Emphasis mine; I’m going to need a cite on that. My understanding is that admission to the Billy Graham crusades is entirely free of charge.
For those who are interested, here’s an article on T.D. Jakes. I hadn’t heard of him either and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of him, even after reading the article.
Sampiro, thanks for saying a lot of what I was going to say. One thing that particularly annoys me about the likes of Benny Hinn, Robert Tilton, etc. is that they appear to care nothing for their flock and only about the money. One thing the Trinity Foundation noticed when they started their ministry to the homeless in Dallas is they had people who had given all their money to televangelists, turned to the televangelists for help and been told, in effect, “You’re on your own.” Were these people fools for doing so? Certainly. I still vividly remember hearing Robert Tilton saying some anonymous viewer “If you send me $1,000, God will get you out of debt!” (He used to be on before the morning news in Hawaii. That claim led to me making a call which I think led to him being taken off the air a week later.) Back in the 1990s Mr. Tilton also had an unpleasant habit of only opening envelopes which contained cash and throwing those which only contained prayer requests into the trash, unopened.
Healing’s an interesting question to me. As I’ve mentioned, a very dear friend of mine used to be a hardcore Fundamentalist. When he was one, he did faith healings. Many years later, he became a convert to Wicca. One of the things that stunned him is that the energy he felt and made use of when doing healing within a Wiccan context were identical to what he felt when doing healing in a Christian context. Was it genuine? I don’t know. I have asked him for advice about a particularly nasty case of flu that’s been plaguing me for the past three weeks, but that’s because he used to be a medical corpsman in the Navy. I haven’t asked him to heal me because that’s not my style. I have gone to the doctor and gotten massive quantities of quite effective drugs. My friend has also never accepted a dime for his healings. Instead, he sees it as sharing a gift he’s been given.
In Matthew 7:15-23, Jesus says:
Now, earlier in this chapter, He says "“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. " However, Christians are also commanded to be “shrewd as snakes”. I wouldn’t trust the average televangelist further than I could throw him or her.
CJ
Speaking of enemas… and what a great segway that is, did you hear about this?
Before I express my views on Hinn, I am what many would consider a fundamentalist Christian.
That being said, I abhor people like Benny Hinn. They give a bad name to people like me who honestly care for other people and want to see them have a real relationship with Jesus Christ. There is another guy out there, Jesse Duplantis, who is asking people to give him $1000 so he, oh excuse me, his ministry, can buy a Citation 10.
I can’t stand these kinds of people who are what I like to call name it, claim it people. They believe that if they have enough faith that they can make God do whatever they want Him too. I don’t think they have read the same bible I have, because what I read in the bible says that God is bigger than any box we try to put Him in.
Anyway, if you want a good book that kind of touches on this subject, but is fiction, check out Frank Peretti’s The Visitation. Excellent book, IMHO.
my $.02
Andrew
Not only are supporters of Hinn falling for the act, they are falling for it when he openly flaunts his wealth in his seminars. I wen’t to one with a bunch fo friends when it came into town just on a lark. Near the start of of the sermon, he came out with an “inspiring story” regarding him and some phillipino airport workers that happened when he stopped there to refuel his private jet.
Does Graham do any faith healing? I thought he was legit, in the sense that he merely earns money for preaching. More power to him, sez I. This is a different category entirely than prentedning to heal. He gets paid to talk about his view fo Christianity - what’s wrong with that?
Hugh Hefner makes his money honestly. Hinn takes it by fraud. Hefner also pays taxes.
Because he acquires wealth through fraud and does not pay taxes on it.
The not taking a salary thing is a bit of a scam. Everything is legally the propery of the church but it’s still his. It’s a common dodge for these assholes to do that. It’s a way to avoid paying income tax.
Having said that, thje issue is not Hinn’s wealth (which is not commendable but is par for the course) it’s the fact that he’s a con artist.
This is not about wealth so you can take that red herring back to the fish market.
Any pastor who pretends to practice any sort of medical healing is a fraud. Hinn is ome of those frauds.
There’s not a shred of evidence for this.
If it involves medicine that what does God have to do with it?
Placebo. And the effect is marginal at best.
Scientific studies on prayer and healing have not shown prayer to have any noticable effect other than placebo. Patients who are prayed for without their knowledge do no better than people who are not prayed for at all. People who think they’re being prayed for but are not show the same marginal plecebo effects as those who actually are.
The distinction seems to be that patients who believe that other people care about them and are praying for them do slightly better than those who don’t,
Also, “lots of educated doctors” saying something about prayer is not valid, scientific evidence. It;s anecdotal and often biased by a priori religious beliefs.
That’s another crimson fish there. No one has said anything about people praying for themselves, we’re talking about people claiming to have the supernatural ability to heal others and charging money for it.
I’m definitely not defending Benny Hinn. I went to two of his events in Tulsa, the first around the time a few months before George Bush was elected. He stated that he was “prophetically” told that George Bush would be president. I was shocked he would put people’s faith in the line by making such as outright prediction. Anyway, to my dissappointment, George Bush was actually elected, but it brought me back to some thoughts I had about Benny Hinn.
Where did that electricity come from? It was a warm, tingling, buzzing sensation that I felt on my hands, almost like the feeling from bioelectrical machines. What was that?
I don’t know what it was, but something’s going on. It appears that so many people report feeling electrocuted when they go up on stage.
I have a lot to say about Pentecostalism, and I wouldn’t even label myself a Christian, since there are thousands of varieties, so I just don’t label myself. I don’t defend most forms of Christianity and even the evangelical kind. I don’t think the Bible is unflawed.
Despite this, I’ve got to say, Benny Hinn is using some sort of power (spiritual or physical) to do what he does. Haven’t read many claims about any physical methods he is using, so as of now I’m guessing it’s something that’s unknown or unexplained.
It was pure essence of Zombie Electricity. Amazing stuff.
When my old man was confined to a wheel chair from Lou Gehrig’s, he was pretty desperate to find something to make him walk again. At one point he wanted to goto Benny Hinn’s thing when he was in town, but we convinced him it was a load of horse shit. I was shocked he would even ask, since all his life he was a sharply cynical guy who went to church *maybe *once a year, and thought everyone was out to scam him.
I can’t imagine what he went through. It’s impossible for me to put myself in his mindset, but I don’t know what I’d do. While he never went to any of the healers who worked under the guise of religion, there were plenty pulling equally vicious crap under the guise of science. I’m talking homeopathy, Reiki, magic energy webs, bee stings and shit like that. I don’t remember the details, I was 12 when he died, but there was a lot of this going around. Desperation, I think, can easily circumvent logic and reason. I have a lot of sympathy for desperate people, especially when they get played by some fucking prick like Benny Hinn.
The jury’s still out on faith healings but this thread proves resurrections happen. But since it is anyway-
My sister is a Fundamentalist and growing progressively wackier in her beliefs. Only her stinginess and racial separatism keeps her from following a Jim Jones type into the jungle or turning over all of her (substantial) assets to some guy with a photo-op hospital in Burkina Faso that treats three people per year with Band-Aids and a multimillion dollar Aspen getaway with a bidet that sprays Evian. Currently she’s under the sway of a British revivalist who’s touring the nation but mostly based on the Gulf coast. She’s referred many times to feeling electricity in her hands.
I actually have wondered what causes this- whether it’s a psychosomatic thing or if perhaps there’s literally something in the air that causes it (by which I’m not talking spirit of God so much as some kind of electrical conduction that can happen in large groups). Any thoughts?
Van de Graaff generator under the stage?
I wouldn’t put it past some of these people.
Studies have been done and they refute that prayer helps heal.
You can’t fix stupid.
Mmmmmmyup, you are. Welcome to the SDMB, Paid Shill or Ignorant Retard. Only time and your continued posting will reveal to which equally reviled category you belong!
Agreed (six years after the fact). 
When I was a teenager, I remember seeing Benny Hinn in the TV listings. I hoped that it was a typo, and that the upcoming show was actually Benny Hill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. 
As EP suggested, 'twas the power of Necroposting. 