Necrovesting

How to make a ton of  money in the coming die-off in America.

A few months ago, one of my colleagues told me his new purpose in life was to make as much money as possible prior to the collapse of society in the United States. Will society actually collapse? I think it unlikely. We are fairly good at hiding the ugly truth from others as well as ourselves. Corporate controlled media provide us with limited information and mind numbing entertainment. For the more intellectually demanding, there is Fox News. Yes, there seem to be more people who are miserable after having become recently poor, there are more homeless, holding up cardboard signs, begging for money and offering God’s blessings in return. But the last election would indicate that we are fine with that as many Republicans beat Democratic incumbents in the 2010 Elections.

Many members of the middle class seem to be intent on helping the rich amass all the wealth they can. The idea has taken root that if you give the rich all the money you worked for, they will hire you to perform some menial task for them (Reaganomics). This explains why it’s vitally important that we continue to export jobs to other countries while at the same time excluding immigrants from coming into our own. And of course if we are going to give our money to the rich, we have to take it from the poor, or at least stop buying them welfare Cadillacs. Once the poor are used up, the money will have to come from the middle class.

The natural outgrowth of Reaganomics is the Tea Party movement. The theory of the Tea party is that those who wish to harm you the most are your best friends. This is evidenced by the popularity of free bus rides to political rallies.

Angry Teabaggers show up to public events armed, signifying their willingness to kill other Americans. The laws of the land however have not been changed to allow them to do so without repercussions. Politicians however are exempt from those rules and so can create laws and policies that kill people with little or no come back. Look at how many people Bush and Cheney killed without consequences. How many Americans knew that they would become homeless or even die when they voted for Bush, not once, but twice? Thus the idea is that if you really want to kill other Americans, elect politicians who will do it for you.

In 2012 we will have the opportunity to elect (or have the Supreme Court select) somebody to the White House who will be able harm and kill even more Americans than anyone in the Nation’s history. It’s true; Americans are setting the stage for a significant increase in their death rate. The 800,000 Americans who died fighting World War II will pale in comparison. Not only that, but WWII will have been fought only to bring our own version of of the Nazi Party home less than a century later.

Introducing the next President of the United States of America:

Scott “Kochsucker” Walker.

If there ever was a bought-and-paid-for President, this man will be it. And if you are smart, you stand to make a lot of money from this. Americans want to be harmed and are willing to pay well for the opportunity. Look at Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. These guys make piles of money doing harm and millions listen to them. In a reality based world they would be enemies of the state and taken out and shot.

If you missed out on making money during the Bush administration because you did not think it was right to bet against America, you will soon have a chance to correct that and get rich the same way the guys who bet against and profited from all the families who lost their homes to foreclosure.

The republicans in Congress managed to modify Obama’s health care reform to guarantee that insurance companies would make maximum profits, that fewer people would have coverage and the cost would be prohibitive, in short, achieve exactly the opposite of reform intent. It’s really a soft-eugenics program. On the surface it would appear that the poor and lower-middle class and the already sick are targeted for early death, but an unexpected epidemic may take out a lot more. The beauty of this program lies in the fact that it goes almost unnoticed by society at large. It’s like the unemployment situation. Sure, there are lots of people unemployed, but it’s not as if you can find a convenient parking spot at the Mall! And the beauty is that people will have voted in favor of it!

Already, on the State level, newly elected republican Governors are cutting health care expenditures that will cause the early deaths for thousands of Americans waiting for transplants or life-saving medical treatment currently paid for by the state. To offset these cuts, they will cut taxes for the survivors.

With republicans in congress and the White House we will be able to roll back health care and health research to such a degree that many more will die, especially in the event of an epidemic.

If you are lucky enough not to get sick, in the near future you may be in a position to do very well financially, but only if you act now. Remember, if you don’t get sick, it’s because God loves you and therefore he wants you to make lots of money too, especially if it’s at the expense of those he does not love and smites with sickness.

However, you will also have to be careful and understand the risks. With progressively more republican de-regulation, food supplies and drinking water will become unsafe. It’s true; corporations do not actually want to kill you, especially in the event they end up having to defend against the frivolous lawsuit your greedy relatives might slap them with. But none the less, mad cow disease and other deadly scourges will increase. Pharmaceutical companies will continue to develop new drugs but they need people to die in sufficient numbers to scare others into buying those drugs. Agricultural corporations will need to continue to develop products using genetically modified seeds to remain “competitive”. The long term results of this experimentation are not yet known.

Legislators all over are proposing new, more open gun laws that will set the stage for shoot-outs that would make Sam Peckinpah shout out, “Where’s my camera?”  The belief is that in these stressful times as many people as possible should have a lethal and easy to use weapon close at hand.

Finance rules that allow a few to get rich while economically wiping out many others will result in increased suicides and murder-suicides.

The key to success in killing as many Americans as possible does not lie in using bombs or weapons of mass destruction but letting people do it themselves. It’s the triumph of the individual over the masses. Ayn Rand would approve. Cuts in the funding of education are vital in this regard as few as possible should be educated. We only need just enough to build the technology and put it in the hands of uneducated idiots. The idiots will do the rest.

Between universal access to guns, health care for only a few, technology like 400 horsepower cars in the hands of texting idiots, unregulated finance, the near certainty of a few epidemics, republican foreign and domestic policies encouraging terrorism, a death-based economy will boom. Trickles of death will turn into streams. Streams of death will turn into rivers. Rivers choking with corpses and somebody will be needed to organize it and do the work.

Employment will surge and there will be good jobs! After all, which job would you choose? Dig graves or flip burgers? Sure, there will be jobs where you have to handle the dead, but there will also be many peripheral tasks that do not bring you in contact with the dead should you be squeamish about such things.

America will need to industrialize around the number of people dying (and America always approaches things in an industrialized way). Cemeteries will be needed to be built, crematoria on a scale that even Hitler would never have foreseen need to be constructed. Coffin making, corpse processing facilities, grief counseling, catering. An entire infrastructure will be needed. The possibilities are endless! A Necronomic boom!

Let’s look at some specifics of interest to those who might consider investing their money in this trend.

The biggest publicly traded funeral provider in the United States is Service Corporation International (ticker SCI). From Reuter’s news service: “Service Corporation International is a provider of death care products and services, with a network of funeral homes and cemeteries. As of December 31, 2009, the Company operated 1,254 funeral service locations and 372 cemeteries (including 212 combination locations) in North America, which is geographically diversified across 43 states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The funeral segment also includes the operations of 12 funeral homes in Germany. Its funeral service and cemetery operations consist of funeral service locations, cemeteries, funeral service/cemetery combination locations, crematoria, and related businesses. It provides all professional services relating to funerals and cremations, including the use of funeral facilities and motor vehicles and preparation and embalming services.”  They keep cemeteries, crematoria and funeral homes humming.

On the face of it, this company and other smaller similarly situated companies would stand to reap huge gains.

However, they may not have the best business model. In a situation where entire families will be getting wiped out, paying over 6 grand for each funeral will not be a viable option. Low- or reasonable cost providers who sell an efficient, dignified service on the other hand, will thrive. Many services are already available for less than $1000. Also people are getting away from the hazardous waste, formaldehyde pickled, sealed casket, concrete vault, big marker disposal method and often opting for simple cremation or organic burial.

In 1997 a mutual fund called the Pauze Tombstone Fund was created, but it was ahead of its time and failed in 2008. Unfortunately, despite what many thought about George W Bush, he did not like killing Americans per se, he only liked to gamble with other people’s lives and he was quite satisfied if they were merely maimed as he could use them to go out and jog with.

At this time the significant majority of funeral providers in the US are small, family run businesses, and thus, closely held instead of publicly traded. But with a potential doubling or tripling of the death rate, these businesses will need capital for expansion too. Since Wall Street excels in the creation of investment vehicles, there are certain to be sector mutual funds or ETFs to take advantage of the coming bonanza.

The key to success is to be ready when these investment opportunities arrive.

Some might think that this investment strategy is reprehensible. After all, you are betting on millions of people dying. I however, view it as respecting a person’s right to be manipulated and lied to. People are not forced to watch Fox News or listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Nor are they required to vote for politicians who are obviously bought and paid for by, as George Carlin would put it, “rich cocksuckers”.  They do so of their own free will.

How to make Big Money from the Bible- A practical guide for Televangelists

Contents:

Foreword
1. Why become a Televangelist?
2. Does God Exist?
3. Educating Yourself
4. Dealing with The Bible
5. Building a Church
6. The Holy Land
7. Wives
8. Sex
9. Spending the Money
10. Staying out of prison
11. Love and Happiness

Foreword

People used to come up to me on the street all the time and ask me: “Vinnie, how am I going to be able to survive the Bush Administration?”

“That’s easy!” I would answer, “Just invest in 100:1 leveraged sub-prime mortgage backed securities! You can’t lose!”

But now it seems I’m asking myself nearly the same question: “How can I survive the Bush administration without becoming a war profiteer, a hate-radio talk-show host or a television preacher?” After all, it’s difficult to tell people at cocktail parties that you make $8.76 for every Iraqi killed or made refugee. People could get strange ideas about you. Then there’s the hate-radio talk-show host thing. I don’t have a voice like Rush Limbaugh and if I said the things he does, I would burst out laughing and call my listeners idiots and morons.

And then there’s the television preacher. This would simply never work because I actually believe in God.

But that does not mean that I cannot advise others how to achieve success as a Televangelist and that is what this guide is all about. So sit back and prepare to be astounded. With the possibility of tent cities and huge lines of unemployed in America’s near future, time is of the essence.

A quick note on conventions used here. God is always referred to in the masculine form. That is not to make some sort of chauvinist statement. Anyway, everybody knows God is an old man with a long white beard who wears a white toga and sits in a big chair in the sky. Also, the guide uses the masculine when it comes to Televangelist. Men do not have a lock in this racket and like any other profession, women are just as capable. The roles can obviously be reversed and you can be a Televangelista. Just so that’s clear.

Money is always written with a capital M. The reason for that should become obvious.

This guide has eleven chapters, one for every apostle if you leave out Judas who ran off to be a founding member of today’s Republican Party.

You may notice that no successful televangelists are mentioned by name. That’s because I am told one will sue me in all 50 states and I don’t want to make the others jealous.

Chapter 1. Why become a Televangelist?

The question might seem silly, but you really should ask yourself “Why do I want to become a Television Preacher?”

The reason you ask the question is because the answer is so vitally important. If the answer is something like “I want to dedicate my life to the Greater Glory of God!” then stop reading right now. If, on the other hand, your answer should be: “I’m greedy, I like to live well, wear expensive clothes, and travel in luxury. I want to manipulate people, earn a fat income and pay no taxes!” You may have a shot. Even if you were to answer “I want to have sex with under-age boys or crack-whores!” You are bound to enjoy a measure of success.

The late great comic Richard Pryor had a character in his repertoire called The Reverend White who would always say “Got-to have….da Money!” That too is what this is all about. The Money.

“OK”, you ask, “what do I have to do?”

If you want to make the Really Big Bucks, some of you will most likely have to make adjustments to your morality. If you are well advanced toward getting your MBA very little adjustment should be required. If you are squeamish about cheating people, you may have some problems. If you are like George Washington and cannot tell a lie, this line of work is not for you. If starving babies bring a tear to your eye, walk away now. If you tend to demand justice for downtrodden people, forget this career. If you want to make America a better place, forget you ever read this.

In short, being a televangelist is similar to selling dope or being a pimp, except, it’s actually legal. Like selling dope, it requires courage and cunning. And unlike pimping, it requires conservative clothing.

So what kind of lifestyle can you expect to enjoy after making your decision to become rich and putting your plan into action?

You will be idolized by many people (who you may think are somewhat dumb). Presidents (especially Republican ones) may call you and ask for advice on how to run the country. You can expect to be well known. To be sure, you will have your critics. Some people resent success, it’s only natural. But as everybody knows, such people are Godless Communists; or worse: Liberals.

That brings us to an important consideration. You must have a group of people who you can demonize. The reason is you have to set those inside your group apart from those outside your group. It’s a well known phenomenon that dates back to cavemen. Social scientists call this “ethnocentricity”. You know, the way Hitler went after the Jews. It’s important to find such a group because you can use this group to deflect and defend your own shortcomings by blaming society’s ills on them. It used to be easier to find such people and demonize them, but laws prohibiting discrimination are becoming broader. Besides, picking on the Jews could backfire (see Chapter 6 on the Holy Land). Gays are still used as a group for scorn, but this only works if you are a closet Gay yourself. And then not for very long. Also, this may be short-sighted as research has shown that Gay people tend to have above average incomes and Waiters say they are good tippers. You may therefore have to invent a group to be a receptacle of hate. One sure way to success is to be original about these things!

Look at the way some pharmaceutical companies invent diseases for which to sell drugs. Kind of like that.

It’s OK to hate, you’re a Christian now. Just remember: any group of people that you pick out for hatred, will diminish your market from which to collect Money. So consider that before you start picking on the 6 million Muslims that live in the U.S.

You could pick on Armenians, they don’t have any Money anyway, but your flock may have difficulty relating to people who live so far away. You can also do what many other successful Televangelists do: Excoriate Liberals.

The advantage to this is it does not limit your behavior; you can drink, screw, steal, do drugs and be generally anti-social while you pretend to piousness. And another advantage is you have people like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of other worthless asswipes doing the front running for you by telling your parishioners how Liberals think. Let the right-wing hate machine “crank up the Mighty Wurlitzer” for you. You probably didn’t know that Hillary Clinton phones up every Liberal in America every morning and reminds them to breathe.

See? This guide is filled with useful and valuable knowledge!

Let’s work up some numbers just to see what we are looking at.

First of all, making up an imaginary group of enemies is a smart thing because you can use imaginary, or nearly imaginary numbers as well as completely made-up talking points. The number of Armenians for example is easily determined and really doesn’t amount to much of a threat (3.2 million people). Liberals are another matter. If we use President Bush’s approval ratings as a guide, it becomes evident that more than 80 percent of the American people are flaming Liberals by our admittedly somewhat broad definition (this definition is actually flawed because not all conservatives are morons, but we are creating imaginary fear here so facts are of no consequence and in fact may confuse things more than you might wish). That means there are 4 times as many of “them” than there are of “us”. This is something to fear! Remember, “they” want to destroy America by keeping you from destroying it!

Important note: If you should find yourself in front of a group of people when you say such things do not entertain questions. You do not want somebody asking, “Why would 80 percent of the population of any country wish to destroy it?” Talk fast, don’t give anybody time to think.

That means that about 20 percent of the population could be open to the message you have to bring. In reality however it’s more likely to be about 16% (see Chapter 10 regarding the so-called Bell Curve). But even that is still a lot of people. In fact, based on July 2007 Census Bureau estimates, it’s just over 34.6 million Americans over the age of 20. OK you have some competition, but if you are more charismatic than the next guy, you win.

Make no mistake: this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This takes effort and time. But therein lies an advantage. Because this process takes time, you have time to learn how to deal with vast wealth and power. It’s true what they say about Money not coming with instructions. We’ve all heard stories about country bumkins who win vast sums in the lottery and make fools of themselves with exotic dancers. You do not want that. So allow time for your plan to develop and bear fruit. Grow with it. Think of it like a multi-level marketing scheme, but with a better up-line for you. Grow rich slowly and by the way, stay away from investment bankers.

Many people are obsessed with obtaining power and then when they get it, they don’t know what to do with it. More on this later in Chapters 2 and 10.

Remember, if everybody in America sends you one dollar you will be pretty rich. But that’s over 300 million people! You only need a few thousand people to turn over their life savings to you to achieve the same thing.

An important thing to remember is that Americans love to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Not only that but, as everyone knows, Americans are generous to a fault. This generosity has earned them the envy and hatred of the world. Americans are generous because they can be and their standards are measured against the greatest documents ever written, The Declaration of Independence and the United States’ Constitution.

Your job is take advantage of this urge to join others and to immerse your beaker into this river of generosity and drink your fill.

Do you think you can do that? Then read on:

First we need to look at a couple of people who as it turned out were not successful evangelists. Never the less we can learn from them. Research these two: Jim Jones, Jim Bakker.

Chapter 2. Does God exist?

Let’s just get one thing clear for starters. This guide is not about God and it is not about The Bible. It is also not about the kind of Christianity Jesus Christ preached about in the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the Peacemakers.” Who’s he trying to kid? It is about being a modern day Televangelist. The distinction should become clear soon enough if it isn’t already.

So, does God exist?

This of course is the question mankind has been asking for a long time, perhaps even, for ever. And we need to get this out of the way early because it can really hold you back.

God has never actually offered scientific proof of his existence, but certain inferences can be drawn. In any event, for the ordinary person the conundrum goes something like this:

If you live your life as if God exists and he does not, it will not matter anyway. If however, you live your life as if God does not exist and he does, then when you die, you will discover that you have made a terrible error. Therefore it’s the default position to take it that God does indeed exist and plan accordingly. Obviously there are many millions of people who do not need to boil the question down to its most basic logic. They simply believe and that’s that.

For the budding successful televangelist the only answer to the question, “Does God exist?” must be: “I hope not!” After all who wants to get up in the morning looking forward to a nice flight on a customized Lear Jet while putting on 6 or 7 thousand dollars worth of suiting only to step out the front door and be struck by a bolt of lightning and turned into a smoking piece of pork-rind right there in your long circular drive with your Chauffeur and Gardener looking on with a wild surmise?

So work this problem out early because there is no surer way to fail than to be in doubt.

For determining whether or not God exists, try this little test: Hang out by a place that is popular with suicides. When somebody comes up to jump, say to yourself: “if this person survives, God exists.” If the person survives, take up lock-smithing or become a private detective.

Another important thing is that you have to stay under the radar as far as God is concerned. Don’t be too noticeable. Dress for success. A purple crushed velvet suit with bellbottom pants and a matching top hat is outré. Stick with conservative haberdasheries. Make sure your shoes are polished and your teeth are straight and gleam. And no diamonds in your teeth. That’s just crass. Also, drop the dark glasses. They make you look sinister. You can be sinister, just don’t look it.

Remember: God is very forgiving, but watch that you don’t cross The Line. Don’t get your trophy wife turned into a pillar of salt like Lot did.

Take this business of George W. Bush talking to God and then claiming God told him to invade Iraq. That’s really pushing it. Stick with the basics. Like the Ten Commandments. Most of them are easy enough to live with anyway. It’s really unlikely you’ll actually kill somebody with your own hands. The only really tough one is the one about adultery. And there may be some wiggle room there if you double up on the condoms.

Remember, the people you’ll preach to probably prefer not to think too deeply and envision God as an old man with a long white beard sitting in a fancy chair surrounded by clouds and clouds of Angels. Let them keep their illusions just so they put Money in the collection plate.

People who come to your Church will want to have some certainty that you believe in God. It’s only natural. And if they should show up for Church services on a Sunday only to find the doors padlocked, signs of a Sherriff’s Sale on the windows and the church bank accounts looted, they will at least derive some comfort from the knowledge you believe in God. You are interested in taking their Money, not their illusions.

Faith as entertainment. Americans are used to being entertained. There are a zillion TV channels and they run 20 different movies in the same theater. People have exotic home entertainment systems, TV’s and DVD players in their cars and even while we are standing in line at the supermarket, while we age our wine, we are kept entertained. The important part, especially in a church setting, is to provide shallow, emotional appeal. This is about exploitation. With their critical thinking faculties shut down, people will behave foolishly and join the herd waving their arms. This does not mean they are idiots, well, yes it does, but we don’t put it that way. They are Possessed of the Spirit, Locked in with Jesus, a flock ready for fleecing. And that’s why you are there: to help them to get fleeced.

Life is complicated and fast these days. Crazy guys like Kim Jong Il could nuke us any minute. Clinically demented people are heavily armed because guns are so easy to get and they are shooting people they don’t even know and for no apparent reason. Naked women walk along the highways for sport. OK, maybe that last part isn’t so bad. The Church brings some stability, a rock as it were, to people’s lives and you give it the pizzaz, that zing, to make it work. You provide a framework within which to operate. You tell people that it’s not their fault that the world is a crazy place. It’s those sex crazed liberals! So keep watching Fox News and everything will work out. You are one of the leaders of the new America called Dumbfuckistan. Act like it!

Don’t you think you should be well-paid for that? Silly question. Of course you should!

That brings us to another thing. Your competition. Keep abreast (so to speak) of what people like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are up to. Watch American Idol. Be able to take swipes at that Simon What’s-His-Name guy. Knowing what your competition is doing is vital to your economic well-being. Every businessman knows that.

But what God is really about is Power. And God doles out Power on occasion. Take Moses. Look at all the neat stuff he could do and it was all because God gave him the Power. Over the centuries many men have been seduced by the idea that God gave them Power. The list is long. OK, here are just a few: Torquemada, John Calvin, Henry VIII, Ivan the Terrible, Mad King George, Czar Nicholas, George W. Bush.

Of course no one is suggesting that George W. Bush is like Moses. Bush got his Power from his Dad’s buddies, questionable election tabulation software and a bunch of slime balls who wouldn’t know what democracy was if it reached way down and castrated them with a dull spoon. Like these guys:

Or These:

Do not make the mistake of thinking when you are standing in front of your congregation that God is speaking through you (more on this in Chapter 10). Still, you can act like He is and if you do that part with any skill at all, you will be showered with Money.

What are the chances that God will send an Angel to your parishioners in their dreams and admonish them: “Don’t give that Asshole another dime!”? Pretty slim so it would seem.

Chapter 3. Educating yourself.

Now some people might argue that in order to run a church you have to be a builder, a facilities engineer, a librarian, a psychologist, a teacher and an economist in addition to the obvious role of being a Pastor. But that’s all baloney. When you promise Eternal Salvation and a conservative political agenda, people will tolerate a cold, drafty sanctuary, a leaky roof and hard pews. On the other hand, maybe you should be a bit of an economist.

Not only must you do many things to be a successful Televangelist, there is a sequence in which you must do them.

The important first thing is the process of creating what the intelligence services call “a Legend”. Spies show up for their secret missions with a fake name, a full set of fake documents and a complete fake history to go with them. You too need to establish a similar fake identity and suitable credentials. You probably will not need a booby-trapped attaché case (more on this later in Chapter 9) or a trench coat. However, you have to have a history and some sort of educational attainment. You have to have a workable name. You need a name that rolls off the tongue. Make sure the name is easy to remember, easy to pronounce and easy to spell. Stay away from names that have an alternate meaning that causes people to laugh, like Harry Beaver, Hugh G Rection, or Mike Hunt. How can anybody expect to be taken seriously with a name like that? Study the market out there and work up an empirical analysis. For example: solve for the number of syllables in the name of known televangelists against earnings. If there is data correlation, use it. A lot of known Televangelists end their first names with a “y”or “ie”. Compare their earnings with those who don’t.

Having a Doctorate degree helps. No, not a Medical degree, that’s too hard and takes too long. No, we’re taking about a correspondence degree from a prestigious university. These are the kind of universities that advertise in match books, “True Detective” or “Soldier of Fortune” magazine. Obviously this also this means your language use and vocabulary will have to reflect your educational attainment, fake as it may be. Doctoral types don’t use expressions like “There ain’t no…” They use expressions like: “…non-reversible inter-variant probability ratio…” You don’t have to know what it means, you just have to know how to say it. Most people will assume that you are speaking in “tongues” anyway. They are not likely to admit they have no clue as to what you are talking about either.

Once you pick a university, stick with it. Even if it turns out they say they’ve never heard of you. After all, it could just be a bureaucratic mix-up. It is better to have that than having a former business school Professor saying that he considered you capable of little more than being able to bankrupt a small business like George W. Bush had. And boy, did that Professor turn out to be wrong. George W. Bush is well on his way to bankrupting the richest country in the history of the planet!

The key to being a successful liar is to keep it simple, include some truth and always tell everybody the same lie.

Redemption is a good thing too. George W. Bush got a lot of votes to be President of the United States because many considered him a redeemed drunk and doper. But pick something you can live with. Being a recovering alcoholic is good, but then you can’t be seen drinking. Being a cured homosexual is a good ploy but eventually that will likely be exposed as a hoax. Being a cured sex addict falls flat on its face if your Wife gets pregnant. Some sort of drug addiction is probably safe as long as it is actually curable. A lot of people relapse into crack cocaine use, so pick something else. Pick Oxycontin for example. It worked for Rush Limbaugh! Remember, the people at the ACLU are your friends even though you will want to take every opportunity to say horrible things about them. Talk about Grace and Forgiveness!

The reason this all this belongs under Education is because of course as part of your visit from the Angel of God, which cured you of your affliction, you also got a vision which started you on your Ministry. Your Epiphany. Your Road to Damascus. Hence, your attainment of your Doctorate at the rather ripe age of 37. You were a worthless druggie stealing your parents’ light bulbs until you were 29. Then you met your Lovely Wife, and the rest as they say, is history.

Make sure that when you conjure up your history, the numbers add up. You cannot expect people to believe that you got a Doctorate degree in 21 months. You can easily father two bastards with the same woman in that time frame but cannot obtain a PhD. Pick a university that is nowhere near the place you plan to establish your church. There’s nothing worse than meeting somebody who does not remember you attending the same classes he did. Maybe you should hire somebody to act as a former classmate to help establish your credibility.

It pays to do research ahead of time. Look at variables, run scatter diagrams and determine best-outcome scenarios with regard to yourself and your church organization plan. This is the age of scientific management. These days you need a college degree to manage an Olive Garden Restaurant. If you can’t do this kind of research yourself, hire some starving graduate student to do it for you. Promise Eternal Salvation if you are too cheap to pay. The effort is well worth it because having a good plan in place will be obvious to all members of your congregation later. If you run your operation by the seat of your pants, you won’t even get enough Money to wipe your ass. Nobody said this would be easy!

Chapter 4. Dealing with the Bible

Assuming we have the “God Issue” in Chapter 2 worked out, we have created our “Legend” as in Chapter 3, we now have to go to the next stage. The Bible. In order to make the Really Big Money, you are going to have to know a little about The Bible. Sorry, but that’s how it is.

Read and learn the Bible. You never know when somebody in your congregation might be tempted to play some one-upmanship with you. People take pride in their knowledge of the Bible, and rightfully so. Don’t get caught out. Also remember that people think one of the most important aspects of your job is interpreting the Scriptures. Don’t get mixed up. Pick the passages that will insure you collect the most Money, interpret them to your advantage and stick with it. It’s probably best to recognize somebody who is looking for an intelligent discussion and don’t allow them to bait you. Remember, you’re the Doctor, the other guy is just some schmuck who thinks he’s smart. Stick with what you know. Answer any questions they ask with an answer you know. For example: if somebody asks you about Noah and the Ark, tell him that Deuteronomy wants him to kill all the fags and send him on his way.

The good news however is that you do not have to interpret The Bible correctly. Besides, a lot of Bibles these days come with a list of real life problems and life events and point to the precise section of the Scriptures that deal with it. A real time saver! There are terrific software programs that can speed looking stuff up. Pick out the parts that can make you rich. Those are mostly found in the Old Testament because that’s where the really scary stuff is. So study the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Amos is good too although a bit short.

Fear is your Friend. Instill it in your congregation and go out and buy a wheel barrow to take the Money to the bank. In Genesis, skip the part about who begat whom because their names are unpronounceable and nobody can remember them anyway. The Garden of Eden thing is good, especially the part about Original Sin. Don’t dwell on the fact that Adam and Eve were naked. Remember, the reason we wear clothes is so that people will have a place to carry their wallets! We can skip the New Testament for the most part. The Four Gospels are terrific reading, but there’s just no Money in them. This New Covenant stuff really does not help. If God is going to forgive you for your sins anyway, what’s the point of giving Money to the church? It’s more satisfying to go to a massage parlor that gives “happy endings”.

Still, people will expect you to recount “the Christmas Story” around Christmas and “the Easter Story” around Easter. Just remember: Jesus was born, lived and suffered on the cross just so you don’t have to go out and get a real job. Under the circumstances, two hours a year isn’t asking much.

As an added point, be sure to preach your “Shit your pants in Fear” sermons around the time tax refunds start coming in. There’s no good reason people should waste those refunds on gas-fired BBQ’s and patio furniture to enjoy the summer months with when they could be giving the Money to you. What do they think? That they are going to turn that weed patch into the Garden of Gethsemane and roast a few weenies?

Still, you may be able to find some parts of the Four Gospels to use out of context. The real mother lode however is found at the end of the New Testament: The Revelation of Saint John, commonly called “Revelations”. Some juicy stuff there. Luckily for you, loads of people have laid the groundwork in literal interpretation of the scariest parts of the Bible. Some have even extrapolated some fantastic “rapture” scenario whereby all the Faithful will be suddenly whisked off to Heaven leaving their cars careening out of control on the roads or their clothes in a heap behind their lawnmowers. This is handy to tap into for getting people to turn over their cash to you early. Unlike you, they can’t take it with them (more on this in Chapter 10).

There’s even a video on YouTube about the Rapture. It takes place in a small church where The Book being held by the Minister suddenly slams onto the floor and the only two people “left behind” are a teenage boy in a red t-shirt and a similarly aged girl with big tits.

In reality the only things that seem to get raptured right now are people’s retirement accounts and home values.

In the past there have been lots of Preachers who went with that “the World is about to End” theme. It’s a risky proposition because if the world doesn’t end when you predicted it will, you look kind of silly. OK, maybe you can go back and redo your calculations and come up with a new date, but two misses and you’d better consider moving to a new town. Do some research here, maybe you can figure out how to make a few bucks off the fear the world will end. After all, people who listen to you aren’t exactly interested in doing an empirical analysis now are they?

Look, let’s just get down to basics here. Many books much thicker than the Bible have been written about the Bible. It is not this author’s intent to work up another scholarly critique here. This, as should be clear by now, is about Money.

The Books of the Bible were written a long time ago. People lacked, not to put too fine a point on it, a certain knowledge then. They weren’t stupid, they were simply ignorant. They were convinced the World was flat. They hadn’t figured out the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And it was going to be a long time before Isaac Newton came along and had the apple fall on his head and thus invented gravity. Luckily for you, America has taken the direction that you can use to line your pockets. Old fashioned science is being replaced by superstition and it won’t be long before they start burning witches again.

If the guys who wrote the Bible had approached things differently, the Bible would have remained obscure and Christianity would have fallen flat on its face and you would have to come up with another scam to fleece people. If the Prophets had written that they foresaw a cure for syphilis and hoof and mouth disease, nobody would have believed a word they wrote. The Bible was written for the times in which it was written. It was written to appeal to people who had the knowledge of the times. People accepted that Moses had magical powers. Well, he was certainly a smart guy. He built the Pyramids. That’s nothing to sneeze at. As for actually parting the Red Sea, well….

So when it comes to the physical stuff, perhaps The Bible should be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, when it comes to understanding human nature and behavior, the authors of the Bible had it pretty well figured out. Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, it’s all there in lurid detail. And this is precisely where you need to focus your attention as well.

Human Nature and Behavior.

You need people to fill the collection plates and give Big Money to your phony-baloney missions to feed starving children in Africa. That’s how you need people to behave. It has to become natural for them to give Money to you. And you have to use The Bible to help your cause. You have to scare the shit out of them that they will burn in Hell for all eternity unless they give you Money one day and the next time get them to give Money to help pathetic hungry people in Africa who would mow your lawn for cheap and vote Republican if only they could. You have to exploit their emotions until their wallets are empty.

This means you have to learn some public speaking. You don’t have to be as good at it as Adolf Hitler was, but you should be better than George W. Bush. There are three basic needs to be met: narcisism, hubris and mendacity. You have to love the sound of your own voice. You have to believe that everything you say has value. You have to be willing to alter the facts to fit your story line. There are lots of books and even courses in public speaking. Here are just a few quick pointers: Practice first in front of a mirror or even do a video of yourself. Read ahead of your speaking and look up from your text and scan your audience while finishing the sentence. Learn to recite a few short scriptures by rote so you can look toward Heaven while you say them. Modulate your voice so people will know when God is talking, the Bible is talking or it’s just you.

Here’s a good one to remember: Cast your eyes to the ceiling and cry out, “Why Have You Forsaken Me?” That’s a biggie. Don’t wait too long to pass the collection plate around afterwards.

If you use paper to work from, don’t let anybody see it. You don’t want anybody to know you can’t spell and people will think you’re an idiot if the letters are big. Once you get your church operation going you’ll be able to get a teleprompter installed in the pulpit and you’ll be off to the races. Once you get your television operation going you can even stop to pick your nose. All the bad stuff will be edited before it is broadcast!

Like the premise of multi-level marketing you too should multiply yourself to achieve greater success. To this end you should employ a Biblical Scholar to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the use and interpretation of the Scriptures. A Divinity School dropout is ideal for this; just make sure he was not kicked out of seminary for having sex with animals or something.

Remember, your job is to make Money. The Bible is merely one of the many tools in the toolbox.

Chapter 5. Building a Church

In order to really make it Big you really need to have a Church. This would seem kind of obvious but there are a lot of people out there who just don’t get it. You need not just a building, but something really impressive. You need lots of glass. Crystal is even better. People in the congregation will think the warmth coming in, is God smiling down on them. They are Chosen. And they in turn will choose to put lots of Money in the collection plate.

In order to build a church you need to get some wealthy Investors. This is where a well written business plan becomes so valuable. A good business plan, an artist’s rendering or perhaps even a nice mock-up is in order. The investors will want to know what’s expected of them and what to expect in return. And don’t be stingy here. You do not want bitter words and bad publicity later. Get a good written contract. Cross the Tees and dot the Eyes.

If it turns out that you can get a member of the congregation to do the contacting for the Greater Glory of God (meaning: for free) share some of the savings with the investors (also see Chapter 7 for another great idea on attracting investors!). Remember: fleecing the Investors means getting off to a bad start. At the end of the day you want the investors to say nice things about you, as it might affect the length of your prison sentence.

Of course, the Church is just the start. Remember you may want to come back to these investors when the time arrives to build your television studios. A school for Kindergarten to High school graduation will follow. You may even find the need to build a University to provide highly unqualified graduates to work in government in case the Republican party ever gets back in power.

Some newer churches lately have tended toward the stark, unadorned, utilitarian style of steel industrial buildings. The implication here is that a Journey of Faith takes place in the Heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Europe during the middle ages cathedrals of immense beauty and complexity took decades, even centuries to construct. Those people understood what was needed and so should you. OK, if you are starting out you may have to settle for a rented facility next to a sex shop with a flashing pink neon dildo in the window in a strip mall, but this should only be a temporary measure. Build something nice.

Then there’s the all important issue of the name of your Church. Stick with something positive. Something with “Fellowship” or “Community” or “Life” is nice. Stay away from things like “Reaper”, “Sepulcher” or “Apocalypse”. Also leave out the sex-obsessed themes like “Virgin” or “Conception”. And don’t be too obvious by calling it “the Fellowship of Filthy Lucre” you don’t want to attract too many bankers or mortgage brokers. There’s reason they have so much Money, they don’t part with it easily which means they’ll just take up space and suck up the free coffee and pocket the sugar bags and creamy-poo’s during the after-church social hour.

Eventually you will need certain accoutrements in your church such as an open elevator platform that delivers you from your limo to the pulpit, preferably with wind blowing in your hair for that Cecil B. DeMille effect. As your Church grows, so will your aura of self-importance. The Ego must be fed. Remember: according to most Televangelists, Heaven is furnished in an ornate, even grotesque, bad taste. Use your imagination here.

Of course a Church is more than just a building. A Church is people. You need a hierarchy of Elders, Bishops, perhaps even a few Cardinals, a music department, ushers, catering, a whole panoply of people who can act like they serve God, but in reality just make sure your zipper is pulled shut. Remember, since you’re at the top of the pile, the more layers of flunkies you have, the bigger your operation can be! Most of the Elders and Bishops will serve without pay because of the status and they get to sit on your stage in comfy chairs instead of hard pews with the rabble. For this privilege they will be your stooges. It’s no problem if these people actually believe in God; just make sure they don’t get access to the accounting records. Be sure you can trust the folks operating the collection plates. It helps if they are burly, intimidating and tough. Offer them a fully paid-for membership at the nearby gym. You may expect to give them their cut of the take.

But the building exists to hold all of you and it must do more. It must hold the congregation.

The seating for the congregation has to be such that they can see you. Any interference in their line of vision is likely to show up in the collection plate as skimpy donations. Make sure the ventilation is adequate. Your sermons have to strike fear in people so they will tithe to offset the consequences of their sinfulness and you don’t want the place to stink. Besides, it’s better for you if people put Money in the collection plate rather than waste it on soap and deodorant. Who ever said that Cleanliness was next to Godliness knew nothing about the church business!

Music.

Music has been an integral part of the worship service for centuries and people expect it. All churches have more or less impressive music programs. Some churches even have concerts and collect donations from those who otherwise wouldn’t dream of attending services. And you should have a music program too. Music hath alarums to calm the savage beast. But it must be judicially used. The wrong kind of music can bring about disaster.

There is nothing more sublime than the sacred music of Johan Sebastian Bach. His music is so good that even the Roman Catholics use it although, as everybody knows, Bach was a notorious heretic Lutheran. You, however must not use such music in your worship service. You have to protect yourself and hearing an aria such as “Mache Dich Mein Herze Rein” will definitely make your ears bleed if you have been paying attention here.

OK, perhaps it’s time for a little education:

Mache Dich Mein Herze Rein is an aria from the St Matthews Passion by J.S. Bach. In it, Simon, who has made his tomb available for use by Jesus sings: “Mache Dich Mein Herze Rein, Ich wil Jesum selbst begraven” etc. “Make My Heart Pure, I want to bury Jesus myself”. The implication here is that he wants to be made worthy of the task which he is about to perform. Don’t worry, you will never be worthy of such a task or even any task remotely close to it. When you are buried they will probably intall a dance floor and a urinal on your grave. And that’s why you should not listen to this kind of music or have it in your Church.

Figure on something involving electric guitars. After all, you do not want God to hear your shallow, tawdry sermons and blasphemous Biblical interpretations and there is nothing more effective to send God down the road than the sound of an electric guitar, a snare drum and a cheap electric organ set to full vibrato. Oh, an get the choir some decent robes and send them out to the cleaners once in a while. Sheesh!

People who run Church music departments are generally a pain in the ass. Eventually they will want a pipe organ. This is the traditional instrument used in the worship of God. Don’t fall for their arguments. People worshiped God for millennia before pipe organs ever came along. A good pipe organ can set you back over a million bucks and that kind of Money is better spent on a helicopter so you don’t have to sit in traffic. Besides, in a helicopter you can fly low enough to spy on people who sit in their hot tubs in the nude on your way to conduct church services.

Clearly however, the most important part of your Church is the congregation. These people are the ones that fork over the Money. They are your customers, your marks.

So who should you attract to your church? Obviously people with lots of Money to give, but that’s not always so easy. There are a lot of competing forces out there. Billions are spent every year on advertising to get people into stores and onto car lots to part with their Money. And while you may pretend to offer Eternal Salvation, the benefits and joy of ownership are not as obvious as a new automobile with a GPS navigation option and those cute little TV sets in the head rests that keep the kids from driving their parents to commit violence.

Young people are great because of their energy and enthusiasm. They can be utilized to add value to your facilities by doing volunteer clean-up work around the church (saving you the cost of a gardening service that thinks it can charge $250 per man-hour for shoddy work), having car washes and doing community service to advertise your church.

People in their 30’s and 40’s have lots of useful skills and may even have some Money to kick in as well. Obviously somebody who owns a stained-glass window business can bring great benefit to your church. Make sure you get somebody who can fix your HVAC system. It needs to be working well and repairs can be costly. In fact, a modern church needs all manner of skills excepting perhaps a medical examiner. But medical examiners do make good Money and can help out that way instead.

But the real gold mines are the elderly, often with plenty of Money and one foot in the grave, they seek salvation and are willing to pay for it. Don’t let them waste their Money on world travel, Diesel Pusher RV’s or their grand children’s education. Here’s where a well run endowment program really pays off. Get your church in their wills! If you can’t get their Money, at least get their house. Periodically inspect the property to make sure the yard is cleaned up (have the youth-group help them out) and value is maintained. Make sure they pay their taxes, help them apply for senior discounts. There are a few caveats however. Obviously childless couples are ideal, but stay away from couples with one child. The Only Child never learned much about sharing and so is likely to create problems when it comes time to settle probate. It’s best stick with the childless or couples with four or more children. They are used to sharing and will likely present a smaller problem.

Consider this picture: You are standing at your pulpit ready to deliver the week’s sermon and you look over the crowd. When you see those bobbing white-haired heads, think: Accounts Receivable. Nice? Indeed.

Try and resist the temptation to ask the elderly parishioners to park across a busy street.

If you have some single rich old geezer in your congregation do not let him get married to some young looking blond bimbo who wears mini-skirts and no underwear, unless of course, she’s your Mother!

It is important to realize that every person that you come in contact with has some value you can extract. From a passing profound insight of a one-time visitor to a demented widow who leaves you her entire estate, everyone has some special gift and if you can see it, it’s yours for the taking. Let’s say you find an unconscious drunk in the bushes next to the parking lot. What value can you possibly obtain from such an unfortunate person? Well, for starters, the backwash in his bottle of Thunderbird can be used as Communion Wine. Do not neglect to check his teeth for gold fillings either.

Extra Money Making services. The wise faith-entrepreneur provides a full array of life cycle services such as weddings, funerals, baptism etc.

Weddings. This is the biggie as far as Money goes. People spend a fortune on weddings and there is no reason you shouldn’t get your cut. Many weddings these days are professionally planned to cope with the complexity and the large number of guests. Consider having a professional wedding planner on staff or keeping one on a retainer contract. Every aspect of the event can provide income. From the sanctuary rental, performing vows, reception with catering, the possibilities are nearly endless. Perhaps wedding dress stores and tux rental outfits can provide kickbacks for steering customers their way. Even recommending honeymoon resorts willing to give a commission can be part of your “Marriage Service”. And don’t forget Florists or OB-GYN and Abortion clinics!

Just one more thing. Get a guarantee in writing that they will pay for damages in case any of their drunken loutish guests get out of hand.

Baptism. If your Wedding Service was a success, Baptism is sure to follow.

First Communion. You can charge for this? Hey, those candles aren’t free! A good catering department can always serve a nice lunch to the family and guests after services for a reasonable price.

Funerals. Yes even funerals can be an opportunity to squeeze a last donation from somebody. Offer a dignified pre-planned (and of course pre-paid!) remembrance service. The blue-hairs will love you for it! And if the kids later tell you they were touched by the service and offer up something extra, don’t tell them it was already paid for.

Running a Total Quality Church demands constant improvement. Never turn down a chance to make a buck. If the computers are left on at night, why not rent them out to a “spam” email pumper?

Rummage sales are great church social events and a terrific way to get rid of all the nouveau riche junk you bought early in your Ministry and recover some of the cost as well. It’s also a great way to meet women from the congregation when their hair is down and their blouse top buttons are open and you can ogle their boobs.

Sell hats, t-shirts and sweatshirts in the church and on your website. Don’t sell sexy lingerie or see-thru swimwear even though some of the women may offer to model it for you. Wearing a sweatshirt with the church name and logo is a great way to bamboozle policemen into thinking you’re not driving while drunk.

Television. As soon as you get comfortable as a public speaker you should get your television program going. The advantage here is they can replay your sermons 24 hours per day 7 days a week while you sit by your swimming pool, fondle the girls in bikinis and get drunk. You can have a news program where you can misinform people about what’s going on in the world and flog your junk science diets, exercise programs and dubious books hawking politics masquerading as religion. Join the Green Movement with “A Porpoise-Driven Life”.

You can have live interviews where people read the questions and answers from a teleprompter. You can ask idiots to call in and in exchange for a small gift have somebody pray for them. Maybe somebody needs a new hot tub or a set of hair curlers. You can pray they get it. Television is great for faith healing scams. Nobody will know it’s a complete fake. You can show badly acted movies about the Life of the Prophets. There’s really no limit what you can do with TV. Just don’t cuss or show naked flesh.

Now for the bad news.

Running a Church is a people-oriented business. You cannot grow your church business by buying a larger packaging machine or inventing a new widget or developing a new product line. You have to work with people.

The biggest single negative is that indeed, you have to work with people. And in order for people to give you their Money they have to be comfortable with you. You have to create that comfort. That means you have to listen to their silly-assed problems. You don’t have to solve them but you can help your parishioners solve them. Mostly this means waiting for them to stop talking and them confirm what they think they should do. You have to show some patience.

The more affluent Members of your congregation can generally solve their own problems and most of them live their lives in such a manner that they seldom have problems they can’t solve, and if they do, they can afford professional help instead of turning to a buffoon like you. But they do like and expect Special Treatment, so give them a warm and hearty handshake and if they telephone you, don’t leave them on hold for longer than it takes to drive to the next nearest church.

Remember the wise adage: “I’d walk across town to preach a sermon, but I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to one!”

It’s the poorer members of your flock that are generally the biggest pain in the ass. If a single mother who has to work two jobs comes to you with news that one of her children has cancer, you have to show some sympathy and compassion. “Yeah, whatever!” is not as good an answer as “We’ll be sure to pray for her.” By saying this you show you are connected. By praying for her, you put the turd in God’s pocket. If the kid dies, it’s not your fault. Resist the urge to ask if she has medical coverage. Being your brother’s keeper is a New Testament thing.

You do have to really listen however, because sometimes your parishioners will come up with a really crazy and dangerous idea that cannot possibly work. For example: A man comes to you and says his Dad has Alzheimer’s and he wants the name of a guy who can put his Dad out of his misery. If you just blurt out the name of one of your best friends, this man will know who you hang out with in your spare time and you will blow any chance that this crazy old coot will leave his Money to your church. You have to see the wider canvas.

When the news is bad tell them it’s all God’s Unknowable Plan. If things turn out good, remind them that you were on your knees for them in devout prayer.

Telling Jokes. Don’t. Eternal Salvation is a serious business and fake eternal salvation doubly so. Leave the humor to people who are actually funny. If a person does not understand a a funny story told by Robin Williams, it’s because that person is an idiot without a sense of humor. How do you think idiots without a sense of humor are going to react to your jokes? There are few things worse than having to explain a joke later.

Chapter 6. The Holy Land

You may be surprised that there is so little to say about the Holy Land in a guide like this, but there simply isn’t any need.

OK, a few things: For most people, the Holy Land is Israel. Look, we’re not making judgments here. This guide is about making Money. Israel is a secular state that does pretty much what it wants with unconditional support from the United States. The US gives the Israelis pots of Money to carry on in their task of bringing civilization to an otherwise barbaric region with cluster bombs and by other means. In fact, until George W. Bush came along, the US unqualified support of Israel had been the single most expensive undertaking in history. By supporting Israel you are merely tapping into that Money stream. In actuality however, the Holy Land encompasses Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories as well as parts of Egypt, Iraq and even Iran. So if any of these other countries offer to pay you more, go ahead and call the Israelis bums and take the Money, because that’s what it’s all about.

By the way, if you go to Damascus, there are a lot of Iraqi women working as prostitutes there thanks to the turmoil in their own country created by George W. Bush. They are not of your faith so screwing them does not count as a sin.

Traveling to the Holy Land. At some point you will want to travel to the Holy Land. As a Christian Pastor this would seem reasonable especially since you can get the church to pay for it. Resist this urge. There is no real need for this what so ever. Watch a few National Geographic Specials or check out the Travel Channel. Then do a fake Sermon on the Mount. With the advent of cinematographic special effects, you need never leave the comfort of your church basement.

And never, ever, get the idea that you will be leading members of your congregation on a tour where Jesus walked and performed miracles. These people will soon catch on when you come tooling up in your $1 million luxury Coach and they get to travel in a non-air-conditioned school bus with lumpy seats.

In all traveling, try and be discreet. Don’t put “Dr.” in front of your name on the luggage tags. Don’t use flamboyant, obviously-expensive luggage. And don’t wear a dog-collar. People who have real problems will come up to you looking for help. Who needs that kind of aggravation? Be unobtrusive and remain polite to airline staff. You don’t need to rub in that they just got chiseled out of a good Union contract. They are poor, you are rich. You know it. Leave it at that.

Speaking of traveling, here’s a good scam to make some extra Money: If you travel to the same location several times a year, invest in some low cost prepaid tickets. Then have the church secretary buy last minute full fare tickets. When you get to the airport, cash in your full fare ticket keep the money and fly on the discounted one. Try and get the airline to refund cash. That way you’ll have money for tittie-bars and hookers.

How to fly first class: Always have the Church Secretary buy economy class tickets. Word will get out and the parishioners will think you respect them. At the gate, after making sure that nobody who knows you is on the flight, upgrade to first class. Pad your expenses to recover the cost.

Chapter 7. Wives

Wives can be a major asset. But they can also be a serious problem. They generally want to know who you really are and will make efforts to find out. Also they sign your IRS Form 1040. Don’t think you can fool them. They can hire detectives and will go public if provoked.

Therefore it will be necessary for you to take your wife into your confidence. You have to do this carefully because if she insists on wearing provocatively short dresses, furs and driving around in a red Corvette, somebody is bound to notice. She really has to be on board with you on this. If she wants to take part in your operation, well, you will have to work it out. If you tend toward loud arguments at home, build a sound-proof room in which to settle your differences. To the outside world it is imperative that the two of you are the picture of wedded bliss. If this is going to be a problem you should divorce her or better yet, kill her. Being a widower is more acceptable to your flock than being divorced.

The best situation is that your wife is fully on board with your operation and has her name on the signboard in front of the church, right by yours. The Perfect Couple. If she also preaches sermons you can double the utilization of your facilities by having more services and passing the collection plate around more often. Don’t let her detract from her conservative dress by smearing on grotesque quantities of make-up. Leave the expensive investment-grade jewelry with the big diamonds in the vault. Wear stuff that is tasteful but obviously modest in cost. You should suggest she does not bring up the subject of “depilation” in the Ladies’ Circle.

If people come to services mostly to ogle your wife, well, you’ll just have to accept that.

If she’s good looking and “puts out”, investors will be easier to come by too.

Your wife should be fully integrated into your “Legend” (see Chapter3). She should be part of, if not the driving force behind your redemption and conversion from worthless sinner to Man of God. Women are good at this sort of thing and there are many men who owe their success in life to the fact that their wives worked hard and supported them through college, sacrificing their own education in the process. People can relate to that. This also means she has to be fully with you with regards to the operation of your church. This means The Money. She has to know where it comes from and where it’s going. She also has to know and be part of any contingency planning (more on this in Chapter 10). In short, she is the one who should be your bookkeeper. Oh, you can have an official church accountant who does the books you want the world to know about. But the one who does the real books has to be trusted and likely to share the same fate as you in the event you are caught.

Everybody knows what the government is for. It’s supposed to protect you from the consequences of your stupidity and illegal acts. That’s why we vote for Republicans. But there are however misogynistic boy scouts (well, you know how hard it is to fire civil servants) who could come after you anyway. You have to protect yourself from such creeps. Obviously she would not use a computer connected to the church server to do this work. In fact your private accounting files should be encrypted and the computer should be physically disconnected from the router or modem while the accounting file is open to preclude any possibility of getting hacked by government busybodies.

So, either your wife is completely out, in which case she stays away from your church and any church activities (tending to your redemption, she became incurably ill and is bed-ridden is a nice touch here) or she is completely involved. There is no middle ground.

If you should start your new career while still single and meet the woman of your dreams later, especially if she is a member of your congregation, she is likely to fall in love with the fake person you have become. This is trouble. She could easily ruin you if she finds out what you are really up to and decides not to play along. She’d better be really good in the sack for you to take those kinds of risks! Of course she could be wise to you all along and turn out to be a real gold digger in which case the laugh is on you! But at least you’ll be two of a kind.

That brings us to the question of children. Picture the red “Danger!” sign flashing on Dr. No’s console in the James Bond movie. Children have the uncanny ability to spot their parents’ character flaws and since they can’t verbalize them, they mimic them. That means that your nine-year old son will be feeling up girls’ dresses or playing pitch pennies with the other boys and swindle you out of your collection plate swag. Who needs that kind of competition? Make sure you have the hammer and you can drop it hard to keep your kids in line. Make them get regular haircuts and wear nerdy clothes. Keep control of your daughters, especially when they enter puberty. Your kids may feel the need for symbols to prove their superior status. After all, you are blessed by God, it would seem reasonable that they benefit by extension. No flashy cars, body guards or expensive vacation trips. And absolutely no bragging at school! This is your livelihood! Don’t let your kids screw it up.

As an added incentive you can always tell them you will make sure that they can avoid the military and other people’s kids will fight, get maimed and die in various wars and not them. That should do the trick.

Chapter 8. Sex

In centuries past Churches were always in favor of sex and procreation. There have always been good reasons for this. Life was precarious, medical knowledge practically non-existent and life was brutish and short. Society was inefficient and wars and famines took their toll. Luckily, there weren’t too many ways to avoid carry-to-term pregnancy until fairly recently. Also as awareness rose about stresses to the planet became universal, people chose to have fewer babies. The result was a dropping in birth rates among white people living in Europe and the U.S. Fundamentalist Christian churches became aware that the Godless and those of different faiths (which to them amounts to the same thing) were out-breeding the Faithful and took positions to counter the onslaught. Hence sex is once again blessed and even encouraged but with a few limitations.

No, we are not going to tell you how to do it. That seems to come natural. But you have to be careful. People are funny about sex. Some Religious Cult leaders make rules under which they can have sex with all or any of the females in the congregation. This is not advisable. For one, there’s a lot of disease about. Also, children can be expensive and paternity tests are good these days. Hookers are risky too. Sometimes they are not discreet and take perverse pleasure in bringing down pillars of the community which you will have to pretend to be. Female church secretaries are often fairly safe. Do not keep an employee on the payroll after you’ve stopped having sex with her.

Let’s interrupt to make a point here. There are others out there doing the exact same thing you are. It’s a big country and there is plenty of room. Being in contact with these colleagues can be beneficial as far as developing best practices goes and also gives you a place to transfer employees who are sexually speaking, used up. Help pay for the moving van.

Practice Safe Sex. Do not mess with the choir boys. Cruise for paid gay sex where nobody knows you and the cops don’t care. Don’t touch strange men in airport mens rooms. Go on a Gay Cruise instead. If you have to have sex with under-age boys, there are plenty of impoverished countries to go to. You can even make the Church pay for the trip. Call it, “Missionary work”.

Be careful with the teenage girls in your youth group. Girls seem to enter puberty earlier these days. They dress and act sexually provocatively and look more mature than they really are. Make sure nobody sees you sporting a woody. I fact, a smart play is to make sure there are always others around when you are with the kids. Once your church has a few bucks in the bank you become a target of greedy lawyers. Somebody will always be after you, even if you are only doing under-aged boys in the Dominican Republic.

Do not download dirty pictures from the Internet. Also do not contact like-minded perverts over the Internet. They may turn out to be police or FBI running a sting operation. Do not buy a used computer. It may have bad stuff in the hard drive that can be found and blamed on you.

Do not get involved with polygamy. Having just one wife is complicated enough. Especially if she’s older than 15.

Kinky Sex. There may be a sequel.

But even if you throw all caution to wind and get caught in some sexually compromising shenanigans, there is always the fallback position. You, after all, are only human and can run afoul of the temptations of the flesh. In this case it’s best to make a frank and full confession in public, with lots of tears and go right back out and do it again.

When we talk about sex, can abortion be far behind? Whatever your private views are about abortion, keep them to your self. Also don’t tell anybody about the abortions you’ve paid for in the past. As far as your church goes however, you must be staunchly against Roe v Wade. The reason is simple. It’s called a PAC and it is the single best way on the planet to skim Money, get nice junkets to various fatuous conferences, eat well and get laid by expensive hookers (the discreet kind).

Perhaps another short mention of Cults is in order here. Cults are always associated with wild sex. You do not want to be caught running a Cult.

Fun Fact: The Roman Catholic Church considers the Mormons to be a Cult. But then again, the Vatican can hardly be expected to be completely objective about such things.

Remember: Church is Good, Cult is Bad.

If you run a Cult all kinds of people will be after you and muddy the waters for you. It is however easy to slide into Cult status so you should be aware of the warning signs (With credit and apologies due to Jeff Foxworthy).

If single women want you to father their children, you might be a Cult.

If your parishioners donate their new SUV’s to you, you might be a Cult.

If you have a fleet of Roll-Royce Motorcars, you might be a Cult.

If you serve poisoned Flavor-Aid instead of Kool-Aid to children you might be a Cult.

If your congregation is waiting for a fleet of flying saucers to take them on a field trip, you might be a Cult.

If Presbyterians picket your weddings, you might be a Cult.

You get the idea.

If, on the other hand, Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church mob picket your funerals, you’re definitely a Church.

Chapter 9. Spending the Money

The Bible tells us the Love of Money is the Root of All Evil. Whoever came up with that one was obviously not too well off. The statement reeks with resentment. Actually it should probably be “The unwise love of Money…..” And of course we are going to be very, very wise. Where Televangelists go wrong is not so much in how they collect Money, but in how they spend it. Size up your congregation. Find out what they are like. Ask leading questions, like: “Do you think Air Force One should be bigger than a 747? Should it have a solid gold bidet?” If you get the answer, “It should be a Piper Cub with jump seats”, don’t go out and buy your self a Lear Jet with church Money. Your Church first and foremost is a business. It should be run along strict, sound business rules. Control debt, control costs, re-invest profits. Stay in touch with your customers. Grow the business.

Remember your customers are likely to be conservative or even reactionary. They may not be well-educated and watch Fox News not understanding that Fox News is the very reason they are so ignorant. So adopt the proper attitude and demeanor. You can look successful. That’s OK. Even having a tan in the middle of a Minnesota winter will pass muster. Don’t spend Money on dark glasses. That’s so Jim Jones.

People put Money in the collection plate. Use some of the Money to make continuous improvements to the sanctuary and other facilities. People want to be able to see where their Money is going. If the flat-screen TV in the youth lounge fell off the back of a passing truck, that’s fine. Just so people see improvements.

This might be a good time to talk about the Collection Plate itself. This is as important as how the bill is presented in a restaurant. You know, in a diner with a 200 foot high sign that says “EAT”, the waitress tosses the bill, face up, on the table in the general direction of the person she thinks will fork over the cash. Moving up in the world, the bill goes face down and is placed so that anyone at the table may reach for it.Then in the places with the cloth napkins, the bill comes in a little folio. The folio can vary in size and material such as plastic or leather. Expensive “organic” eateries even have an artistic handmade folio. What’s the point here? Judge your congregation. For the lower to middle income crowd, a nice open brass plate is fine. You want people to be able to glare at each other, raise their eyebrows as if to say, “50 cents? You put in 50 cents? What kind of cheap motherfucker are you?”

For the wealthy, a different approach is required. A tasteful, claret or purple colored (or should that be “coloured”?) velvet bag that is easy to pass along, yet difficult to see into, is required. People of the upper classes like to be discreet in their giving and write checks for tax purposes as well. A nice little envelope for that is in order too. And if you really want to go hoity-toity, supply monogrammed envelopes to your affluent clients. In Europe in centuries past, it was traditional that the wealthy purchased pews and even had them custom- built. This might be a quaint custom to bring back and provides the church with more income and that way you can have the collection bags for the wealthy as well as the brass plates for the plebes going at the same time.

Of course you can also stagger worship services to accommodate your social strata. Provide early services for the poor so they can get back to their menial minimum wage jobs and later services for the rich so they can have a nice Sunday morning lie-in and possibly even sex. Make sure to allow enough time to get the poor-smell out of the building and get the broken down cars moved after the early service. Provide valet parking for the later service. And remember to take your cut of the tips!

And this brings up another thing. If your operation is situated in a town where the manufacturing jobs haven’t moved off-shore yet you may want to have services that cater to shift workers.

When it comes to collecting Money, your church must always be an open, welcoming Sanctuary. Go hi tech. In this modern Internet age you can have people donate on-line into the Church Paypal account and they don’t even have to wash and shave and show up for services and take up valuable pew space!

Have a good youth program. Develop a good program in the afternoons. Remember if kids have spare time, they’ll hang out in Malls and spend their allowance Money on saggy pants, terrible music and pimple cream when they should be giving their Money to you. Start out with a work session. Work is good character training and working for God, doubly so. Then it’s a quick, friendly game of volley ball to blow off steam. Serve them a meal (for which you can collect a modest charge) and then it’s off to a comfy lounge for a discussion. Teenagers love to talk and you want to find out what their parents are saying about you (more on this in Chapters 8 and 10).

Resist the urge to be flashy. Heavy gold chains look good on Rappers. If you have to walk around like that, do it elsewhere. You don’t have to tell people you vacation at Hedo. If you say you were “in Retreat” for a week, nobody is going to want to check if you have a sun burn on your genitals. Get a regular haircut; or look like Ben-Gurion, that’s fine too.

There are parts about your operation that have to be transparent and parts that do not and absolutely should not. To be secretive about all the Church finances is bound to raise suspicion and invite investigation. Go ahead and let people know how much gets put in the collection plate every week, but that’s all. Make sure that any kick-backs and vigorish from florists and such are paid into nominee offshore bank accounts. Keep the profits from your investments in African mines and sweatshops in China or Saipan private.

Investment schemes. There are always people who start investment schemes geared toward getting Christians to invest their money. People may believe that because they are doing God’s work they can offer exceptionally high returns. But in reality it is because Christians are so gullible when it comes to others who claim to be Christians. Eventually it turns out that they cannot offer those high returns without running an illegal pyramiding scheme. Do not get involved with such people, in fact, warn your congregation against such people. After all, you are supposed to be their friend. They only need to be gullible for you. You just don’t need that kind of competition and even if these scam artists could provide the kind of kickbacks that would make recommending them worth your while, you never know when their empire will collapse possibly dragging you down as well.

Avoiding taxes is another biggie. The IRS has ways of finding out how much you make. Stay below the radar. Their forensic accountants are without peer. Getting involved in politics can lose you your tax-free status. And so while it might be Christian to support a war-monger for President, you risk possible eventual ruin by actually doing so from the pulpit. But if somebody should stand on the sidewalk after the service outside your Church handing out “Kill All LIEberals!” bumper stickers, well, it’s a public sidewalk isn’t it?

Spending Money on your self is a Big Temptation. Try to resist it. If you feel you need a helicopter or a jet aircraft, get somebody else to come up with the idea. Pay yourself a modest salary. Clergy are paid enough to shop at Macy’s, not Saks or Tiffany. Shopping the sales at Nordstrom is cool. Your parishioners want you to look good, just don’t overdo it. You are entitled to certain fringe benefits. Church provided housing is a time honored tradition and should present no problem.

Your car should reflect your image. That is, the image you wish to present to your parishioners. Let’s say you run a church in Houston’s 3rd Ward. Do you show up to conduct your Sunday service in a white 4 door Rolls Royce? No, you use the battered Honda. The Rolls is for when you hang out in the Woodlands. And of course you have to have some suitable companionship to go with you in case of sudden sexual urge.

Unfortunately the church business is a social business and so you must be a bleeding-heart commie-pinko with certain aspects of it. Make sure your low-pay church employees get a few fringe benefits. If you give the employees a free lunch on pay-day, they won’t end up at the casino next door, gamble and come back to work late, drunk and broke. You have to help people. Remember, Republicans like getting social benefits, they just hate giving them to others. Give the Church employees some sort of health benefits, even it’s only a discount card. Then, if they get sick, fire them. After all, who needs them if they can’t even show up for work?

You can have a more opulent life style than your poorest parishioners, after all, you are highly educated and experienced, but don’t go above that of your wealthiest parishioners. In most cases there’s a reason the wealthy have money. They are smarter and they’ll be on to you in a flash. Envy can start with a tiny spark and quickly burn out of control. It didn’t get to be one of the Big Seven Sins for nothing.

In any case, you’ll be able to get what you need, should it come to that. And that brings us to the all important issue of cash management.

OK, so you’ve got a nice racket going. Your congregation is tithing, the collection plates are full and the skim by the ushers is reasonable and under control. Your “extra services” operations are profitable. You’ve got a few elderly people in the endowment scam and you’re just waiting for them to croak. Your under-the-table commercial interests are paying into your Cayman Islands bank accounts. Your African miners are getting slave wages and the female workers in your sweatshop clothing plants are being forced to get abortions when they get pregnant. And if that’s not enough for you, you’re porking that cute brunette kindergarten teacher after lunch. Life is good.

Remember why we started this? To get Money and lots of it. The point is to accumulate Money or negotiable securities and other assets. Should you pay off your original Investors from the Money the congregation is bringing in? Yes and No. You should convert the Investors high-interest debt to a nice low-cost bank mortgage and keep your cash in nice safe CD’s or even better, in a Forex Currency trading account. But the mortgage interest is higher than what the CD’s pay! That’s very true but what you need is a fat pile of cash sitting there that you can abscond with just about any time should the need arise. And that’s worth something. Besides, it’s not your Money (at least not yet) so who cares? And if somebody starts wondering why the church has so much Money in the bank, tell them you are thinking ahead toward building a new school, buying a forested bible retreat, perhaps even building a second church across town (wasn’t that why you needed the helo?). You are supposed to be the visionary, it goes with the territory.

Remember, keep it liquid, keep it loose and be ready to move quickly. Keep your ear to the ground. Listen to what’s going on in the congregation. Is somebody asking impertinent questions about the Church’s finances? Stay in Control and have a Plan.

These days some Televangelists feel they need a security detail. This is an interesting idea. And why not? Famous celebrities have bodyguards to keep deranged fans at bay. Some celebrities have such status that they are continually hounded by throngs of shutter-snapping paparazzi effectively negating the need for such a costly trapping as body guards. Never the less, having a security detail is a sign of status, it says “I’ve arrived!” even if it is only in your own mind. You want to maintain the pretence that you are a Person of Value, one who should be listened to and whose opinions are to be respected and advice followed. A body guard detail certainly should help convey that idea. But look at it this way, it’s an expense that reduces your take later. But if you have decided to stick with the game, it could be Money well-spent. And if you are schtupping the under-age daughter of a guy who wrestles on WWF, a heavily armed security detail is to be strongly advised.

In Chapter 1 we learned about Reverend Jim Jones. A tragic end to a man well ahead of his time. If he had waited until Ronald Reagan had entered the Whitehouse he could have done so well dealing with the mentally ill and people with AIDS. And in this Bush Administration, he would have really hit his stride by being the Head of the faith-based “No Poor Left Behind” program. Dubya could have crowed in his State Of The Union speeches about the decline in the number of Americans without medical coverage. A real shame.

Let’s go to Chapter 10. We’re nearly there.

Chapter 10. Staying out of Prison

Perhaps one of the most bizarre aspects of the corporate malfeasance scandals of recent years is that the people involved in cheating their employees and stockholders stood around and waited for the authorities to show up at their door with TV camera crews in the early morning and make them do the perp-walk with their hair as yet uncombed. What were these people thinking? Why didn’t they have an exit strategy in place? It could not have been the cost, they looted plenty of Money. What then? Perhaps they failed to take into account what it was they were doing was simply wrong. Perhaps they had convinced themselves they deserved the Money they took and that the trust they betrayed didn’t matter. Maybe they just thought they could get away with it. Or, and this is a remote possibility, they were willing to face the consequences of their action. Now we know there is nothing inherently illegal about running a Church. Lots of nice people do it and retire and live to a ripe old age and probably even go to Heaven. Of course, they are not looking for the kind of Money you are and not willing to do the things you do to get that Money.

So you have to do two things. You have to stave off that evil day of reckoning, but when it comes, you have to recognize it and skip town with the Money. That’s why it’s important to have a two-fold strategy in place.

First, it is important to maintain an equilibrium of values. In short, never believe your own B.S. Establish a place, physical or mental, where you can go every day to recount the lies you told and the undeserved rewards you reaped. Call it your confessional. Remember, for your followers, it is a Journey of Faith. But for you, it is a Journey of Wealth. It’s vital that you do not get the two mixed up. Because while you are preaching gleefully about hundreds of millions of people dying early and horrible deaths as you try and drive the world toward Armageddon: and even though you could surpass Joeseph Stalin as a mass murderer, it’s still about the Money.

Don’t entertain any illusions about what you are doing and why you are doing it. You are selling a product that has no guarantees or warranties expressed or implied. Your product has no substance. It can’t be parked in somebody’s driveway. People can be fickle and act with a herd mentality. One minute they are calling you “Reverend” and the next minute they’re a lynch mob.

Face it. You’re a con man and a fraud. Live with it. And every day you get away with it, is another small victory. Keeping things in perspective will insure that you recognize the signs of a turning tide early enough to escape the consequences of your acts.

And that’s what brings us to our Second Part, the Exit Strategy. In the event you find yourself on the windy side of the law, or even on the bad side of your congregation, you need to have a place to go. A funk hole. You need to have a secret location complete with travel documents and a number of bank accounts by which you can sequentially funnel the liquid assets of the Church into your capacious pockets in such a way they cannot be traced. Now you know why you take out a mortgage against the church instead of having all your cash non-liquid in a piece of real estate. Also make sure your investments can be quickly liquidated. While it’s OK for a Fundamentalist Christian Church to be invested in armaments manufacturers, stocks have a three day to-clear date. That’s why bearer bonds held in a private vault are a good thing. Banks are closed on weekends and having to wait until Monday could mean the difference between sitting on a beach with a tall, cold rum-punch with a scantily clad bimbo and sitting in a jail cell with a disagreeable room-mate who is licking his lips while eyeing your butt.

You could carry the church’s monetary assets around in a suitcase or a booby trapped attaché case, but people would wonder why you are always carrying a bag handcuffed to your wrist. Also, thieves have no mercy these days and will cut off your arm to get that bag of swag without a second thought.

We’ve already dealt with the issue of your wife in Chapter 7. Now you know why it’s so important to have your wife squared away and part of the program. In fact, when you are having a nice vacation, make a quick detour and you can organize the whole thing in advance. Let your wife pick out your living quarters and let her have fun furnishing them.

Former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski would not be in jail today if he had donned a decent toupee and taken up a new career as a beach bum on Barbados at the proper time.

There are almost no non-extradition treaty countries left so if you have to move, keep it on the low-down. Being the only guy in Mariscal Estigarribia, driving a red Ferrari is bound to get you noticed. There are lots of places in the world now with big American expat communities and not speaking the local lingo will not be an impediment. Nobody will notice another modest middle aged guy and his mousy wife. And remember from Chapter 3, create a good legend. Be a retired insurance salesman; tell people to look both ways before crossing the street. Mention a statistic.

When looking at people who landed in jail for doing what you are doing, one thing stands out. They did not know when to quit stealing. Everybody who steals gets away with it for a while, but the real artists are the ones who know when to quit.

Is there then a clue by which to determine if you have hit the punch-out point? Yes, there is. When parishioners start selling their organs and donate the Money to you, it’s time to cash in your defense stocks and get ready to blow town. There is however, still one thing. Even at the organ selling stage, there is a chance you can leave a lot of Money on the table. Therefore some statistical analysis is in order. According to some scientists intelligence wise, all people can be graphed into a shape that looks like a bell, hence the name, Bell Curve. Basically 68 percent of people fall in the middle of the curve. The first Standard deviation point occurs at both 15.9 percent points and the second standard deviation point occurs at both 2.2 percent points. People who would sell their organs and donate the proceeds to you surely fit into the cohort labeled 2nd standard deviation-negative (known in probability speak as -2SD). By doing this analysis you can determine fairly precisely just how many will participate based on the size of your congregation. Also remember to account for the sampling error factor which increases as the cohort size drops. Don’t get greedy, stay on the low side of the range.

Let’s do a little Magic Money math:

Let’s say you have a congregation of 1000 people. According to the bell curve, 2.2 percent of people fall into the -2SD cohort. Therefore you can predict that 22 members of your congregation will be organ sellers. Next we move to the so-called sampling error. This is a concept normally used in polls that sample a small segment of the population and then come out and say “xx percent of Americans feel….” The smaller the number of people sampled, the greater the sampling error. Since in this case your sample (which is statistically derived anyway) is 22 out of 1000, you get an error of 6.1 percent. This number can be positive or negative but we pick the negative number to be on the safe side. Thus we get -1.342 persons with a 95 percent confidence interval. You have to round up to the nearest whole person or -2. That would mean you call it quits with 20 organ sellers. However if you have a congregation of say, 18,000 people, the sampling error drops to 1.4 percent. Using the 2.2 percent -2DS distribution we get 396. Correcting for the sampling error which is now 6 persons, we get 390 organ sellers. As you can see, getting out early would leave a lot of potential earnings behind.

Perhaps the most egregious example of a man who didn’t know when to punch out was Jim Bakker of PTL fame. He was doing so well with his “prosperity based” system of Christianity. This is the theory that if you wake up to find a new Cadillac in your driveway, it was not abandoned there by a bunch of teenaged joy riding hoodlums, but delivered there, just for you, by God Himself. Send Jim and Tammy Fay some dough and God will turn the Caddy into a Rolls. God can do that, you know.

We’ve mentioned Power. Power is without a doubt the most potent motivator in mankind. You will get it. You must learn to control it. You got into this racket for the Money. But people often stay because of the Power. Manipulating people is fun and deeply satisfying. Running a Billion Dollar per year Faith Scam and paying no taxes puts you in the same financial league as the Big Boys in business or the Mob. There comes a point where not stealing the Money is actually better than stealing it, but very few reach these stratospheric heights.

Any kind of Power is enjoyable and whether is used for good or bad is immaterial. This is why the religious right works so hard to change public school curricula so that students will be ignorant or even learn things that simply aren’t true and all at taxpayer expense. Real power however is the Power to kill people. Ask any serial killer, it’s the Power to bring suffering and death that makes it so thrilling. Killing people or even killing by proxy can land you in jail, but supporting government policies that kill people does not land you in jail but still allow for some level of satisfaction. That may explain why so many Televangelists lean to the politically conservative side.

In multi-level marketing people start out with dreams of untold riches, but for most, success is measured in getting a 30 percent discount on overpriced stuff. Very, very few make the millions dreamt of. If you abscond with the life savings of a few smucks, nobody is going to come after you. But steal a billion and they’ll hunt you down like a dog. It’s also easier to keep a low profile as a low-grade millionaire, than a billionaire. This is why if you become a Biggie, you are better off sticking with the game. Still, if it should turn out that like the very few, you have a real talent for this kind of work, why not stay with it? You never know, you might not go to Hell when you die after all.

If you should find yourself wildly successful beyond your expectations as well as the scope of this guide, you may want to consider franchising your Church. The nice thing here is that you would only rarely have to face the low-class rabble that make up your congregation and spend most of your time with people very much like yourself. Here your job would be to travel around the country, or perhaps the entire world, in style, while padding your expense account and giving motivational talks to other scam artists and getting a cut of their take. Another aspect to franchising is the Power. When you franchise you multiply yourself in so many ways. As your franchised congregation grows, it becomes a power in the communities across America in such a way that you ultimately determine which businesses will thrive and which go under. The graduates from your schools go out into the community and determine which products will be sold and not be sold where they work. Your university graduates can infiltrate society in ways the intelligence services of the former Soviet Union could only dream of. And unlike the Soviet Union, your operation to destroy America from within will be entirely legal. If your zombies are caught, there are no legal ramifications.

Chapter 11. Love and Happiness

Right Wing Hate Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh supported George W. Bush in his desire to attack Iraq. Limbaugh has made an average of $3700 for every American soldier killed or maimed in Iraq since then.

Late May 2008 Update: The Veterans Administration has reluctantly revealed that approximately 1000 Iraq War Veterans per month are attempting suicide and there are estimates that as many as 18,000 Veterans have committed suicide after returning from tours of duty in Iraq. This, while it helps reduce the effect of the empty promises of support for veterans made by republicans, also reduces Rush Limbaugh’s take from $3700 each to about $2000 each.

For Rush, the Iraq war has been a good thing. But with the upcoming change in the Whitehouse, Rush has to look forward to the day when the war will be ended and his cash flow dries up. Rush Limbaugh (and joined by other Right Wing Hate personalities) has expressed a desire to have Hillary Clinton as President rather than the expected and reasonable endorsement of John McCain.

Why? So that he can continue to make Money by creating divisions in American society and damaging the country.

Rush Limbaugh is a guy who took the hate of 20 million Americans who were looking to hate other Americans and turned it into a $50 million a year paycheck.

To be a successful Televangelist you have to think like that.

OK. Enough of that. Perhaps we should stop to ask what do conservative talk show hosts and televangelists provide that makes them so appealing? By now My Dear Reader, you’ve long figured out that this guide isn’t about becoming a Televangelist, successful or otherwise, at all. The idea of using the Bible as a tool to make Money is despicable in much the same way that using the Koran to justify murdering people is.

This is about sorting through all the crap and garbage that comes your way and maintaining perspective. It really is amazing that someone can come on the radio or television, write in a magazine, or stand and talk in front of a group and be believed by people who are otherwise so intelligent, kind and generous.

The success of so-called “conservatives” is due to their conjuring up a completely imaginary enemy. A democracy by definition consists of competing groups politically as well as economically. But nobody who is participating in it wants to actually destroy it.

Life in our times is complex and ambiguous. We are called upon to make decisions, sometimes important ones, while knowing we are not in possession of all the facts. We decide and hope for the best as we step off the cliff’s edge into the darkness below. And then if our choice turns out to be wrong we establish a framework or a system that makes the decision for us in the future. In the process we think we will make fewer wrong decisions when all we are really doing is making fewer decisions and losing our skill at making them.

We look for some talisman to protect us from our mistakes. We look for something to divide the grey area cleanly into areas of black and white. We know we cannot unscramble an egg. And therefore the only way we can demystify the grey into black and white is by lies. We are more comfortable with the lies than we are with the grey.

Under our system of freedom, people like Rush Limbaugh are free to tell us what they like. But we are also free to believe them or not. But they want us to believe they are unscrambling the egg. They are not. And so it is that while creating a world of black and white makes sense, it has to be based on false premises. And while a world based on false premises can continue to function for a while due to inertia, eventually it becomes obvious that it cannot continue to do so forever.

America has been put in a precarious position partially by people in charge, but also by people who let them take charge, making their decision either by stepping of the cliff and hoping for the best or by accepting the lie that the egg was indeed unscrambled. And in between those in charge and those who allowed it stood a cadre of shamans who connected the two groups with their lies. And while they can lie all they want, why give up your freedom by believing them?

But we know this now and we are seeing the consequences.

If we accept, that as persons, where we are at any given moment is as a result of all the choices we made prior to that moment, we have to agree that as a society the same is true. Where America is today is the result of choices the country as a whole has made. And as making no choice still has consequences, it is a choice as well.

A society can only function if people make it function. Putting nothing in and taking everything out leads to a breakdown. People came to the United States from other countries primarily because they saw that in their own societies many people put effort in and very few reaped the reward. The promise of America was that you could take out nearly all you put in. But that was in the past.

The promise of America now is that you can take out more than you have to put in and that has to be false. It has to be corrected.

And so it is, when we make choices as individuals that land us in the wrong place, we change our course. If our course is a result of outside influences, we have to adjust settings to compensate. This is of course assuming our mistake was not fatal.

It is naïve and unfair as well to contend that all the problems of the world were created by, and the fault of this Bush administration. It would merely be reversing the positions of the black and white fields. The problems were already there, we just put incompetent people in charge of solving them. Hopefully this is a temporary aberration and not a fatal mistake.

All is not right in the world. Nor will it ever be. It cannot be the task of America to fix every problem. What America can do and has done before is set an example. An example for fairness, an example for truth. Many people in the world do not need or want to live in America. To them the mere fact that America exists and sets some standard is sufficient and indeed it should be.

The Middle East (among other problems).

It is easy to say that the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City and Washington DC was the work of 19 suicidal criminals egged on by some crazed terrorists and we need to get those guys. It sounds nice, it’s simple. It’s so Black and White. But it’s not at all that simple. The problems in other world societies have been festering and in need of change for a long time. There really is no single cause for the attack. Is it the way the Middle East was carved up by the European powers? That could certainly be a problem. Borders were created that ignored traditional Tribal territories. Was it the way the oil wealth was divided among those in the region? Not much hint of fairness there. Is it a clash of cultures? Has Western culture gone off the rails? Is it the decline of the culture in the Middle East? The Middle East had a number of thriving cultures when the Europeans were still painting their faces blue.

Is it due to longstanding injustices inside the societies of the Middle East region? Certainly. The Israel-Palestinian questions and the role of the US there is part.“Radical Islamists” talk about “Crusaders”. It’s interesting that they would use such a complex historical perspective as a backdrop while we look for such a simple and immediate explanation. They are militarily weak and we are strong. You would think it would be the other way around.

The September 11, 2001 attacks were the result of long-standing and worsening grievances, many of which were not of American origin, aided by the monumental incompetence of the Bush Administration. And instead of looking for a chance to get to the bottom of the problems and deal with them, George W. Bush magnified the previous incompetence by attacking the wrong country and making the problems worse.

He compounded all of this by originating a set of economic changes that increased economic stratification in American society, taking the country further away from its Foundation and ability to correct its course. Not yet satisfied, Bush appointed incompetent and dishonest cronies to important positions in government, in effect, breaking those departments.

The notion that the September 11, 2001 attacks were all part of a clever plot by neo-conservatives and Bush to take over the country is flawed in several respects. First, the neo-cons had already taken over the country and second, it would mean that all the incompetence and screw-ups by the Bush administration were just a distraction to cover the larger evil. The Bush administration would have done better by preventing the attack and catching the perpetrators when they stepped on the planes. Even had the attack failed to take place, the statement about why America “deserved” to be attacked would have been made. Bush could have crowed about how lucky we all were having him running things. Bush could have still done all his domestic spying and civil liberties restrictions in the pretense of securing the country. Also, his lies about the Iraq war would have taken longer to unravel.

For the neo-cons and the Bush administration, incompetence and bad judgment come natural.

But if there is one service that George W. Bush, his parents and his cronies have done for the World, it is showing us the consequences of putting the wrong guy in charge of things here in America. We had apparently forgotten that lesson learned from the Hitler years. Hitler did not take over Germany by himself. He had lots of help. The People of Germany suffered terrible consequences as a result. Bush is certainly not in Hitler’s league and hopefully the American people will not have to endure what the Germans went through during and after World War II. But one thing that America did then was look at the root causes of Hitler’s rise to power and took corrective action. This time America will have to fix itself.

Those who have read the Osama bin Laden manifesto may have noticed that there were a number of very reasonable requests and points in it. Of course by attacking the U.S., bin Laden negated any obligation we might have had to look into his grievances. Osama bin Laden made himself and his organization part of the problem. That was a mistake on his part and has delayed any sort of move toward a solution as a result. But we still need to look at the root causes of the widespread hatred for things American and at the very least, acknowledge them.

The next few Presidents of the U.S. have their work cut out. Let’s hope there will be forces in the country to help rather than hamper in that task.

In Conclusion: What we as individuals must do.

We need to accept that life is complicated and ambiguous and that there are rarely easy answers but often correct ones. We need to stop accepting lies because they make sense on a shallow emotional level. We need to stop thinking that leisure and entertainment are serious and that work and solving the real problems of the World are not.

There’s a reason you have a brain. Get a good education so that you can walk around in the World and understand what you see instead of just training for a trade so you can work hard and have money to buy junk you don’t have any use for. And that way you do not have to rely on others to think for you because they most likely do not have your interests in mind.

Remember, your television is there for a reason: to entertain you while getting you to watch commercials which in turn serve to create a demand for products. So looking to the TV to get any sort of valid information is mostly a waste of time. This is especially true with news. The news channels have to keep going 24 hours per day. Fox News deals with this problem by simply making stuff up. That’s why in surveys, people who watch Fox News score consistently as the least well-informed.

TV News has to have enough stuff to keep going and allow news to interrupt only if it is emotionally wrenching enough not to interfere with other programming. That means you have to turn off your TV and find News information elsewhere. Take a newspaper for example, are you going to read every page in a 100 page paper? No, you are going to go through the paper culling what tidbits you can that have some substance for you. With the TV news you have to sit through piles of garbage in the hope that some gem of knowledge will immerge from the swill, and it may not. In the meantime you have been robbed of your time and your control over that time. So enjoy your time in front of your TV. There’s nothing wrong with escaping for a few hours and it’s probably less harmful than crack-cocaine. But know why it’s there.

And when you are done escaping, go out and find out what’s going on in the world. In order to find out what’s going on in the world, you have to go out and make an effort. Because if you don’t make that effort, people like Rush Limbaugh will help get people like George W. Bush in charge of running the country and you will get wiped out. You will lose your rights, your money, your medical and retirement benefits, your security and your ability to cope with ordinary everyday problems.

And we see this more and more.

People do wild and bizarre things because they come to their own ‘reasonable’ conclusion that shooting a bunch of other people is a great way to solve their problems. Is there really much difference between somebody who shoots a bunch of people and then kills himself and a Palestinian suicide bomber?

Somebody out there wants to love you. Find them.

We live on a planet with 6 billion others with whom we have amazingly similar needs, wants and likes.

Does anybody actually want to go to bed hungry tonight? Does anybody actually want to live in a ramshackle house overrun with vermin? Does anybody want to perform back-breaking toil while watching others who do no work and just have fun? Does anybody want to be miserable? Do homeless people really like fresh air? Are things really working out well for people affected by the Katrina storm? Is torture really nothing more than frat-house pranks? Does a hand-held GPS receiver really tell “them” exactly where you are?

The fact is we do not, nor do we have to have, everything in common with everybody else. We do not have to isolate ourselves because of it. We do not have to be afraid of others. We merely have to exercise reasonable caution and look both ways before crossing the street.

Thank you for reading this.

New York, NY. March 2008.

Copyright © 2008