I suppose I should add a note of explanation to this, perhaps my favorite gif of all time. And yes, I know I've posted it before, but can you ever see this enough times? And isn't it better just the way it is? Let's just say this guy is caught up in the spirit of Dancing with the Stars, only he can't dance. Actually, this was filmed during the height of that Toronto Blessing/Holy Laughter/Kenneth Hagin/rolling-on-the-floor ("carpet time") movement which had people mooing, bleating and crowing like roosters in church, all to express - I guess - the glory of God. This guy prefers to spin around in circles, stomping all the way.
I love to watch people go wacko under the power of the Holy Spirit, but this is really extreme. I have no idea what's going on here, because all the other videos I found of this woman were relatively "straight" - IF this Pentecostal shit can be said to be straight! I have no idea why drunken delusion, howling, flailing around, rolling on the floor, babbling in nonsense syllables, walking people around on leashes, etc. is assumed to be Godly. To me it's spiritual masturbation. Why not go help someone in need? But that has nothing to do with what is happening here. It's no better than actual drunkenness, which never helped anybody. I think a large part of this is the kind of herd mentality that caused Jim Jones' nearly one thousand followers to drink the Koolaid, even forcing their children and babies to drink it. This Heidi character is a performer, as far as I am concerned, putting on a show to convince the yokels in the audience to pony up for the sake of her "mission". It will work. I know this, because it always does.
I thought long and hard before posting this bizarre, even horrifying story about one of the strangest figures to inhabit the internet, the crazed evangelical preacher Jonathan Bell. I discovered JB maybe 3 or 4 years ago, stumbled on him while researching corrupt televangelists. You know the kind. But this. The more I found out about him, the more unbelievable it got.
I don't know if you want to read all of this or not, but it gave me a chance to trot out some of my favorite Pentecostal gifs, featuring some of the strangest human behaviour on record. These are Holy Ghosters of the most extreme degree, experiencing something called the Toronto Blessing (involving a lot of flailing around and guffawing). There are many more Bell videos on YouTube, though he really only did two official broadcasts: the "casual" one (excerpted above) and another, longer one he did dressed in (inexplicably) a tuxedo.
I suddenly realized that this guy, a former hairdresser, has hair so much like Donald Trump's that it's downright eerie.
(Excerpted from Snake Oil, 2009) Upstart TV preachers flock to Dallas like young starlets drawn to Hollywood. So began the story of Jonathan Bell who arrived in Dallas from Kingston, Ontario in early 1992 with a vision from God to start a television ministry. Accompanying Jonathan were Carrie Hart, a 71-year-old invalid, and her 35-year-old retarded son. With the $1400 per month that the Harts received in government checks, the three got set up in a one bedroom apartment in the predominately gay Oak Lawn section of Dallas, and Jonathan Bell Ministries was on its way.
That first Texas summer, however, took its toll on the trio of transplanted Canadians. Their living arrangement had deteriorated to the point that on the night of July 28th, police were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance at the ministry apartment, whereupon Jonathan was hauled in on aggravated assault of an invalid. The police incident report reveals a sorry state of affairs: Jonathan typically sent the Harts out early each morning on ministry errands, and they were expected back promptly at 9 PM. Being late, or not following instructions exactly resulted in a beating. Neighbors told police that they had seen the Harts with bruises and black eyes. The Harts were given just a few dollars a month, and Jonathan got the only bed while they slept on the floor with no bedding.
In what may have been a water baptism gone horribly awry, Harry Hart, the son, claimed that earlier in the summer Jonathan had tried to drown him at an area lake by holding him underwater by his hair. Within a few days of Jonathan's arrest, the Harts returned to Canada, and all charges were dropped. This sordid little tale would not be worth telling if shortly thereafter Jonathan had not gone on to produce two of the most psychotic, disturbing religious programs ever made.
Flanked by a potted plant, Screaming Boy was born in the studios of Dallas Cable Access. Religious fury in a rented tux. The petulant, porcine pentecostal launched into a hellfire and brimstone sermon at max volume which didn't subside for a solid hour. But much more than the message itself was the delivery, complete with nervous tics, bulging veins, and a childish, bullying demeanor. An implicit "n'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah" was almost audible at the end of every sentence. His main message concerned those smug, self-satisfied, so-called Christians in "their fancy churches" who "weren't gonna make it in."
"I've been looking for a church here in Dallas where they don't just preach the Word on Sunday and live like the DEVIL the rest of the week! Last Friday I went to a singles get together at the Church of Christ, and they were going to show Terminator 2...to people who weren't even saved! I mean, COME ON!" [note that the singles group was going to show Terminator 2. I guess Jonathan took care of THAT!] "If you don't realize you're a filthy, rotten sinner, you're going to hell, Buck-o." So don't you blame Screaming Boy when, on Judgement Day, you're on the wrong side of the gate. And, hey, you might be in a car crash tonight. You'll see. Jonathan's making it in, and you're not. N'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah.
"I"M NOT AN EXTREMIST!!!"
Speweth Jonathan: "I study the Bible five to eight hours a day!! And because I have faith as a child, Jesus Christ shows me visions all the time. He talks with me all the time, whether YOU believe it or not!" [So THERE!] "Two years ago God gave me a vision where I saw young people, men and women - no children there - no clothes on...They had their hands up in the air and they were screaming and yelling in Hell!" Also perversely compelling were the little tidbits he threw in about his own life. Abandoned by his mother at age eleven, Jonathan was put in a foster home with a man who sexually abused him. He suffered from depression until age twenty-seven, but managed to build a successful career as a hairdresser making, he claimed, $100,000 a year. He led a singles group at a church in Kingston, Ontario, but then God told him to go to Dallas and start his own ministry, and to build a Christian Boy's Ranch for abused youngsters.
Hmmmmmm... Good thing that in that vision of Hell that God gave Jonathan, none of the naked people were under eighteen. My writing skills at conveying the viewing experience of watching Screaming Boy are woefully inadequate. If I said he was a cross between Porky Pig and Sam Kinison, would that help? If I noted that for no reason little subtitles would appear on the screen with slogans like "Satan Wants Your Mind and Soul," would you start to understand how mind-numbingly weird these shows were? Or that, in the finest cable access tradition, Jonathan spent half the time looking into the wrong camera?
Sadly, after producing just two one hour programs on Dallas Cable Access, Jonathan Bell vanished. Calls to Dallas Cable Access yeilded no information. Letters sent to his Dallas PO Box went unanswered. While reviewing the two Screaming Boy episodes in preparation of this story, I decided to call the church in Kingston where Jonathan said he had led the singles group.
"We are in no way associated with Jonathan Bell. If you're writing something about him, please don't mention the name of this church. We don't know any more than what's been in the papers." click The papers?? Surely they weren't concerned about a little blurb in the Dallas paper almost three years ago about the assault on the Harts.. With much excitement and a healthy dose of foreboding, I dialed the number for the Kingston Whig-Standard. The worst was confirmed.
"A Kingston hairstylist and former host of a self-help cable TV show, who is facing a number of sexual charges involving children, will remain in jail until a bail hearing Monday. "Jonathan Bell, the 35-year-old owner of the Jonathan Bell Salon at 477 Macdonnell St., appeared briefly at a bail hearing yesterday in provincial court on Wellington Street. "He faces 11 sexual molestation charges, some of them stretching back almost two decades... "Besides running his own salon, Bell was known to many people in the Kingston area through his short-lived Cablenet TV program, called Success In Life. "Rob Heeney, program manager at Kingston Cablenet, said the show ran monthly from September 1993 to December 1993. 'It was a self-help show,' said Heeney. Part of the show involved Bell giving people make-overs." --excerpted from The Kingston Whig-Standard, November 4, 1994.
Subsequent articles revealed that Jonathan pleaded not guilty, was denied bail, and that still more charges were filed. It is interesting and somewhat telling that upon his return to Canada he choose to name his new television program so similarly to Robert Tilton's "Success N Life," even though he expressed nothing but sneering contempt for "so-called preachers here in Dallas who live in their big, fancy houses." It occurs to me now that what was played out on Dallas Cable Access was more than a tormented individual ranting and raving about Jesus. What we had witnessed was no less than Jonathan Bell in an all out battle with his personal demons, the title match for his very soul. Chalk this one up for the Devil.
Hey, y'all! It's Friday, so I thought I'd post something idiotic that I made last night.
A few years ago, somebody came up with a Revolutionary New Idea for gifs: 3D! Basically, the figure stands there moving minutely back and forth while the background shifts slightly, and to be honest, my Grandma Smith's old stereoscope gave me a better 3D image than this.
Then came the NEW, IMPROVED 3D gif. This is being touted as a revolution in giffery, but I don't see it. I hate those white lines, for one thing. This is almost as bad as the "improved" MP4 gif with sound. Imagine a 3-second, irrelevant sound bite repeating over, and over, and over again. What people don't seem to realize is that you can watch a repeating image ad infinitum, but chunks of nonsensical sound are about as pleasant to listen to as a parrot on speed. Anyway, those lines just don't seem to do it for me, but the other night, lost in yet another late night YouTube labyrinth, I discovered. . .
PENTECOSTAL PREACHERS IN 3D!
These are every bit as primitive, and wobble back and forth just as stupidly, with lots of distortion. Distortion is what I live for. These gifs were taken from a 21-part (no kidding - each video running for half an hour) denouncement or annunciation of the Toronto Blessing, also called Holy Laughter. I've explored this phenomenon in past posts, as expressed by Kenneth Hagin and many other equally idiotic types. But as much as this gospel of lunacy has its proponents, it also has many (MANY) detractors who seem to believe that laughing and rolling around on the floor is demonic.
I think this is Kenneth Copeland, or maybe it's someone else - I think they're all interchangeable. Most of this video was shot in the mid-'90s (how I love mid-'90s video in all its flickering, grainy glory!), but the commentator, while debunking these Pentecostal practices as demonic, keeps on freezing the frame. Well, ALMOST freezing the frame. This is as frozen (speaking of!) as a frame got back then. I can't reproduce the sound here, thank God, but the debunker kept running the "speaking in tongues" (a lot of nonsensical blather) slower and slower to make out words like, "I love Satan!" "Fuck you!" and "I buried Paul!" I'm surprised he didn't play any of it backwards. Hey, The Donna Reed Show would sound demonic if you slowed it down that much.
The guy on the right is supposedly responsible for all this hell-on-earth: Rodney Howard Browne. He comes from South Africa, which is suspicious in itself, isn't it? All that voodoo. One day in the mid-'90s he showed up at the airport church in Toronto and unleashed all this rolling-on-the-floor mayhem, and soon it caught on, contagious, like some ludicrous brain-suspending religious disease.
Uhm. The freeze-frame portions of these (21!) videos were rather limited, focused mainly on the evangelists themselves. But this has got to be the strangest manifestation of the Holy Ghost I've seen.
I'm really not sure what's going on here. Dirty little secrets? Manifestations of Satan? Sweet nothings?
This one isn't quite as 3D as the others, but it gets the feeling across. This is one of the more sedate manifestations of the Toronto Blessing.
Can't you just see the Holy Ghost shining forth in this dude? . . . You can't? YOU just try making yourself appear and disappear like that.
This Toronto Blessing thing has apparently made a much-more-modest comeback, after being fiercely denounced as demonic by Christian conservatives for years and years. It has now been "rebranded" and given a new spin as Catch the Fire. There are slickly-produced videos with testimonials from fresh-faced, attractive individuals who have been paid to insist how this loony laugh-fest (now, presumably, somewhat toned-down) has changed their lives. Someone has been hired to give all this a much more sanitary spin.
But I'm not buying it. It's all the work of the Devil. In 3D.
Ye-e-e-e-s, it's that wacky bunch of Pentecostals, the Kenneth Hagin gang! They dance! They laugh! They scream! They roll around on the floor! It's hard to believe that religious people can behave this way, but it sure looks like they do. To me it has a kind of sexual component to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The Shakers, known for their complete abstinence from all sexual activity (which is why the sect died out quite a long time ago) used to whirl around and dance madly when overtaken by the Spirit, but it was not quite like this. Nothing else is quite like this. This is a bunch of adults acting like idiots, behaving more immaturely than toddlers who generally have far better self-control. The idea is that God is filling them with the Holy Ghost to the point that they start to flail around involuntarily, but I don't believe it. Most of it looks faked. There are people who get up and dance around and then go and sit down again, their part of the performance over.
My favourite moment is around the 9:03 mark, where a guy rolls down the stairs, leaving a gun sitting on the step behind him. Obviously it fell out of his pocket as he was holy-rollin' along like that. Personally, I'd be scared of an evangelical who was armed. And wouldn't it be interesting to do a weapons count in this crowd. How many are exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms? All the time, I mean, even in a religious meeting? But maybe they need to be armed here more than anywhere else.
I am at the point in my life now where I don't understand religion at all. And this from someone who was a lay minister and Bible teacher for 15 years. No kidding. But if this is Christianity, then forget it. These are not Christians. They're crazy in the head to begin with, and fork over all their hard-earned money to fuckwits like Hagin. The bizarre thing is that there are tons of "straight" videos of Hagin giving sermons that are, while not exactly my cup of evangelical tea, almost sane. They're in plain English anyway, with no barking or guffawing. He had quite a reputation as a sort of charismatic Billy Graham type, until his ministry took a turn for the supremely silly.
This laughing/flailing idiocy was originally called the Toronto Blessing and took place in a church near an airport. Maybe all the noise drove them to it, who knows. The Hagin videos were made some time in the '90s, and it would be interesting to know where these people are now. How many of them stayed with it. Or if this sort of orgy still goes on, or was it just a fad? I also wonder what happens in the hotel rooms where the participants stay during these big crusade thingammies. I just think it could turn sexual at the drop of someone's pants.
ADDENDA.
Tanganyika laughter epidemic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The laughter epidemic began on January 30, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha. The laughter started with three girls and spread haphazardly throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12–18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days in those affected. The teaching staff were not affected but reported that students were unable to concentrate on their lessons. The school was forced to close down on March 18, 1962.
After the school was closed and the students were sent home, the epidemic spread to Nshamba, a village that was home to several of the girls. In April and May, 217 people had laughing attacks in the village, most of them being school children and young adults. The Kashasha school was reopened on May 21, only to be closed again at the end of June. In June, the laughing epidemic spread to Ramashenye girls’ middle school, near Bukoba, affecting 48 girls.
The school from which the epidemic sprang was sued; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off. The following symptoms were reported on an equally massive scale as the reports of the laughter itself: pain, fainting, flatulence, respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying, and random screaming. In total 14 schools were shut down and 1000 people were affected.
Dancing Mania
Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St John's Dance and, historically, St. Vitus' Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, Germany, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, France.
Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania.
The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is, however, thought to be as a mass psychogenic illness in which the occurrence of similar physical symptoms, with no known physical cause, affect a large group of people as a form of social influence.
