This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1460086
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1460086
Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?*
Grim Reaper: I’m slow but my work is permanent.
(*I know he was never ordained but still.)
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Basically I got nothing… except this goofy picture of a cat.
I had to put mine ‘to sleep’ last week and I’m so sad about it. I miss him so much. His name was Avigdor, Avi for short.
Here’s a pic of him when he was a young thing.
…
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This overlooks the fact that The 700 Club was basically the ‘you can use the media, too, guys…’ that inspired Limbaugh, and through his example, created Fox News.
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Only on occasions such as the death of someone like Pat Robertson do I hope I’m wrong on the whole atheism thing.
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I’m so sorry. Adulting really sucks sometimes. I know you did what was best for Avi.
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Pat, what a man. Preying on lonely old people afraid of death.
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I either didn’t know or I had forgotten that Robertson’s law school started out at Oral Roberts U.
My favorite (possibly apocryphal) ORU story is about his medical school at ORU (“City of Faith”…where they no-shit taught faith healing). Oral commissioned a bronze sculpture of human hands in prayer: it was titled Healing Hands and sited near the entrance of the “City of Faith”. When the sculpture started to patina (turn green), as bronze left outdoors is wont to do, Oral called the sculptor in to complain: “Look at these hands! They’re turning green!”
“Yes. Isn’t it beautiful?” said the sculptor.
“No. I don’t want them green. I want them natural,” said Oral.
After “City of Faith” was closed due to malpractice lawsuits and the insane expense of running a med school, the sculpture was re-named “Praying Hands” and moved to the entrance of ORU. They apparently polished it up and varnished it to protect it from atmospheric pollutants and oxygen, because the last photos I saw of the thing are not patinaed at all.
My wife insists that she and some of her friends ordered a Domino’s pizza be delivered to Oral when he was on one of his Prayer Tower fasting rants telling his marks that if they didn’t provide money to fund something or another that doG would call him home.
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He learned from the best: Oral Roberts was one of his pals.
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If memory serves, a 700 foot Jesus was somehow involved in Oral’s medical school. Also, if memory serves, at the time the school was built, Tulsa did not need another hospital, at least in the part of town where Oral wanted it built. Hard to believe that my good Episcopal grandmother LOVED Oral Roberts.
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Yes, it ended up being a high-rise hospital (very inefficient when you have to move patients around) because some giant Jeebus or another told OR to build the thing. The building height was chosen to equal Giant Jeebus’ height.
My Baptist Granny was a huge OR fan, too.
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Pat Robertson is now next to Jerry Falwell in Hateful Hell.
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There’s a new limited docuseries on Amazon about the Duggers. Very enlightening about the loony “evangelicals” who are working to take back America.
Worth a watch.
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You said a mouthful there.
Suicide rates among the early settlers are never mentioned. They killed themselves left and right all over Oklahoma, and Kansas, and all the desolate, mind-bending geographies of the US.
If you survived the summers, and the winters, and the Comanche, and the desolation, well, every now and then the entire world would rear itself into a great funnel of Holy Devastation and tear everything to ribbons.
What did it take to mentally survive on the plains in the 17th and 18th centuries - absolute confidence in something invisible?
In a way I admire the MAGA fuck-sticks - the pioneer mentality. Not a dumb fealty exactly, more a knee-jerk absolutism. It is a dumb love, it can always find a way to burn.
Dumb like amoeba. Dumb like life.
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Not surprising given the roots of movement conservatism in the marriage of tent revivals and mass marketing: passion and grift breed extremes most of which are pernicious.
The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.
– Rick Perlstein, The Long Con
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I’m gonna get me some religion
I’m gonna join the Baptist church
Gonna be a preacher so I don’t have to work
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Finally! I’m glad he’s dead. (This, from a church organist!)
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Oral Roberts: Impossible to look at this grifter and not think of Elmer Gantry and every parody of every Bible-thumping messenger of jaybus.
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“Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal.
He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them.”
Mark Twain
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I’m glad he is dead and I am a nobody.
Show me his grave and I will dance on it, plus something else.
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