I’d never heard the story beyond the mockery of the makeup and hair:
Her highly coiffed, heavily made-up persona was mocked and parodied on comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live. She died in 2007 at the age of 65, having remarried.
Pieters never met her in person but is a close friend of her son, Jay Bakker. “He was 10 at the time that I did the interview with her and he said that it changed his whole outlook on his mother and on on all of it. She began taking him and his sister to LGBT-affirming churches. pride parades, Aids hospices and hospitals and had them learn about people with Aids by interacting with them in the hospital.
“She saw that she had a ministry to the LGBTQ community and took great joy in it. She was the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point and she had all the drag queens and the gay people all singing, ‘Jesus loves me this I know / For the Bible tells me so’. She had them all singing along and I would have loved to have seen that.”
Good to find out that televangelist hucksterism does contain at least some Christians. It is, after all, love the sinner, hate the sin.
Narp. She was a liar and a grifter who just changed the grift.
Idk where people get this idea that God is a Liberal Democrat. We are told by reliable sources that God hates the wicked every day. Forgiveness is available, but only if we repent our sins and accept Jesus Christ.
Jesus didn’t lead the prostitutes and the tax collectors in a parade where they were encouraged to be proud of their sins – he told them to sin no more. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is nowhere to be found in the Bible.
Pride is famously the first of the seven deadly sins. Taking part is in direct contradiction with anything Christian.
Interesting that God changed his tune over the millennia. There was lots of smiting of the wicked going on in the Old Testament, but then his innovation of Jesus changes all that – the smiting goes away but only if you follow Jesus. However there’s always Lucifer in the background to claim the non-conformists & keep the rest in line.
O/T but on a point Tim likes to raise: from today’s Guardian –
Unlike sheep, which can be driven forward, goats will only follow, so the herder must walk ahead, said Jeuken. “They’re a bit sexist: they respond better to females than males.”
“… love the sinner, hate the sin.”
That was Gandhi, not Christ or any of his followers. Christ demands that sinners repent of their sins and then – STOP DOING THE SIN.
Gandhi, Jesus – little Asian chaps preposterously telling us how to live our lives. Mind you, it’s hard not to prefer them to the God of the OT, the old Nazi in the sky.
“Idk where people get this idea that God is a Liberal Democrat.”
I’ve always seen the Christian God as being a rather spoilt child inclined to tantrums. The requirement to spend one’s lives telling Him how great He is or it sulks. (The capital letter requirement) The capriciousness. So if you base your religion around worshipping a 6 year old, what can you expect?
“goats will only follow, so the herder must walk ahead”
Someone who’s obviously never kept goats. Goats disperse themselves over the landscape & can generally be found wherever you didn’t want them to be.
Another difference. With sheep the IQ is in inverse proportion to the numbers. One sheep can be remarkably intelligent. A flock has the intellect of algae. One goat can be reasonably pleasant company. Goats on mass plot one’s destruction.
‘Someone who’s obviously never kept goats.’ Except:
‘Jeuken, 31, had an edge: she ran her own herd on her family farm, earning the nickname “the goat lady”. Last year she graduated as a veterinary nurse.’
There’s a similar Pratchett quote that I can’t find at the moment.
BiS – I think it’s got something to do with the fact that there’s a million and three ways to fuck up your life, but very few paths to live well and in ways that guarantee the game will continue with your descendants.
So if you base your religion around worshipping a 6 year old, what can you expect?
Objectively the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen, which has been rapidly declining into incoherence and insanity since we decided
fuck you, DAAADwe were too smart and sophisticated for this God business.I prefer to see societies thy other way up, Steve. First you need good agricultural workers produce a surplus so not everyone has to work on the land. Then those not working on the land can produce the tools make agriculture even more efficient & start creating the infrastructure of civilisation. Unfortunately you also need a military to stop your neighbours stealing all you’ve achieved. Which is when it all starts going wrong. The military ends up ruling & taxing you. Religion’s just convenient, non-military way of keeping people in line.
Priests don’t build civilisations. Working people do.
BiS – Religion’s just convenient, non-military way of keeping people in line
You say that like it’s a bad thing, but I reckon a phlegmatic analysisism of the last 50-odd years would reveal that social capital doesn’t regenerate by itself.
@jgh
There’s a similar Pratchett quote that I can’t find at the moment
SirT’s Small Gods is apposite on the matter of gods and religion.
Yes, it’s in a comment about how Omnianism would have been different if that first believer (Gods gain power from being believed in in Discworld) had been a goatherder, not a shepherd. For sheep have to be driven, while goats can be led…..
there’s a million and three ways to fuck up your life, but very few paths to live well and in ways that guarantee the game will continue with your descendants
True, but the rest of the animal (and plant, bacteria etc) kingdom seem to manage it tolerably well without the concept of a god. It seems to become a thing when a society grows bigger than a tribe.
Probably more that the society is now big enough to have material wealth, and some lazier or less productive members would rather claim that wealth for themselves than work to create their own. Therefore “god says each of you must give the priest (ie me) half of everything you own. Every year”.
It’s a neat side-step around BiS’s observation:
Because the parasites can now also afford to pay the military to protect them from the society.
Some ignorance displayed above, not all of it corrected. New (and Old) Testament sheep followed the shepherd as anyone who has read it knows.
The core of the English army was the yeomen, who were required to train regularly in archery, so the military were not a separate class but part-time farmers; comparably Greek city-states only had full citizens as soldiers (until the Spartans had virtually died out and recruited some Helots to fight alongside Spartiates). Full-time soldiers (Roman or Norman) were there to control conquered foreigners.
Quite so, John77. The Founding Fathers were steeped in the classics, hence that stuff about a well-ordered militia, etc.
As an aside, when Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill were in Jugoslavia Waugh recommended reading the Bible. R C had never read it, so started at the beginning. A week later he remarked “Christ, I never realised God was such a shit”.
Takes one to know one I suppose.
“Idk where people get this idea that God is a Liberal Democrat.”
Idk where people get this idea that God is a Christian.
Jonathan said:
Christ demands . . .
Again with the Jews taking over thing.