So today about 20 people from my office attended one of those motivational seminars where they have speakers on various subjects: Sales & Marketing, Goal Achievement, Leadership, Competitiveness, etc.
Scam the first part: each of these “motivational speakers” were also selling stuff, lots of it–books, tapes, DVDs, stock-picking programs originally for $6000 but available while supplies last for only $2995! It was exactly like a live infomercial. I was born at night, but not last night, so I expected all of this.
Now, they saved the two headliners (a local sports celebrity and Rudy Guliani) until last, in order to keep people in their seats. Makes sense, right? Before that, though, the perky emcee introduces "the reason I am here, my husband, Mr. So-and-So, who is also the producer of these Motivational Seminars tm! (In retrospect, she had a vaguely Tammy Faye hairdo). Which leads us to:
Scam the second part: Mr. So’s topic was something like “Spiritual Success” or somesuch. Boring, bring on the football player! Mr. So puts up a graphic on the video screen of a little circle labeled “ME” and a larger circle labeled “Circumstances”. He then draws like a pulley around the two and the the circles vibrate violently to illustrate, I guess, how the two interact. He then asks how we “center things”. Answer: Boom, big, blue circle labeled “God”. Uh, oh.
“Now, there are 20,000 people here, and we all have 20,000 views on what God means to us, and that’s OK.” Except for the atheists in the audience, this is a reasonable “save”. If he were saying that by believing what you believe, that can “center” you, I guess I could agree.
But then a little later, he starts with “23 years ago, I changed my life. I said, LORD JAYSUS, COME INTO MY HEART, LET ME DO THY WILL, and my life was changed, blah blah blah.” He later asked the audience to say the “affirmation” with him, noted that people were supposedly “writing it down”, and repeated it a third time. His final stick was to show us how to fill out their little comment cards, and to check the box on whether or not we had BEEN SAVED TODAY!
Jesus Christ on Toast! You made up an all day seminar on Business and Sales Motivation just so you could preach at us about your particular brand of Chritianity? We paid for this crap, wasted a day, sat through your infomercials and crappy hot dog lunch for this??? I am a Christian, and I was offended, did you not even consider my Hindu and Jewish coworkers who were with me? Guess what, fucknugget, they do not except JAYSUS as their personal Lord and Saviour. GET OVER IT AND SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT! Fucking tools!!!