Let's be clear – televangelists prosper only because people, many Americans in the case of televangelists, have a tendency towards fearfulness, blaming, stupidity, and control-freakism. Televangelists don't preach Christian love, they teach fundamentalist hate. Those who know how to love don't need to listen to – and more importantly, donate to – hatred-spewing bigots.
Televangelists, and conservative Christian preachers, are often caught with their pants down in acts of unmitigated hypocrisy, or with their fingers in the till. In keeping with the pettiness of televangelical views, they tend not to be efficient or imaginative criminals, but they often commit petit crimes on a gross scale.
Inanities from Pat Robertson, who recently endorsed Rudy Giuliani:
"God's pattern is for men to be the leaders, both in the church and in the family... Women should listen and learn quietly and submissively. I do not let women teach men or have authority over them."
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." ~ fundraising letter, 1992
"We have imagined ourselves invulnerable and have been consumed by the pursuit of ... health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality... It [terrorism] is happening because God Almighty is lifting his protection from us." ~ this is Robertson's explanation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in a three-page statement released Thursday, September 13, 2001, quoted from AANEWS #958 by American Atheists (September 14, 2001)
"I am absolutely persuaded one of the reasons so many lesbians are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement is because being a mother is the unique characteristic of womanhood, and these lesbians will never be mothers naturally, so they don't want anybody else to have that privilege either."
"Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."
"If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it'll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn't necessarily something we ought to open our arms to. "
"It's one thing to say, "We have rights to jobs ... we have rights to be left alone in out little corner of the world to do our thing." It's an entirely different thing to say, well, "We're not only going to go into the schools and we're going to take your children and your grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals." Now that's wrong."
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
"You see what happened in 1962. They took prayer out of the schools. The next year the Supreme Court ordered Bible reading taken from the schools. And then progressing, liberals, most of them atheistic educators, have pushed to remove all religion from the lives of children.... The people who wrote the "Humanist Manifesto" and their pupils and their disciples are in charge of education in America today."
"The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement... We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America."
"We have enough votes to run the country. And when the people say, "We've had enough," we are going to take over."
"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe that I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election of 2004. It's shaping up that way. The Lord has just blessed him.... I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad. God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."
More quotes from this obnoxious bigot, if these aren't enough.
