Family values megachurch matriarch dies, cutting off her own child because he had the temerity to do the right thing about child abuse because it threatened her revenue stream? That tracks. Same megachurch matriarch partly responsible for many thousands of preventable deaths, while taking taxpayer cash intended to help prevent those deaths? That tracks. Using the rubes' money to have a luxury vacation with her new husband before her first husband's corpse has decayed to dust? That tracks.
I bet we could all write the obituary without knowing anything other than the megachurch connection: "Megachurch leader dies amid scandals involving sexual abuse and financial shenanigans, disowns childrenfor speaking up. Google the name for scandal details."
Why did she take off her clothes?!? Why did she take off her clothes, when a man in a position of power was in the room with her after she’s been trained from birth to obey adults, especially men, and probably never told that what he was doing was wrong or even the correct words for her own body parts that shouldn’t be exposed to him others? This type of religious fanaticism breeds victims for perverted old men, and perverted young men, and perverted middle aged men who flock to religion to gain access to unprotected, ignorant little girls and boys right under their family’s noses.
Anyway, tots and pears to her family. So sad to see a grifting pedophile protector go so early. I hope it was painful and lingering.
Exactly! These poor little kids are groomed from birth to be malleable toys for the vile and disgusting people who gravitate to these churches for the sole purpose of abusing children.
Or even the ministry. They could join a respectable church. There are such things. They could even join a Humanist group, but I’m afraid that would be going too far.
The response to that should have been 'what about Pete and Pete's wife's feelings? They're adult, they'll be able to cope. Don't you think that the little girl and her wellbeing might be important?'
"Um, no? Because we view children as objects for adults to control and use as they please? What an ungodly question! Now if you don't mind I'll be off worshipping the ground Donald Trump walks on."
I was at a local Mother’s Day show put on by my friend and director in town, the show was a group of women presenting monologues about mothers. It was touching and funny and sad all at once, I cried a lot and laughed a bunch too.
Anyway, the last monologue was about a mother trying to warn off the speaker from being too loose to avoid unwanted pregnancy (it was entitled “Don’t Drink the Wine in Iowa City”). Anyway the mom told the daughter to not drink the wine in Iowa City, because the daughter of the family friends did and now she has to get married. But if the speaker does drink the wine the mother will have to kill her then kill herself because she couldn’t live with herself for killing her child and her grandchild and leaving her other children motherless and her husband alone and then go to hell… where she wouldn’t know anyone.
That line got a huge laugh. The performer was quite good.
Anyway, I feel like Lamb expects to go to heaven with all her friends, but if her beliefs were true, according to her own book, she would be in hell, and likely will know plenty of people, to her surprise but no one else’s.
Instead of trying to hide what happened to the little girl, they could have 1) backed the child up to the best of their ability, 2) gone after Pete, hammer and tongs, because CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE, and 3) told their congregation that "WE DON'T TOLERATE PEDOPHILES IN THIS CHURCH!" That might not only have made a positive impression, never mind be among the first churches to make such a statement, but 2) improve the confidence their current crowd might have in their church.
On the OTHER hand, if they have pedophiles in their congregation, it might not go over so well! 😖
These phony TV preachers, offensive as they are, are not the real problem. The real blame rests with the people in front of their televisions who fund and enable them. Without their enablers, people like Joni Lamb are powerless and hiding in the shadows. The ultimate root causes are stupidity and willful ignorance.
No. The victims of con artists are not the criminals. That’s like blaming a goose for pâté. Regardless of what tradition, enablement, threat, or inducement places an audience member in front of the television (or in the congregation) for the first time, they are then intentionally force-fed a toxic cocktail of 80% fear, 10% assuagement, 9% empty promises and 1% ego stroke/greed/supremacism to keep them right there. None of the victims are there primarily, mostly, or even very much at all because of selfish motives; there is just enough personal responsibility to convince people once they get torched that it was completely their fault the whole time so they feel shame and stay quiet. The ones who are completely at fault are the knowing perpetrators and propagators of those systems—the corrupt egomaniacal personalities the cult is built around—and the handful of greedy power-brokers in their inner circles who are the only ones benefiting from those mechanisms of power and control. The ones being controlled are always by definition the ones getting shafted in every way possible—the flock getting fleeced by the wolves.
Blaming victims is absolutely the wrong response to systems of high control.
I’m glad we can agree this is a systemic issue and not just a ‘few bad apples.’ can absolutely sympathize with this sentiment, but it is ignorant of the kinds of exploitation that
Dick Cheney. Was bird hunting (quail? pheasant?) Rotated a bit too far left or right when some birds took wing and shot one of his fellow hunters. They were walking more or less abreast.
Killing animals for sport should be illegal (I'm fine with doing so for self-defense or food purposes, but not when it's done just for the "thrill" of it).
And they should only be allowed to hunt large 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 (though not the endangered ones, obviously). Only fair that the animal be adequately equipped to fight back!
*𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵- scratch that, I have a better idea: 'sport' hunters should only be allowed to hunt 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 'sport' hunters. It's the only way to ensure total fairness, you see! If it really is all about the love of the hunt, and not just a sick power trip, then surely they'll agree enthusiastically with this reasonable proposal!
Well, you know what Hemingway said - there is no sport like the hunting of man, and those have hunted armed men and liked it never want for any other kind.
That's literally the most traditional way humans did it! I would also allow rock-throwing, but only with the rocks already in the hunting grounds. Original way, none of these newfangled ideas. No chipping flint points either, or any metal. Just stalk them for days with nothing but sharp sticks, your bare hands, and limited water.
I would SO FAR RATHER capture an animal in the viewfinder of my camera than in the target reticle of a rifle scope. A camera safari would be SO STINKING COOL!
One day in the supermarket I was going down an aisle where a woman had placed her cart perpendicular to the shelves, across the entire aisle. The person in front of me didn't say a word but turned the offending cart parallel to the shelves so they could continue through the aisle. The woman who had blocked the aisle with her cart yelled at the other person for moving her cart. I stood there and patiently told her that the other person moved her cart because she had placed it blocking the flow of traffic down the aisle. She vehemently denied doing that, at which point I told her that yes, she had, and denying it was pointless.
"They used Christianity to enrich themselves and knew that fighting culture war battles—and pretending to be persecuted—was an easy path to wealth. They never gave a damn who got hurt in the process."
True Christians. The grift that keeps on grifting.
Ironic, since the very notion of praying as something that could actually end up having results (i.e., praying for x to happen/not to happen) comes across like a form of witchcraft (to me, anyway).
Family values megachurch matriarch dies, cutting off her own child because he had the temerity to do the right thing about child abuse because it threatened her revenue stream? That tracks. Same megachurch matriarch partly responsible for many thousands of preventable deaths, while taking taxpayer cash intended to help prevent those deaths? That tracks. Using the rubes' money to have a luxury vacation with her new husband before her first husband's corpse has decayed to dust? That tracks.
I bet we could all write the obituary without knowing anything other than the megachurch connection: "Megachurch leader dies amid scandals involving sexual abuse and financial shenanigans, disowns childrenfor speaking up. Google the name for scandal details."
SPOT ON JOE,SPOT ON !
Karma is a Bitch right???
"And nothing of value was lost."
That's what I came here to say as well.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/240/395/092.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXJmfd3cmg
Good riddance.
Why did she take off her clothes?!? Why did she take off her clothes, when a man in a position of power was in the room with her after she’s been trained from birth to obey adults, especially men, and probably never told that what he was doing was wrong or even the correct words for her own body parts that shouldn’t be exposed to him others? This type of religious fanaticism breeds victims for perverted old men, and perverted young men, and perverted middle aged men who flock to religion to gain access to unprotected, ignorant little girls and boys right under their family’s noses.
Anyway, tots and pears to her family. So sad to see a grifting pedophile protector go so early. I hope it was painful and lingering.
Exactly! These poor little kids are groomed from birth to be malleable toys for the vile and disgusting people who gravitate to these churches for the sole purpose of abusing children.
And yet, no matter how obvious every bit of this is, the sheep are willing to line up to either get fucked or sheared or turn into lamb chops.
And I may be including their own family. I haven’t heard that Jonathan and Suzy have decided to leave Christianity.
And too much of this happens because Thinking Is HARD, and they'd rather let someone else do their thinking for them! 🤪
Christianity has been a colossal grift since the days of the apostles...
They didn't get notified of the impending death. Doesn't mean they've left the religion, but it does show they're not in this ministry's good graces.
Or even the ministry. They could join a respectable church. There are such things. They could even join a Humanist group, but I’m afraid that would be going too far.
"Joni confronted her, saying, “‘Look at what you’re doing to this family! What about (Pete’s wife and Pete)? What about their feelings?”"
Can I just say: Fuck their feelings.
The response to that should have been 'what about Pete and Pete's wife's feelings? They're adult, they'll be able to cope. Don't you think that the little girl and her wellbeing might be important?'
"Um, no? Because we view children as objects for adults to control and use as they please? What an ungodly question! Now if you don't mind I'll be off worshipping the ground Donald Trump walks on."
I was at a local Mother’s Day show put on by my friend and director in town, the show was a group of women presenting monologues about mothers. It was touching and funny and sad all at once, I cried a lot and laughed a bunch too.
Anyway, the last monologue was about a mother trying to warn off the speaker from being too loose to avoid unwanted pregnancy (it was entitled “Don’t Drink the Wine in Iowa City”). Anyway the mom told the daughter to not drink the wine in Iowa City, because the daughter of the family friends did and now she has to get married. But if the speaker does drink the wine the mother will have to kill her then kill herself because she couldn’t live with herself for killing her child and her grandchild and leaving her other children motherless and her husband alone and then go to hell… where she wouldn’t know anyone.
That line got a huge laugh. The performer was quite good.
Anyway, I feel like Lamb expects to go to heaven with all her friends, but if her beliefs were true, according to her own book, she would be in hell, and likely will know plenty of people, to her surprise but no one else’s.
Stick with whisky in Iowa City. It even rhymes, sort of.
Wine is fine but whisky's quicker
Iowa City used to have a lovely microbrewery back in the day; now it's more of a vodka town:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/is-vodka-samm-a-role-model-for-american-women/
Instead of trying to hide what happened to the little girl, they could have 1) backed the child up to the best of their ability, 2) gone after Pete, hammer and tongs, because CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE, and 3) told their congregation that "WE DON'T TOLERATE PEDOPHILES IN THIS CHURCH!" That might not only have made a positive impression, never mind be among the first churches to make such a statement, but 2) improve the confidence their current crowd might have in their church.
On the OTHER hand, if they have pedophiles in their congregation, it might not go over so well! 😖
These phony TV preachers, offensive as they are, are not the real problem. The real blame rests with the people in front of their televisions who fund and enable them. Without their enablers, people like Joni Lamb are powerless and hiding in the shadows. The ultimate root causes are stupidity and willful ignorance.
No. The victims of con artists are not the criminals. That’s like blaming a goose for pâté. Regardless of what tradition, enablement, threat, or inducement places an audience member in front of the television (or in the congregation) for the first time, they are then intentionally force-fed a toxic cocktail of 80% fear, 10% assuagement, 9% empty promises and 1% ego stroke/greed/supremacism to keep them right there. None of the victims are there primarily, mostly, or even very much at all because of selfish motives; there is just enough personal responsibility to convince people once they get torched that it was completely their fault the whole time so they feel shame and stay quiet. The ones who are completely at fault are the knowing perpetrators and propagators of those systems—the corrupt egomaniacal personalities the cult is built around—and the handful of greedy power-brokers in their inner circles who are the only ones benefiting from those mechanisms of power and control. The ones being controlled are always by definition the ones getting shafted in every way possible—the flock getting fleeced by the wolves.
Blaming victims is absolutely the wrong response to systems of high control.
The people who willingly delegate their thinking to the clergy are not victims.
I’m glad we can agree this is a systemic issue and not just a ‘few bad apples.’ can absolutely sympathize with this sentiment, but it is ignorant of the kinds of exploitation that
This Lamb of god was just a wolf in sheep’s wool. You should only say good about the dead. She’s dead. Good.
OT:
These people are fucking garbage.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-burgum-hunting-trapping-rollback-restrictions-87ad8b1e287cba9fd4b90d6d053e0b39
When they only see resources to be exploited and not nature to be protected, this is the result. They don't care about anything other than themselves.
With any luck, these gun-toting buffoons will miss their targets and hit each other.
A certain bespectacled late ex-Vice President did exactly that!
Who was that? Didn't learn about that in Norwegians school.
Dick Cheney. Was bird hunting (quail? pheasant?) Rotated a bit too far left or right when some birds took wing and shot one of his fellow hunters. They were walking more or less abreast.
So he didn’t know how to use a veapon safely? I hope he got some jail time.
Not a second of jail time. In fact, Cheney’s victim apologized to Cheney, if you can believe that.
Here’s the wiki page on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney_hunting_accident
It was his own lawyer that Deadeye Dick shot in the face.
After it was determined the lawyer wasn't badly injured, much hilarity ensued about that fact.
Killing animals for sport should be illegal (I'm fine with doing so for self-defense or food purposes, but not when it's done just for the "thrill" of it).
I think that someone who wants to hunt for the 'thrill' of it needs to do their hunting armed only with a spear and a knife.
And they should only be allowed to hunt large 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 (though not the endangered ones, obviously). Only fair that the animal be adequately equipped to fight back!
*𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵- scratch that, I have a better idea: 'sport' hunters should only be allowed to hunt 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 'sport' hunters. It's the only way to ensure total fairness, you see! If it really is all about the love of the hunt, and not just a sick power trip, then surely they'll agree enthusiastically with this reasonable proposal!
Well, you know what Hemingway said - there is no sport like the hunting of man, and those have hunted armed men and liked it never want for any other kind.
That's literally the most traditional way humans did it! I would also allow rock-throwing, but only with the rocks already in the hunting grounds. Original way, none of these newfangled ideas. No chipping flint points either, or any metal. Just stalk them for days with nothing but sharp sticks, your bare hands, and limited water.
The "thrill" of killing animals is a substitute for the "thrill" of killing people.
I would SO FAR RATHER capture an animal in the viewfinder of my camera than in the target reticle of a rifle scope. A camera safari would be SO STINKING COOL!
Agree 100%.
OT
Bet Jodi Lamb was like this, too
gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2026/05/10
(click on comic to enlarge/enhance)
One day in the supermarket I was going down an aisle where a woman had placed her cart perpendicular to the shelves, across the entire aisle. The person in front of me didn't say a word but turned the offending cart parallel to the shelves so they could continue through the aisle. The woman who had blocked the aisle with her cart yelled at the other person for moving her cart. I stood there and patiently told her that the other person moved her cart because she had placed it blocking the flow of traffic down the aisle. She vehemently denied doing that, at which point I told her that yes, she had, and denying it was pointless.
I bet you also believe that masks prevent disease transmission.
Yeah, I'm funny that way.
OT - 10,000+
𝐀𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐞𝐱𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐬
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/astronomers-find-over-ten-thousand-potential-new-exoplanets
And the REALLY neat thing is that the count given here is likely the barest fraction of the number of exoplanets in our galaxy!
Yet we can't find Planet 9 in our own solar system. : )
But we can find Plan 9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
It's covered in ice.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eyVWQH7jIg8
"They used Christianity to enrich themselves and knew that fighting culture war battles—and pretending to be persecuted—was an easy path to wealth. They never gave a damn who got hurt in the process."
True Christians. The grift that keeps on grifting.
Gah - sorry, that was like swimming through a sewer and I gave up halfway through.
Fundies spend lots of time hollering about all the evil in the world. I guess they’d know.
No surprise that an xtian woman who covered up child sexual abuse turned out to be a Trump supporter.
"Day Star" (sometimes "Morning Star") is a reference to Satan (see Isaiah 14:12).
Lamb was of the Devil.
Ironic, since the very notion of praying as something that could actually end up having results (i.e., praying for x to happen/not to happen) comes across like a form of witchcraft (to me, anyway).