You can't get close to God on commercial.

Prosperity gospel preacher and measles aficionado Kenneth Copeland is closing in on his first billion dollars made.

“If I flew commercial, I’d have to stop 65 percent of what I’m doing, that’s the main reason,” he said.

Copeland said he was a “very wealthy man” and acknowledged using the private jets to travel to his vacation homes. Guerrero asked how he would respond to those who say preachers shouldn’t live so luxuriously.

“They’re wrong,” he replied “It’s a misunderstanding of the Bible that … if you go into the old covenant, do you think the Jewish people believe you should be broke?”

Guerrero follows up: “Are you saying that Jewish people appreciate money more?”

“They believe in wealth,” Copeland said.

A wealthy televangelist explains his fleet of private jets: ‘It’s a biblical thing’ [WaPo] Read the rest

The "prosperity gospel" (previously) is a religious doctrine that encourages poor people to send specific amounts of cash (usually in the hundreds of dollars) to charismatic preachers, an act the preachers characterizes as "seed giving" -- and the preachers promise that God will reward these gifts by making the givers rich. Read the rest

Donald Trump's “prosperity gospel” spiritual advisor Paula White, a pastor who is reported to reside in an 8,000 square foot house and travel on a $2.6 million private jet, is commanding her congregation to cough up their January salaries to her or else God is seriously going to punish them so hard. Read the rest

A Lamborghini here, a Lamborghini there, sooner or later it starts to add up. Read the rest

Writing in the Baptist News, Miguel De La Torre -- a progressive professor at Denver's Iliff School of Theology -- denounces evangelicals who "forgive" Trump for his myriad sins and support child-molesters like Roy Moore, saying that they embrace a faith that "fuses and confuses white supremacy with salvation." Read the rest

The queen of the world's first mega-sized “prosperity gospel” empire has died. Read the rest

That weird meeting between presidential candidate Donald Trump and a number of so-called Prosperity Gospel evangelists sounds weirder the more we learn about who was there, and what they actually say they believe. Read the rest

Peas, celery, parsley, and a variety of lettuces are growing in an old London WWII bunker 100 feet underground. To enter the 2.5 acre farm you must first wind your way down a 129-step spiral staircase near the Clapham North tube station. Once inside, you will see a sophisticated indoor farming system that will produce food consistent in flavor and color.

Crops will be grown in a sealed clean-room environment with a bespoke ventilation system, advanced LED lighting and a sophisticated irrigation system that enable the farm to produce crops with very little energy. 

The farm is pesticide-free, uses very little energy, and makes very little impact on the environment. The project, called Growing Underground, was hatched by Britsish entrepreneurs Richard Ballard and Steven Dring, who at first raised capital via crowd-funding, and then got two-star Michelin chef Michael Roux Jr on board as a backer. The farm will begin selling to Covent Garden buyers in just a few weeks. Read the rest

"Medication" by Andrew Brandou, from his Jonestown paintings

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Some people use the word "cult" as a pejorative, a catchall for sects whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream of organized religion. I use the word as a social scientist or psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. As I wrote in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, "what makes a cult cultish is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are." Read the rest