A Harsh Rebuke to Televangelists

Reading about televangelists as in these posts at the Rude Pundit and at Pandagon makes me in turns sad, angry, afraid, disgusted. In my view, these guys are blasphemers. They slander God, and they are the folks Jesus was talking about when he warned that not everybody who called "Lord, Lord" would be known to Him. They mislead millions, and they will be judged because of it. Of this I am as certain as I am of anything.

John Hagee claims that he knows that God smote New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina to prevent a gay pride parade. In view of its being the divine wrath, it makes sense that FEMA wouldn’t want to mitigate the suffering any too efficiently. Some televangelists, including the now dead Jerry Falwell and the not yet dead Pat Robertson, reckoned that the WTC attack in 2001 was a message from God about the gays. GW Bush says the attackers were evil and that God didn’t do it, but he is not a qualified televangelist so what does he know?

Hagee is impatient for the horrible deaths of most of humanity, and he expects that God is going to start a killing spree any day now. Jesus told us to pray that we do not see the time of trial, but Jesus said a lot of things that Hagee apparently doesn’t credit. Blessed are the peacemakers? Just dicta.
It seems to me that Hagee is dead wrong. He is lying about God. Of this I have a strong conviction, and I feel that it is incumbent on me to tell the truth. God did not tell Hagee that Katrina was His doing to stop a gay pride parade. And Katrina was no such thing. The WTC attack was no such thing. The tsunami in Indonesia was no such thing.

I base this solely on my own conviction after searching my heart and considering how gracious and merciful God is. Besides, it stands to reason. If the Son of God was sacrificed for sin, why would God be interested in preventing sin, even if you reckoned that homosexuality was a sin? Wouldn’t a God that routinely caused bad things to happen that would not otherwise have happened without His divine intervention send some storms in the path of the genocidal maniacs in Darfur? Wouldn’t he have smote the Hutus or the Nazis of Pol Pot with some foul weather? I suppose you could claim that genocidal maniacs are instruments of God and that all this genocide was meant as a message about gays. And that’s just what you might do if you were an insane blasphemous televangelist.

Oh, I forgot. The Holocaust was God’s way of chastising the Jews according to Hagee. Just as He used the Babylonians and the Romans to get the Jews back into line, God used Hitler to send a message to the Jews to get right with Him. Presumably, if the Jews had repented of whatever it was that made God angry, then the Holocaust would have been averted.

If Hagee is receiving spiritual messages, they are from the Devil. Many of the televangelists are on Satan’s payroll if you ask me. Why does God let these people mislead us? Why does God inflict us with GW Bush and his ilk? It's not because of gay people, I'll tell you that much.