out a little back to religion as a whole. It has been said that Christianity has had the best salesman in the history of… well, salesmen, I suppose. Obviously, unless you’ve been living in a hole, you may have heard of Jesus. Yes, Jesus, the best salesman in history, started out with several apprenti, and now owns a large fraction of the world. Now, not too long ago, I posed a question to myself (and by not too long ago, I mean “while I was writing this piece not 1 minute ago”), and the question was, “Should we take that word salesman, combine it with the name Jesus in the same sentence, and still use ‘salesman’ with the modern connotation?” And after thoroughly going over this question in my mind, I believe the answer is yes. What do we think of salesmen today? We have in our minds, clear as a puddle of water after a spring rain, an image of a guy / woman / hermaphrodite (though what one looks like, nobody knows, ironically enough) sitting at an auto-dialer, popping questions into peoples’ ears and/or answering machines like a doctor stabbing a needle deep into a patient’s skin. |
Consider what would happen if in today’s world, a guy ran around shouting, “Ok guys! There’s this dude overhead! And he watches all over us, yea, that’s right! And don’t forget, don’t do bad stuff, because he can see you, in your house, at work… even in the bathroom! If you do bad stuff, you better watch out, because after you’re dead, when nothing can possibly happen to you, you’re going to suffer! Burn! Because you do have life after death” and so on. Any rational being should by all means reject such crazy talk as crazy talk, yet people obviously don’t, because Christian people, as I stated above, constitute a large fraction of the world’s religious folk (like water). Jesus made sense with many of his other teachings, many of with which I agree with (not listed here, but you can probably figure them out), but the ones listed above were my main complaints. Now, I apologize for the Amazonian discourse, but now, we’re back to televangelists (the craziest of the crazies). Televangelists, on the surface, just want to continue the tradition of being excellent salesmen, but their motives are much more selfish than that. I watched several of these programs, and I find it odd that they all manage to slip in a telephone number to donate money to. Who among you has seen the movie Seven, starring Brad Pitt? Remember the lawyer that was killed? And what was his sin? Hrmm….. If I remember correctly, it was a little something called Greed. Was it Greed? Yes, yes, I think it was. Now, excuse me if I’m wrong, but I think the last time I checked, sins were bad things to be doing, not things that followers of Christianity should be doing. What’s it called when you do something that you preach against? I think it starts with H- and ends in –ypocrisy. Hypocrisy! That’s the word. I realize I haven’t really proved my point yet, but I’m running out of space for this column, so I’ll get back to y’all later. Until next time. |
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