$50 MILLION Embezzled by the Good Christians at Trinity Broadcast Network

[haele]

38. Their faith is probably genuine - but it's Mammon they worship. A prosperity gospel encourages

only lip service to charity, mercy, personal responsiblity or ethical behaviour and encourages all sorts of bullying, lying and cheating to prove that you are a better gatherer of wealth and power than your neighbor.
If your god only shows his or her love by "blessing and elevating you" with wealth and goods over anyone else, then your god doesn't care if you mercilessly prey on your supposedly equal and faithful neighbors the same time you pray to your god - because so long as you get your goodies, no matter how you get them proves that what you do has to be right in your diety's eyes. It's justified. And there's just enough threads of justification for sociopathic or bully behaviour in the KJV that many of the modern "born agains" to think that it's just ducky - that a supposedly merciful creator of all has gratuatously ensured that everything around them was created just for them, individually, to dispose of however they feel.

In my understanding of religious traditions back into the ages that are now considered part of myth, what passes for Prosperity Gospels nowadays, were found in the religious tenets of war gods, not in those of any creator or fertility gods.
Baal and Moloch would approve. On edit, Baal probably wouldn't, Baal didn't look kindly on false oaths and cheating others.

And showing mercy is not something they'd do to anyone who would make excuses for them just because they mouth the words from the same book. There is no excuse for them, their works and lies speak for themselves. They will take any grace one may want to give them and throw it in the trash-heap, thinking that person weak anyway for excusing their behaviour as a brother or sister in religion. They hide behind religion as a thief hides in a dark alley, wrapping other people's belief around them like a coat.

One does not need to think they are judging these people by speaking the plain truth about them. Commenting on or calling out their actions and works is self-protection, not judgements, if that is what one may be trying to avoid.
Excusing their actions as being "mis-guided" only gives them strength.

Haele