For those of you who do not know who Todd Bentley is, he’s an evangelical speaker who thinks God gives him the power to instantly heal terminally ill people.  He performs his “miracles” by literally punching and kicking sick people while letting out an Emeril style “BAM!” on a stage in front of a packed audience of thousands of his followers.  Some of his most recent exploits include kicking a man in the stomach who has stage 4 colon cancer, bashing a crippled woman’s legs repeatedly onto the edge of the stage, and finally smacking a quadriplegic in the back while exclaiming, “You will get a new spine from God TONIGHT!”  I don’t know which is worse; That this man gets away with duping all these gullible people into believing he actually has the power to miraculously heal them, or that people are actually stupid enough to pay through the nose and travel thousands of miles to witness his bullshit. 

This guy is just one of the many reasons why I am against organized religion as a whole.  Like I said in another blog, whether it’s a Muslim extremist who fills his pockets with shrapnel and blows himself up on a crowded bus in the name of Allah, or a loud mouth greedy cash sucker who dupes weak-minded people into believing that he can heal them with God’s power, organized religion invariably leads people to behave in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with the world they live in or the overall quality of their lives.  If you have principals that you wish to live your life by, because that makes you happy, then more power to you.   But when you make decisions based on something that exists only in your mind, and has nothing to do with reality, you are just as naïve as the people in Todd Bentley’s audience.

By the way, here’s a link to a Dateline segment on this hack…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp_SXpy8q7w

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