Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Suppose, just for the sake of consideration, that Tim Lee was an astute businessman. Suppose that OPEC didn't rear its ugly head and gas didn't zoom upward in price. Suppose that these were actually well constructed vehicles, not the "wildebeasts" one former salesman called them. Hot, heavy, clunky, smoky pieces of junk.
Suppose this thing had actually made a profit. I would still ask, what the hell (and I use this word deliberately) was Witness Lee doing, using the podium to extract money from church members for business ventures? What the hell was going on here? What kind of glassy-eyed idiots did we have to be (and I was one) to think that moving ourselves into collective money-making enterprises was church... I don't even have words here...
We had all this hifalutin verbiage of the glorious church, the bride of Christ, and accompanying vilification of "fallen Christianity" which missed the Divine Mandate, then suddenly we were getting excited about building MOTOR HOMES? What the hell?
At the very best, this thing was going to be a snare, a trap, and a stumbling. At the very best.
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I couldn't agree more. Maybe Lee thought that Ponzi schemes couldn't fail in the LC because "there is no hierarchy in the church life". Think about that one for a minute.
On a more serious note, there are absolutely no excuses whatsoever for Lee to have used his ministry as a platform for business ventures. What I find particularly disgusting is the that he knew very well that the saints would be willing to go along with whatever he wanted to do. If there's anything thing I've learned from my time in the LC, it's that LCers love to give. They love to give time, money, and energy to the LC. To put it simply, anyone who donated to Daystar had their "willingness" taken advantage of.
Maybe most LCers couldn't see beyond the "giving" aspect (as they conditioned to), but did it ever occur to anyone that the business was not guaranteed to be profitable? Apparently not. Business involves an inherent risk, and this is exactly what everyone was oblivious to. I'm sure everyone thought God's blessing had been upon Lee from day 1, so maybe they felt invincible to anything but success.
In a best case scenario, it would have taken the business years to grow, and a good amount of time for it to become significantly profitable. That is assuming the books are 100% legit and there are no underhanded dealings going on. The formula for success just wasn't there and it just seems so far-fetched that anyone could have believed in it succeeding. Even if it was successful I'm sure the Overseas Christian
Stealers nonsense would have caught up to Lee before long.