Give me $300 to save your failing ministry! Sale ends today!

[Underseer]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rollto...es-over-a-sign-of-the-christian-times-lsp-52/

Christianity is dying in the developed first world. Now there is a whole industry bent on exploiting all those dying churches for every last dime they have.

If I didn't have at least an ounce of morality, I would be out there exploiting those failing ministries myself.

 

[steve_bank]

It is common. On my cable there is a nightly show. The guy asls for 'seed money', in the name of Jesus of course. Send $100 and god will give you back more. Of course there are people who claim they gave $100 and a few eweeks later got back $1000 in some way.

200 people a month at $100 is 20K a month. Probably more than 200 people a month.

Back in the 70s or 80s Oral Roberts told his followers he woulddie without contributions.

 

[Jobar]

I thought a lot about that blog while working today.

Back in 2013, before Christian leaders really realized just how serious their decline was, Rachel Held Evans (at the time an evangelical) wrote about those leaders’ unwillingness to question their tribes’ teachings. She gave speeches to pastors’ groups about the serious problems she perceived in evangelical culture. In those speeches, she detailed evangelicals’ obsession with sexual rules, their soul-crushing bigotry and sexism, their outright science denialism, their over-politicization, and more. Afterward, these pastors always responded in the same exact way: "Invariably, after I’ve finished my presentation and opened the floor to questions, a pastor raises his hand and says, “So what you’re saying is we need hipper worship bands. …” And I proceed to bang my head against the podium."

I wonder what changes might actually prove effective in halting the decline of most Christian denominations. None that they'd be willing to make, I'm sure. Like so many conservatives, they despise and fear change;

We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.

Ideas, like living things, have to adapt to change or die. Seems to me that most evangelicals, in particular, had rather die than change with the times. That same failure to adapt is the common fate of hardcore conservatives; they prefer the past to any future.

 

[Underseer]

I thought a lot about that blog while working today.

Back in 2013, before Christian leaders really realized just how serious their decline was, Rachel Held Evans (at the time an evangelical) wrote about those leaders’ unwillingness to question their tribes’ teachings. She gave speeches to pastors’ groups about the serious problems she perceived in evangelical culture. In those speeches, she detailed evangelicals’ obsession with sexual rules, their soul-crushing bigotry and sexism, their outright science denialism, their over-politicization, and more. Afterward, these pastors always responded in the same exact way: "Invariably, after I’ve finished my presentation and opened the floor to questions, a pastor raises his hand and says, “So what you’re saying is we need hipper worship bands. …” And I proceed to bang my head against the podium."

I wonder what changes might actually prove effective in halting the decline of most Christian denominations. None that they'd be willing to make, I'm sure. Like so many conservatives, they despise and fear change;

We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.

Ideas, like living things, have to adapt to change or die. Seems to me that most evangelicals, in particular, had rather die than change with the times. That same failure to adapt is the common fate of hardcore conservatives; they prefer the past to any future.

Human beings already have a nasty tendency to resist admitting that we are wrong about something. The more successful religions take that nasty habit and the sloppy thinking that makes it possible, and makes it worse to help spread the political control mechanism to more people. If the people spread the control mechanism for you, then you don't have to waste as much money on proselytizers.

During the early days of the development of the scientific method, the Catholic church humiliated themselves over and over in spectacular public fashion. It took them centuries, but they finally admitted that evolution is "not incompatible with the teachings of the church" or however they phrase it.

The disadvantage of the Catholic church is also its advantage that patriarchal hierarchy that leverages so much control. That's bad whenever church/state separation isn't a thing, but in this case it moderated some of their more extreme views, at least on matters of conflicts with science. Most of the time.

Protestants on the other hand don't have a large organizational structure to preserve hard-learned lessons, so it's entirely likely that they will never learn, or at least they'll have to keep learning the same lessons over and over.

Since Muslims have an organizational structure (or lack thereof) similar to Protestants, I expect they will also never learn/have to keep relearning.

 

[Learner]

Yep, you gotta be careful. I keep getting e-mails from Nigeria.

 

[Underseer]

There's an entire industry dedicated to preying on the inherent gullibility of Christians. I think people who take advantage of Christian gullibility are a special kind of slimebag.

Preying on gullible people who are under an awful lot of stress is even worse.

 

[steve_bank]

If I didn not have a moral compass and sense of ethics I'd have a miraculous conversion commong to Jesusu, write books, give seminaers on the evil atheists, and start a TV show.

 

[Underseer]

If I didn not have a moral compass and sense of ethics I'd have a miraculous conversion commong to Jesusu, write books, give seminaers on the evil atheists, and start a TV show.

Make sure you play up the "I used to be an atheist" card. You know how much Christians and Muslims love appeal to authority fallacies.