If you'll agree to tithe your income for 90 days and don't receive a blessing from God,

you'll get your money back guaranteed.

This sort of spiritual mumbo-jumbo is, as Carl nicely sums it up, bonkers.

Those who propose these gimmicks are treating God as a pagan deity and wrapping it all up in

vaguely orthodox theology.

We can't stand by and accept this prosperity gospel light.

Keep listening to Mortification of Spin, Bully Pulpit, with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

We guarantee you'll receive a blessing or your wasted time back.

So stay with us, and then after the podcast, keep listening to learn how you can download a free MP3 message.

So I am on the beach here with my co-host, Carl, and Todd, and it seems that we have stumbled upon a plaque.

It's in remembrance of what Carl would call a

controversy right Carl controversy controversy that's correctly pronounced yes for a

change yes it looks like you were a great blessing an example to the children

on this beach what is it that this plaque is referring to here?

Well, it's a particularly dark period in my life. Some weeks ago, I was a speaker at a conference

at an unnamed location on the east coast of the United States. And late in the evening, one of the

elders, one of my

elders from church and myself and his brother-in-law headed down to the beach to smoke our pipes.

I've only started smoking my pipe relatively recently due to the malignant and unwelcome influence

of Todd Pruitt in my life. That's a quote from my wife, actually. But we lit up our pipes.

It was late at night. There was nobody around. And I would say within two minutes, we were busted

by some man who came striding up to us and said that he didn't want to judge us, but we'd got

...