Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Media is aiding and abetting in Televangelist Fraud

The media routinely provides disclaimers claiming that they don't necessarily agree with the content of paid programming; however by allowing massive scams where they get a cut of the loot and refusing to sell advertisements that might interfere with profits, this raises major doubts about the legitimacy of this claim!

The commercial media has, for all practical purposes, abandoned any attempt to provide unbiased media coverage long ago and they've consolidated into six oligarchies that don't provide diversity at all; instead they're all for profit businesses who allow financial interests to decide the vast majority of their programming. This was brazenly demonstrated when they refused to sell Adbusters "uncommercials" even when they were willing to pay the going rate as described in the following excerpt:

Mainstream media has been censoring advertisements that interfere with their profit for decades, including refusing to sell Adbusters Un-commercials but it has only been reported in low profile locations!

Several women's groups joined Adbusters in purchasing four spots on the CBC show, Fashion File, and they attempted to buy airspace on CNN's Style with Elsa Klensch. Both networks refused to run the Adbuster's uncommercial. Adbusters also attempted to buy time on ABC, NBC, and CBS for a spot declaring the day after Thanksgiving, "Buy Nothing Day." None of the major networks would run the ad. Richard Gitter, NBC's vice president of advertising standards and program compliance, says that NBC doesn't air controversial ads. Gitter continued with more candor, "this action was taken in self-interest. It was a spot telling people, in effect, to ignore our advertisers" (Oldenburg). Complete article

There efforts to buy advertisements for their uncommercials go back close to twenty years, if not longer; however they have done little in the past ten years to push the issue, at least that I can find. The official version of truth, according to the advertisements, and often the content from the mainstream media, is a commodity, or at the minimum it is heavily influenced by financial interests. This goes beyond advertisements telling people to buy nothing, on Black Friday; they air an enormous volume of advertisements that are blatantly false like Colonial Penn life insurance, which doesn't cost much, but if they spend all that money on ads it's clear that they can't afford to pay out much for claims, and requests for charity, that also spend an undisclosed amount to pay for ads, leaving a fraction of the money for the actual charity, and much more.

Perhaps I'm wrong!

Perhaps you can figure out which ads really are providing accurate information that benefits the consumer. If so fell free to find it and let me know about it so I can correct this, but, if so, there has to be some explanation to how they can get the money for the ads without reducing the deal they give the customer, which is hard to believe in for profit industries, or even charities when they buy a large amount of ads or other products or services from for profit industries.

Can TV stations refuse to carry advertising? Apr 13, 2009

Adbusters suing networks for not airing spots 09/15/2004 updated 03/28/2017

Censorship of Advertisers 09/15/2003 This article claims that advertising has been protected by the first amendment; however it fails to mention the ads the media censors including Adbusters which sued the following year, although they had tried to buy ads prior to this article.

On top of that these six oligarchies that control over ninety percent of the media only cover candidates that don't challenge their control of the media; although they provide an enormous amount of coverage for candidates that do a fair job pretending to represent the public making an enormous amount of promises, and occasionally even speaking out against the media; but when they get in office they routinely show their true colors.

Televangelist fraud is incredibly easy to expose, or at least to those capable of a minimum amount of rational thinking; however it's still an enormous business.

Why?

What makes religious people believe this even when many of these lies are so obvious? There's actually an enormous amount of research available on this, although it isn't presented to the vast majority of the public. I explained previously in Dobson’s Indoctrination Machine that a major part of the reason why many children learn to believe irrational claims is that before they develop critical thinking skills religious educators recommend they be taught or disciplined with authoritarian methods often using corporal punishment. This is often accompanied by emotional appeals, and at a very young age, often before they fully learn to speak English or walk, children learn to believe what they're told and to obey orders without question.

As I explained in Philip Zimbardo, Lucifer Effect, Stanford Prison Experiment and Eli Roth Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority experiment much more extensive than most people realize the military has been studying how to get obedience for decades, although they have claimed that they were trying to teach people how to avoid replicating the holocaust. The military is simply not in the practice of teaching their recruits to stop and think things through before they blindly accept orders from commanders sending them to war based on lies.

In addition to that, thanks largely due to support for corporal punishment based on their interpretation of the Bible the most religious states often ahve the highest murder rates as well as explained in Does lack of education increase violent crime? Religion? And blind faith in leaders, including many that routinely betray their followers has also contributed to the fact that poverty, lack of education and income inequality are worse in the states with the strongest religious faith.

If they spend all this money on Mega-Churches without taking care of basic functions of society, like child care, educating the poor or providing social help for dysfunctional families that are in abusive homes it's not surprising that they have more violent crime in the most religious states, and as I'll elaborate more on below it is worse in most of the areas that have the largest concentration of Mega-Churches, often led by televangelists that are involved in one scam after another. These scams are often reported much better on the alternative media than in the traditional commercial media which is making an enormous amount of money selling these televangelists air time; so they have a financial incentive not to report it.

The most religious people are also more likely to blindly follow their leaders when it comes to politics and support of wars, which have been proven to be based on one lie after another. The largest rate of military recruitment is in the rural North West, where there's very little other work or high population; however the largest volume of recruits come from the Southern Bible Belt states, which also have the highest murder rates. And, as people can see from the current Senate Race in Alabama many of them are very reluctant to admit to themselves that their candidate has been implicated in child abuse.

Even after they admitted that there never were any weapons of mass destruction there was much more support for the war among evangelical leaders and followers according to Most Evangelical Leaders Still Support Iraq War 02/12/2008 And there were reports to indicate that this war, and many others were based on lies from the beginning including Scott Ritter who as this article reminds us, Pro-War Christians Should Come Clean 12/08/2004, disclosed the lies used to justify the Iraq War. Mohamed El Baradei also exposed these lies before the war began but few if any high profile ministers spoke out against it, either before or after the wear. During the Vietnam war there were much more clergymen including Martin Luther King Jr. and the Berrigan Brothers that came out against the war; however now there are almost none, at least that get any media attention speaking against current conflicts, even though it isn't hard to find research that exposes one lie after another that wars are based on.

These Clergymen claim to be "Pro-life!"

Real "Pro-life" people, especially those also concerned with quality of life, believe in protecting the environment, providing health care, education, child care and oppose wars while holding politicians accountable after they break one promise after another!

The same Evangelical preachers or other Clergymen that support one war after another are often also opposed to environmental protection economic policies that cut funds to social programs, educational opportunities for the poor, fair wages for the working class, diverse media and many more issues that benefit the vast majority of the public. On the rare occasions where clergymen do speak out for the poor they often do so in opposition to their own Church leadership especially in the Catholic Church which has a much more powerful hierarchy. Martin Luther King Jr. was of course one of the exceptions, who was much closer to his own community than any leadership he might have been accountable to and when both the Berrigan Brothers and Óscar Romero spoke out against the Vietnam War of oppression in El Salvador they did so without the support of the Vatican.

Many wonder why so many people vote against their own best interests one time after another; it's often because they're taught from birth to trust their leaders, instead of developing critical thinking skills so they can understand the issues, often very simple one!

Amazingly many of the most famous Televangelists, including Joel Osteen don't even bother doing a good job pretending to help their own communities, as demonstrated when he refused to open his door during Hurricane Harvey until after he was shamed into doing so. When this happened it wasn't the mainstream media that sells him enormous amounts of time on TV that shamed him, at least not initially; it was people at the local level that reported the story on social media. When it went viral the mainstream media finally reported on it; but they were quick to allow Osteen to have equal time to explain his views or much more time. Many of his followers may have accepted whatever explanation he had to offer them.

I can't imagine that anyone familiar with the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the "money changers" in the temple would think that he would have been too happy with modern televangelists if he were around today. But regardless of how happy he would have been my best guess is that most of the depictions of him with white skin that would have been more common in Europe than in the Middle East would have been accurate.

As I said above the most religious states also have the highest murder rates; and a large portion of the biggest Megachurches are also in cities with exceptionally high murder rates, especially in the South; however there are also a lot of them that are in small communities just outside of big cities, often with much lower crime rates. Glancing at some of these Churches indicates that it will show possible evidence of major amounts of economic inequality.

At least three of the five lists of megachurches cited below have over half the the ten biggest churches in cities with above rates of murder often well above and if you count the small communities that serve larger cities nearby it is even more. One of the remaining two only has three out of the top ten in cities with above average but six of the remaining seven are just barely outside of big cities with higher murder rates, although one or two isn't much above average. The fifth one is the longest and will take a closer look since it's alphabetical, but it probably indicates that over half of these megachurches are in areas with high murder rates. Part of the reason for this is presumably that in order to attract large congregations they have to be near big population centers and major cities have higher murder rates; however part of it also that the states with the biggest churches, as I reported in the previous article, are in the most religious states, especially the South that supports corporal punishment more, which also have higher murder rates.

Security has become an enormous expense for many of these Megachurches, often to keep hecklers from exposing the scams that many of these Pastors are involved in or, in some cases, to protect the pastors from their own followers. T.D. Jakes had to get a Restraining order against one of his own parishioners, and Joyce Meyers body guard was charged with murdering his own wife about six years ago. There are also many other stories about less popular preachers either being charged with murder or getting involved in domestic violence problems with their own families. Creflo Dollar was charged with abusing his own daughter and on another incident one of the preachers at his Church was killed. Ironically on at least one occasion a preacher who couldn't keep the peace in her own family used this to make her claim that she was an expert on domestic violence as a former victim. In "Spare the Child" Philip Greven explains that most evangelical preachers teach their followers to use corporal punishment to control their children and this escalates to more violence later in life. He also cites examples where many preachers have used these tactics on their own children and they often rebelled violently. Most modern preachers don't advocates this publicly anymore, although there are some exceptions including Pat Robertson who has recommended on television that an atheist child be beaten until he respects peoples religion.

This form of teaching is almost certainly a major reason why the most religious states have higher murder rates and most megachurches are in areas with higher murder rates as well.

Preachers don't turn out to be much if any less violent than the rest of society, although they may maintain better images, or at least they used to before the scandals about child sex abuse came out; however the media still gives them better coverage to preserve the impression that they do have higher moral values.

It doesn't take a genius to know that if a community spends millions of dollars on monuments that they only use once a week for purposes of worship and not much else while declining to provide funds for education, child care, and other social programs that it is going to cause problems one way or another.

This isn't something new; the cultures that built what we consider great monuments in the past, like the pyramids, obelisks, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, the Bayon, the Easter Island statues and many other monuments that are still around today, all went into decline, mostly as a result of corruption and fighting wars instead of performing basic functions that they needed to maintain their culture.

Anyone familiar with alternative media outlets that do a better job reporting the news that the mainstream media refuses to cover already knows that massive portions of our society are already in decline and with all the bickering over tax cuts for the rich we're inevitably going to follow in their foot steps.

10 Largest Megachurches in Texas originally published in 2016 updated November 2017 Six of these megachurches are in cities with murder rates ranging from 7.43 to 13.77 the other four are just outside of these same cities and only one of those four has much more than 100,000 people, two of them have less than 50,000 with congregations of 24 to 28 thousand people clearly drawing from larger cities.

Top 50 Fittest Mega Churches in America 2015 08/15/2015

List of megachurches in the United States

Full List of Megachurches

Newsmax's Top 50 Megachurches in America 11/11/2015

Top 100 Largest Participating Churches in America 2017 Only three of the top ten Churches in this list are in cities with above average murder rates, another six are in communities with small populations near larger cities with above average murder rates and only one is in an small city with below average rates surrounded by other cities below average. The first thirty seven of these have more than 10,000 members and are in cities have average murder rates lower than the ones on the other lists.

Initial count lists seventeen megachurches in cities with above average murder rates, ten of those are close to, if not more than double the average murder rate, and three of them are three to six times the average murder rates; eight of them in small communities with below average murder rates, but they serve a much larger congregation which includes cities nearby with much higher rates; and only three with below average rates that are either farther away from big cities or large enough to be independent of them. These twenty eight Churches are the top ten from four lists after subtracting those listed multiple times.

Counting all the ones from the top ten of these lists including one just below a 10,000 congregation, with a massive television audience, and adding more with a minimum congregation of 10,000 there are a total of one hundred and thirty-four; seventy-five (56%) are in cities with murder rates above average; forty (30%) are below average serving cities with above average murder rates; and nineteen (14%) of them, including the only one with a little less than 10,000 members, are in communities with below average murder rates including some that also serve larger cities which are also below average. This means that 85% of these Megachurces draw resources from cities with above average murder rates, even though 30% are outside these cities. The current percentage is about 85% either in or near cities with above average murder rates; and 15% serving cities with below average murder rates.

Forty-seven (35%) of these megachurches are in cities that have more than double the average murder rates; twenty-two are in cities with triple average murder rates; twelve of them in cities with four times average; six with five times average; College Park Ga. and Birmingham Al. have six times the average; Baltimore has seven times average; and Detroit has eight times average, each with one megachurch.