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Meditation 914
Critique of Religious Faith
Religious Beliefs Are Harmful (Part 6)

by: Fred Leavitt

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Maybe They Had a Bad Connection

Every profession has its share of hypocrites and criminals, but religious leaders'"the ones who instill moral codes in their followers'"should not compete with pornographers and snake oil salesmen for the moral vacuum award. Below is a very incomplete list of religious leaders who made headlines during the past 25 years.

You shall not murder. Sixth Commandment

• Shoko Asahara claimed to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Shiva, and promised to lead his followers to salvation when Armageddon arrived. His cult, Aum Shinrikyo, released deadly sarin gas onto the Tokyo underground in 1995. Seven people were killed.
• Meir Kahane was an American Jewish Orthodox rabbi. He was imprisoned for plotting the bombing of a mosque.
• Swami Premananda set up an ashram in Sri Lanka that became noted for taking in orphans. He was convicted on several charges of raping girls and also for murder. He is currently serving a double life sentence.

You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:43)

• Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has organized demonstrations in at least 22 states at funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. His supporters carry placards reading "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and they shout epithets at grieving parents. Phelps asserts that God punished the soldiers because the U.S. is tolerant of homosexuality. In his words, "God hates fags."
• Jerry Falwell called James Bakker, a former Assemblies of God minister and host of a popular evangelical Christian television program, a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history."

You shall not commit adultery. (Seventh Commandment). According to many religious leaders, there are prohibitions of many other forms of sex.

• Bakker's staff members paid $265,000 to his former secretary to keep secret her allegation that he had raped her, In 1987, following threats that the payoff would be revealed, Bakker resigned from his position.
• Warren Jeffs, the former President of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was charged with conspiracy to commit sex crimes. He was arrested after being on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for a little over 16 weeks.
• In 1986 Jimmy Swaggart helped defrock fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman for conducting an extramarital affair. The next year, a private detective hired by Gorman took photos of Jimmy Swaggart with a prostitute. Swaggart told the Assemblies of God leadership that he suffered a lifelong addiction to pornography.
• In 2006, Pastor Ted Haggard of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, admitted to some charges levied against him by his former male escort. The escort claimed that Haggard paid him for sex over a 3 year period and used methamphetamine with him. Haggard at first claimed he did not know his accuser. He later admitted that the escort had given him a massage but denied that it was sexual. He also admitted buying methamphetamine but denied using it. He was fired by the church for "sexually immoral conduct."
• Israel's Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, has been repeatedly accused of breaking the law. In 2003, an Israeli newspaper published a report in which four young men accused Metzger of groping them. He has been accused of sexually harassing women as well.
• Paul Crouch is the co-founder, chairman, and president of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the world's largest Christian television network. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Crouch in 1998 paid a former employee a $425,000 settlement to end a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging that the man was forced into a homosexual encounter with Crouch under threats of job termination. TBN officials acknowledged the settlement while claiming that it was made in order to avoid an expensive lawsuit.
• During the last decade, thousands of pedophile Roman Catholic priests have been exposed in the U.S., Ireland, Canada, Poland, Australia, Britain, France, Mexico and Austria. In some cases the crimes were covered up by Church authorities and the perpetrators moved to another location, sometimes repeatedly. As a result, some of the pedophile priests had continued access to children whose lives they ruined.
• And not just young boys. The Magdalene institutions, originally established in the nineteenth century by the Sisters of Mercy as spiritual refuges for prostitutes and other women penitents, took in as many as 30,000 women until they closed in 1996. The institutions held girls and women against their will for "offenses" such as flirting or having been raped. Inmates were often beaten, stripped naked, mocked by sadistic nuns, and abused in other ways.
• And not just the Catholic Church. In 2005, Rabbi David Kaye of Potomac resigned from his job after allegedly trying to solicit sex from minors online. It was part of an undercover probe by the television show "Dateline NBC." In 2006, two lawsuits alleged that a Brooklyn Yeshiva knowingly harbored a child molester.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Matthew 19:24.

• Between 1984 and 1987, James Bakker and his wife each received annual salaries of $200,000 plus huge bonuses. Bakker was charged with fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering and sentenced to 45 years in prison. His associate, Richard Dortch, senior vice-president of PTL, also went to prison.
• Televangelist Robert Tilton's paid television program, Success-N-Life, aired in all 235 American TV markets. Tilton taught that all of life's trials, especially poverty, were a result of sin. When a person made a vow to Tilton, Tilton preached that God would reward the donor with vast material riches. In 1991, ABC News reported that Tilton's ministry threw away prayer requests without reading them, keeping only money and valuables sent by viewers. Investigations initiated by the state of Texas and the Federal government found nearly 10,000 pounds of prayer requests and letters to the Tilton ministry in a disposal bin at a Tulsa-area recycling firm.
• Gerald Payne founded the Tampa-based Greater Ministries International Church. In 2001 Payne received a 27 year prison sentence for promising 18,000 Christian investors that they would double their money through "divinely-inspired investments." Before his arrest on 19 counts of fraud, conspiracy, money-laundering, and related charges, Payne and his partners took in almost $580 million.
• Brother Patrick Henry Talbert of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple told his audience, "God says give, and it shall be given. You give a gift, we basically take it offshore '" and we've been doing this for nine years, nobody's ever lost a dime '" and we multiply it back through the body of Christ. ... We don't promise you nothing. We just say nobody's lost a dime in nine years, and we double everything." In 1999, a federal grand jury indicted Talbert and six others on charges of money laundering and mail fraud. According to the 20-count indictment, the group's "Double Your Blessing" and "Faith Promises" programs were elaborate frauds that bilked thousands of people for tens of millions of dollars.
• By the mid-80s, Jimmy Swaggart's weekly "Jimmy Swaggart Telecast" attracted eight million viewers. He amassed great wealth, taking in more than $150 million annually.

The pope nominated Mother Teresa for sainthood a year after her death in 1997. A "miracle" had to be attested. Christopher Hitchens wrote, "Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No."

Hitchens wrote that MT was a friend of poverty, not of the poor. She said that suffering was a gift from God. "She was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating." Keating received a ten-year prison sentence for his part in the savings and loan scandal. During the course of his trial, she pleaded to the judge for clemency.

Hitchens, noting that her global income was more than enough to outfit several first class clinics, and that she never published an audit, asked what happened to the money. He wrote, "The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been." He added that "The decision not to do so... is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering, but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection." One of her volunteers described her "Home for the Dying" as resembling photos of concentration camps such as Belsen. No chairs, just stretcher beds. Virtually no medical care or painkillers beyond aspirin.
Hitchens noted that MT "checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age." He concluded, "Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud."