← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

It’s been a GREAT week for religious hypocrisy…

… and although UD knows that not everyone shares her attraction to any combination of flamboyant, relentless (and in the very best cases, litigious) religious self-righteousness plus equally relentless moral debauchery, she hopes that at least some of her readers will enjoy as much as she does the details of the Daniel Greer and the First Baptist Church of Hammond Indiana cases. Both stories have emerged not a moment too soon — just as America’s highest-profile sanctimonious person, Ted Cruz, has fled the scene. Both cases feature noisy revilers of nasty secular culture now in court for staggering sexual and/or financial degeneracy.

Yum. Let’s go there.

Until the current civil case against him, alleging that for years he raped a fifteen-year-old boy in his care (“Rabbi Greer was in his sixties when he forced the minor Eli to engage in acts of sex with him, including forced fellatio, anal sex, fondling and masturbation,” the lawsuit says. “Rabbi Greer frequently gave Eli alcohol at the time he raped and assaulted his child victim. Rabbi Greer showed Eli pornographic films. The lawsuit says Greer sexually abused [Eliyahu] Mirlis at multiple locations, including on school property, at the rabbi’s home, and at motels and rental properties.”), Rabbi Daniel Greer was famous for having spawned one of the Yale Five. His extremely orthodox daughter and four fellow indignants sued Yale University for making them live in debauched secular co-ed dormitories. The suit was of course immediately and irritatedly dismissed as soon as it got to a judge (they “could have opted to attend a different college or university if they were not satisfied with Yale’s housing policy.”), but because the story came out of Yale it got oodles of unwarranted attention.

Now Father Greer bids to make the family name even more famous than his daughter has made it by railing against homosexuality while, according to the complaint, raping a boy for years.

Lovers of out-there religious hypocrisy will also enjoy the mischievous megachurch of mid-America, where … er… let’s see …

Ex-pastor Jack Schaap is currently serving a federal prison sentence …

… Schaap pleaded guilty to transporting a girl to Illinois and Michigan for sexual encounters over a four-week period starting the week before the girl turned 17. He also had sex with her in his church office.

Schaap is named in [a recent] lawsuit, but not as a defendant, accused of helping facilitate a financial fraud that bilked two investors out of more than $200,000

A former deacon at the church, later hired as a financial planner, Thomas Kimmel, 70, is also in federal prison …

In 2014, Kimmel was convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, according to court documents.

His role as a fundraiser in “Sure Line Investments,” a business buying and selling used cars which devolved into a Ponzi scheme, involved Schaap and snared a number of individuals around the country, according to court documents.

Kimmel was a financial adviser at First Baptist Hammond and traveled the country seeking investment in Sure Line, according to court documents.

And Schaap preached from the pulpit that Kimmel’s investment opportunities would give church members more money to use for God, according to court documents.

Both Schaap and Kimmel received commissions on the investments they secured for Sure Line, 1 percent and 10 percent respectively. That information was never disclosed to church members who invested, according to court documents.

It’s got everything but animal cruelty.

Margaret Soltan, May 8, 2016 8:18AM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=51709

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories