And what’s with all these “She’s probably suffering from PTSD amnesia” excuses? If she was, she shouldn’t say that she does remember with such conviction.
Recommendation: Stephen King’s most recent novel, Revival, is a great story about what happens when a minister experiences a horrific tragedy…and the sermon that follows.
I think airing such a video would be wrong. Let the person deal with her grief. At least her appeal to God shows shows she believes in God. I actually doubt that for some of the TV preachers.
You missed a list item – Burn Her!
Yeah, I air it and provide an evil laugh sound track.
Jacquie is not a hypocrite. Nor is she a blasphemer.
She was upset and angry. And who among us wouldn’t be under the circumstances?
Note that she didn’t doubt God’s existence. She didn’t, as some posters have implied (or outright stated), “bullshit” about her faith.
She had a bad moment. As a father and a Christian (specifically, a Catholic), I can imagine how she felt.
Apparently some here feel that those who hold religious beliefs with which they disagree aren’t entitled to grief, or even anger, about a child’s death.
Saintly Loser, are you taking into account the point made in Post #22?
Yes. Post 22 said:
I don’t think she had a moral failure, first of all, and she certainly didn’t “despair” (at least not as I, and my particular branch of Christianity, understand that word).
I think this comes down to a lack of understanding of what religious faith is on the part of those who don’t have faith.
Jacquie had a bad moment. Who wouldn’t, under those circumstances? But on the whole, it’s not dishonest of her to claim that her faith remained with her, or that she believes, and has always believed, that God has a plan for her child?
Imagine a woman who has a horrible, horrible day. She loses her job, she finds out that her father has cancer, they’re out of her favorite coffee at Starbucks, whatever. So she gets home and is sitting on the couch, and her husband comes in and walks over.
She flips out. She says “I hate the way you come in to the house. You never take your shoes off, and you track dirt all over the carpet, and you drop your briefcase on the floor and make enough noise to wake up the baby from his nap. I can’t stand you anymore!” And she rushes out of the house and sits in the garden by herself and decompresses a bit.
Are her actions incompatible with a later claim that she loves, and has always loved, her husband, and knows that he’s a good man with the best interests of his family at heart?
Now, maybe Jacquie could have written a better sermon, and said something like "I had a terrible moment, and I screamed and shouted, but, even in the darkest moments of my grief over Jennifer’s death, I never doubted the divine love or mercy for an instant. All things work together for good for them that love the Lord, I said.“Even as my baby lay dying, I knew that God had a plan for her and for me that would ultimately be to our betterment. And when the doctors told me she had died, I knew Jesus had taken her to his bosom and would take care of her far, far better than I ever could. Yes, I grieved, but I wasn’t angry at him; I didn’t blaspheme. From the moment we got up that morning to the moment we put my baby in the ground, I knew–not believed, knew–that ‘Little ones to him belong / They are weak and he is strong.’”
Her actions are incompatible with a later claim that she was never angry.
I left out one more important reason not to release the tape: her congregation won’t care. Evangelical preachers have been caught out in way worse ways than lying about their grieving process, and been welcomed back into the fold. She’s not going to lose any followers over this. Probably pick up a few.
HOw do you understand the word despair, then? Because I can’t think of another word that better describes a parent’s feelings on the death of a young child.
The thing is, she also called God an evil motherfuck. That’s not a lack of faith in God in the sense of disbelieving in His existence; that’s a lack of faith in God in the sense of believing He exists and is the Demiurge, if not Satan.
And even that was not her moral failing. Even if I believed in the Christian faith, I wouldn’t expect Christians to be morally perfect, or to never falter. But assuming she remembers the breakdown at all (and, as jsgoddess observes, she genuinely may not), she flat-out lied about in her sermon. Now I suspect Jesus, if he exists, would give her a bye on the breakdown without even being asked; the sermon is another matter.
How is calling the Lord of Hosts a “selfish, evil motherf***er” whom she hates not blasphemy?
In the first place, nobody has used the word “PTSD” but you, dude.
In the second place, jsgoddess and others have suggested, based on their own experience with grief, that Jacquie may genuinely not recall the breakdown – that in the grey haze of unbearable sorrow, her memory of the event may have edited itself into something she can bear. Now I did not think of that possibility when I wrote the OP, but I can imagine that happening. If it did, she obviously doesn’t know so consciously, and won’t without therapy or some triggering event. Seems silly to blame her for it.
To a Catholic, despair means “The voluntary and complete abandonment of all hope of saving one’s soul and of having the means required for that end.” (From the Catholic Encyclopedia.)
I suspect that to most Christians, that’s a big “so what?” In a moment of grief, she said something that she really doesn’t believe.
Just about any Christian would give her a bye on the sermon. She lashed out in grief. Anyone would. It doesn’t take away from her faith, or her trust in God, or any of that.
Really, I have to say I can’t see her supposedly contradictory words here as a big deal, nor do I think she’s a hypocrite. She’s not perfect. None of us are.
To sin, there must be intent and understanding. In a moment of extreme grief, I doubt that Jacquie was capable of either.
So atheists can’t despair because they don’t care about saving their souls? That’s a bullshit definition.
So the Catholic Church is supposed to be sure to give atheist-inclusive definitions to all their theological terms?
I think we can safely assume that a married mother of at least one child, pastor in her own right of a megachurch, is not a practicing Catholic, and so would mean something else by that word.
OK, fair enough. I understand that “despair,” here, describes the state of mind of one who has just lost a child.
As I said above, I’m a parent. I hope I *never *know what that feels like.
Whatever happened to “Give your troubles to God” and “God will never give you more than you can handle” ?
Those phrases seem like silly platitudes to me, and pretty much devoid of meaning. Maybe they help some people. I have no idea.
I do, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. That’s is half of why, though I find your reasoning questionable, I agree with your conclusion that the video shouldn’t be aired.
The other half is that, even if the most cynical reasonable interpretation of Jacquie’s actions is the correct one (that she genuinely believes in God, genuinely and knowingly blasphemed, remembers it, and lied in her sermon for the sake of her career), airing the video is unlikely to convince any of her followers of her cupidity.
(And, incidentally, it is NOT reasonable to believe that Jacquie didn’t believe in God at the time of her outburst. Whom would she have been talking to?)
The other other half I wouldn’t air the video is that it’s gonna destroy the show, as many people will judge doing so to be the action of a vindictive, petty SOB who is probably from Pompei.