Gauging progress in the faith depends upon how one perceives the race. Another jet and a bigger mansion for Robert Tilton, more Rolls Royces for Creflo Dollar, and for their followers perhaps a desperate last attempt to be miraculously healed or to escape perpetual poverty. In Dante’s definition of inverse progress in hell (hell being the “realm … of those who have rejected spiritual values by . . . perverting their human intellect for fraud or malice against their fellowmen”) it would seem that Bob and Creflo would land at the 8th ring. Dante reserves the depths of hell for those who have committed fraud – with spiritual fraud qualifying for the inner portion of the 8th – 9th circle. Those who “pervert and falsify ecclesiastical office, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence” or those who made money for themselves out of what belongs to God: “Rapacious ones, who take the things of God, / that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, / and make them fornicate for gold and silver! / The time has come to let the trumpet sound / for you.” The violence done to the dispossessed (Kenneth and Gloria Copeland rail against modern medicine as the money is better spent on their jets) certainly puts them at the 7th circle. Kenneth and Gloria and all who have “plundered” their neighbors, according to Dante, will apparently be immersed in boiling blood forever. Oral Roberts, the father of seed-faith (promise of prosperity in return for giving) televangelism, televised faith-healing, can probably now report whether his “head is twisted around such that he is compelled to walk backwards for eternity,” but Dante would consign all false-prophets to the 8th circle of hell where they are “blinded by their own tears.” Continue reading “The Delights of Dante’s Hell: Paula White and Oral Roberts Meet Robert Schuller”