Duper's Delight is a nickname for the smile that precedes a deliberate lie. I have seen it many times dealing with Lutheran leaders. Obama smiled for a moment when he told of learning about the private email server at the same time the public did - through the news media. However, we have copies of his emails, using the code name "bobama," that were on the private server.
I made some predictions about the Love Letter pastor in Alaska. I said it was a long-term habit - and his classmate wrote to me that it was. I assumed that a big stressor brought out the aberrant behavior, and that was exactly what happened. He had just been confronted about his ministry. Knowing WELS, I figured someone in his family was influential, so he was being protected by the District President and Circuit Pastor. Right again. More details could be added. An abusive sect behaves in predictable ways.
One former Lutheran was very upset about the Evangelical church he joined. I began telling him how people were behaving. He was quite startled and said, "How do you know?" I told him about my experiences and the common themes that reveal themselves when people are dishonest and covet power.
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| If a dentist lived here, would his business decay? The Lutheran leaders remind me of this house. |
One irony is that people rush ahead with their claims even though technology has changed everything. Boomers are just about hopeless with computers, but the younger generations are almost as bad. I do not mean everyone should know the rules of subnet masking or recite the OSI model. Every so often I say to a techie, "It's always the physical layer, isn't it?" One Hispanic installer said, "Jes" with a sigh. Perpetual storage of data is the biggest threat to deceit.
The big change is this - everything is saved on hard drives, flash drives, servers, and The Cloud, usually multiple times. If someone wants to brag on the Net, the boasting is saved on the Net. The tiniest details can be put in a little pile to put together a profile. When I worked on an earlier class reunion, I paid for Spokeo ($30) to find classmates. I could start with a name and a state, find a home, discover the age of the owner, and learn about that person's job and the value of the home. I had two people named Charles R in my hometown. One was Junior. I found his address and his father's on Spokeo, by looking at their ages. There are always missing classmates, often in the school's hometown.
Someone googled a pastor's name and found a long post on Ichabod about that individual. But the pastor erased that call from his resume. Deception? Let's look at the website where the Invisible Pastor worked. No record of his time there remained. Often all the pastors are listed, but not always. Jim Huebner is the one and only pastor to serve Grace, Milwaukee. Huebner's blowhard bio sounds like he wrote it himself.
The funny part about erasing that information is that the individual draws attention to it by making it seem to go away. Church and Change had their own websty, photos and bios of the board members (half from Mark Jeske's congregation). As soon as I published that information, photos and bios disappeared faster than a bottle at an underage drinking party. Eventually Church and Change disappeared - or rather, went into hiding. The hellish members denied they were working together and hated me for publishing their gushing posts on their rather public discussion site.
When a WELS pastor threatened to gang rape a young woman, his name was erased from the congregation's website - or so they thought. I knew WELS had a policy of deleting information, so they could deny the obvious. I began opening documents and there it was, still on the congregation's website, but not on the staff page. Of course, he did not use his Christian name in making the threat. He used another name, like Carlos Danger (Huma's hubby) and the Net found him out.
The big lie among Lutherans is that they are Lutheran. This weekend the same old trite phrases will be cited repeatedly. Like love, love, love - which is now love, love, love, love, love - grace will be multiplied many times over to make up for their lack of preparation. They will invoke grace countless times, as the sectarians always do, but they will be unable to articulate the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. If that did, as Professor Surburg wrote in Christian News, they would have to admit that their UOJ dogma and apostate agendas have nothing to do with the Christian Faith.
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| Luther - "The world runs on greed and deception." Or, as 29A says, "It's all about the benjamins." |
