I went to a church like this one time when my family went on vacation to Florida when I was a child. The church was having one of those revival things and my stepfather's idiot mother made us go every night of the week we were there so I didn't enjoy it.
The part I remember the most was the pastor talking about some guy outside of a bar talking shit to god drunk as shit until someone witnessed to him. That drunk was him and he turned his life around and had a big fucking church in Tampa or something like that. He started doing the laying of hands and shaking in their suits and shit. It scared the shit out of me. People were screaming and falling to their knees and yelling and falling over like sandbags. Then my stepdad started speaking in tongues and looking to the ceiling
The part I'm trying to get to with all that back story was some really fat older woman was hootin and hollerin like mad and fell over almost directly in my line of sight. She was wearing some kind of dress and apparently no underwear or maybe her asshole ate it because her dress rose up enough to reveal whatever was under her dress to my eyes. I sat there and looked and just stared at this mountain of creased and folded flesh for some amount of time, not being able to take my eyes off it. I just stared at it and everything in the background was just noise because I had found something my young mind couldn't properly register at the time. The next thing I remembered was walking into a Denny's.
I will always remember when my grandmother called me in to her TV room one day when I was about nine. There was a faith healer show on, and she made sure to explain to me that those men were frauds and the people in attendance were only fooling themselves. RIP, Grandma the Poet.
I remember one week over the summer I went to West Virginia with my Presbyterian church group to work with Habitat For Humanity. While we were there, a local Baptist church hosted us for dinner and a service. Things devolved quickly. They lined up a group of local kids to confess all the sins they had committed during an indeterminate time-frame while the congregation hooted and yelled alleluia, which, if you're Presbyterian, is terrifying. The climax of the whole event was a morbidly obese girl who, after confessing her sins, burst into tears and ran up and down between pews screaming "I don't want to go to hell! Jesus save me from hell!"
tl,dr: Mainline Protestants should stay out of West Virginia and/or evangelical services.
Like Bob Larson's "exorcisms", this is more religious stage hypnosis. If people believe strongly enough that an easy-to-manifest effect will happen to them when the religious leader gives some kind of cue, it will happen. The advertising itself is part of the suggestion, telling people what to expect to happen.
Related to / beyond that: they desperately want to see some kind of proof that Jesus is out there and has some discernible effect on their world, so they generate that effect.
I want to see David E. Taylor and Master Ryuken battle each other's minions.
I sold this guy a website, no joke talked to him for like 4 hours on the phone.
http://www.joshuamediaministries.org/
That's the old design and I'm sure the new one will be just as much of a trainwreck because this dude thinks he can get HBO.com for faith healers for ,000 lol
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