Colorado pastor charged for cryptocurrency scam he perpetrated at God's command
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I'm convinced that the vast majority of these folks are either selling unlicensed securities, sham interests in social media / crypto / real estate / commodities / life coach etc, or they are stealing directly from the federal government via tax shams and assistance programs. The sheer number of hustle culture participants that "participated" in PPP (paycheck protection program) for example fraud is frightening.
> Hacken, a cybersecurity company, audited the cryptocurrency, according to INDXcoin’s website. State investigators, who obtained copies of Hacken’s audits, say that the Regalados fail to mention that Hacken gave it a rating of “zero out of 10.”
“This [terrible] idea will change [nothing positively, but will cause] the world [to eat itself].”
“I know I should be saving money for a house but god spoke to me and I spent the downpayment on <fancy car that’ll get repo’d in a year>”
Religion being used that way isn't limited to evangelicals nor Christianity. In fact, it's basically the reason people are mocking the phrase.
They are taught to blindly follow and never question authority. The pastor is the "shepherd" of the "flock" and they openly talk about it in terms echoing the way that the Disciples followed Jesus. And there's a reason you hear about what seem to be so many nasty stories of evangelical religious leaders abusing their power than mainline ones. And there's a reason authoritarian politics are so closely identifiable with evangelism in America.
Second, they work HARD TO create an in-group and out-group. There are the "saved" and everyone else. If you're "unsaved" and attend the church, the pressure is INTENSE to commit. RELENTLESS. And once you're in, you're on the inside of an "us against the world" mentality. I'll give an example. You know the current "War On Christmas?" People walking around like NPC's saying "I don't care, I'm going to say Merry Christmas - since when did that become a crime, none of this 'Happy Holidays' stuff!"
I remember being inside the movement in the eighties, and the thing they were completely up in arms about then was that businesses were co-opting Jesus's name by using "Christmas" to sell stuff. So the move to "Happy Holidays" by corporate America wasn't just an inclusive, religiously-neutral way to put it. I distinctly remember listening to christian radio at the time and the conversation being about pressure campaigns to get "Merry Christmas" out of businesses. I'm sure businesses were happy to oblige to stop the PR onslaught. It was the "War on Christmas" of its day. And twenty years later when it fits their agenda to creating division between believers and non-believers? The entire thing reversed directions.
I would say most people do not expect God to set a bush ablaze and speak verbally to them, but make it obvious they should do this or that thing.
Of course, one would hope that a pastor would realize feeling called to scam money from his congregation to renovate his house and buy a car to come from Satan, not God. But temptation is strong. :P
That's why many conservative evangelicals did mock and accuse charismatic tv preachers of being grifters, unrepresentive and false teachers. Though that public tension and conflict seems to be abandoned for the sake of political unity nowadays.
I've known calvinistic missionaries (all dead now) from these groups, they speak of being burdened, and "feeling" called, but they're clear that a personal burden is not a revelation or prophecy, it's just a personal conviction from the text combined with circumstances and an affinity of where to go, not the voice of god. No different than a person feeling convicted to become vegetarian because of something they read. They cited some passages from paul about going where "he choose" (I've no interest in looking that passage up at this point) and the use of casting of lots to show it's internally driven conviction and pragmatism and not a revelatory special calling. Being explicit that anyone hearing the voice of God probably needed medical help, personal prophecy wasn't a source of inspiration and truth but were warned against.
It's been a big part of the modernistic bent of the dominant Calvinistic protestant denominations. It was also drove the focus on literacy and certainly influenced the trend towards academic and textual rigor.
Widely abandoned in the U.S. only quite recently by low and high protestant calvanistic conservative groups alike.
Pentecostal and charismatic groups have been around obviously but weren't taken too seriously and were even warned against by dominant evangelicalism, but that has relatively recently changed in conservative Presbyterian circles and influential groups in baptist circles like Sovereign Grace Churches (though they aren't baptist, they've become heavily culturally entwined via southern seminary and other places).
This has basically reintroduced miracles and promoted an embrace of magical thinking in laity's daily life that was long absent from those bookish, stuffy, severe, and practical protestants.
(for context, I worked in evangelical christian ministry for multiple years when I was younger)
2015 was a sort of tipping point, IMO, that has caused a sort of paradigm shift in Christianity. (sorry, a little vague, but I'm still trying to understand all the changes.) My hope is that all Christianity will go back to basic tenets of faith, biblically taught.
And there’s the key. If only people would read the Bible. If they would read even just Philippians 3:12 or Hebrews 10:26 or any of a number of other passages, they would see at once what heresy “once saved, always saved” is.
But no, Christianity is too often just a club. Most people have no actual interest in the Bible. God has ever worked with minorities and remnants. Christianity strongly Bible-based will always be small by comparison.
I rather like the way Dickens framed it in A Christmas Carol:
> “There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
But the people who wanted to keep the definition of the american church a "small c" lost pretty thoroughly to the political action clubs.
The SBC boycotts/cancelation of Disney in 1997 and the memetic cancelation of General Mills cereal was all outworkings from Jerry Falwells take over of american christian expression using Francis Schaeffers films to provide emotional impact and introduce new political reasoning and adopt what was previously "the roman catholic" issue of abortion as a primary political, religious and social wedge issue. That was the core "ratchet" issue.
With Lamar Alexander, Alan Keyes and a few others politicians campaigning with extremely heavy religious strategies in republican primaries in 96 you see a turning point and culmination of the political work of Falwell and others through the 80s. It showed that there was effectively no pushback left among evangelicals to messaging that conflated Republican & Christian, the assimilation was sufficiently complete.
Idk, there's almost an infinite amount of causes and drivers but there were a lot of bad turning points along the way.
In what feels like a past life I actually went to a influential seminary in the early 00s, the few older professors we're academic and rigorous, the rest of the younger professors and the students themselves we're... bad, just really awful people with odd pathological relationships and furtive self serving behaviors, the amount of extremely insular "christian celebrity" worship was shocking to me at that age.
And in this context I think confronting the mindset is a valuable thing to do even if you are speaking with an atheist. Essentially, questions like:
* If everyone adopted your mindset, what kind of world would we live in?
* Do you think your friends and family would be proud of you if they knew you were acting this way?
* Would you feel good if you knew all your friends and family were acting like you?
* Are you acting in a way you might regret later in life?
Going to “basic tenets” and doubling down on sola scriptura is just fundamentalism and is why evangelicals and the like are the way that they are. And they’re (relatively) modern inventions!
I can tell you haven't tried to date such guys. They may not feel enough guilt to keep them from engaging in casual sex, but many of them absolutely feel guilt. Indeed, sometimes it's a complex of immovable guilt and shame, in the style of classic Freud, with the entire panoply of coping mechanisms deployed to deal with the dissonance (projection, affect isolation, displacement, dissociation, reaction formation, etc.)
That is a great line.
> Regalado had told investors that the funds would be going to "widows and orphans", but spent most of it on himself and his wife.
Maybe his parents are dead and his wife was windowed in the previous marriage :)
He actually contradicts himself as he denies spending the money on himself and hiss wife, and admits spending money on a home renovation "the Lord told us to do".
I thought when someone said something like "your house looks divine" it was a metaphor!
How is that a thing. Why do so many people fall for it? How do these people get discovered. The only reason I know about them is because of a meme YouTube video where a reporter drilled a televangelist on camera.
Aside: may I propose we style the Internet variety as eVangelists?
Suddenly he was devoting all his time to studying rites and rituals, almost cutting out contact with is family, and taking up extra jobs so he could send money to this guru.
My dad met this guru once when he visited here in Norway. My dad said he spent way more time talking about the stock market than anything spiritual.
Yet to this day, a couple of decades later, their son is still laboring hard for this guy.
I did get to speak to him a few times after he had converted. For me this whole thing was utterly bewildering.
Looking back at us growing up, I suppose what he was seeking was somewhere to belong. It wasn't about this or that religion specifically, that seemed almost incidental, looking in from the outside.
His life had gotten a new meaning: follow these rites and rituals, and do whatever this guy says. In return he got a sense of belonging.
Still really weird to me, and still very hard for his parents. But their son willingly and with open eyes embraced this.
I've reflected on this several times, and my conclusion is that some people just want to believe, so they can belong.
America has a long history of "preachers", and "evangelists". I was in a thread yesterday that referenced Johnny Appleseed who was ministering and planting nurserys.
There is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Ang... ) That continues to be looked at and dwelled upon.
This carries through into modern times... Sam Kinison who was a famous and very distinct comedian gets a lot of his style from being a tent revival style preacher (You can watch is comedy that is very NSFW and his preaching its an interesting counter point). Mind you Sam is a contemporary of Jim Baker (a massive scandal that makes this one look small), and his wife Tammy Fay. And in the very present The show The Righteous Gemstones makes fun of the excess and money that preachers can generate.
This is no longer an exclusively offline type of localism either. There is no shortage of online bubbles that are well insulated from outside perspectives.
It’s not even a “poor, dumb people” thing. We are all subject to the network effect and must make continuous active effort to avoid sinking into a comfortable echo chamber. I know so many people who grew up combatting religious fundamentalism, dispatching creationist arguments with expert logical fallacy-fu, only to later fall into their own malign belief systems, losing the ability to question. Even academia, where the foundation stones of skepticism and innovative thinking were laid, has bubbles of very smart people whose working environment is being drained of heterodoxy.
For instance, why do people like going to concerts? It's $100 or more to be surrounded by a hostile crowd, probably catch COVID, certainly induce some hearing damage, have zero peace and quiet for hours, etc. None of these "costs" really stack of up course if you find going to concerts rewarding in an emotional sense. If the concert itself never moved you emotionally, it'd be very difficult to see why people would put up with all the additional externalities of the whole event.
This isn't a perfect comparison, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at.
No idea why, if anyone wants to enlighten me let me know.
Your comment reflects a very Europe-centric view of the world.
Cut off the tip of your ding dong and get to eat bacon. Or not. Easy choice. /s
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/16194-circu...
This form of genial mutilation is most often performed on babies for no reason other than perpetuating religious or cultural expectations of the parents.
Imagine if 1/3 of the world gave their babies botex or other face modifications after birth because they thought their babies looked ugly and I was on here defending the baby's rights to not be unnecessarily modified without their consent.
Then you come on here and joke about how passionate I must be about other people's faces. It's not about the faces or genitalia, it's about one's right to bodily autonomy.
Like referring to public school as "traditional education" in comparison with the implied "non-traditional" home schooling (which is the actual tradition).
I am from Europe where it isn't a thing, this table should help explain the difference in opinion in the West.
Top 5 Countries by Circumcision Rate High and Low
United States 50-60%
Indonesia >90%
Pakistan >90%
Bangladesh >90%
Egypt >90%
(European Countries with Lowest Circumcision Rates)
Finland <1%
Denmark <2%
Norway <2%
Sweden <3%
Iceland <1%
PS - it was unprofessional to add a link to a random article on reasons for circumcision, it makes you sound butthurt, no one asked or cares to discuss genital mutilation reasons. If you are interested in sharing your vague opinion and articles about it then Ill bite. Not anyone cares in this thread about my opinion on this matter (understandably) but I find it barbaric and have only pity for any man subjected to it as a child.
TLDR We were just talking about how its unheard of in western democracies outside the US
Is Ghana a western democracy or did you just toss them in for some extra bias/flair? Maybe you just had trouble staying on track with the thread which was about televangelists and didn’t mention male genitalia at all.
But it is a fair enough comment to say I should stay on track when I called you out on it too ( I edited that out as I felt it was a bit rude to comment on your attitude ).
Regarding Ghana I dont think you understood my point, I don't believe Ghana is a Western Democracy, but I do believe it has a high right of circumcision, my point is simply that noone in the West circumcises, only the USA. I guessed Ghana was a poor country with comparatively poorer and lower levels of education and GDP with a high percentage rate of circumcision and it seems I was right - its over 95%
PS - you are again being rude by suggestion I am trying to add flair to look cool. You clearly are having trouble understanding by basic point and instead guessing its because I am trying to sound cool. If you look at my account its over a decade old with barely any points on it, I dont care about upvotes.
Racists always have such a way with words.
You are now saying I was "ragging" on Ghana by stating their 94% circumcision rate, when I was just stating a statistic. But your comment does belie that you agree circumcision is bad, hence your perception its insulting to mention countries with high circumcision rates. Aleast we can put this conversation behind us now.
I'm glad we finally reached common ground.
Regarding the racism comment, I dont quite understand what circumcision has to do with racism, but if it helps I am a minority.
Though based on this guy’s fundamental moral failings, that probably wouldn’t have stopped him…
This one seems to be two in-groups at once. Believers in cryptocurrency and believers in a particular type of Christian god.
According to answers to this question, "Is it insider trading if I bought Boeing puts while I am inside the wrecked airplane?" [1]
"Insider trading, I like to say, is not about fairness, it’s about theft. It’s illegal to trade on information that isn’t public and that you have some duty to keep secret" - Matt Levine
[1] - https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/98706/is-it-insider-...
"So the charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed $1.3 million, and I just want to come out and say that those uh charges are true," said Regalado in the video, presumably causing a cold chill to run down the spine of his defense attorney in the middle of whatever he was doing.
I do agree that, overall, the formal structure of Islamic clerical organisations looks somewhat more horizontal (look ma, no pope!), and precepts towards charity look more stringent than the average "try to be good" message of other religions; but it's hard to deny that there are - and were - a lot of very temporal benefits accruing towards people of power under Islamic rule. Some rulers even derive their legitimacy from dynastic relationships to the prophet - that's worth a lot of money...
Now, we do say "God is dead" but by that we don't mean in the sense that "Mohammed is dead" or "Elvis is dead" or "Margaret Thatcher is dead". We're talking about the idea, and so that's rejected by the Faithful.
Nobody said that "the guy at the top of the pyramid making most of the money" is supposed to be god.
Doesn't matter anyway, y'all are taking a joke way too seriously.
Figuring out which is which while avoiding getting rekt is not easy, but can be done.
Normally both 1 and 2 would be eliminated as projects tried to intentionally use buzzwords to confuse investors into thinking they were doing something cool. They would write papers that mentioned nothing specific and you would sometimes come away thinking: 'what the fug are you even building' or often 'this exists already so what is your take on it?' The latter of which is hard to deny because many tokens, ICOs, blockchains really don't need to exist. Technically you could have argued that Ethereum didn't need to make a new blockchain because a third-party system could have been made that added smart contract logic on top of Bitcoin like a soft fork. This would have been similar to master coin.
I'd say that the quality of the people around a project can tell you a lot. Often scammers use impressive sounding publicists to make them seem like they're successful entrepreneurs. But when you dig deeper its all just paid shilling.
Maybe some might offer a valid case like anonymity, but very limited pool.
No true scottsman would ever have perpetrated such a scam. In fact, true scottsmen never do anything bad.
I'm not referring to the scam. I'm referring to not abiding by basic tenets of the Christian faith.
It's not my faith. Also, televangelists aren't christian either. Again, those who fail to follow the basic tenets of a religion cannot claim to be followers of said religion.
> That's the basic way of implementing a "no true scottsman" argument.
Either you haven't got the point or you're just trying to be contrarian. I think the point I made is clear and easy to understand. I won't repeat myself.
I don't know what you are referring to as the "basic" tenets of a religion. The majority of muslim men in western societies drink alcohol even though it is strictly forbidden in the Quran, and yet those men are considered to be "muslim" regardless.
You can find various infractions for any follower of any religion and then subsequently argue that this person isn't following the "basic tenets" of that religion and therefore is not a member of that group. That's the "no true scottsman" argument that you can make to rhetorically "remove" "undesirable" members from the group and thus make the group look better. It has nothing to do with reality.
Televangelists are very obviously, very clearly, Christian. They don't follow all of the teachings of the Bible, just like no other Christian follows all of the teachings of the Bible. Not sure who gave you the authority to dictate what their religious identity is.
Though there are many instructions in scripture that many christians ignore or fail to live up to, there are a set of core beliefs that comprise the essential nature of the Christian faith. The Apostles Creed summarizes most of them for Christianity.
As an example, if you deny the deity of Jesus, then you can not reasonably claim to be a christian. This is the case with Mormon's, who are sometimes called Christians, but whose theology differs in significant ways from Christianity.
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There is also another way to approach the idea of "that person isn't really a christian". Though it is in fact, impossible for a human to judge definitively, Jesus does say that "you shall know them by their love one for another" (John 13:35). And the bible does teach that under certain circumstances, the Church is to treat someone claiming to be christian as though they are not, because they refuse to acknowledge and/or address behaviors that are instructed in scripture.
The Church isn't generally good at that, which may be the point of the OP. But, it does allow the Church to say that someone who unrepentantly practices sinful behavior doesn't represent Christianity.
And this right here allows you to take any Christian, point to something sinful that they appear to be doing, and claim that they're not really Christian.
The Church doesn't get to just point at a person who commits a sin and say that person isn't a Christian. There is a formal process for evaluating if that individual meets certain criteria (laid out in scripture). Its not done without serious consideration.
And there is a significant difference between saying that a person "isn't a Christian" and saying that some practice by a christian "doesn't represent Christianity".
For a practice to be considered "Christian" it should resemble the established and agreed upon tenets of the Christian faith, as laid out in the Bible and generally agreed upon by the Church at large.
Its like, I can claim to be a lawyer, but to actually be one, I need to pass the Bar. And a lawyer can be disbarred, if their actions show them to unable to execute the duties of a lawyer in accordance with the standards set by the state they practice in.
Similarly, a licensed Lawyer can claim something is lawful, but that be false when compared to the actual written code of that state. Someone can then come along and say that the advice and practice of that Lawyer does represent the actual law of that state.
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Look, I get it. Its frustrating to see christians do bad things, and for the church to not take responsibility when it should. And I'm not defending that. It is also frustrating for the Church when people do not represent it fairly. This is a common issue with any organized group of people, because People aren't always reliable. A fact the Bible has much to say about.
It would be interesting if “cryptocurrency” is now this entrenched as a synecdoche for any scrip-y scam.
Take religion, the perfect tool designed to manipulate the credulous masses and now add the latest grift of the moment and take in the money... And when you get called out, blame god.
And these evangelicals claim to be morally superior than the rest of us. Pfff
That's the point of this article and its title.
But no one cares about the missionaries who risk their lives to benefit others, and all positive things are thrown out the window.
Then, let's blame God because a human did something bad "in His name."
See the irrationality of the "logic"?
"If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you, and he gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes to pass, of which he spoke to you, saying, “Let’s go after other gods” (which you have not known) “and let’s serve them,” you shall not listen to the words of that prophet, or to that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the LORD your God, fear him, keep his commandments, and obey his voice. You shall serve him, and cling to him." (Deut. 13:1-4)
"But those who are determined to be rich (greedy) fall into a temptation, a snare, and many foolish and harmful lusts, such as drown men in ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some have been led astray from the faith in their greed, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." (1 Tim. 6:9-10)
More Scripture on that topic: https://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/is-gambling-a...
Knowing these, we can look at the cryptocurrency market to see it's mostly gambling, get rich quick schemes, attempts to rebel at authority (esp IRS), unstable, and often with illegal activity. This would keep us away from most of that even if we'd consider it for legitimate instruments or smart contracts. Anything that's helpful, not sinful, is a gift from God who raises up many brilliant inventors to solve our problems. Even indirectly like how smart contracts inspired millions to be invested in tooling for verifying software.
With that general impression, we look at the guy starting a cryptocurrency with high skepticism. We'd say: "Brother, why would a man of God charged with preaching Christ dying for our sins and moving money to society's helpless need a cryptocurrency? Are you serving God or money? And should the church's money be focused on such things? If you lack a Biblical answer, then perhaps you have been tempted by the Devil to set your heart on the wrong things. Please pray God helps you overcome this, focus on what truly matters, and serve Him faithfully."
And we'd pray for them. And God would help them overcome temptation or set an example of who to protect His flock from.
The Bible also has lots of stories of people taking incredible risks to follow the leaders God chose for them, so I'm not sure it has great advice for biblically-minded investors under the sway of a greedy pastor.
With that in mind, the Deuteronomy passage says that anyone claiming to be a prophet, but contradicting God's existing Word (eg commands), is a liar. Most people falsely claiming to be prophets have poor character, be ego/money centered, people pleasers, often contradict the Word, cherry-pick what serves them, and/or fail in their predictions or miracles (see Deut. 18). The Deut. 13 test is even easier today since we have the whole Word, including Jesus' and Apostles' ministry, to test them with.
You and I know this verse is talking about forgiveness, but the Bible contains very many verses that can, out of context, be used to justify a great many evils.
Back to your original point:
> Followers of Jesus Christ are commanded and equipped to test prophets rather than blindly believing them.
Recent history shows us that followers of Jesus also make spectacularly good marks for anyone with a good sales pitch and some memorised lines of New Testament teaching.