It’s Pastor Paula’s Birthday Soon…

Wow, wish I could have people just write out checks to me. Oh right! I could! All I have to do is start my own church & people will automatically look to me as an authority (even though I’m female…bummer) & give me money! YIPPEE! I’m rich!

I enjoyed the “Ads by Google” advertising the Liberty University!

Googling for ‘Paula White Benny Hinn’ is rather interesting.

So, in addition to the general tackiness of asking for money as a gift, giving a monetary gift to Paula (and notably, not the church) for her birthday can be tax refundable?

I’m not a US citizen, but perhaps some who are might like to report suspected tax fraud to the IRS

When Pastor Paula White came out aggressively last week against a Senate financial probe into her multimillion dollar ministry, she again brought to light the question of whether the government should step in to ensure that churches and ministries are not misusing money.

White, along with her husband Randy, were among the other three (including Eddie Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and Kenneth Copeland Ministries) who provided incomplete responses to Grassley’s questions regarding their personal and organizational finances. Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Church International declined to provide any information.

White defended her decision not to cooperate with the investigation as she addressed participants at Bishop T.D. Jakes’ 2011 Pastors and Leadership Conference last week.

“The church better recognize. It should be thanking six ministries for fighting for the body of Christ for saying ‘we are not going to let you dictate to us how we interpret Scripture,’” she asserted, noting that she spent millions to fight the probe.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/paula-white-others-should-mind-gods-reputation-in-their-finances-says-evangelical-49741/

Ah you gotta love those master con artists.

Nothing like good old christian teaching to turn black to white and white into black.

I think atheists should look on the bright side here.

I suspect that many of those thousands (millions) captivated by prosperity gospel will inevitably be disappointed.

Many of those will be of the mind that failure of properity gospel will mean that GOd has forsaken them, and many of those will conclude that there is no God.

On another thread here, someone was taken to task for suggesting that it was narcissistic to believe in God while babies starved in Africa, but doubted the existence of God becasue they woke up being groped by a Christian.

It’s a mindset that God is great as long as I get what I want. It is a mindset on the fast track to atheism, imo.

They just changed the event description and deleted all but a few of the comments.

Meanwhile, I’ve been fasting as a protest to the federal budget cuts aimed at the people already hurting the most. And I am praying for hardened hearts to be softened (and the “hard hearts” I’m praying for are not the people who normally get the label so y’all are off the hook)

Well, I don’t think so either. That’s why I mentioned that people can become atheists (or rebellious theists) for bad reasons like “God let my grandmother die.” That type of deconversion has nothing to do with critical thinking. People can become atheists for non-rational reasons, and in my opinion, that’s no better than becoming a theist for non-rational reasons. From my perspective, converting or deconverting based on emotion is ridiculous. People should evaluate various religions using their brains and not base their decisions on how a certain religion makes them feel or how members of that religion behave. They should only be concerned with whether the religion is true or false.

I agree completely.

Speaking as a pastor’s wife…

It’s not uncommon for churches to give the pastor a little something for Christmas or for their birthday or their ordination anniversary/anniversary at a church. Usually, however, it isn’t phrased as a compulsory exercise with tax deduction benefits — it’s totally voluntary and it’s usually a few folded $1 bills or something given to the council president.

I’m all in favor of someone trying to get the 501(c)3 status of Pastor Paula’s church revoked. The way they’re doing it *IS* shady.

I assume you also don’t live in a villa and have a private jet? She does or did.

Yeah… can’t say I do.

Organized religion is a generally a fraud, but it’s amazing that it still works when it’s so blantantly obvious.

I frequently speak out on the mega-church movement and how Joel Osteen’s church could have fed the hungry in the world and provided clean water almost everywhere for what they spent buying the Compaq Center to assuage his ego.

Nowhere in the Bible does the “prosperity Gospel” exist. It’s actually preached against in several parables.