Who better to advise the flock on investment opportunities than the same church-authorities-cum-businessmen who say you won’t go to heaven if you disobey them?

Two leaders of a Bay Area church with a controversial past are under investigation for an alleged real estate scheme, KPIX 5 has learned. Some members of the General Assembly Church, with congregations in Vallejo, Union City, Moreno Valley in Southern California and two other states said the promise of eternal life cost them dearly. “It was a nightmare,” said Horace Gill. He was the pastor of a former branch of the church in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Gill said in 2002, pastor Lacy Hawkins started preaching about a real-estate investment opportunity.

Members of the congregation, prodded by their then-pastor, put a fortune into real-estate deals run by Hawkins’ second-in-command under the business name ‘Daystar.’ Questions were not allowed. Recalls former church member Julio Ramirez,

“Anytime we used to ask questions we were told that you are in a bad spirit, what is wrong with you?”

God did, however, quietly perform a miracle, and made all the Daystar investors multi-millionaires.

Nah, just kidding.

Daystar suddenly closed its doors in 2006. Stunned church members asked for their money back, only to find out it was gone.

But that’s nothing compared to what a business-minded leader of a church with one million gospel lovers can do. Just think of the riches that so many faithful people can produce! David Yonggi-Cho sure did.

The founding pastor of the world’s largest Pentecostal congregation is being indicted on charges of breach of trust for costing the church more than $9 million in a stock scheme gone awry. South Korean news sources report that prosecutors have indicted David Yonggi Cho, founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church which has more than 1 million congregants, for a stock scheme in which he arranged for the church to buy his son Cho Hee-jun’s stock “at a rate three to four times [the] market value.”

Other church leaders, too, are having a spot of trouble with that whole Biblical values thing.

A former West Michigan church deacon accused of taking cash from the weekly offertory basket has pleaded guilty to larceny. Joseph Finnigan made the plea Friday in Ottawa County Circuit Court. The 73-year-old pleaded to two counts of larceny over $20,000.

Our favorite story in this roundup happened just yesterday, when

[David Yonggi-Cho photo via hani.co.kr; Joseph Finnigan photo via WGVU]

À propos of yesterday’s post referencing the Ten Commandments, I thought I’d share this video of the late Christopher Hitchens proposing a rewrite of Christianity’s best-known moral code. The best bit starts at six minutes sixteen seconds.

Also, this: In 2008, Stephen Colbert met Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland. Four minutes eighteen seconds into the video, Colbert asks the congressman about his ostensible love for the Ten Commandments. What follows is as staggering an act of political self-immolation as has ever been committed to tape — funny and mortifying at once.

Thanks for visiting — see you on Monday!

Ah, church. The warm bath of social acceptance… the quiet presence of divinity… the lovely prospect of lawsuits and restraining orders…

Wait, what?

A central Toledo church is seeking protection from 13 members of its congregation who allegedly have become disruptive to the church. Southern Missionary Baptist Church, 1224 Indiana Ave., has filed a motion for a temporary restraining order in Lucas County Common Pleas Court. The church and its pastor, the Rev. Lemuel A. Quinn, have asked the court to block Elmore Sturdivant and 12 others from engaging in disruptive conduct that has included physically assaulting the pastor, holding a meeting in which they allegedly acted to remove the pastor and others from their church offices, making false reports to police, threatening church members and leaders, and circulating rumors of the pastor’s death “in order to diminish the attendance at the church’s weekly services.”

Thou shalt not steal sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? No loopholes there, right?

But wait. Per Wikipedia:

Significant voices of academic theologians … suggest that the commandment “you shall not steal” was originally intended against stealing people — against abductions and slavery.

There! A loophole big enough to drive a church van through! So maybe that explains what one of God’s earthly stand-ins, Pastor Arthur Pearson, decided to do with his congregants’ money.

Pastor Arthur Pearson pleaded no contest to embezzling between $50,000 and $100,000 from the Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church. The allegations first surfaced in early January 2012. He turned himself in, and claimed his contract did not specifically prevent him from using certain funds on personal items, such as car repairs and mall shopping trips.

His contract did not specifically prevent him from taking other people’s money for his personal shit. Another awesome loophole! Thank you Lord!

In March, [Pearson] was ordered to stand trial. He was eventually fired from the church in June.

That the flock ousted the shepherd may have had something to do with the findings of forensic accountant Michelle McHale-Adams.

McHale-Adams examined checks and credit card statements from the church. For instance, $5,000 and $4,500 checks that Pearson wrote to himself for bonuses. She also referenced Pearson’s $22,000 credit card bill that was paid by checks from the church’s account. The accountant’s testimony showed that checks from the organization’s accounts even paid the Pearson’s mortgage and license plate renewals. “That check was flagged for $607 because on the back of the check it referenced Reverend Pearson’s four personal vehicles,” said McHale-Adams.

Come on, you can see why owning four cars costs a little extra cash, can’t you?

Now get this: Pearson wasn’t the only one who had his hand in the collection box — he had a church-lady accomplice.

A second person involved in an embezzlement scheme that may have lost Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church more than $230,000 over three years has entered into a plea deal. Gerolanita Bailey, the former bookkeeper at Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, pleaded no contest to a charge of embezzlement of between $50,000 and $100,000. Bailey, 50, is accused of taking nearly $60,000 from the church and using it for her own benefit — mostly to pay bills.

For the sake of their precious thieving souls, I’d recommend reading and reciting Psalm 62.10:

Put no trust in extortion;
set no vain hopes on robbery;
if riches increase, set not your heart on them.

Seems clear enough. But what do I know?

[image via Zazzle]

Given the title of this blog, Christians who say that those in favor of equal rights “have broken the moral compass” get our automatic attention. And who better to school us on the finer points of morality and decency than the fundies of Westboro Baptist Church, who show up at military funerals, and at remembrances for victims of school shootings, carrying signs like these:

This week, Westboro’s paragons of virtue were at it again.

Outside Santa Monica High School on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, Calif., Westboro Baptist Church members assembled with signs reading “God H8s Fags” and “You Eat Your Kids” to protest the school’s affirmation of LGBT students, according to the Los Angeles Times. According to their website, Westboro intended to target “brutish teachers & hateful parents” who “have broken the moral compass of this generation” and have doomed the nation by “embracing sodomy.”

Watch what transpired:

Herbert Rodgers couldn’t stand the thought of Carmen Tarleton, his estranged wife, seeing another man. Nor could he stomach the idea of the pending divorce. He beseeched the Almighty for divine intervention.

When God didn’t stop him, he said, he set out for her home, planning to beat the man with a baseball bat and pour lye over him. But when he got there, there was no man, so Rodgers broke into the house through a window, tied her up and dumped lye all over her in an attack that left her with a broken arm, a broken eye socket [from his beating her with a baseball bat], and burns over 80 percent of her body.

He didn’t care about the presence of their 12- and 14-year-old daughters, who were living with Tarleton. When Vermont State Police Troopers responded to the 911 call, the girls were outside the house, screaming “He’s killing her!” The officers entered the home, where

…[trooper Hugh] O’Donnell and other responding officers found Tarleton crawling on the floor, her face distorted from the chemical, her skin turning brown before his eyes as she begged for an ambulance. …

“During my encounter with Rodgers he told me that he had been talking to God over the past week or so asking him to stop him from doing this,” O’Donnell said in an affidavit released Monday. “He said that he was going to wait until his birthday for God to respond.”

That was six years ago. In recent days, after a mind-boggling 55 prior surgeries, Carmen Tarleton received a new face. No word on whether God has gotten better at obeying ultimatums from the faithful.

[image via nbcnews]