Great moments in religious fervor


This evangelical preacher is literally phoning it in while he talks in tongues.

I am curious as to what was so absorbing on the phone that he forgot to talk in tongues and just began groaning.

Comments

  1. Matt G says

    I sometimes wonder about this. How many actually believe what they’re preaching, and how many are full-blown con artists? Is it possible for someone be somewhere in the middle?

  2. Rob Grigjanis says

    Matt G @1: I think a reasonable first approximation is that the ratio of con artists to true believers is roughly the same across all ideologies. A second approximation would include how much money can be made from the true believers.

  3. Jenora Feuer says

    @Matt G:
    The problem is that people can drift back and forth across the boundary. There have been cases of people who actually believed they were psychic to start with, then who made mistakes and were still believed, then decided to just invert everything and still got believed, and ended up moving over to full con artistry because it had become obvious to them that whether what they said was actually ‘right’ had no relation to how well it worked. There have also been cases of people mostly starting as con artists, especially in quack medical cures or the like, becoming true believers in their own bull. Folks like Alex Jones may be examples of the latter; it’s harder to tell the difference between a true believer and a con artist who doesn’t break character.

    (People who’ve moved from true believer to con artist tend to be more willing to talk about it, at least after they’re not running the con anymore.)

  4. machintelligence says

    Someone give him a sharp poke; he seems to be “stuck in a groove” to use vinyl record parlance.

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