| Link to the Time article - >Time magazine names T.D. Jakes 'America's best preacher' as well as a second article Spirit Raiser Pentecostal preacher T. D. Jakes rose to prominence after having wrote a book entitled 'Woman, thou art loosed' and since then seems to specialize in preaching to women so as to encourage them to accept conservative Christian dogma. Women should not work, as this deflates the natural male ego. His wife describes her attitude before she became a Christian. "The unemployment (money) ran out," Serita Jakes recalled. "And he was digging ditches with his brother to lay gas lines and preaching to revivals to subsidize their income. I worked as a DJ at a Christian radio station at night, but little did I realize that it was deflating his masculine instinct to want to take care of his family." I have serious problems with a man telling 'a woman's story'. For example Jakes said, "Some of the issues, the divorce, the abuse, the traumas, the various types of pain that women are facing today are not new," Jakes said. "They have been facing them for years ... " This is true, but Jakes is a man, and he has not been facing women's problems for years, but this practice of telling the stories of others is quite common in conservative religious circles, where, for example, the story of certain disliked minorities (such as gays and lesbians) will be told by heterosexual preachers, who emphasize 'their suffering' or 'the darkness' they experience and so on. People should be allowed to tell their own stories, free of censorship, by the way. For example one could hear the story of a 'converted woman' who stopped working to avoid threatening her husband's masculinity, and then hear the story of a woman who worked while, by their family choice, her husband stayed at home (by free from censorship I mean that they would not be screened so that the story would be how much pain and misery and male sexual inadequacy they struggle with, since there are people out there who are happy with their choices, and deserve to speak as well.) This practice of speaking for others or censoring stories that are not ideologically 'correct' is epidemic in conservative Christian circles. Women's stories should be told by women, and should be told by women in all their diversity. As for commentary on conservative Biblical doctrine concerning women, for some critical examination of this particular view of the sexes you can consult my critical commentary the conflict over the status of women in the Church Testament. It turns out that in the very beginning of the church women held the very highest offices in the church. This stirred up a powerful counter reaction by Greek Stoic males who forced women back down into subjugation where they remained in the church ever since under the ruse that 'it was the word of God' for them (simply because the letters written by radical women who discarded their veils, or became apostles and prophets were not included in the canon, and we only know they existed because they are attacked in the Stoic letters that were written by Stoic males and canonized by celibate Stoic males and thus declared by the vote of Stoic males to be 'the Word of God'. The Bible is also contradictory and dualistic on the subject of the place of women as it is on just about everything else. You can also find more evidence for the sexist nature of Biblical portrayals of women by consulting my page on Zionism. While it is true that Jakes preaches with classic Black Pentecostal flair, the ideology of female subjugation he espouses is very questionable, does not appear to be original to the church, but is merely the repetition of the backlash against radical female emancipation that seems to have the defining characteristic of the social movement that was the early church. The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush Click here for more information |
A Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory
is also available as a zip file -> unified.zip
Introduction :The Pioneer Effect and the New Physics. A brief description of the new physics required to explain the 'Pioneer Effect', which is the constant deceleration of space craft as they fly through space.