#5241
yeah that's the wrong Church of God.
#5242
catchphrase
#5243
it might be good for me to catch up on Pentecostalism and do some research on economic class of membership. Where I come from it's gotten big only recently and the SBC was in charge and then there were a bunch of churches that were like Shep's Church of the Fuzzy Amplifier and not associated with any council.
#5244
theres a bunch of megachurches here flying that are flying what i assume is a christian dominionist flag and i hate it! they just held a conversion therapy conference and yelling at cops asking why they were fucking with protesters instead of the people guilty of conspiracy to torture children was fun + infuriating
#5245
i gather justin bieber is a member of hillsong, the notorious strayan pentecostal megachurch. curious that a former child star would join a church founded by, and run by the son of, a vicious paedophile
#5246
now that tpaine has come out this is a pro-LGBTQ and therefore anti-Catholic space. Catholics out.
#5247

Petrol posted:

i gather justin bieber is a member of hillsong, the notorious strayan pentecostal megachurch. curious that a former child star would join a church founded by, and run by the son of, a vicious paedophile


wait tell me about this. hillsong is huge here in the canadian prairies and despite more than a decade's distance from all that crap i suddenly feel an urgent need to expand my litany of stupid awful evangelical bullshit. i never knew anything about them except their mass production of smug overproduced shit music from people i hate for people i hate more

#5248
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#5249
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#5250
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#5251
yeah powells was a little disappointing when i went there. tbh the big classic established stores never really have a decent selection of commie crap, i always find the best used leftist lit at small out of the way bookstores
#5252

shriekingviolet posted:

Petrol posted:

i gather justin bieber is a member of hillsong, the notorious strayan pentecostal megachurch. curious that a former child star would join a church founded by, and run by the son of, a vicious paedophile

wait tell me about this. hillsong is huge here in the canadian prairies and despite more than a decade's distance from all that crap i suddenly feel an urgent need to expand my litany of stupid awful evangelical bullshit. i never knew anything about them except their mass production of smug overproduced shit music from people i hate for people i hate more


Oh boy what a story

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/frank-houston-tried-to-buy-forgiveness-from-victim-in-deal-drawn-up-on-mcdonalds-napkin/news-story/24f42dcdf0ff4a12ea059e0ca7aed437

HE was a charismatic leader of what became one of the most popular evangelical movements that swept the world but what Frank Houston did was not at all Christian.

The much-admired high flying preacher was a secret paedophile.

One of his victims was a seven-year-old boy whose forgiveness Houston later tried to buy along with a free entry to Heaven for $10,000 in a deal drawn up on the back of a grubby napkin at Sydney’s Thornleigh McDonalds.

“I want your forgiveness for this. I don’t want to die and have to face God with this on my head,” the victim, now aged 52, said Houston told him when they met at the fast food restaurant in 1999.

It was another grubby week at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, sitting in Sydney. Another church, another paedophile scandal.

After the Catholic Church, the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers, the Salvation Army and the Anglican Church, the commission has turned its attention to the growing Pentecostal movement, of which Hillsong Church is at its heart.

It’s image is hip and cool, miles away from the stuffy services of the more traditional churches, with lots of happy young people - hence its congregation’s nickname of the “happy clappers”. But not even it can escape the taint of paedophilia.

“I don’t want to die and have to face God with this on my head”

Hillsong Church, its founder Brian Houston - Frank’s son - and his PR minder have striven to distance the church from the actions of Frank Houston. The abuse on up to nine boys happened in the 1960s and 1970s and all but one of the victims was molested in New Zealand.

He had been an ordained Salvation Army officer in New Zealand until he set up his first Assemblies Of God Pentecostal church in Lower Hutt in 1960.

Frank moved to Sydney and established the Christian Life Centre in 1977.

Brian Houston was working as a window cleaner and, with his wife Bobbie, followed his father to Sydney In 1983, Brian and Bobbie formed the Hills Christian Life Centre which merged with the CLC in 1999 and was renamed Hillsong in 2001.

Every weekend, Brian preaches the Bible to 11,000 people at the Baulkham Hills Hillsong church, 35,000 across Australia and other Hillsong congregations across America, Europe and even in Moscow and South Africa.

This week, he was instead swearing on the Bible as he gave evidence at the commission which is investigating the way child sex abuse was dealt with by the Hillsong Church and Australian Christian Churches, formerly the Assemblies Of God (AOG), the umbrella group for the around 1000 Pentecostal churches in Australia.

It will next week move on to look at child sexual abuse in two other Pentecostal churches - the Melbourne-based Encompass Church and at a Sunshine Coast church, which cannot be identified.

Hillsong has been dragged into the royal commission because not only is Brian Houston the founder and senior pastor of the church, he was the national president of the AOG from 1997 to 2009 and in charge when his father was outed as a serial paedophile.

Brian Houston spoke of his devastation when Hillsong’s business manager, George Aghajanian, told him in around October 1999 that he had to talk to him about his father. Aghajanian had been approached by a pastor from another church who had been told by a mother that Frank Houston had abused her son from the age of seven, starting in 1969.

Brian knew the family - he had even stayed at their Coogee home with his dad when they had visited Sydney. When the family had been asleep, Frank had often crept into the boy’s room, fondling his genitals, masturbating him and penetrating his anus with a finger.

“I’ll never forget that day,” Brian said. He said he cried and “went home. I was devastated...totally devastated.”

But his gut feeling told him it was true. When he confronted his father, he confirmed it although playing down the extent of the abuse. Brian suspended his father from preaching and called a meeting of the AOG elders who backed his decision.

But the commission has been told that under the AOG’s rules, Frank should have been sacked as a confessed paedophile. Instead it took a year and revelations of other victims in New Zealand before he was told he was sacked - but Frank said he was resigning anyway.

The AOG in New Zealand revealed that 50 of its pastors had known of Frank’s sex abuse. None of them went to the police or did anything about it.

Brian Houston has denied he had a conflict of interest in being in charge of the investigating body in Sydney - as well as son of the perpetrator.

Frank was never reported to the police and after a lifetime of preaching, he died in disgrace on the Central Coast in 2004, aged 84, albeit it with a retirement package set up by the AOG for himself and his wife Hazel.

In one breathtaking act of hypocrisy, while staying with his young victim’s family, Frank had signed and dated a copy of the Bible for the boy’s mother. The date stuck in the boy’s mind - it was the day before his eighth birthday and the first night that Frank Houston crept into his bedroom.

“I remember when he was touching me inappropriately I would be petrified and would just lay very still. I could not speak while this was happening and felt like I could not breathe,” the man told the commission.

“I’m not sure how long he would stay in the room with me but it felt like forever.”

In the words of one of the Pentecostal slogans: “What would Jesus do?”


#5253
cooked a meatloaf
#5254
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#5255

animedad posted:

luckily most therapy it seems has nothing to do with psychology and is more like a hired empathetic friend



well theres a reason why people go through a degree and then training and supervision and are required to register as a psychologist, rather than just turning up with empathy in their hearts. its why a psychologist is not the same as a friend, they have more to offer than just listening to your problems (though that is, in and of itself, an immediately beneficial aspect of therapy). it takes certain knowledge of psychological research to do good clinical work . if you dont know how to identify different clusters of symptoms in seriously mentally ill people, or what the etiology of a variety of conditions is, what the best approach to treatment in particular cases is, and other vital stuff like that, you'll be a bad psychologist. If someone turns up with schizophrenia then you need to be able to identify it and have applicable knowledge about how to go about handling and treating that person. its inherently a scientific discipline even if the application is more interpretive/interpersonal (like medicine).

#5256
yeah. my therapist has a master's in social work I think
#5257
#5258
groans. . .
#5259
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#5260
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#5261

animedad posted:

luckily most therapy it seems has nothing to do with psychology and is more like a hired empathetic friend


Gibbonstrength posted:

well theres a reason why people go through a degree and then training and supervision and are required to register as a psychologist, rather than just turning up with empathy in their hearts.



everything gibbonstrength posted is real important. having seen the inside of a masters psychology program specifically aimed at therapy practice however, i can tell you many of the people in the profession want to spend money on a piece of paper that lets them just turn up with empathy in their hearts to be a friend for pay and will actively resist any attempts to teach them anything about mental illness and proper clinical practice. they still get degrees and practice "successfully" btw

and then there's the sociopaths who just have assessed it as their easiest path to mad cash and don't care about anyone. like dentists for the soul. they're hilarious!

#5262
Sounds like the whole field is fake. Just my opinion. Hell, I could be wrong, though I absolutely am not and will ban anyone who suggests it.
#5263
i would trust a dentist for the soul a lot more than i would somebody who got into it for empathy
#5264
your transmission's very hurt. this part here, the box with the gears, i don't know what that's called, anyway it's leaking some kind of fluid. it's sad, really. somebody put a lot of work into building it and now it doesn't work and i understand how frustrating it is that you can't drive it. i have no idea how to fix it, but my creator has given me enough werewithall to know that i am a strawman character in a car analogy. is this mercy or cruelty? new developments do nothing to clarify - look to the right, i cease to exist now
#5265
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#5266
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#5267
you deserve to be happy tpaine although most currently existing people probably do not
#5268
i like how people have to lie all the time so their therapist doesn't throw them in the nut bin. my best friend in college made that mistake of being like "yeah i think about killing myself all the time, i have depression" because he didn't know the dance of "oh no, i am one of those people who has a broken leg but it does not hurt. yup. i got bones shooting out in all directions like a viking maul but i'm mostly just concerned with my soccer hobby. can i have some painkillers now"
#5269
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#5270
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#5271
now im imagining the xherim as the choir of angels that is all chaotic conflagrations of septum piercings, baroque sex toys and cool yet practical hair. instead of burning wheels within wheels of eyes & stuff
#5272
the xherim appeared before Daniel and proclaimed BEHOLD, YE ARE QUEER AS FUCK, and he was sore afraid
#5273
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#5274
damn it was ezekiel with the trippy angels wasn't it. back to remedial bible study for me
#5275
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#5276
personally, i've always been optimistic. dunno what's that about, it's not like i've had many girlfriends, but i've got a couple good friends and a supportive family. but shouldn't we always be optimistic as communists? i mean, communism will win! we see and understand all of the contradictions in our society, and we have the answer! it's merely a question of telling others, and committing greater effort. all the terrible things in the world, and we are opposed!
but i'm also willing to believe i've just got lucky with brain chemistry. but still people, we can win!
#5277
british ML organ workers spatula has a patreon that theyve put up to support causes they actually endorse, like setting up worker coops in the united states. they pull in 10 dollars a month. red salute.
#5278
I prefer even the critiques of modern mental health doctrines on here with a bunch of nonsense words in them to the self-hating ones that pretend that empathizing with the patient means that all contemporary therapy is somehow worse than nothing for everyone. Even the most impersonal and brutal psychoanalytic techniques are premised on the idea that the analyst must recognize themselves in the analysand when it occurs and every type of medicine has better outcomes if the patient feels the professional cares about them, from dentistry to major surgery, and the most effective way to convince someone of that is to actually care about them. If there's anything that stifles more effective experimentation in treatment, beyond bourgeois contempt for social solutions, it's that most medical professionals' places of business are rotating doors responding to salary/wage clocks in both directions so there's no time for those treating patients to establish that rapport with any of them unless the patient hires a special secret company for a million dollars per year to ensure it, which also encourages psychopaths to go into medicine, especially in the United States where doctors can just refuse to take every kind of insurance. tpaine's argument that everyone is garbage is also acceptable.
#5279
the mere notion that something could work for some people that you don't personally understand or vouch for sets off a series of psychotic passive aggressive posts.
#5280
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