Jesus Made Me Puke

[Chilly]

Don't believe I've seen this article here. Its about a journalist who joined John Hagee's church and went to a retreat put on by them.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...e_me_puke/print

 

Quite a well-written piece. Oh, and the story he makes up, nothing short of awesome.

 

By the way, next to Hagee's church in San Antonio, is a place called Tom's Ribs. Each Sunday, lots of his church members go to eat at Tom's Ribs. Who owns Tom's Ribs? You guessed it, Hagee.

[Dwight Drane]

Don't believe I've seen this article here. Its about a journalist who joined John Hagee's church and went to a retreat put on by them.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...e_me_puke/print

 

Quite a well-written piece. Oh, and the story he makes up, nothing short of awesome.

 

By the way, next to Hagee's church in San Antonio, is a place called Tom's Ribs. Each Sunday, lots of his church members go to eat at Tom's Ribs. Who owns Tom's Ribs? You guessed it, Hagee.

 

I read the author and clicked off.

 

That guy is disgusting. He was on Bill Mahr when Tony Snow was on there, and Snow was out of his seat and ready to pummel the snot out of him.

 

I take most of liberal media with a grain of salt and actually prefer to watch MSNBC to Fox, but this guy was the posterboy for liberal flaiming BS. I am not a big fan of Hagee or any church movements that play for power and cash, (almost all), but you just need to light this clown's crap up with a Zippo without giving it a second look. I swear I would have taken him out for Snow that night.

 

By the way....San Antonio has more than one BBQ joint! If anybody wants a good place to order from, New Braunfels Smokehouse is awesome. Top notch stuff and it's shipped cold to your front door. And no I don't own any part of it!

[yall]

Don't believe I've seen this article here. Its about a journalist who joined John Hagee's church and went to a retreat put on by them.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...e_me_puke/print

 

Quite a well-written piece. Oh, and the story he makes up, nothing short of awesome.

 

By the way, next to Hagee's church in San Antonio, is a place called Tom's Ribs. Each Sunday, lots of his church members go to eat at Tom's Ribs. Who owns Tom's Ribs? You guessed it, Hagee.

 

Taibbi is a sad Hunter S. Thompson wanna be.

 

I'm no fan of wacko evangelicals either, but everytime he writes about something he begins by insulting the subjects which immediately removes any notion of neutrality. You know 2 lines into the story what his conclusion is going to be.

 

It's not journalism, it's OpEd.

[ieatcrayonz]

Don't believe I've seen this article here. Its about a journalist who joined John Hagee's church and went to a retreat put on by them.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...e_me_puke/print

 

Quite a well-written piece. Oh, and the story he makes up, nothing short of awesome.

 

By the way, next to Hagee's church in San Antonio, is a place called Tom's Ribs. Each Sunday, lots of his church members go to eat at Tom's Ribs. Who owns Tom's Ribs? You guessed it, Hagee.

A word from the wise Sonny. When you have a Farked up mind you are easily fooled.

 

Does it really matter if you are fooled by a preacher or a drugged out loser smelly hippy who writes for Rolling Stone?

[Chilly]

By the way....San Antonio has more than one BBQ joint! If anybody wants a good place to order from, New Braunfels Smokehouse is awesome. Top notch stuff and it's shipped cold to your front door. And no I don't own any part of it!

 

No sh--? It does?

 

I threw that in there to show Hagee's supreme sense of business. Way to take advantage of your members.

 

Taibbi is a sad Hunter S. Thompson wanna be.

 

I'm no fan of wacko evangelicals either, but everytime he writes about something he begins by insulting the subjects which immediately removes any notion of neutrality. You know 2 lines into the story what his conclusion is going to be.

 

It's not journalism, it's OpEd.

 

You expected something that was published in Rolling Stone to be anything but?

 

The real value here, at least to me, was shedding a light on Hagee's practices and the way his church operates (as well as some humor involved). Yes, he does wrongly try to spread it to all Christianity, when that obviously isn't the case.

[X. Benedict]

Don't believe I've seen this article here. Its about a journalist who joined John Hagee's church and went to a retreat put on by them.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...e_me_puke/print

 

Quite a well-written piece. Oh, and the story he makes up, nothing short of awesome.

 

By the way, next to Hagee's church in San Antonio, is a place called Tom's Ribs. Each Sunday, lots of his church members go to eat at Tom's Ribs. Who owns Tom's Ribs? You guessed it, Hagee.

 

The idea that Hagee's church needs to be infiltrated to be understood is really laughable.

[Chilly]

The idea that Hagee's church needs to be infiltrated to be understood is really laughable.

 

Perhaps to us - but I know several fans of Hagee who refuse to believe anything bad about the guy (or would think that there would be vomiting rituals, such as was in the article).

[Alaska Darin]

You're all a buncha neocon dumbasses. [/bishopgiveshedd]

[yall]

You expected something that was published in Rolling Stone to be anything but?

 

No, not really. But I still read it occasionally, and it still riles me up. Their reporting on just about anything is dubious.

 

I will never forget the article that chastised fans of metal and hard rock for "liking the way it sounds" as if there are far more compelling reasons to appreciate MUSIC.

 

The real value here, at least to me, was shedding a light on Hagee's practices and the way his church operates (as well as some humor involved). Yes, he does wrongly try to spread it to all Christianity, when that obviously isn't the case.

 

Fair enough. Assuming what was reported wasn't all total exaggerations, it was kinda reminiscent of Scientology.

[buckeyemike]

Oooh, those bad evil religious people.

 

Spreading their ideas all over the world to unsuspecting good humanistic people.

 

Forgive me if I sound proud, but I feel that I am uniquely able to critique this article (I did read it a couple of weeks ago). I've been in evangelical churches all my life and currently teach Sunday School. I once considered myself a member of the Christian political right, although I no longer do, as I've become much more libertarian over the last five years or so.

 

Some of it he gets right, especially the general psychological feeling of wanting to be a part of something that is bigger than you are. Other times, the writer shows just what an ass he is. He judges these well-meaning people and while I don't agree with most of what went on during this "Encounter Weekend", these people are honestly attempting to live their lives centered on Jesus Christ.

 

See, true Christianity is the life you live when no one else is watching. When I worked at a Christian radio station in college twenty years ago, there was a popular song called "Tuesdays & Thursdays", about living a holy lifestyle the other days of the week. Yes, it takes commitment and yes, it's difficult. You have to want to do it.

 

I've never been on one of these "Encounter Weekends", but I've been to Bible camp and plenty of revival services in my day. The key to living the Christian life is to realize that we as humans are small and what God really wants us to be is faithful to Him.

 

He gave His Son Jesus to us so a) we could be saved from hell and b) so we wouldn't have to go through life alone.

 

Remember too that there are jerks in churches, just like there are jerks everywhere else. As a friend of mine said years ago, don't let the bastards get you down.

[X. Benedict]

Oooh, those bad evil religious people.

 

Tiabbi has long been hostile to religion. That's no surprise.

 

Hagee himself, however, does deserve the public scrutiny that comes with making public political endorsements.

[buckeyemike]

Hagee himself, however, does deserve the public scrutiny that comes with making public political endorsements.

 

I don't disagree with you on Hagee. I'm no fan of his and posted here last week that he divorced his wife in the mid-70s and married a woman he allegedly had an affair with.

 

I hope he repented. And that's the last I'll say about it.

[Chilly]

Forgive me if I sound proud, but I feel that I am uniquely able to critique this article (I did read it a couple of weeks ago). I've been in evangelical churches all my life and currently teach Sunday School. I once considered myself a member of the Christian political right, although I no longer do, as I've become much more libertarian over the last five years or so.

 

I'm sure there are lots of people here that have spent a long number of years in evangelical churches. I spent my first 18 years in them as well.

 

Some of it he gets right, especially the general psychological feeling of wanting to be a part of something that is bigger than you are. Other times, the writer shows just what an ass he is. He judges these well-meaning people and while I don't agree with most of what went on during this "Encounter Weekend", these people are honestly attempting to live their lives centered on Jesus Christ.

 

Quite frankly, I felt this was much more of a commentary on Hagee's church than a judging of any of the people attending it, outside of them being broken and looking for an improvement in their life (which in itself isn't a judgment, more of an observation about the state that they are in).

 

The real judging was of Fortenberry and the other life coaches, taking advantage of broken people in alarming ways.

 

See, true Christianity is the life you live when no one else is watching. When I worked at a Christian radio station in college twenty years ago, there was a popular song called "Tuesdays & Thursdays", about living a holy lifestyle the other days of the week. Yes, it takes commitment and yes, it's difficult. You have to want to do it.

 

I've never been on one of these "Encounter Weekends", but I've been to Bible camp and plenty of revival services in my day. The key to living the Christian life is to realize that we as humans are small and what God really wants us to be is faithful to Him.

 

He gave His Son Jesus to us so a) we could be saved from hell and b) so we wouldn't have to go through life alone.

 

Remember too that there are jerks in churches, just like there are jerks everywhere else. As a friend of mine said years ago, don't let the bastards get you down.

 

Which is all well and good, but one would think there should be a movement within the evangelical churches to get rid of churches like Hagee who seemingly pounce on people and take advantage of them.

[slothrop]

Tiabbi has long been hostile to religion. That's no surprise.

 

Hagee himself, however, does deserve the public scrutiny that comes with making public political endorsements.

 

Tiabbi used to write for a Buffalo rag called the "Buffalo Beast." He used to cover a lot of my events. Yes, he was an ass - but a funny ass. Journalism needs people like him to point out the absurdity of today's politics.

[PromoTheRobot]

Radical Christians are every inch as scary as radical Muslims. I would love to stage cage match brawls between them. Maybe they could just wipe each other out.

 

PTR

[buckeyemike]

Quite frankly, I felt this was much more of a commentary on Hagee's church than a judging of any of the people attending it, outside of them being broken and looking for an improvement in their life (which in itself isn't a judgment, more of an observation about the state that they are in).

 

The real judging was of Fortenberry and the other life coaches, taking advantage of broken people in alarming ways.

 

Bluefire, you and I are a lot more alike that I initially thought!

 

And I do agree with you and these so-called "life coaches". For me, I think that "life coaches" are a massive waste of time and money, Christian or not. Many people can't deal adequately with life, but I think this is where the support of family and friends has to come in. We all have problems in life; it's how we handle things that's the key.

 

Churches like Hagee's do fleece the gullible. That's why I don't attend nondenominational churches, because there aren't enough checks and balances present. I'm certainly intelligent enough to question things (in fact, my parents, who are Christians themselves, encourage this), and that would make me a danger to those who want unquestioning allegiance and demand authority for their rule.

[slothrop]

This part had me rolling in laughter:

 

Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan's wound was a tale that wouldn't have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life — something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men — although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women's roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.

 

Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.

 

Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.

 

"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"

 

My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real past — not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process — but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.

 

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

 

The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to tea-saucer size.

 

I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.

 

"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know — whap!"

 

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.

 

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

 

So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.

 

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:

 

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

 

Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from José at the last part — his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.

[Steely Dan]

No, not really. But I still read it occasionally, and it still riles me up. Their reporting on just about anything is dubious.

 

I will never forget the article that chastised fans of metal and hard rock for "liking the way it sounds" as if there are far more compelling reasons to appreciate MUSIC.

 

 

 

Fair enough. Assuming what was reported wasn't all total exaggerations, it was kinda reminiscent of Scientology.

 

RS lost all it's musical credibility the day it put the Backstreet Boys on the cover. I didn't read this article yet but their political stuff can be very interesting and well researched.

 

Oooh, those bad evil religious people.

 

Spreading their ideas all over the world to unsuspecting good humanistic people.

 

Forgive me if I sound proud, but I feel that I am uniquely able to critique this article (I did read it a couple of weeks ago). I've been in evangelical churches all my life and currently teach Sunday School. I once considered myself a member of the Christian political right, although I no longer do, as I've become much more libertarian over the last five years or so.

 

Some of it he gets right, especially the general psychological feeling of wanting to be a part of something that is bigger than you are. Other times, the writer shows just what an ass he is. He judges these well-meaning people and while I don't agree with most of what went on during this "Encounter Weekend", these people are honestly attempting to live their lives centered on Jesus Christ.

 

See, true Christianity is the life you live when no one else is watching. When I worked at a Christian radio station in college twenty years ago, there was a popular song called "Tuesdays & Thursdays", about living a holy lifestyle the other days of the week. Yes, it takes commitment and yes, it's difficult. You have to want to do it.

 

I've never been on one of these "Encounter Weekends", but I've been to Bible camp and plenty of revival services in my day. The key to living the Christian life is to realize that we as humans are small and what God really wants us to be is faithful to Him.

 

He gave His Son Jesus to us so a) we could be saved from hell and b) so we wouldn't have to go through life alone.

 

Remember too that there are jerks in churches, just like there are jerks everywhere else. As a friend of mine said years ago, don't let the bastards get you down.

 

Let me start by saying I believe in God but believe he's very saddened by all of the religions on this earth. If you want to know God then know your heart. Your heart is the CPU of God's programming. If you can look at two consenting adults in love and tell them you can't get married because it's a sin to marry the same sex then you're being heartless. If you believe that the death penalty is worth it even though innocents die then you're heartless. If you can walk into an emergency room where a fourteen year old girl is crying because she's been raped and tell her she can't have a morning after pill because God thinks it's a sin to kill a few cells then you're heartless. There are a great many things religion tells us is wrong but is actually right and ok. 'Nuff said.

 

Nobody really buys the religious stuff anyway. If heaven is such a great place why do people do whatever they can to avoid it. Years ago if you got cancer and died it was because there wasn't much anyone could do about it and "God was calling you home." Today if someone gets cancer it's something they fight tooth and nail to survive from using all of the latest medical science. If you survive it's a miracle and if you die it's because "God was calling you home." In fact it's considered crazy to not try to live as long as possible. How about if you die it's because medical science couldn't cure you and if you live they could. Once again, if heaven is so great why do people fear dying?

[buckeyemike]

Once again, if heaven is so great why do people fear dying?

 

Because we're human and want to live on this earth as long as possible. Even the Christians. I know where I'm headed, but I don't want to go there quite yet.

 

It's the same reason why people seek out faith healers like Benny Hinn, who I think is nothing but a charlatan...we desire to be whole and healed, here in life, when it is not always God's will to do so.

 

But I'll leave it at that. This is not the place to get all stressed out about religion.

[Marv's Neighbor]

Maybe Hagee would make Jesus puke!