RMJ has had some of the best blogging on the flooding from hurricane Harvey because he's there. I haven't said much about it because all I know is what I'm reading in the news and hearing on the internet, so I defer to people who know what is going on.
His piece about the whited sepulcher, Joel Osteen, who is screwing unto others as he would never want to be screwed unto, is essential reading.
Among other idiocies in the First Amendment is that such outfits which are obviously not religions but profit making shake downs of the deluded, the vulnerable and the suckered are, for legal fiction, religion and so benefitted by the 2nd if not 3rd fate tarnished silver-age poetry of the 18th century Constitution and subsequent tax and other law, cannot be reliably or safely distinguished from real religious congregations and institutions which engage in and promote charity and charitable behavior, the only ones for which there is any excuse in public good so as to allow such provisions in the law.
We've let our layers, our judges, our justices and the law schools and law firms off the hook. Such distinctions as anyone with any sense of decency and honesty can make with ease, they, with their legal educations, most of the most influential from the most elite and prestigious universities in the country, pretend can't be made.
No pseudo-religious outfit that behaves in such a crisis the way Osteen's has should continue to be classified as a religion and should lose all of the privileges granted to businesses under the Constitution even as alleged journalists and media venues who lie in promotion of inequality and so attack democracy should lose their classification as "press" under the law. If our legal system is too stupid to make such distinctions with honest reliability, we need to replace it with professionals who are honest and intelligent enough to do that.
In lieu of that, I would recommend giving your donations of money to the organizations and people really making the Law, the Prophets and the Gospel real, in real life, in Texas, Louisiana and other places of disaster, not the liars and hucksters and profiteers. I'd send money to that mattress store baron who has done the right thing over the hallelujah peddling fraudsters. At the very least "religious" outfits should be expected to meet that level of credibility.
Update: When I wrote this morning, I hadn't known that exactly that passage, Matthew 23: 27-32 was the Gospel in today's Catholic liturgy. It's even more appropriate than I'd remembered.
Jesus said,
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the memorials of the righteous, and you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood.'
Thus you bear witness against yourselves that you are the children of those who murdered the prophets; now fill up what your ancestors measured out!"
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