DJ Hi-Tek texts the word "faggot" everytime; he's taken that word and made it his bitch..
The proceeds from church business are second only to the benefits of being a government official in Nigeria. When congregations see their pastors display amazing wealth, they do anything to attain it as well. So when a preacher speaks out against corruption, moral decadence, and so on, the message is dead on arrival. Most don’t practice what they preach. The commercialisation of religion has been made possible by the proliferation of churches which concentrate authority in a single individual. He is the star of the show. In older denominations like the Catholic Anglican churches such displays of wealth are non existent because there are no stars, there is no special treatment and no one owns things like cars, houses, expensive suits and so on. For example, the Pope, head of a billion Catholics worldwide, flies Alitalia when he travels. They can do this because they have no wives or children to cater for, while Pentecostal pastors do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they should be poor, but since religion is now unquestionably a business, it should be handled as such. Churches should be taxed. (more)Additional BBC reporting paints the darker side of preacher power:
We met the reverend when we were following up the case of a widower called Therese. She lost her husband a few years ago. Soon after she was introduced to a new church run by a husband and wife pastor couple. At the end of her first visit to the church the pastors told Therese that her late husband had been a member of a devil worshipping cult and persuaded Therese that God wanted her to sell everything her husband owned. The car (a Mercedes), carpets, a gas cooker, dining table and chairs, clothes, cutlery, crockery and even the curtains were all taken to the church. Therese was told that if anyone found out what had happened God would kill her and her children. Therese ended up sleeping on the streets with her 2 teenage children. We were told it was a common story of how those in a position of power and respect had taken advantage of a vulnerable individual. Luckily Therese met Reverend Oluchi. For over a month she slept on the floor of the church without telling anyone what had happened to her before the reverend managed to get the story out of her. When we followed up this story during our filming we found the police just about to arrest the couple Therese accused. The police took us to the church in question. We watched as they stormed into the middle of Sunday service and arrested the couple. (more)(HT: Hamdi Abdi)
However, it must be noted that, as we've become big, much of life had to get out of the way. When modern Homo sapiens started scrambling out of East Africa, the average extinction rate of other mammals was, in scientific terms, one per million species years. It's 100 times that now, a number that threatens to make non-human life on Earth collapse. In regard to that number, environmentalists usually say that humanity's fate depends on the life around us. That's debatable. Humans are adaptable and perfectly capable of living in squalor, without clean air or clean water or birds in the trees. If not, there wouldn't be 7 billion of us. Conservation is a moral question, and probably not a utilitarian imperative.NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Anand Giridharadas and Teju Cole for the Indian and Nigerian perspectives:
