If Joel Olsteen was ugly he’d be writing horoscopes.

That’s basically all his so-called sermons amount to, only swap out “Gemini” for a vague entity he calls “God,” and swap out “Sagittarius foresees” for a vaguely described “Scriptures say to you that…”

The man’s a menace.

He talks about the Bible in vague terms, using phrases like “Scripture says…” followed by half-sensible paraphrases of scripture. Anytime a preacher says “scripture says” I immediately know that guy has either forgotten where the verse is he’s trying to quote (been there) or is about to make up something that he thinks sounds Bibleish.

His twitter page, which is basically just a collection of snippets from his sermons, is actually the perfect format for his brand of religiosity (I refuse to call it theology). His actual sermons are basically just his twitter page with all the tweets strung together. In fact, it’s almost difficult to compare and contrast the two. After a while, I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Which came first, the string of mindless fluff dispensed as tweets, or the sermons that simply contain a man in a well-tailored suit dispensing mindless fluff?

Anyway, I wrote some replies which I know full-well will never been seen by him since he doesn’t even run his twitter page. He has a whole team of people who carefully manicure his digital presence just as they carefully manicure his fingernails.

I scrolled for a loooong time through his twitter feed and I can count on one hand the number times he even mentioned Jesus. In fact I could count on one hand and still have four fingers left over. He mentioned Jesus in a tweet on Easter.

I suppose he felt obligated to throw a bone.

He talks about God like He’s a force of nature.  He talks about the Bible in ways devoid of context or concern for who is speaking and to whom, why it’s being said and when. Wading through his many inane platitudes paints a picture of someone who thinks of the Bible like it’s a book that has no real message behind it. Instead, to Joel, the Bible is a fortune cookie dispenser: Just open it at random, read any verse in any order, and whatever you read can always be applied to you and your present circumstance, no questions asked.

This is not the way to study the Bible, nor the way to preach it. Even if I could talk to him about this, I doubt he would listen. He makes too much money telling people that God is just ready and waiting to give you everything the world has to offer if only you would give him (Joel) a little bit more of your money.

Jets don’t come cheap.

~ Matthew