HOLY SHIT! It's those Pentecostal guys - IN 3D!

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.

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SOLVED: the mystery of the laughing evangelist!

BAM! I solved the sucker. Ever since I saw a good chunk of video of this guy pushing people over while laughing maniacally, I HAD to find out who it was. Wasn't that easy to track him down. Had to keep looking under search terms like, "Evangelist who heals while laughing". Found out a bit about the phenomenon of "holy laughter" and "the Toronto blessing" (which I vaguely remember from years ago). It basically means laughing your ass off in the name of Jesus. Yeah, OK.

Well, this ol' guy, see, after years of a more-or-less Oral Roberts-like life of preaching with some head-pushing on the side, decided to get on the cackle-and-guffaw bandwagon, taking an entire congregation with him. This is the other part of the original video I saw from the compilation, with much better picture quality (aren't you glad?).

So I have solved the mystery. This is one Kenneth E. Hagin, who also made numerous videos of reasonably sane preaching along evangelical lines, so I am not sure exactly what it was that pushed him over the edge. And I was right, this was at some kind of conference in St. Louis, something called a Holy Ghost Meeting, with everybody all dressed up in suits and ties and lovely '90s dresses with puffy hair. Compared to earlier videos, Hagin looks bent and frail (he died in 2003, alas), and I've finally figured out why three or four guys had to hold him up: if they didn't, he would literally die laughing.

This holy laughter stuff induces a kind of oxygen-deprivation trance which, combined with a mass-hysteria effect, makes large groups of people stoned out of their minds and prone to completely wacky behaviour. To my eyes at least, the so-called convulsions are completely fake in almost every case, though the occasional genuine orgasm of faith might have squirmed through. (And you can't tell ME this stuff isn't pretty orgiastic in nature.)

Watching this again, though, even the laughter sounds extremely phony, and the expressions on people's faces are - oh, get real, people, this isn't funny! Hagin looks like he should be committed, and the guy in the red tie, well. . . If I was a standup comedian, which this guy is, I suppose, I'd expect better laughs than this, at least more spirited than the "AHAHAHAHAHA" I'm hearing. When the whole thing degenerates into moans and howls, with men in suits flailing around on the floor, it all gets a little tiresome.

I found a web page that has links to seemingly hundreds of articles furiously denouncing the holy laughter/Toronto blessing phenomenon as the work of the Old Scratch himself. I didn't read any of them because I was beginning to go totally numb. It's a defense mechanism, see, when things get overloaded. I just sort of short out. . .





. . .a. . .n. . . d.. . . . 






. . . excuse me.

Post-Blog Thoughts. Typical of me, since I am a bloodhound and a bloodthirsty busybody, I had to poke my nose into the subject of "holy laughter" in all its manifestations. It ain't a pretty sight. What I came up with was extremely polarized, both for and against. True, the "for" camp didn't seem to need much scriptural justification for all that screaming and rolling around: it was fun, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with fun so long as no one gets hurt. But I refuse to believe that no one ever gets hurt.

This doesn't appear on the videos, which are no doubt edited, but things MUST get out of hand sometimes. Out of hand might take various forms - flailing so violently so that you hurt yourself or others, peeing yourself, peeling off to get hot and heavy with a favorite flailing partner (for it's well-known that uncontrollable laughter has a sexual component, a slap-and-tickle effect), biting and scratching, unwelcome (or welcome?) grabbing of someone's none-of-your-business, and basically falling into a violent mass hysteria that has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality. The worst of it, though, is looking like a damn jackass (on YouTube no less), and not even caring who sees it.

Here is a partial list of "symptoms" of this phenomenon (and the more I read about it, the more I am dying to try this thing for myself). It's from a site called Unholy Laughter, one of the many purse-lipped, disapproving screeds which condemns all that carpet-lint-gathering-on-one's-Sunday-suit:

Some other phenomena that take place at these laughing revivals include: "shaking, jerking, loss of bodily strength, heavy breathing, eyes fluttering, lips trembling, oil on the body, changes in skin color, weeping, laughing, 'drunkenness,' staggering, travailing, dancing, falling, visions, hearing audibly into the spirit realm, inspired utterances--i.e. prophecy, tongues, interpretation, angelic visitations and manifestations, jumping, violent rolling, screaming, wind, heat, electricity, coldness, nausea as discernment of evil, smelling or tasting good or evil presences, tingling, pain in body as discernment of illness, feeling heavy weight or lightness, trances--altered physical state while seeing and hearing into the spiritual world, inability to speak normally, disruption of natural realm--i.e. electrical circuits blown, the 'fire of God' burning you that you have to remove some clothing, pawing people and roaring like a lion, walking like a chicken, howling like a wolf, digging the ground with hoofs like a bull while prophesying, flying like an eagle, throwing communion bread around to show your joy in the Lord, screaming AHHHHH as a mighty warrior to stop the preaching of the word of God during a service, incoherent babbling, pounding the floor with your arms while holding a conversation in tongues with the minister in charge of the service, feeling electricity shoot through your body, affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc."(22)

It's that (22) part that just devastates me. 

Listen, I've had my own strange experiences, things which I still don't understand, but they've never been communal. It's hard for me to believe I could experience real revelation in the midst of a cacophany of cuckoos. I'm of two minds about all spiritual experiences: they often seem dodgy because they're self-proving, i. e. it MUST be God because God's telling me it is; I don't need proof because I have faith, etc. But at the same time, the game could be vastly more complicated than we can even comprehend (in fact, this seems likely), in which case logic falls down like a house of cards, blown away by the howling winds of Pentecost. 

So it comes down to the question, for each of us: what is authentic and  important to ME? This is my sticky spot. All this guffawing and staggering around isn't individual; it's surrender to a bizarre group mood or group energy in which the participants dance around like marionettes controlled by some force outside the self. It's NOT coming from within or everyone wouldn't be goose-stepping to it so gleefully. These people have thrown their individual will away and surrendered to a sort of collective will, which is the most frightening force there is. Think how suggestible such a gibbering mob is. If half the "symptoms" I've listed above are real, there are aspects of the experience that are downright frightening. At very least, it's disturbing, especially (Land o' Goshen!) that "affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc." thing. 

They say "affecting", however, without spelling out exactly how. Could I disable the security scanners with the Holy Spirit and smuggle a 48-piece set of silverware aboard a plane, maybe hidden in the lining of my coat? Guess I'll never find out.

POST-POST Revelation! I just noticed something when making the gif of the poor bugger in the red suit: the seats have plastic on them! Maybe these people aren't so insane after all. Seems to me they must be ready for anything.

Public Access Prophet: you've never seen ANYTHING like this!

This is one of those miracles of 1990s public access TV: a show that lasted two episodes before the Rev. Bell was carried off, either by the holy spirit or the forces of justice. I can't find the other one (it's around the internet somewhere), in which for some reason he wears a tux. I'm still trying to figure out the set - if that's what it is - or just how psychotic a person can be. Not too sure where he is today, IF he is today, or if he's doing serious time somewhere. Somewhere.

TV's worst evangelists: Glory Be to Fraud

Guess I must just be in a righteous mood. You know how it is on YouTube: it's designed for addictive browsing, where way leads on to way, and often you can't go back. So you end up affixing, pasting your favorites onto your blog so you won't lose track of them.

This has to be the ugliest piece of video I have ever seen, so of course I had to post it. When I first watched it, I just could not take in what I was seeing. It was an ugly mob scene featuring hysterical men making weird noises and pushing people over. I would love to know more, i. e. who ARE these people, WHERE are they and WHAT are they doing?, but the video says nothing. The clips have been taken from other videos, perhaps illegally, so are not labelled.

This is obviously some sort of mass exorcism. Trouble is, it's the exorcist who's possessed. Possessed by the God of idiocy. The most baffling and grotesque example is the long clip in the middle. For some reason another guy sort of holds on to him, so he won't float away to Cuckooland. One wonders at the sadism of such people, who surely can't believe they're doing anything of value, or doing anything at all except create false hopes and suck away cash.

Though it's the poor and marginalized who are most taken in by these vampires, I notice the suits and ties and '80s-style dressed-up women with high hair and wonder who on earth would fall for this. It's desperation, for sure, the need to believe, but do we really have to check our intellect at the door, to give our will over entirely?

I'm reminded of Nazi Germany, of Triumph of the Will and its hideous uniformity, the fierce, vacant pride of people falling into lockstep and throwing their individuality gleefully away. People do NOT want to think for themselves. It's a burden to make decisions and live with the consequences. I've heard so many people, even "moderate" Christians and people in 12-step groups (which can be more fundamentalist than the whooping, hollering crowd you see here) go on and on about how "God is in charge, God makes all the decisions, I just put it all in God's hands." Even when I was part of the United Church, that Godless bunch of New Age heathens and mortgage brokers/Mary Kay salesladies, I was encouraged, nay, pressured to just trust in God, bring all my troubles to Him/Her and believe that I would be guided, reassured, even healed.

Didn't happen, folks. In fact, I wasn't the only one who found that her soul maladies and vulnerabilities of the body only got worse in "God's hands".

The truth is, "God" does not HAVE hands. God is a concept, just about the slipperiest, most unknowable and inexpressible concept that exists. God is, perhaps, the mysterious force that gave rise to all life, to the entire universe. And it didn't happen in a week or even a couple thousand years, but an expanse of time so vast we can't even comprehend it.  But is there a personal God, a God who knows us, cares about us, tends to us and listens to all our sorrows?

I think not. Sorry, God. For that, we need each other.

Afterblog. After watching this compilation, I am incredulous: I MUST find out more about the maniac with the suit-and-tie audience. Watching it over and over again, I notice to my horror that most people in the audience are wearing badges. Are they all members of the Gospel Insane Asylum Club or what? Is this some sort of conference? What the hell is going on here? Why are people going along with it? Are they functionally sane? Is HE functionally sane? Are people that desperate to be taken over, to voluntarily give up their will and power of decision? In other alarming clips, I've seen examples of people claiming to be "healed", when in truth they had cancelled surgeries, chemotherapy or other medical treatment in the deluded belief they didn't need them. In one clip, an elderly woman said she was scheduled for open heart surgery because she had several blocked arteries, but glory be to God, she didn't need it any more! "So you went to the doctor and - " began the televangelist scumbag. "I don't need no doctors now! I'm healed! Glory be to God!" In this case, even the evangelist seemed a bit uneasy, but quickly went on to the next victim.

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