I was fascinated with prosperity gospel televangelists and faith healers back in my 20s. I wasn’t a fan of these people. I didn’t agree with their message, and I knew they were scamming their audience for money, but that’s what made them fascinating (and appalling) to me.
What struck me the hardest was when a faith healer or one of their supporters would claim that someone didn’t get healed or was still struggling financially because they didn’t have enough faith.
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“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Matthew 17:20b-21, NIV
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Shifting the blame from the preacher to the congregant gives the faith healer an out while forcing the follower to feel guilty and try harder. “Maybe if I donate more money, I’ll be healed.” It’s a system of control. And those in control want the rest of us to be constantly searching or waiting for something better, and they give us someone to blame for why we don’t yet have that thing.
“You don’t have enough faith.”
“There’s a demon inside you.”
“You must have a secret sin you still need to confess.”
“Just donate more money and you’ll receive your blessing.”
As long as you don’t blame the preacher, he’s still free to grift. It works the same way with the politician…
“Immigrants are taking your jobs.”
“The gays are destroying the sanctity of marriage.”
“Trans people are ruining sports.”
“Black people take advantage of welfare.”
“The left has declared a war on Christmas.”
The significant difference between the preacher and the politician is that the televangelist wants you to blame yourself (feeding off of religion-induced guilt and fear) and sometimes demons, whereas the bureaucrat wants you to blame other people (feeding off systemically engrained bigotry and hatred), painting these people as demons. Either way, they spread their rhetoric with an absolute disregard for truth to gain more money and power at the cost of the health and stability of everyone else.
And those in power, both in the sociopolitical sphere and the broadcasted religious sphere, hold on to their power by supporting each other, at least insofar as it secures their growing wealth and power.
I swear if Christians actually listened to all the warnings found in the Bible, Trump would’ve never become president. Sure, the discussion is a bit more nuanced than that, but I’ve studied the Bible a lot, which makes me wonder why they try so hard to shove their preferred camel through that needle’s eye.
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“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Matthew 19:24, NIV
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The politicians currently in power in the United States government and their oligarchic allies preach rugged individualism, but don’t be fooled: they understand communal support. The “elites” help each other and bail each other out all the time. They get handouts from the government, special privileges, and protection from the law. It’s socialism for the mega rich and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” for the rest of us.
We are sold the “American Dream.” We’re told that “hard work and determination” are what we need to become anything we want to be. But the system is rigged against the regular person by being designed to make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful at the expense of the regular person.
Then when someone happens to “make it” because they had the right opportunity with the right tools at the right place at the right time, they’re boosted up as “heroes” we should aspire to emulate. They make movies about such people. And while I want to see people succeed, such success stories are used as propaganda to make the rest of think we can do it too, as long as we work hard and never give up. It’s a system designed to keep us in our place. The occasional “breakout star” is spotlighted to gaslight us into thinking that the “American dream” is something we all can attain.
But the reality is that most of us don’t have that kind of opportunity or luck in our timing. And that leaves us disillusioned and frustrated. Those heroes with success stories of overcoming adversity and struggle were placed in a system they should have never had to fight their way out of and one in which we never should have been part of in the first place: a system that created much of those struggles and hardships.
And if we struggle, we’re deemed “lazy” or we’re “not working hard enough” or we “want handouts” or we’re “inferior.” It’s the faith healer all over again who claims you weren’t healed because you “don’t have enough faith.”
Our planet has more than enough resources to provide every single human being adequate food, clothing, healthcare, and shelter. Earth possesses enough resources that no single human being should ever die due to a lack of food, clothing, medication, or shelter. So why, then, are so many of us not doing well? Why do we struggle to get the medication we need? Why are we forced to work ourselves to death just to survive?
The reason is that a small minority of people have claimed all of Earth’s resources, often at the cost of the lives of others. A tiny number of people hoard as much money and property as they can, and our society praises them for it.
I’ve talked about this before, and it’s worth talking about more.
Elon became our first trillionaire recently. Meanwhile homeless people get arrested for sleeping on a bench. How does that make sense? The U.S. government protects pedophiles and rapists while we bomb other countries for oil and money, or as a distraction to keep us from focusing on what they’re really doing. They vilify certain groups of people to keep their supporters angry, as though the struggle is easier to accept if we can blame someone for it.
They’re just not blaming the right people.
Stay safe. Look out for each other. Speak out against injustice. And try like hell to not lose your sense of joy. If they can’t get us to join them in their hate, then they want us to despair. Despair leads to hopelessness, and hopelessness leads to giving up.
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“There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 8:14-15
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Dead-Logic 