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Joos opine christians caused recession.

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  • Joos opine christians caused recession.

    J-ewish editor to Atlantic writes piece entitled "Did Christians Cause Recession?" http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print...sperity-gospel

    America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

    by Hanna Rosin

    Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

    Image credit: Mark Peterson/Redux

    Like the ambitions of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor’s basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can’t otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass—“because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me—and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips.

    It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”

    Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

    Later, D’andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and “you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that.” Then, just that morning, “Jesus gave me $1,000.” She didn’t explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. “If you have financial pressure on you, and you don’t know where the next payment is coming from, don’t pay any attention to that!” she continued. “Don’t get discouraged! Jesus is the answer.”

    America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”

    Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

    In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

    I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream—one that’s been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today’s economic reality, and to see whether “prosperity” could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing.

    Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.” For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay’s church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

    One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

    Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

    Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.

    But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy j-ewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.

    Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

    On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can’t believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father’s church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he’d managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King’s suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.

    ----------------
    Larry King raised inquiry based on above piece to Joel Osteen last night on CNN. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bes...iref=allsearch

    Now after all the financial scandals in the last two years in which a joo was the principal culprit, could you imagine if MSM writers/media celebrities were going around asking if "J-ews caused the recession???".

    American J-ooish leaders would be demanding boycotts, firings, protests and disparaging everyone involved by comparing them to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
    Last edited by freakyfreaky; 12-18-2009, 08:46 PM.
    Between childhood, boyhood,
    adolescence
    & manhood (maturity) there
    should be sharp lines drawn w/
    Tests, deaths, feats, rites
    stories, songs & judgements

    - Morrison, Jim. Wilderness, vol. 1, p. 22

  • #2
    Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

    The economists say they are Christian but in reality its just a popularity tool, I doubt they give a damn about anything save their own wallets, as for the bible itself that does not suggest throwing your money into mortgage banks or spending up and getting into debt with loan sharks.

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

      Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat.

      The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.


      “ Anyone who bought stocks in mid-1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even."


      The Roaring Twenties, the decade that led up to the Crash, was a time of wealth and excess, and despite caution of the dangers of speculation, many believed that the market could sustain high price levels. Shortly before the crash, economist Irving Fisher famously proclaimed, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." However, the optimism and financial gains of the great bull market were shattered on "Black Tuesday", October 29, 1929, when share prices on the NYSE collapsed. Stock prices fell on that day and they continued to fall, at an unprecedented rate, for a full month.

      The October 1929 crash came during a period of declining real estate values in the United States (which peaked in 1925) near the beginning of a chain of events that led to the Great Depression, a period of economic decline in the industrialized nations.

      Oops, the Hryas did it again... again and again because people never learn.
      "Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it." ~Malcolm X

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

        Israeli ministers battle over recognizing Evangelical christians as independent church. Interiro Minister position may be proof that Israel really not very democratic at all or J-ewish democracy not much different than Muslim democracy except for religious preference.
        Israel Today is a Jerusalem-based Zionist news agency founded in 1978 to bring a biblical dimension to journalism on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

        Breaking news about Satellite from The Jerusalem Post. Read the latest updates on Satellite including articles, videos, opinions and more.


        Some Evangelical leaders may no longer be willing to support Israel.
        American Family News (formerly One News Now) offers news on current events from an evangelical Christian perspective. Our experienced journalists want to glorify God in what we do.


        Oh no, Joos never harass anyone, but if these ones did in US, it would be a hate crime.
        Breaking news about Satellite from The Jerusalem Post. Read the latest updates on Satellite including articles, videos, opinions and more.


        The snake Peres kisses Chrisitan butt for Christmas. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

        Israeli Joos not as democratic or respectful of the freedom of religion as they would like the world to think.
        Last edited by freakyfreaky; 12-31-2009, 10:36 PM.
        Between childhood, boyhood,
        adolescence
        & manhood (maturity) there
        should be sharp lines drawn w/
        Tests, deaths, feats, rites
        stories, songs & judgements

        - Morrison, Jim. Wilderness, vol. 1, p. 22

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

          Ultra orthodox Jewish leaders in Jerusalem have denounced the harassment of Christian clergy.


          J-ewish leaders condemn harassment of Christians in Jerusalem

          by Charlie Boyd
          Posted: Friday, January 8, 2010, 12:19 (GMT)

          Ultra orthodox J-ewish leaders in Jerusalem have denounced the harassment of Christian clergy.

          Representatives of the Beth Din Tzedek, the tribunal of the Orthodox J-ewish Community, acknowledged in a letter to the Holy See this week that “irresponsible” youths within its fold were harassing and insulting Christian clergy in the city.

          The harassment includes spitting and cursing at priests and nuns, and painting anti-Christian graffiti on the walls of churches and holy places, reports Catholic news agency Zenit.

          Such actions, the J-ewish leaders said, “desecrated” God’s name and were “liable to bring tragic consequences upon our own community”.

          "We hereby call upon anyone who has the power to end these shameful incidents through persuasion, to take action as soon as possible to remove these hazards, so that our community may live in peace,” the leaders stated.

          The ultra Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Papenheim has met representatives of the Israeli foreign ministry to discuss the letter and the incidents of harassment.

          The Rev Samuel Aghoyan, an Armenian Orthodox cleric, was quoted by the National Catholic Reporter as saying that he had been spat upon as many as 20 times, most recently in November.

          “I was walking back from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and I saw this boy in a yarmulke and ritual fringes coming back from the Kotel, and he spat at me two or three times,” Aghoyan said.

          “Every [Christian cleric in the Old City] who’s been here for awhile, who dresses in robes in public, has a story to tell about being spat at. The more you get around, the more it happens.”
          Last edited by freakyfreaky; 01-15-2010, 09:44 AM.
          Between childhood, boyhood,
          adolescence
          & manhood (maturity) there
          should be sharp lines drawn w/
          Tests, deaths, feats, rites
          stories, songs & judgements

          - Morrison, Jim. Wilderness, vol. 1, p. 22

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

            It would be fun to beat those little bastards up, maybe cut their queer looking locks of hair off too!
            For the first time in more than 600 years, Armenia is free and independent, and we are therefore obligated
            to place our national interests ahead of our personal gains or aspirations.



            http://www.armenianhighland.com/main.html

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

              As this kinds of articles show us over and over again, the jew vs christian vs arab debate is at the center of everything in the universe.
              this post = teh win.

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: Joos opine christians caused recession.

                Originally posted by Sip View Post
                As this kinds of articles show us over and over again, the jew vs christian vs arab debate is at the center of everything in the universe.
                Oh sip, you slipped. j-ew vs. christian vs. arab debate??? what about the muslims? Israel is an arab state? Ashenazis vs. Sephardics? Zionist Christians vs. non-Zionist Christians? Oh, what were you trying to articulate?

                tsk, tsk, tsk, Sip, I expect more from you.
                Between childhood, boyhood,
                adolescence
                & manhood (maturity) there
                should be sharp lines drawn w/
                Tests, deaths, feats, rites
                stories, songs & judgements

                - Morrison, Jim. Wilderness, vol. 1, p. 22

                Comment

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