Evangelist marries 8-year old girl

[laconicsax]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31913443/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts

TEXARKANA, Ark. - Evangelist Tony Alamo preyed on his loyal followers' young daughters, once taking a girl as young as 8 as his bride and repeatedly sexually assaulting her, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Clay Fowlkes said that girl's story and others unwound an "elaborate facade" Alamo wove around himself. Lawyers for the 74-year-old Alamo, who is charged with taking underage girls across state lines for sex, argued that the alleged victims traveled across the country to further the outreach and business interests of a "bona fide religious group" that the government targeted out of its own prejudices.

...

Alamo summoned another 15-year-old girl to his home in 1994 by telephone, authorities said, then telling her parents that God instructed him to marry her. Fowlkes said the parents consented and Alamo repeatedly sexually assaulted the girl, taking her on trips to West Virginia and Tennessee as he prepared for a trial on federal tax-evasion charges.

Another similar call came in 1998, when Alamo married a 14-year-old girl, Fowlkes said. In 2002, Alamo summoned three underage girls into his bedroom and shut the door, telling them God wanted him to marry two of them, Fowlkes said. Alamo later sexually assaulted two of those girls he married, one 11, the other 14, the prosecutor said.

...

Alamo, whose ministry grew into a multimillion-dollar industry on the backs of his followers, was convicted of tax evasion charges in 1994. He served four years in prison after the IRS said he owed the government $7.9 million. The evangelist has blamed the recent charges against him as the work of a Vatican-led conspiracy.

So atheists are bad people because they don't share these Christian values, right?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. At least he MARRIED them!

Imagine what would happen if teh gays got teh marriage!!!

Wait .................

[hobbit709]

2. Cut his balls off and stick them in his mouth.

That's what should be done with him.
And the parents that consented to that should be horsewhipped.
If he wants traditional values, then he can have traditional punishment from the same century.

[rurallib]

6. a tea bagging story I could go for.

[laconicsax]

12. The traditional punishment would be against his victims.

[provis99]

3. there's plenty of child marriage in the Bible

I guess he's just carrying out his Christian duty, as God instructed.:shrug:

[valerief]

4. I like your last line! nt

[SidneyCarton]

5. This extreme and distorted view of Christianity brought to you by...

The DU League of the Militant Godless: Applying the broad brush since 2001.

[laconicsax]

8. Please identify the broad brush.

Was it where I excerpted an article or when I asked if the values demonstrated are the kind that make Christians better than atheists?

I guess if your thinking is narrow enough, every brush looks broad.

[SidneyCarton]

9. Nice ad-hominem.

You take a fringe group of Christians, whose beliefs lie outside of the mainstream as your example, and then note their behavior as the "Christian Values" that Atheists are criticized for not having. I would imagine that Theists criticize Atheists on any number of topics, but I have yet to hear an argument about Atheist immorality being due to their unwillingness to rape children.

[laconicsax]

10. Are Christian values not the values held by people as stemming from their Chistian faith?

Religious identity is based on self-identification. If some groups of Christians believe that their religion encourages something you find abhorrent, you can't insist that those groups don't count. It isn't up to you to decide if someone else belongs to a religion.

Theists routinely assert that atheists and other non-believers have no morals/are immoral because they don't subscribe to some Abrahamic faith, the argument being that the Abrahamic faiths imbue their adherents with good morals.

I provided an example of one of those adherents holding that bigamy and child rape are perfectly fine as an outstanding example of how the argument that faith in the Abrahamic god makes one a moral person is fundamentally flawed. I never held him up as an example of all Christendom but somehow you thought I was.

Since you saw a broad brush, one of three things must have happened:
1) You didn't read what I posted before accusing me of attacking you, making you an idiot and an asshole.
2) You feel personally attacked by my criticism of Alamo's behavior, meaning that you empathize with the plight of a child rapist and see yourself as the embodiment of all Christendom.
3) You misread my post.

Your spelling and grammar indicate that you aren't an idiot, the tone of legitimate anger in your responses indicate that you aren't an just an asshole, and I never suspected you of being a megalomaniac child rapist. I'll just assume that you misread my post and accept your apology.

[xfundy]

14. A-Men!

[SidneyCarton]

15. Really, this is too cute.

If I disagree with you I must be:

A. An absolute idiot.

B. An apologist for child rapists

C. Illiterate.

Well given such options Laconicsax, I must immediately bow to the superior intellect. Obviously as a Christian, my beliefs merge effortlessly with the pedophile you profiled in your OP, I will be contacting my church today to have my records withdrawn and become a Atheist myself as you have clearly shown me that such is the only possibly moral decision I could make. I certainly wouldn't want to be an associate of pedophiles and fools, now would I?

:sarcasm:

[laconicsax]

18. Where did I say disagree? Oh! That's right! I didn't.

The third possibility I gave was, "you misread my post."

Does that mean that you're illiterate? No.

Does "misread" mean disagree? No.

Since you saw the option "you misread my post" and thought it read "illiterate," we can consider that matter resolved unless you want to give more evidence that you tend to misread what I write.

Let's go back the beginning. Show where I made a broad-brush accusation and I will happily recant and apologize. If you can't, then you can admit that you were wrong and apologize. Sounds fair to me.

Giving an example to falsify a blanket claim (Christianity=morality) is not a broad brush attack. Nowhere did I claim that all Christians like to diddle 8-year old children nor that doing so is a central tenet of Christianity. Those would have been broad-brush attacks.

By the way, I'm glad that you recognize the argument for belief of 'accept or something unpleasant happens' or 'accept to save your soul' is coercive and wrong.

[rd_kent]

22. Instead of getting angry about being "broadbrushed"

perhaps you could take that anger and point it toward those that SHARE your religion and take it back from those that distort it for their own purpose? Or would that mean that you would have to SINGLE HANDILY take on the xtian faith since IMHO, all faiths, including xtianity, twist and stretch their scripture to fit whatever dogmatic path they are trying to follow.
Dont get mad at those who see your religion as a cancer on society because of shit like what Alamo did, get mad at those that are giving YOU bad name.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

27. Hey, expecting mainstream Christians to be responsible for Tony Alamo

(a nutcase from way back--he kept his late wife's body laid out in bed for years back in the 1960s or 1970s) is like expecting the Democrats to be responsible for Lyndon LaRouche.

Really, it's an exact analogy. Nutcase CALLS himself something that he isn't.

The nutcases do not consider US to be their co-religionists, especially since my denomination just voted to allow uncloseted gay bishops.

We're not even on the same planet theologically.

[xfundy]

11. A "Fringe group?"

More and more, much of organized religion is revealed to be organized crime.

Your beliefs sound as crazy to many ppl as the beliefs of other religions sound to you. That's just the way it is, dear.

[SidneyCarton]

16. No "dear" I'm afraid you saying so does not make your statement fact.

And as to this particular instance, the religion in question was anything but "organized."

[laconicsax]

19. Christianity isn't an organized religion?

That's a new one to me.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. Tony Alamo is not a member of any organized Christian denomination

Thanks to our freedom of religion, any nutcase can declare himself a "minister," collect followers, and do things that a Lutheran or Episcopalian or yes, even a Roman Catholic, would get tossed out of the clergy rank on his ass for.

The organization actually provides some quality control. In order to become an Episcopal priest, you have to go through a tough "discernment" process in which a committee from your congregation probes your psyche and asks tough questions for 12 sessions. Then you have to be cleared by a diocesan committee in a similar process. If the diocese approves, then you have to go to seminary for three years of academic study, after which you serve as a transitional deacon (kind of an internship) in a parish. You have to pass a battery of academic and psychological tests, and then you can be ordained IF a parish is willing to hire you. The process tends to keep the riffraff out, and since Episcopal priests do not take vows of celibacy, the priesthood is less likely to serve as a "hideout" for pedophiles. In fact, everyone who works with youth and children in an Episcopal parish has to take training on the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behavior with minors.

Now here's the Wikipedia on Tony Alamo:

Hoffman was born in Joplin, Missouri,<1><2> to Jewish-Romanian parents in 1934.<7> As a child he moved with his family to Montana, where he was briefly employed as a delivery boy for Helena's Independent Record newspaper.<8>

In the early 1960s, Hoffman moved to Los Angeles, California. He assumed the names Marcus Abad and Mark Hoffman and pursued a career in music. He was briefly incarcerated for a weapon-related offense.<2> Hoffman married Helen Hagan (born Helen Alice Muller in New York, New York) in 1961. On May 25, 1964, the couple had a son, Mark Anthony Hoffman. While married to Helen, he met aspiring actress Susan Lipowitz (born Edith Opal Horn in Dyer, Arkansas<7>), a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity who was nine years older than Hoffman and married to a man whom Hoffman would later describe as a "small time Los Angeles hood".<8> After both Hoffman's and Lipowitz' divorces, Lipowitz and Hoffman married in a 1966 Las Vegas, Nevada, ceremony, and the couple legally changed their names to Tony and Susan Alamo.<2>

Together, the couple established the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation in 1969 in Hollywood, California.<7> They also manufactured and sold a line of "Tony Alamo" brand sequined denim jackets, a business that would eventually land Alamo in prison for tax evasion.<9>

Susan delivered the sermons on the Alamos' syndicated TV program during the 1970s while Tony appeared to sing a gospel song. When Susan died of cancer on April 8, 1982, Alamo claimed she would be resurrected and kept her body on display for six months while their followers prayed. After 16 years her body was given to her childhood family. <10>

So you see, Tony Alamo just declared himself a "minister" without training, without anyone's approval. If you look at the picture that accompanies the Wikipedia article, you'll see that he looks like the crook he so obviously is.

But hey, if it makes you feel better and help work out your bitterness at your ex-fundamenatlist, ex-Mormon, or ex-Catholic background, who am I to confuse you with facts?

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. According to Associated Press, they have:

a 'ministry'
a 'headquarters' patrolled by armed guards
a 'complex'
a web site
the complex was still able to hold Sunday services without Alamo, who was in Los Angeles that Saturday (so there are other people to run the services)

all from 1 piece: http://cbs2.com/national/Tony.Alamo.investigation.2.822128.html

They sound pretty organised to me. And that Wikipedia article you quoted called their ministry an 'organization' too.

[David Zephyr]

7. Evangelists, Vampires and Real Estate Agents.

Three of a kind.

[rd_kent]

23. Hey wait a minute! I AM a Real Estate Agent!

THAT makes me a bad person? How so?

[rrneck]

13. Alamo is the leader of a cult

using Christianity as a tool for money, power, and sex with young girls. There is no love lost between me and most of Christianity, but this guy is beyond the pale. Unlike most Christians, good and bad, he has no belief in the tenets of Christianity any more than Bob Madoff had in double entry bookkeeping.

[laconicsax]

20. What defines Christianity then? What are its tenets?

[rrneck]

25. Very good point.

I haven't picked up a bible in decades so I may have been talking through my hat.

I have been thinking that Christianity may have jumped the shark around the middle of the fifteenth century. When the practice of any religious faith departs from the practice itself to some codification of orthodoxy that is the signal of its decline. That's when faith is overwhelmed.

I remember finding Alamo's screeds under windshield wipers back in Nashville. They were mostly anti-Catholic conspiracy stuff as I recall. He was obviously shit nuts and preying on others credulity twenty years ago. In fact, about that same time when I was in undergraduate school and I had an English professor who, at that time and in that place, was very unusual in his own right. He was into organic gardening, bicycles and recycling. Everyone figured him for a real tree hugger. I recall that you could be walking down the hall with him and he would be picking up aluminum cans and dropping them in the new fangled cardboard recycle bins that had appeared on campus. He didn't make a big deal out of it, it was just a thing he did. And before long, I found myself doing the same damn thing. The value of any religion is not found in its orthodoxy, but in its practice. As a meme, religion is very tenacious, and I don't see it going away any time in the near or distant future.

I know a lot of Christians who are pretty nice people. They try to get along with everybody. They don't steal, lie or cheat. They certainly don't do so in the name of some deity. The tenets of Christianity, as I understand them, are pretty benign; make nice, don't steal, help people when you can - all the Jesus stuff. The tools of cruelty and oppression are in the Bible as well, mostly in the Old Testament as I recall.

It seems to me that the Bible isn't telling us to do anything that we already don't know how to do, either good or bad. The fact that the tenets of Christianity have been codified into an orthodoxy that is in itself revered is the problem. Too many people seem to think that religion facilitates faith, but it is faith that facilitates religion.

So I guess my point here (if there is one) is that Alamo failed to engage in any practice that would be considered right human behavior as described by the tenets of Christianity. He didn't even use Christianity as a product but simply as a tool to exploit others. He wasn't the first nor will he be the last.

[rd_kent]

24. Dude, ALL religions are a cult!

The only thing that separates a religion from a cult is that a church has more members.

[rrneck]

26. True that. I should have been more clear.

I was using the term as a colloquialism. I can't think of any religion that didn't start out as a cult.

cult
  /kʌlt/ Show Spelled Pronunciation Show IPA
Use cult in a Sentence
–noun
1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
7. the members of such a religion or sect.
8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.

[Odin2005]

17. Evil scumbag.

Muhammad married a 9yo girl, so this monster is in "good" company.

[DeSwiss]

21. So atheists are bad people because they don't share these Christian values, right?

So-called "Christians" WILL NOT accept a single modicum, a sliver, not one wit, nor one hint of any kind of responsibility for the evil smell and slime of this, their fellow believer. Nor do they want to accept, hear about, nor acknowledge any of this shit that has happened and been going on right under everyone's noses -- in the Name of Jeebus -- for so long.

Why? Because it just cuts too close to home. They're all in the same invisible belief business.

Now what they will do, is claim that it was "the devil" what made him do it. It has to be the devil, right? Because no Christian would ever do such a thing (as long as one doesn't read the bible too closely).

And with this one stroke, they will have wiped away all responsibility for this and all those other unreported atrocities that are being done, probably at this very moment -- in the Name of Jeebus (until the next time -- and there will be a next time). In their minds it absolves them, and it cleanses them of the stains and the evil taint that he has left behind for them to suffer through. And they do it with the balm of the masses: "Blame it on Satan -- The Invisible Evildoer."

And in this way, this madness is perpetuated. Its worked that way for centuries, without fail....

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms,
but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. ~ H.L. Mencken

K&R