Can Joel Osteen help you pay your bills?

[The Straight Story]

Can Joel Osteen help you pay your bills?

Houston, Texas (CNN) -- Joel Osteen strides into the former Compaq Center. Some 20,000 people are standing and singing. Purple lights softly pulse across the ceiling, and mist floats around two giant screens flashing words to the songs.

It's not a pulpit but a podium. It's not an altar but a stage. There is no cross. Instead a huge globe spins, and two massive bubbling creeks flank the stage. A lighting system softens distant corners of the massive arena and spreads colored light and smoke in strategic spots. Somehow, the space that will hold 40,000-plus on Sunday morning doesn't feel like a sports arena.

In the control room, producers watch multiple camera angles and feeds.

Smiling broadly, Osteen bounds up the few stairs to the stage, closes his eyes, lifts his hands and leads a prayer.

....

"I don't like to be called a prosperity minister because I think in most people's minds that don't know me they think, 'Well, all he talks about is money,' " Osteen said, "Which I don't, I talk about being blessed in so many different ways."

Yet he does offer advice about finances and he has some experience. Osteen said Lakewood still has $40 million to pay off on $100 million he borrowed to convert Compaq Center from a basketball arena into a church.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/18/romans.osteen/index.html

[saltpoint]

1. I'm told by those close to his ministry that Osteen only eats candy.

No meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts, grain, etc.

Just candy. Chocolate bars, yum-yums, Starburst, Nerds, Rollos, TootsiePops, etc.

Now. You know the world well enough to know I don't really think that's true. You might even suspect that I made it up.

But I post it here this evening, with our capital city clogged with a major snowfall, with flights cancelled, with plans scrambled and jostled and wrecked, because the alternative would be to confront directly the sniveling greed-monkey that Osteen is, and to regard the torrent of smarmy deceit that spews from his mouth there in the multi-million dollar Jesus Stadium.

If your ministry needs purple lights, IMO you ain't shit.

[Inspired]

3. I wish I could recommend your comment. Superb. n/t

[undeterred]

5. Well, that diet goes along with the "prosperity gospel".

Ain't gonna last.

[LiberalFighter]

7. I hope he drinks lots of Mountain Dew so his teeth rot out.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. He and is ilk are as scary as shit. Weird, weird, weird.

[Turbineguy]

4. Only members of his church

could believe he would help them.

[pitohui]

6. it's an easy thing for him to prove

if he's so prosperous, if paying my bills is so easy, all he has to do is give the money to my creditors and show me how

except oops sounds like he hasn't even paid off his own place? hmmmm

[KamaAina]

8. Sure he could

he must be worth a bloody fortune to have bought the Compaq Center. I'm sure he keeps that much in checking. And after all, that'd be the Christian thing to do, right? :sarcasm:

[Ikonoklast]

9. P. T. Barnum over-estimated the time frame for suckers being born.

There sure are a lot of them, their money in their hot little hands, more than willing to give it to a con man instead of a poor man.

[Historic NY]

10. who died & made him god?