Why are poor people poor? According to the late Jerry Falwell, it’s because they are not giving the church 10% of their income. He calls it “spiritual mathematics.”
I call it money-grubbing superstitious bullshit.
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[...] Daniel Florian puts it best: He calls it “spiritual mathematics.”I call it money-grubbing superstitious bullshit. This entry was written by Dan Fincke, posted on July 22, 2009 at 2:20 pm, filed under Christianity, Fundamentalism, Religion, Videos and tagged "Spiritual Mathematics", Daniel Florian, Jerry Falwell, Superstition, Televangelism, Unreasonable Faith. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Lisa Hannigan Nominated For Mercury Prize! [...]
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[...] contribute to their church and if you don’t you will perish in hell. Scum bag’s like Jerry Falwell preaching to the poor that they need to contribute more because if they don’t they are [...]
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[...] workers: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-11/local/me-881_1_church-membership and with video at http://unreasonablefaith.com/2009/07/21/jerry-falwell-explains-spiritual-mathematics/) to buy off State of Virginia’s most corrupt officials so that they would not to investigate him. [...]
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[...] and prohibited from collecting tithes from the poor, with clergy demanding them like prototype Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and various televangelists (there is no Biblical foundation for [...]
Hmmmm……
So, if you aren’t having enough sex, it’s because you don’t have sex with me 10% of the time?
Or is it only money?
@Ty: LOL
Sadly there is no hell.
I believe this is where wishful thinking comes into the equation. Assuming the other side = 0, that is.
Some days I would believe that every single one of the people in that room has the mental capacity to realize what a scam their faith is. The rest of the time, unfortunately, I think I’m wrong.
…What does god need with a
starshipbag full of money?Who are we to question Falwell God?
“Falwell” was supposed to be strikethrough. Well, what the heck, it makes a perverse kind of sense this way.
I take a very-mild-kind-of-offense at the lack of “‘s”.
A better question: What does God need with a mountain of foreskins?
In case he runs out of calamari for the Saint’s daily buffet?
He was making a wallet that would turn into a suitcase.
One wonders where he gets all those hundreds of little tiny feet from.
My mistake, I forgot about “natural infant mortality”.
Mea culpa. Or not.
Oddly enough, the two things god seems most worried about is your money and your gonads.
Sort of like a pimp.
I’ve often wondered, if we were made in god’s image, who is god having sex with?
Well, it used to be Asherah, until she left him, which caused the spurned lover that is Yahweh to take his followers and ransack all the other gods’ people.
Well, that’s my interpretation, anyway.
We all know how sexually frustrated men act, too. LOL
Woodenly?
I’ll get me cloak…
I want to steal that.
What does god need with money? “I don’t know how it works… but it does”????? Mind-boggling crapola! What a sales shark.
פ1.00 (Jewish Prepuce) = US$0.23
A good exchange rate in any language. (xe.com is handy for modern currency, but not so great for ancient מיש (MadeUpShit))
I see plenty of homeless people on a daily basis in downtown Chicago. According to Falwell, these folks are not poor or homeless due to, say, family violence, mental illness, struggling within a “rich-stay-rich/poor-stay-poor” economy (a thread that runs throughout human history), or a bad labor market, but…failure to tithe!
“The poor you will always have with you…” Matthew 26:11. Hmmmmm……Classic chicken-and-egg problem. If you have no money to start with, how do you give 10%, exactly…?
If you mug someone for money, do you drop off 10% at the local church, so you can be further blessed…?
Somehow, I doubt that Falwell ever had to confront these issues himself. Call me crazy.
This 10% is an isurancy policy against family violence, mental ilnesses,… LOL
Didn’t the maffia ask money to protect your store?
Homeless need to offer up 10% of all aluminum cans collected, and coins hustled begging. Then and only then will God intervene and give them a good life.
And, if possible, they should go to Falwell’s home and deposit that 10% of cans at his door.
God will reward them with many more cans in return. Maybe a 55 gallon drum, even.
It is sad that otherwise intelligent people can be taken in by logic like this. One reason is that there is a great taboo in our society against speaking about immature faith (the type people like Falwell preach) and mature faith – the kind that may or may not arise after the all-important doubting stage.
If only people understood that preachers like Falwell succeed only in propagating immature religion – for the sake of maintaining the financial well-being of organized religion, they would be more motivated to question men like this and grow out of their need for this immature type of faith!
I was once a christian, now however I’ve realized that I don’t believe in it anymore for different reasons. However, I don’t know how the churches use the money in the US but in Sweden, where I come from, a lot of them use the money for good purposes, even if you aren’t a christian. E.g giving kids with problems at home a place to hang out without getting into all sorts of trouble.
One of Swedens biggest welfare-organisations are christian. They are known for being the organisation that keeps the least amount of money for themselves (to run everything and so on) and they do a great job around the world..
This however, I have no words…
There are traditional roles faith-based organisations fulfill in many countries. Sometimes they really are using the money well and as altruistically as possible. Sometimes they’re more keen on just making it appear so. In Germany, they effectively use less than ten percent for charitable purposes, in spite of factually being the biggest social/health carrier. How can this be? They take the money they get through the church tax, found public service institutions, and then let the state finance 90% of the institutions’s running costs. It might well be that they’re even making a material profit; certainly they puppeteer political opinion and image well to their advantage, which in turn results in continuing preservation of their privileges. I guess it’s the same in almost all European countries – they loudly proclaim that the social systems would collapse or be unfinanceable if thoroughly secularised. The leading politicians have grown up with this mantra and believe it, so nobody even attempts to see if they’re correct.
There’s a giant difference between ostensibly performing charity work through donations and assisting the needy, and advising people to fix their budget by making a financial offering directly to god who will provide you with a personal miracle by which you can afford more of the stuff you need by giving more money away. There’s no comment on whether charities can be good or corrupt.
However, just the same, I mean to point out that the economy in general does better if you spend money than if you hold onto it. None of that guarantees personal stability or security of finances like tithing to Jerry Falwell promises.
EDIT to above: “the economy in general does better if
youmore people spend money than ifyouwe hold onto it.”Yes they do use it on charity but it is used as some mean to convert people.
I prefer to give money directly to the battered women’s shelter, coats for kids etc. Then I know it’s probably not being used to buy Italian suits and Caddys.
At this moment I pay about 2350 euros charity a year, and yes I am a Atheist. LOL
Different charities though.
Everything this man ever said was money-grubbing superstitious bullshit. Didn’t Christopher Hitchens once say by way of “eulogising” Falwell something along the lines of “If you gave him an enema you could bury the remains in a matchbox”?
Perfect example of immature, overly-simplistic, black-and-white “solutions” that the anti-intellectual religious right has to offer. “No, let’s not study sociology to look for larger, more complex reasons for poverty, let’s reduce it to something stupidly simple that we will never bother to test empirically.” *sigh*
@Johnny
There are some great christian groups in the US that do help people out. But there is also a lot of groups like Jerry Falwell who are just con artists trying to steal a dollar.
I think on a local level the are really trying to do good but when you are a national church, they seem to be just in it for the money.
I don’t know if they all actually do good.
A lot of them have a hidden agenda. I know a very religious woman thet helped the older people in the rest rooms and hospitals.
In the end it turned out that she did this so she could te get on their testamen since she was suck a nice person.
Even my grandfather fell victim by such a person. he signed something while he was still getting out a sedation and later it turned out that he gave his house away to that person. This happened 40 years ago.
I’ll give you an example of Jerry Falwell’s spiritual math.
I remember about 28 years ago my father gave that crook $500 for a brick!
A red, damn masonry brick, with our family name stenciled on it. The surface was so rough, and covered with pit holes, you couldn’t even read it. And all to help Falwell build his “college” in Lynchburg, VA. Supposedly, but doubtfully, there is a duplicate in a wall somewhere at the college..LOL…..right.
My whole life I never saw my dad set one foot inside a church, but for some reason he watched that pus nut religiously.
There was one good thing to come out of it though. When the brick arrived…..well let’s just say my dad never watched Falwell again.
The worst part of that video is the smug look on his face, like he genuinely thinks he’s saying something clever and insightful. Honestly, how could anybody be that stupid and that deluded without the aid of religion?
i love the woman at 23-26 seconds. she looks thoroughly confused by his math. as we all are.
Was Mother theresa also not piling the donated money up into bank accounts?
While some churches do perform good works with the money they receive, typically they are nothing other than a money-hungry middleman. If you are desirous of helping the poor or kids in Africa or whatever, there is usually a way to go about it without letting the church take a cut.
Really? God needs money? Is that audience retarded?
lol yea that chick looks to the left at people like wtf?!
Sounds to me like Jerry is falling behind on his bills (or maybe he needs a bigger house) and what’s with churches being tax free??? What if churches had to pay taxes like the rest of us, think the country could afford health care then?
George Carlin said it best –
“Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!”
Ah yes, Jerry FoulSmell! If there is a Ceiling Cat I hope he locks that lying, smirking con man for Christ away in a cat box. Forever.
Or – as Larry Flint put it – Fartwell.
Well being full of sh*t makes your breath smell like a foul fart, doesn’t it?
In the words of Hitchens, “If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
Falwell’s Liberty University was going to go bankrupt, until it was bailed out by Rev Sung Yung Moon and the Unitification Church. So Xtians when you are short on cash, ask a cult leader.
I always find it unfortunate that people such as Falwell are held up as examples and representatives of who and what Christians are in the U.S. I watch videos like this, and I’m as confused as the rest of you, and I wish that all the money that had been given to him and his church and his university went instead to fund organizations that are actually doing something constructive or positive with respect to social change.
It’s examples like this that remind me why I opted for AmeriCorps rather than church work. Far too many churches are more concerned about self-preservation than actually making a difference in the world by serving their neighbors and communities. It’s a shame, and I hope that somehow I can contribute to change in some way in the future.
Okay, watched the video one more time.
Daniel, where does he say anything like,
Why are poor people poor? According to the late Jerry Falwell, it’s because they are not giving the church 10% of their income?
“Whenever I’m counseling a couple who are having financial difficulties, I’ll say ‘give me your budget now’…. And if I don’t see ‘tithes and offerings’ at the top, I’ll say ‘there’s your problem right there’…”
Thought that was pretty clear, myself.
Financial difficulties = poor.
Tithes = an offering to the church of ten percent of your income (that’s literally what the word means).
Gotcha.
10% is pretty much what most Christians I know pay to the church (some as high as 20% lol). Daniel didn’t quote Falwell, he summarized what Falwell was implying; that in order for people not to be in debt they must pay the church.
Does God need money to perform miracles?
According to a friend of mine, not only will this tithe cure me of my health problems, but it will also help me with my faith, and allow me to start making more money, and my life will flow more easy than has in the past. Not to mention that he pays his tithe, and he has all sorts of problems, health, child custody, etc. Yep, paying the tithe certainly helped out.
I remember something on a Suze Orman-a-thon (PBS tends to stick her and Wayne Dyer in place of quality programming during pledge seasons) where she says something similar. Here is the YouTube clip of “For the Young, Fabulous & Broke” that explains how offering to charity works in a roundabout way to wealth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtYZZy6rTPA
Is she full of it? I mean, from a secular standpoint, this is nearly the same thing, right?
In Kenya we call it the prosperity gospel-give and you shall receive, simple.Nothing like working hard. The verse they quote about ‘the measure you give is the measure you will receive, pressed down, shaken up, flowing over’ or something like that, has nothing to do with giving money, but judging other people. Too bad but some folks don’t read their Bibles, otherwise, we woudn’t have it quoted all over the place like that. The Bible is very clear, give what you’ve decided, not what you’re compelled to give.
My cousin once gave everything to a popular televangelist who promised something great would happen to her money-wise, and had nothing to give to the kids that night. Meanwhile, the dude cruises around the country in sleek cars. I don’t know if he ever gives his 10% of everyone else’s 10%, and to whom he gives if/when he does since he, in my understanding, owns his franchise,…erm… church. Also God says that He doesn’t need our offerings, silver and gold are his, as are a cattle on a thousand hills, and that it’s not like he would tell us if he were hungry.
People should just style up and say give money to build another church, buy the pastor a car, bigger house, feed the orphans etc. Because the pastor or church budgets or needy people are not God, unless I’m confused. Which I suspect I am…..
Who was it that declared a 900 foot jebus told him that he’d better raise a few million dollars or he will die?
I believe that was Oral Roberts.
“If you need a miracle, you better put the miracle-working God in your budget.” As opposed to in your heart, I guess.
“I don’t know how it works, it just does.”
I used to say that too about the mirale of tithing. “I don’t understand how it happens, but I give at least 10% of my money to the church, and God gives me enough to live on.”
But I also didn’t keep good records or follow a budget. If I would have looked, the evidence would have been before me that it isn’t magic — I just happened to be frugal enough to live within my means and still give 10% to Jesusland. Others were not so frugal and still gave 10%, and now we have a housing crisis. Go figure.
You should check the contract and see if there is a clause whereby Jesusland will refund you if at any time you stop believing.
Oh how I wish.
Careful with that wishing crap, it might land you back giving away 10%.
I realize this is a shortcoming on my part and I ought to be embarassed to admit this; however, I absolutely hate this man. I don’t know how Christians can tolerate having him among their ranks. He is the very best example of the very worst of Christianity. I truly do hate him and I feel sorry for those who have fallen under the spell of this vulger snake-oil salesman.
Falwell’s reasoning is so transparent that it barely justifies a response of any kind – the fact that people can actually nod and think “yeah, makes sense” blows my lid.