The Prosperity Gospel Isn't The Only Problem.

Aye. I moved. As you can see, it's a studio so kinda downsized. I shop for clothes about 3 times a year. Nothing extravagant, just a few stores at the local mall and only enough to cover my needs for whatever season it is. As an example, I caught these shoes because I don't really have many pairs of sneakers anymore. The brand shall not be named because there's no free ads on this channel, but you know what it is. I don't promote clothes anyway.

Y'all saw the headline "I won't tease you." This video is about the connection between the prosperity gospel, which I've visited before, and black consumerism, or really, grifters. In however many minutes, I'm gonna bring you the kinda data I used to see all the time when my corporate ad agency bosses were figuring out how to sell to us. Then connect that to the way these deceptive clout goblins have weaponized our aspirations and our religions against us.

Shoutout to longtime sponsor Aura for the support on this video. I'll keep it quick. Alright, so y'all have seen me talk about Aura many, many times from this channel. It's an all-in-one cyber security service. I can check out my credit score. I can check out my transactions. I can check out the amount of requests sent to data brokers to remove my data from their services, etc, etc. But I actually want to focus on an aspect of the platform that I don't talk about very often, and it's these helpful articles on the side. Aura actually did the extra effort to put together a state of the youth report. An example of some of the information they gave me in this PDF was that among 11-year-olds, 44% of conversations with AI companions involved violence. There's a graph showing the causes of tech arguments between parents and their kids. There's a word association chart showing the most used slang terms. According to some of y'all, I'm unc, and that one's on there. Get a two-week free trial with Aura if you want a service that goes above and beyond and gives you information you didn't even know you needed. Link in the description and on screen.

I don't ever roast people for aspects of their physical appearance that they can't easily change. Not their face, not their body, not their hair. I've told the story before, but I got hit with partial facial paralysis in college. Something that still affects me as I speak to you now. So I know what it means to be humbled. What I have done in prior videos is point out how grifters and scammers tend to dress. These loud, shiny, bedazzled outfits would make sense if they were an Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band. But that's not what's happening when these pastors, MLM hustlers, self-help course sellers, and stock trading gurus turn your idolization into income. I know some of y'all came for that roasting here too, but I'm gonna level with you. There isn't a lot to say there. I was literally trying to write a section about just their clothes and jewelry and all that, and it felt like when you're in high school, trying to add empty paragraphs to an essay. I think it's much more interesting to analyze the reasons why we fall for that bullshit and sprinkle in examples along the way.

The best way to understand the genesis of modern black consumerism is to start in an era where we started to flex that muscle for the first time. I'll talk about the actual book of Genesis later. Watch this video with me real quick. It's about advertising to the Negro, and it reveals how they looked at us then. Spoiler alert, nothing has changed. There was a time when blacks were denied access to the nicer products sold in America, like clothes and even food. I'm sorry, what? Clothes and food are not the nicer products. Those are basic necessities to stay alive. He probably meant those were categories of products where we got denied. But I couldn't let that slide. When blacks were finally able to shop at mainstream stores, they didn't skip a beat, even going for the nicer items, even if they couldn't afford it. Like I said, nothing has changed.

Civic Science, an organization that collects survey responses on a large scale to sell that data to advertisers, asked over 900 black respondents last year about their intent to spend across several categories. They found that compared to the general population, we plan to spend more significantly on clothes, tech, entertainment, and beauty this year. Now listen, surveys don't necessarily make it a rule for an entire race, but it adds on to a lot of research that points towards the truth. Even in a recession, like the one we're in or headed into, we're pretty likely to keep spending our money the same way we always have. With the brands we trust or luxury brands, we really like luxury brands. This data comes from McKinsey Research in 2023. They're one of the top consulting firms in the game. Black consumers are younger than the general population. Did you know that? We preferred e-commerce by 11 percentage points as a result and have less of a preference for reading reviews. We also prefer black-owned businesses much more than other ethnic groups prefer shopping with their own. I'm going to tie this back into scammer wardrobes and grifter practices after we revisit that weird advertising video.

Here is what sales psychologists have to say about selling to the Negro. The secret of selling to the Negro is expressed in one word. That word is recognition. Now there's nothing unusual about that. People want to be recognized. They need recognition. That's basic in all of us, but perhaps because he's had so little of it, the Negro needs even more. He needs to feel important and appreciated. It shows up even in many of the Negro shopping habits. Anyone who sells or wants to sell to the Negro customer should know about some of these habits. Three habits in particular play a big part in every sales transaction. To begin with, most Negroes buy by brand. They ask for products by name. They're quick to turn down all brands. Do you wonder why? No, I don't wonder why. Versu-signaling, if I had to put it into words, luxury clothes and quality products signal to the outside world and to ourselves that we've made it. We're worth taking seriously. We're on par with the people we see as successful. And we're not reliant on low-quality knockoffs due to economic insecurity. Well, listen to what this customer is saying. That last hat I bought just didn't hold up at all. You see, for a long time the Negro has been sold a lot of shoddy second-class merchandise. So now he asks for name brands in order to make sure he gets his money's worth. Are these things people in other ethnic groups are sensitive to? Absolutely. But the data shows that we're spending more of our income on these products than any of them. So if you want to isolate what makes us more susceptible to it, we gotta listen to what the professional salespeople say about us. I'm telling you, the old-timey language makes it sound outdated and very racist. But these generalizations hold up pretty well to this day. We have access to the same stores and products as most other consumers these days. But the magnetism towards these brand names lingers in our psyche just a little bit more.

I don't think I've told this story before, but it's super relevant to this topic. So bear with me. I've seen an example in real time of us giving our income back to luxury brands as soon as we get it. It was the middle of the peak pandemic years, the day after the stimmy checks went out. I went to Phipps Plaza here in Atlanta to hit the AMC. Since solo movie trips are kinda my thing, I have no idea what movie I was going to see. I don't remember. I just remember that it was really bad. As I walked by the coach store, there was a line stretching across the mall full of us. This is a very black city and that mall is always full of us, but I've never seen a line like that in front of any store in the mall. Even the Apple store after a major drop doesn't have lines like that. Nike and Jordan don't get lines like that. There isn't even a lot of stuff in these boutique stores, just bags and some clothes, but that's the whole point. They keep stock low, the lighting is all bright and enticing, and the square footage is like a studio apartment like the one I'm in. The store wasn't even open and people were patiently waiting to get access to these gaudy pieces. And yeah, it might be true of other ethnic groups too, but we have a particularly strong attachment to brand names, even when those brands aren't particularly impressive. I don't think it's breaking news that brands like Versace, Burberry, Armani Exchange, Louis Vuitton, etc. are all intentionally marketed to the middle class so we can feel closer to the upper middle class. These are all cases of marketing and perceived value taking precedence over their rapidly declining product quality. This article lists some of these brands and explains why their value is hella exaggerated, with stylists and fashion experts weighing in. Brands like Ralph Lauren have private label products for the wealthy without tags and logos. Meanwhile, these scammers rock Gucci belt buckles and glasses to inflate your perception of their value. We got Stormy Wellington rocking black feathers, butterfly outfits and sheer flamingo dresses in promo videos, Myron Golden with the Rolls Royce belts and suits, and every forex scammer you've ever seen with the best K&G outfits their mom's credit card can buy.

Halfway through writing this essay, I was lethargic and I couldn't finish writing it. I felt like this was pointless. I don't know if it's the larger audience or the fact that I've made dozens of these at this point, but it feels like nothing I'm doing is making an impact. I know that's mostly because this is a digital medium and I can't see the effects of my work all the time, but it's not something I can just ignore and keep making entertainment. There's a very clear origin for black people's worship of consumerism and luxury products. And I'm gonna spend the rest of this video nailing that shit to the wall. And yeah, I'm gonna give y'all the specific person to be mad at, but I promise the point is bigger than that.

I've I've done a piece on this concept before, which focused on three different types of black pastors. The corporate megachurch pastor, exemplified by T.D. Jakes, the exploitative criminal pastor, David E. Taylor, and the young charismatic Have you ever been swallowed up? Have you gone through a time of swallowing? The exploitative criminal pastor, David E. Taylor - Dreams is a language from God that is not the norm. A lot of things you may not understand, but it don't mean God isn't speaking to you. ...and the young, charismatic internet pastor who also happens to run a megachurch in Mike Todd. God's saying can you physically and spiritually and emotionally be able to stand? That video explored the fact that while very few pastors are actually committing crimes, almost all of them with large congregations are selling their followers out in favor of secular fame and personal enrichment. While I've been accused many times of hating religion and being unfairly critical towards it, it's just a fact that the black church is the first place most of us get our informal and formal education about which values should matter. We see our family members and friends dressed up in church one or more times a week, thereby causing us to associate formal clothes with religion, which itself teaches us to associate religion with virtue. I mean, the Christian church taught me that virtue itself literally originated in the Bible. I'm not really trying to start arguments this time, though, at least not in this part. Let's move on.

The prosperity gospel is a doctrine that exists to let Christians off the hook for pursuing worldly wealth and to let churches off the hook for not paying taxes. They do things like twist Bible verses to justify accumulating said wealth, ask their followers to fund their private jet purchases, run call-in campaigns where they mail people a dozen times to establish a parasocial relationship that results in donations and structure every sermon around a well-orchestrated ties and offerings segment with the choir killing it in the background. Yes, I'm here to argue that the prosperity gospel is at the root of our addiction to charismatic scammers. People like Stormy Wellington, the MLM Hustler Supreme, Myron Golden, the final boss of religious sales grifters, David Imonitie from iGenius, NVisionU and IML Academy, Daymond John from FUBU and Shark Tank, who have also covered, and he's also from a bunch of other self-help seminars and courses. They all intentionally use prosperity gospel tactics to trick customers into signing up for their pyramid schemes or give them money for self-help courses. Sometimes they do both, completely unrelated segue.

Let's watch pieces of this video by Myron Golden, where he talks about MLM success for regular viewers of the channel. If you're wondering when I'm going to leave Myron alone, the answer is never. He runs a giant sales course selling and motivational speaking business that he markets through two YouTube channels, one of which is called Bible Study. He pushes people to borrow from their retirement or take insurance policies out to invest with him. Myron replied when I first covered him on the channel, which I screenshotted before he could delete it. That whole back and forth is on Patreon. I tore him apart. He claimed that he doesn't use a prosperity gospel. Let's get into the tactics he uses from his own mouth. This video is going to change your life. I'm going to show you how to become a network marketing millionaire. It doesn't matter what network marketing company you're in. The way you become successful is the same. It doesn't matter whether you sell vitamins or whether you sell financial services or whether you sell biohacking equipment. It doesn't matter what you sell, because if you join a network marketing company and make the mistake of thinking that your success is going to be determined by your product or your compensation plan, you are confused almost to the point of delusion. I know that network marketing company, we have the best compensation plan. We have the best product. We have the best product. That's all well and good. Everybody's going to say that, so there's no way to measure it. What you can measure is how can you have success in this arena where you're selling things. You don't have success by emphasizing the product, and you don't have success by emphasizing the compensation plan. We haven't even gotten into the prosperity gospel part yet, but he's already said the quiet part out loud. So we got to pause here.

Multilevel marketing companies are only legal because they pretend that they aren't pyramid schemes. They do this by creating products and elaborate compensation plans where you're supposed to get paid based on a mix of both sales and recruitment. In reality, when you get past the complex sales volume requirements, you cannot reach the higher levels of profitability without recruiting thousands of people. And the stats from several of these companies show that 96% of people or more don't make a profit at all. When you have the knowledge that he has about how this business works, knowing people at the bottom need to be exploited in order for you to succeed, promoting MLMs is evil. This section needed to be in the video because I'm establishing why what he's doing is evil. I'm not done with MLMs yet either. Unpause. You have success by becoming a person of influence, becoming a leader. Leadership is developing in other people a desire to follow you. If you're going to build the business anyway, just understand the objective and don't make the mistake of thinking the objective is to sell a bunch of product. Yes, sell the products. Like, have customers because if you can sell products, then you can teach the distributors you have to sell products. But if you understand that the purpose of you selling products is for you to get good at teaching the people that you recruit how to sell products, then you're going to do better at network marketing. Does that make sense to everybody? Yes. Okay. Here, he's made it abundantly clear that you need to lead others to sell products on your behalf in order to earn tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands per month. That's the kind of money being earned by the people some of y'all hold in high regard, the Stormy Wellingtons of the world. You might be asking what makes this any different to a traditional sales business. Traditional sales businesses exploit people on the bottom of the totem pole too, but there's bare minimums and benefits, compensation, and payment structure that they have to abide by legally. MLMs don't. You're a 1099 contractor like I am with YouTube. So zero benefits. Unlike me, most of y'all make zero dollars after expenses. According to the FTC in 2024, the average monthly revenue was $84 or less for the overwhelming majority of MLM participants across 70 companies. Lastly, the pay structure runs money up the chain to the point where your upline and their upline, all the way up to the very top, are earning pieces of what you sell without working at all. All because they recruited you in the grocery store seven years ago and beat you over the head in Zoom calls every now and then when you miss your sales targets. I made my point. Let's move on to the prosperity gospel stuff.

The next video is called "Poverty is Always a Result of Spiritual Warfare." And by the way, not only do I respect your right to disagree with me, if you can show me from scripture that something I'm saying is wrong, I'll be the first to recant. Like I am not the authority. I am just a, I'm a voice. I'm a vessel. When anybody disagrees with me, I am right 100% of the time about one thing, but there's a 50% chance they could be right and the 50% chance I could be right. And if they're right, I want to know about it so I can change. And if I'm right, I want to know why I'm right. So I don't like, I don't believe that somebody disagreeing with me makes me unsafe. I feel like if I disagree with the foundation underneath a giant section of your business and people who watch agree with me and people in your audience start to agree with me, you might be a little unsafe. Not saying we're going to accomplish that here. I got like a ninth of your audience. Let's see what we can do though. By the way, don't take my word for anything I say. Go look it up for yourself. Go get yourself a strong concordance and then look up each individual word yourself or get yourself the strong's KJV app like I use and look up the words yourself. Don't take my word for it. That's exactly what we're doing. By the way, if you're a Christian, you do not want to watch beyond this point. I promise you, you will not like me by the end of it. I also want to note that if it seems like I'm getting off point in this section, it's because he did. He put all this nonsense in a sales seminar, not me.

Poverty is always the result of spiritual warfare. Like why are people poor? Understand this, before sin there was no lack. In fact, before sin, there was lack. So I got to take that back. Before sin, there was only one thing man lacked and the thing that man lacked was lack. Right? I've got to stop you there. He throws this out with a laugh, but there's a reason he led with it. It's the bedrock of his argument. This goes back to original sin in the garden of Eden. What does he have to say about it? So Genesis chapter two, verse 16 and 17, here's what it says. It says, um, and the Lord God commanded the man saying of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. I'm going to show you that the very first temptation in the history of the world was the temptation to focus on lack. That's the first thing I'm going to show you. The word Eden means pleasure. So it was God's protected place of pleasure for his people. So we, now we know God's ideal environment for man. And when I say man, I'm talking about men and women because it says in Genesis one, God called their name, Adam. Adam later called her name Eve. So God called their name Adam. Right. And the word Adam means man, Aleph, Dalad, Mem, and Aleph represents God, Dalad, Mem is blood. So what is man or a woman, a God-like creature with flesh and blood? I should probably lay down some ground rules for this section. I'm about to put some Bible scriptures on screen as I referenced them and as I respond to what Myron's talking about. And I don't have time to read through those and painstakingly go through every word, but pause the video. That's what the pause button is for. If you want to read the scripture and reference it, go ham. I'm going to say a lot of stuff that's controversial for Christians and believers. And I want to make sure that y'all know that I'm pulling this from the Bible, not out of my ass. When you hunt down and investigate scams for a living, it becomes really, really difficult to stay a religious person. There's a lot of similarities between the scams I've investigated and the general structure of these religions. Hadam means human and Adam's name or Adam was broken off of that. Eve's name was not Eve, it was Hawa or Isha. And that's whitewashing, of course. She was tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit that she then offers to Adam, Adam, and the Christian version. This fruit gave them the concept of shame and the idea of lack. It's not her fault in Islam, by the way. They share responsibility for original sin in other Abrahamic religions. So far, the Christian version has talking serpents, magic no-no fruit that has information embedded in it, and misogyny, since none of this would have happened if Eve wasn't so easily tempted by serpents. Yes, Christianity caused the red pill, too. Now, that's not to say that Islam is not misogynistic, because it absolutely is. In the Quran, not only did they not even give Eve a name, but after they ate the fruit and the fall of man took place, God consoled Adam as opposed to both of them at the same time or talking to both of them. Basically, she was treated like she didn't exist. When Myron says there was no lack, he's leaning on this myth to support him. There's no evidence that it happened. And even if it did, the Christian version is intentionally twisted to be misogynistic and blame humans for something God could have easily avoided in the first place. Most importantly, he's tying the claim that there was no lack before sin to his larger point that poverty is the result of spiritual warfare. He's going to teach you how to uneat the fruit.

In verse 16, it says, "The Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat." Now, like, let's do some thinking now. Let's do some thinking. The word "every" and the word "freely." Are those abundance words or lack words? Every and freely. Look, it don't get any more abundant than every and freely. Like, every freely. What if somebody said you can have every car for freely? What if somebody said you can have every house freely? Like, that ain't a little bit. That's a what? That's a lot. This is establishing the connection between what God was referring to, water, sustenance, touching literal grass, and what Myron wants you to direct your attention towards. Possessions, capital, stuff, consumerism. I'd argue that God was clearly not referring to cars and houses and that using those in this comparison is intentional. If cars and houses are the trees in this metaphor, then the tree of good and evil in the middle has to be our lack mindset, right? This is going to be another mindset mastery seminar. Let's continue just to make sure I'm not jumping the gun. And they've got all these trees. What kind of trees do they have? I don't know. Maybe they got plum trees and maybe they got pear trees and maybe they got peach trees and maybe they got apple trees and orange trees and tangerine trees. It says, "but." Now, he didn't say "and." So when he says "but," the thing he's going to say is not going to be anything like the thing he's already said. It's going to be something different, right? So he said, "but the tree that's in the midst of the garden, thou shalt not eat of it for the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." How many trees is that? One, right? So we have we have two things when it comes to their sustenance, their ability to survive, their ability to live. We have two things in the Garden of Eden. We have abundance and we have lack. Correct me if I'm wrong, Myron, but you just contradicted yourself. Every and freely imply free will, right? The thing is, if there's true free will, but one thing you're instructed not to do on penalty of death, then there's already a problem with this plan. How would these brand new humans know what death is without having a concept of lacking life? How do they know that this voice in their heads has the authority to tell them what to do? What differentiates the voice in their heads from the voice of the serpent in terms of authority? They're supposed to resist doing something forever just because the voice said so. And some people say, "well why, but if God didn't want him to eat off the tree, why did he put it there?" God made man with a choice. This is a bad plan that only ends one way. And since God is supposed to be all-knowing, God had to know this was going to happen. What is this fake test for? God made man with a choice. Why? For the same reason, if you're in a relationship with a man, ladies, or if you're in a relationship with a woman, men, okay, that's God's design, right? You don't want somebody to say, "hey baby, I love you. Why do you love me? Well, just because I have to." Adolescence makes a significant amount of people realize that they're naturally homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc. So no, that isn't God's design. Casual religious queerphobia just sprinkled into this sales tutorial. So God gave us a choice so that when we were reciprocating the love that he had for us, we were doing it because we desired to do it, right? When we did the thing that he commanded us to do that was in our own best interest, we were doing it because we wanted to. Every time somebody brings up the love God has for us, my eyes involuntarily roll back. This is not love. This is control. It's manipulation. It implies the same false authority that parents have when their children become something they don't want them to become. Who are you to tell someone with free will what's in their best interest? You may say, "I'm their parent, therefore it's my job to guide them." Great, guide them to the best of your ability. That's fine. I'd argue that punishing them with eternal banishment from the protection of the garden, like many parents do when they find out their child's sexual identity is on the queer spectrum and kick them out of the house is not a reasonable response to your children exercising free will though.

Well, that seems like a pretty good plan. No, it doesn't. Verse 10, John 10, 10, here's what it says. "The thief cometh not but for to steal, to kill, and to destroy." When you destroy something, do you have more or do you have less? You have less, right? So we can see the thief, by the way, is another name for the enemy, for Satan, for Lucifer, for the devil. He's not, it doesn't say he's coming to steal, kill, and destroy. It doesn't say that. It says he's not coming unless he can kill, steal, or destroy. Like not coming. He said, "If there ain't nothing for me to steal, I ain't going. If there ain't nobody for me to kill, ain't no reason for me to show up. If I can't test something up, I might as well stay home." And now he's preaching. That was preaching. It took me back to attending Presbyterian or Baptist churches when I was younger and how the pastor translates scriptures in the street language that we can grab onto since it had humor in it, right? Y'all mind if I crash out real quick? He introduced the OG villain character in this myth, Satan, aka Lucifer. Satan is the avatar Christians use to answer all the uncomfortable questions about how terrible this plan is. Satan is a fallen angel, right? Why is he given access to the garden at all? God is all-knowing, so we had to see this going badly, right? Did he think his naive, naked creations had the experience to deal with the manipulative fallen angel? Is Lucifer actually the bad guy at all? Or was he up there telling God how terrible his plans are and got labeled as the villain forever? This is starting to feel like America versus every country we bomb to hell, in the same way we put out lies and propaganda about them after replacing their leader via a coup. This is fun. Y'all having fun? I don't know if y'all heard of Gnosticism. Essentially, this is a philosophy that sees Lucifer as more of a light bringer or bringer of knowledge, which is tracking with my argument about Lucifer maybe being perceived incorrectly or, you know, like unfairly shadow-banned to use modern vernacular. And if your perspective shifts to that angle, it sheds light on a lot of things. It casts the creator or God or whatever you call it as this controlling entity, which the Bible supports. The Bible backs up that God is extremely controlling and extremely vain and requires worship and viciously punishes disobedience. And then you have this serpent who's characterized as like trying to become God and that is therefore evil when based on what I saw in the Bible, what he was really doing was waking them up.

All right, if there's anything I'm going to explain more, it's this. This quote on screen is really crucial. It's referred to most often when it comes to people trying to explain why Lucifer is so evil and why he needed to be cast out of heaven. They're called the I will statements. Basically Lucifer saying all the things he will do and what he wants to do, replace God, rule in his place, all that type of stuff. Now, if we presume that replacing God is evil in the first place, which I don't know why we would, but let's just give you the benefit of the doubt that that's an evil thing. Who says Lucifer said this? Isaiah wrote that God said that Lucifer said this. Where's the proof? At best, this is hearsay. At worst, this is propaganda. And it's also extremely flimsy evidence that we use time and time again in this fairy tale to cast Lucifer as the evil entity here. When Lucifer never drowned an entire planet's worth of people, Lucifer has made more money for more pastors than any one supervillain in the history of the world. And it all hinges on his super ability of whispering in people's ears.

Let's get to the part where he talked about wealth and justifies attaining it. What are some of the warnings the Bible gives us about wealth? Well, it tells us not to love it. The Bible tells us not to love the wealth. And you've heard me say this before. So many people, by the way, this is not something that just rich people do. This is something poor people do too. So many people love the money and use the people. I wish I had some help in here. But I believe what we ought to do is we ought to use the money and love the people. And then when we take it to its ultimate extreme, that we can pass the test that the rich young ruler in our story last week failed. And that is that we can use the money to love the people. Oh, snap, let's go. When you use the money to love the people now, guess what you're doing? You're using your abundance to be a blessing to somebody else. You are being way more Godlike. Come on in here. This is a lot. We're in full on pressure mode. And hopefully you're seeing how the manipulation is taking shape. I honestly don't need to show you anything else, even though I definitely will. In those segments, he establishes why wealth is good if it's used to benefit people, implies that he's helping people via his wealth, and says people who use wealth to benefit people are more holy than others. Let's break down why this is manipulative and misleading. Myron is a multi-millionaire, according to everything he's ever said about his income from the master classes, one of which is branded as King Solomon's court, yacht masterminds, private plane mentorship excursions, and speaking engagements. He claimed once that he brings in north of $450,000 a month. I think we can all agree that this is an exorbitant, excessive amount of wealth. There are no ethical billionaires, and I'd argue that there are no altruistic multi-millionaires at that level of monthly revenue. I don't want or need that much money. And neither do you, while I'm sure there's countless people who will tell you that he helped them, but the question is, what does he help them do? He gives them the framework he uses to create five-day master classes with a huge upsell at the end that asks you to borrow from your retirement, gives them the framework to manipulate scripture into justifying wealth, and combines his prowess as a preacher with multi-level marketing sales techniques to convince unsuccessful sellers and poor people that it's all their fault. Mindset, mastery, biblical sales principles, all that bullshit. Nothing about the inherent evils of capitalism, nothing about discrimination that prevents many people in our society from establishing the foundation to participate in the economy. Just full on greed. He tells you what you want to hear so you can reconcile the clear messages about excessive wealth being a bad thing in the Bible with your secret desire to be like him one day. I've already addressed his argument about the eye of the needle in my previous video about him. So the key word in this verse is the word rich, is the word pluseos, and what it means is figuratively rich. So when Jesus said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, he's not talking about a person who's rich in money, he's talking about a person who's rich in self-righteousness. After listening to his whole argument and taking some time with it, I actually agree that the definition of rich can be applied to self-righteousness in this case. That being said, it's not an omission of wealth, it's both. I think Myron knows that, but mentioning that it's both material wealth and self-righteousness that's being condemned by Jesus in this case wouldn't play too well for his message in this sermon, would it? He redefines the word all in this quote from Trash Man. Some of you may be thinking money is the root of all evil. It's not. The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil. It doesn't say money is the root of all evil. He goes on to say it doesn't mean it's the root of every evil in the whole wide world and that the word all in the New Testament seldom means all to the exclusion of none. Usually what it means is all kinds, all types, all manner. What it means is that the love of money is all kinds of evil. And finally, to drive this point home, people will do all kinds of evil things to get money. It is not saying if you love money, that makes you evil. This, in other words, shit he tries to pull with regard to the love of money is especially messed up. Even if we take your word for the meaning of all, meaning all kinds, if a word usually means something but not always, how you fix your mouth to say you're sure, that's not what Jesus meant. I get it. You gotta be sure because that leaves the door open for people to hold you accountable otherwise. The verse right before that says it all. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. Right. What Cam said. So the Bible explicitly condemns having wealth.

Next, he breaks down the serpent and eve part of the story. It says, Genesis chapter three, verse one, now the serpent was more subtle than a beast of the field, which the Lord God has made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, have God said, now I want you to notice what happens here. Yea, have God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Okay. So Satan added a word, not and took out the word freely. Does that change the meaning? You shall not eat of every tree of the garden means something very different than of every tree of the garden you may freely eat. So what Satan did, he added a word and took out a word. Why? Because Satan is a master at twisting language. Myron just did what he's accusing Satan of doing. He compared thou shalt not eat of every tree in the garden to eat freely from every tree. But that leaves out the butt God added to that statement. If God tells you you're free, except for this, that is the same thing as you can't eat from every tree. The serpent was woke. He was trying to tell these naive experimental dirt people in the garden that they aren't actually free. They don't have all the information. If anything, that reinforces my point about Lucifer getting thrown out of heaven for poking holes in God's logic. Allegedly. Am I defending Satan as a broader concept? Not really, but this myth is flawed. God's logic within this myth is flawed. The book is flawed. This religion is built on weird logical inconsistencies and scapegoating of this talking snake. And he's using it to manipulate people at scale. Scape snaking, scape snaking. We're going to fast forward through his very weird rant about his various prejudices to why poverty is the result of spiritual warfare. He's building up to his point. What did Satan do? Satan used words to get Adam and Eve's attention off of all of the abundance they had. He got them to focus on the one thing they lacked. Satan oppresses you by putting thoughts in your mind and making you think the thoughts are your thoughts. I'm going to tell you something. Satan has ruined more people's lives by putting thoughts in their head and making them think those thoughts were their thought than he has by getting them to worship the devil. John chapter 13 verse number 2. "The devil now having put it into the heart of Judas, eschariot Simon's son to betray him." This sequence did one important thing. It established the devil as a source of all thoughts that pull you away from prosperity and wealth. Scape snaking, this imaginary figure for all negative thoughts and actions humans execute due to their own free will. Negative here means whatever God says it means. Ultimately, if there's any message pushed by Christians like Myron, it's that free will is the devil. Making our own decisions in ways that God doesn't like or in ways that society deems is unacceptable, which changes every hundred years or so, is not how we're supposed to live. If we shut up, listen to Sky Daddy and do as we're told by God while shutting Satan's voice out, we'll be good. This is called indoctrination and it's exactly what the serpent was pointing out, in my opinion.

When God made man, God gave man authority, He gave him an assignment, and then He gave him abundance. When we stopped yielding to God's authority, we lost our assignment and we lost our authority. When Jesus died on the cross, He paid for that authority and that assignment, and He's been offering us the keys to the kingdom of heaven for a couple thousand years and we're like, "Lord, I don't know what to do, no keys." If someone gives you authority, an assignment, and abundance, that's an employer-employee relationship. Their job was to please God, this vindictive, vain entity in the sky that wants to be worshipped on altars and drowns people. In this scenario, Lucifer simply pointed this out. And yes, I realize the religious people in my audience who made it this far are actively calling me a tool of the devil right now. If you don't get the point by now, I don't care, honestly. And I'm not responding to y'all. Like, there's no such thing as a lack of resources. And I know some of y'all are not gonna like this statement, but I can't help it. There's no such thing as a lack of resources, there's only such a thing as a lack of resourcefulness. Finally, we've arrived at the point. It only took 37 minutes. Prosperity Gospel insists that anyone's situation can be fixed as long as they shift their mindset and become more resourceful. This position removes all governmental and socioeconomic problems and prevents people from looking too closely at them, the salespeople. If they can get you to believe this, they can freely exploit you forever. If you fail, it's your fault. If you can't reach their level of wealth, hustle harder. If your morals or your sense of ethics hold you back, you're just reading the Bible wrong. It's the foundation of their business model and why they have to make these videos in the first place. If you actually take the Bible for its word when it comes to wealth, you would give most of it away. You wouldn't need self-help courses or motivational mindset seminars. Poverty isn't great. And I'm not making this video to encourage people to stay there. I'm making it so you can identify these tactics when you see them and start to question the framework these schemes are built off of. They need you to believe that obscene wealth is good. They need you to believe them when they point to charity they do for tax breaks or free info like this on YouTube as the way they help people instead of giving all that money away or using it to directly empower their communities. In my deep dives resource library, there's a whole page, couple pages full of resources you can use to climb your way out of poverty in whatever way you see fit. Free courses, free self-help materials, free employment resources, and lists of ways to recognize scams. Y'all got the information now. Can't say I didn't tell you.

So there's a detectives tier on my Patreon reserve for the people that really want to lean in and support the channel at a higher level. Peter Healy, Shean Hoxie, Christian Hain, Elle, and Michael Critz. There's only five of y'all right now so it's easy to remember. I'd make no promises for the future. Much love. Watch any of the other ones on the playlist on screen and I'll catch y'all later man. It's been real.