He didn’t annoint the congregation with oil dripping from the Chevy Tahoe?

No wonder this country is in the mess that it is.

Let’s build a big bonfire and sacrifice a few virgins, cut the hearts out a few really good looking boys, slaughter some prize bulls and a thousand white lambs.

Praying to the magic invisible sky fairy isn’t going to get us out of this one.

Dear old Karl Marx was right on when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses.  These people must be hallucinating on some really powerful smack if they think magic sky daddy is going to save them from the destruction and damage done by corporate fascism.

What, they couldn’t find an Aztec Gold Taurus to pray over?

Oh wait….

http://wonkette.com/403920/jesus-people-pray-that-false-idol-will-save-gods-economy

It’s getting harder and harder to support any sort of a bailout.  It will happen, and it will suck, but I still think it’s a better bargain than the bloated behemoth of a leviathon of a monstrosity that got passed to help those financial nitwits.  It really stinks of class warfare and anti-union bias that the Big 2.5 is even questioned after that stinker passed, though I’m all smiles if Congress puts in some incentives/demands that they stop making gas-guzzling crap that most people don’t want anyway.

While foreign design groups are out making better autos, our nation is reverting to rain dances in hopes that a god will shower us with money. Maybe someone should have prayed that God would send better cars, decent cars or even better marketing strategies for existing automobiles. But for that, you’d either need (a)magic, car-building elves that sneak into factories at night and create the 60mpg hybrid F-150 or (b)well-educated citizens that won’t mismanage their bread-and-butter industries.

The ministers’ plan is to fast and pray for the industry.

Cool.  It’ll probably take at least six months for the ind- wait, when they say “fast”, they don’t mean total starvation, do they?

Shit.

Okay, having the actual SUVs there like golden calves is pretty bizarre.  But you know what?  People belong to churches and care about them.  Pastors are actually leaders.  And here’s a pastor preaching to his congregation not about teh gayz or sex, not about abortion, not about abstinence pledges, but about economic justice.

“Everybody can’t live on Wall Street. Everybody can’t live on Main Street. But all of us have lived on the side street, the working class,” Ellis said. “I call it the working class because everything tells me there is no more middle class.”

[snip]

“It’s all about hope. You can’t dictate how people will think, how they will respond, how they will vote,” Ellis said after the service. “But you can look to God. We believe he can change the minds and hearts of men and women in power, and that’s what we tried to do today.”

If folks were saying, “Prayer instead of activism” I’d have a problem with it.  But I actually think that the point of this kind of service is to motivate activism—to prove to the community that leaders see this as an important fight, to show folks how many other people are involved, to give people hope and backbone to keep pressing even if it seems hopeless.

So, again, having the SUVs there seems pretty odd to me.  But if churchgoers heard preachers talking about the working class and economic justice every Sunday, instead of Teh Sex and sin and whatever, our country would be a whole lot better off.

I think this has more likelihood of working than most prayers.

Because, let’s face it; they aren’t praying to God. They are praying to/threatening Congress.

I still think they’re praying to god, and if the government approves the bailout then this will only “prove” to them that 1) god “exists” and 2) god listens to and answers prayers, just like for those who prayed at Qualcom stadium for Prop 8 to pass. And if it doesn’t pass then they may just think they should have prayed harder/behaved better, etc. etc. I know this seems ridiculous to us (and as a former practicing Christian, slightly like idol worshipping, though I guess he’s praying OVER the cars and not TO them) but as Pesto said, it makes them feel better, and like they’re doing something, and perhaps (hopefully) they will end up actually doing something, though I have no idea what.

The time for magical thinking is over. Even if one believes in the Invisible Bearded Sky Man™, one can’t expect him to do the impossible and knock sense into the heads of industry executives who arrive for their Beltway handouts in private jets.

You don’t have to have a direct line to an omniscient supernatural entity to understand how to make this bailout happen. It involves semi- or full nationalisation of the big 2 (Chrysler is a lost cause that can be picked up for its parts); it involves the government insisting that from now on it’s hybrids and electrics; and before anything else, it involves kicking the arrogant and incompetent greedhead senior executives to the kerb. These are distressed companies—treat them as what they are.

But if this preacher all said that, somehow I doubt he’d have auto dealers (a conservative lot) contributing those shiny props. I also wonder what working class “side street” the head preacher at a megachurch lives on.

But if churchgoers heard preachers talking about the working class and economic justice every Sunday, instead of Teh Sex and sin and whatever, our country would be a whole lot better off.

I get that, but it doesn’t seem like he was praying for economic deliverance in whatever form his God saw as appropriate. He’s specifically praying to prop up the auto industry. That’s not exactly about economic justice.

I also wonder what working class “side street” the head preacher at a megachurch lives on.

Given that it’s a church in Detroit, I’m guessing that a large proportion of the congregants are members of the UAW, and an even larger number depend on the auto industry to make a living.  Detroit is a company town, Michigan is a company state, and without the auto industry, they’re dead in the water.

Though they’d probably have a little more luck if they tried emulating these union members in Chicago instead.

Jon:

The bailout for the financial nitwits is money being loaned (not given) to for the most part going concerns thatl either have a pretty good likelihood of paying back the loans, or will have stock worth being bought back or bought by others when the U.S. decides to sell the shares they’ve bought. As much as I think the U.S. should have stuck with the original plan to buy the mortgage backed securities, the current actions are more likely to result in the U.S. taxpayer being made whole in the end.

There is almost no hope of the auto companies paying back these so-called loans. Going bankrupt would leave them with revised work rules that would make them more flexible and competitive, not only with other automakers, but with other industries (from the salary/benefits perspective). I have to admit that it’s hard for me to cry for a guy who is retired on full pension at 56 (the guy CNN interviewed that I’m supposed to relate to). I’ll be lucky to ever be able to retire at this rate. And I’ll be one of the taxpayers still paying for their pensions.

I’m just surprised it wasn’t Rev. Keith Butler. It seems like somethign he’d get up to.

It’s a bit kooky, but no harm no foul. This doesn’t bother me at all.

The great thing about America is that it doesn’t matter what you believe, what you think or what you say. We are all servants of money, the visible God.

There’s a way better chance of getting that money back from the Big 3 than there ever will be from AIG/Citibank/all the rest of those fuckwits.

Unsurprisingly, Jon Stewart explains this all quite well.

i don’t understand the auto industry.

‘lo, years and years ago, after i got divorced and moved back to california, i bought my mother’s old 88 honda accord. it had been being used by the neighbor down the street for over a year (this was in 96). she had knocked a hole, the size of my fist, in the radiator. the car continued to run for almost 6 months WITH A LARGE HOLE IN THE RADIATOR.
it averaged 36 MPG in the city, and 47-48 freeway

nowadays, a care is marketed with the “astonishing” average of 35MPG FREEWAY! its supposed to be the huge fucking amount! when i used to have a clunker that is 20 years old that does better! (well, it did 12 years ago. but an 8 year old car that got that good of an MPG? that run WELL, let alone with a hole in the radiator?). the car is STILL in use, that neighbor’s grandson Juan uses it now. or maybe it’s his sister’s (they are twins)

IF they actually get some sort of bailout, it should have the stipulation that they QUIT making cars designed to fall apart in less than 5 years. really.

That’s so incredibly Pagan.  I mean, if it floats their boat, then good for them, but let’s say you wanted to do a wealth and prosperity spell, you’d take several items that represented what you were concerned about, stick them on an altar and pray to the Gods for help. 

I guess it’s really a question of optics.  Both Pagans and Christians pray to invisible sky fairies, but we like to use lots of visual cues such as idols, charms and magick herbs, Christians usually just pray.

Nelson Muntz says: Ha Ha!

“I said, HA HA!”

As midnight an hour?

It is either midnight or it is not.  There are not degrees of midnight.  And if he was going for the “darkest hour” metaphor, that comes “before the dawn”.

Well, it makes as much sense as praying over anything else.  It’s not like it’s going to be doing anybody any good.

Looks like someone’s church is heading for spiritual bankruptcy.

Thanks, you just reminded me to email my Senator and Congressman and oppose the bailout. 

and BTW, Karl Marx still had it right, “Religion is the opium of the people.”  Harmful in that it encourages an outer locus of control view of life.

There is nothing funny or odd about working people praying for the survival of their jobs and communities and a large part of the central United States. Auto workers have done a lot of organizing and fighting for the past 80 years. The people in that church almost certainly voted for Barack Obama, and many have doubtless called their representatives in Congress. They have probably done what they could. Maybe later on, if things get worse, they can try community organization and direct action, seize the factories, declare the Socialist Republic of the Great Lakes and secede from the US. But not right now.

There is nothing funny or odd about working people praying for the survival of their jobs and communities and a large part of the central United States.

Sure there is.  For example, they could’ve tried to do something that actually has an effect.

Maybe later on, if things get worse, they can try community organization and direct action, seize the factories, declare the Socialist Republic of the Great Lakes and secede from the US.

You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some direct action at some point.  There are hard times now (and more to come) all over this country, but it’s especially bad in Michigan.  I grew up there, have friends and family there, and I’ll be going there to visit over the holidays.  The October numbers just came out, and Michigan’s unemployment rate is at 9.3%, which as we know underreports how bad the situation is.

So in times like these, people will sometimes resort to the kind of thing we see in this post.  I don’t begrudge folks their religion (though I don’t follow one myself); I do find the SUV props distasteful and, dare I say it, idolatrous, but not all that surprising.

I do think some prayer for economic deliverance, as another commenter put it, would have been the better choice, but again as a nonbeliever, that’s not really my place to say.  I myself am undecided yet on an auto industry bridge loan; not because I necessarily oppose them per se (and the financial loans prove many of our “free marketers” don’t either), but because I’m concerned such loans won’t actually work.

That said, something needs to be done.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to let an entire regional economy sink.

It really stinks of class warfare and anti-union bias that the Big 2.5 is even questioned after that stinker passed

Bingo.  There are reasonable arguments one can make to oppose an auto industry loan, but quite a bit of opposition to it is rooted in exactly this.

There is nothing funny or odd about working people praying for the survival of their jobs and communities and a large part of the central United States

True, and I’m sure those prayers were happening without the intercession of a self-proclaimed middleman. And in regard to that person, there is something enormously funny and odd about the preacher of a megachurch praying for the survival of a seriously dysfunctional industry, and channeling those prayers through what amount to graven idols.

Whatever happened to burnt offerings? SUVs would be perfect for that.

Question: Can one hour be more midnight than another hour? Let’s hope God isn’t a stickler for logical grammar.

and BTW, Karl Marx still had it right, “Religion is the opium of the people.” Harmful in that it encourages an outer locus of control view of life.

AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH

Read the entire f %^king passage!!!

Marx is more sympathetic towards religion, even while disdaining it, than he gets interpreted as today, perhaps because opium was considered quite differently back in his day.

Wow, tin gods.

The satanist subversion would be using a sexy red Italien sports car as an altar, I guess.

PiaToR: Read the entire f %^king passage!!!

Word. Religion, like opium, helps with the pain but not the illness. Like, well, taking aspirin when one would need back surgery.

Laugh all you want.  Just know that people are getting really, really desperate here in Detroit.

Laugh all you want.  Just know that people are getting really, really desperate here in Detroit.

Indeed.  Right now, I’m not especially confident that the political will exists to do anything about that.

“perhaps because opium was considered quite differently back in his day”
Also because Commies are notoriously Godless.