Making discoveries in New Orleans

The front page of the Saturday, March 18, Times-Picayune announces, “The LRA wants to know why FEMA is spending $75,000 on trailers when these cottages cost less than $60,000.” Each 23 to 28 foot trailer, small fragile cheap-looking boxes, is costing the Federal Emergency Management Agency $75,000 to deliver and set up in the yards and driveways of damaged homes. But a “Katrina cottage,” a 400 to 750 square foot prefab house that sleeps four can be built in days and can be expanded into a permanent home, for only $60,000, according to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. The best selling point for the pre-fab home may be that it is made of concrete and steel. If another hurricane targets our area, it would survive the storm better than these cracker box trailers parked in driveways all over the city.

Poor FEMA. I suppose they’re doing the best they can. But nothing they do is ever right or enough.

The best item in Saturday’s paper was a discovery made by one of our collegiate groups gutting out a house in St. Bernard Parish. Trista Wright, who attends Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, pulled a rake through a dusty pile of moldly sheetrock and noticed an old piece of green paper jutting out. “It looked like play money,” she said. It was a hundred dollar bill. Stacks of them.

The college kids called the St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s office who sent a cop over, who in turn contacted the lady who owned the house. She verified that the house had been in their family for generations and that her father had never trusted banks. Best they can figure, the money had been stashed in an air-conditioning vent in the 1960s. They estimate the stack contained $30,000. Aaron Arledge, our associate BCM director who was overseeing the group’s New Orleans work, was quoted: “I had my suspicions at first, but once I met the family and talked to the woman, I have no doubt she’s telling the truth. She said her faither grew up in the Depression and must not have told anyone in the family about it before he died.”

(Note to preachers: There’s your sermon illustration. A father has a treasure which he hides from his family. He dies and they never benefit from his wealth. Know any dad who believes in Christ but never tells the family?)


The group had been working at New Salem Baptist Church in the Upper 9th Ward. Pastor Warren Jones said the lady who owned the St. Bernard house, perhaps a couple of miles downriver from Warren’s church, submitted a request for her house to be gutted by the group earlier this week. He said the group normally doesn’t venture into St. Bernard because there’s so much need in the 9th Ward, but he agreed to do it because she was so persistent and persuasive.

I hope that lady, who asked to remain anonymous, remembers how much she owes to that pastor and those students. Especially Trista who most definitely has the “Wright” stuff.

When you drive around the part of the city that was flooded, you can still read the spray-painted signs on homes put there by the National Guardsmen and other first-responders who were checking for stranded residents. Inside a large “X”, you see the date, perhaps 9-7, the unit’s identification number, and a “NE” for “no entry” or a “O” meaning that no one was found inside the house.

Frequently, the exterior of the house was sprayed with a message to the SPCA, something like “dog under house” or “two cats inside.” The SPCA was trailing the guardsmen, gathering up stranded, hungry house pets and moving them to shelter. Saturday’s paper says animal lovers around the nation contributed $30 million to the Humane Society as a result of Katrina/Rita. Louisiana’s attorney general is looking into their financial activities, fueled, it is said, by internet rumors of inappropriate spending by the society.

A local couple who committed fraud on their insurance company–claiming hurricane damage when they had none–has been busted by a satellite. Inspectors pulled in the space images of the particular neighborhood for several days after the hurricane and noticed no damage to the roof of the claimants’ home. A day or two later, there was the damage–a smashed roof. The damage was inconsistent with what hurricanes do, the cops said. “It appears manmade,” said the supervisor of the State Police’s fraud unit.

An organization called “PICO,” People Improving Communities through Organizing” has brought together ministers from all over the country this week to see the conditions in New Orleans. The lead paragraph to the story: “With angry tones in their voices, clergy from more than 100 cities called on Washington lawmakers to end their squabbling over $4.2 billion in federal money earmarked to rebuild hurricane-damaged housing in Louisiana, and to direct more money to evacuated residents trying to return to the New Orleans area.”

Several of the ministers vow they are returning home to lobby their senators and congressmembers to get behind the rebuilding of this area. Representing 30 denominations, these pastors are particularly disturbed by congressional leaders who have not even been here to see the devastation. Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, member of the Appropriations Committee and chairman of a subcommittee on housing, was singled out as one of the 59 senators who need to get down here post-haste.

A lawsuit seeking to determine whether the hurricane damage was man-made or “an act of God” will be tried in federal court. The issue is whether insurance companies have to pay out for the damage caused by flooding. Most policies do not cover flood damage, but plaintiffs say the city was flooded by levee breaches, the work of man and not God, and this should be covered by the insurance policies. Defendants are State Farm, Allstate, and American.

One more fascinating item in the paper, this one unrelated to hurricanes and city-rebuilding. “DNA challenges Mormons’ faith.” I had been wondering when someone would get around to checking the DNA of the American Indians to see if it is related to the ancient Hebrews, as the Book of Mormon claims. Turns out it isn’t, not in the least. Converts to Mormonism from South American countries who are “Native Americans” were recruited to the religion by just those claims. “We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people,” says a Salt Lake City attorney who is a native of Peru. “It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God.” Now he’s angry. He knows now he has been lied to. To no one’s surprise, he has been excommunicated.

The article recaps how in 1827 22-year-old Joseph Smith supposedly found a set of golden plates buried in a hillside in upper New York State, and was provided special glasses by an angel enabling him to translate the message on the plates into what became The Book of Mormon. Smith called that “the most correct of any book on Earth,” and as a result of its teachings, revealed the true Gospel and rebuked all the mistakes and heresies of Christianity as it was then being practiced. Mormons have difficulty explaining how Smith’s perfect book has been corrected numerous times over the decades as scholars purify it from the mistakes in the original. In it, Smith had the Israelites coming to America in 600 B.C. and includes references to a seven day week, domesticated horses, cows and sheep, silk, chariots, and steel–none of which were introduced in the New World for many centuries.

The writer of the article, William Lobdell of the L.A.Times, seems a little amazed not to find a mass exodus from Mormonism as a result of one more evidence that the whole system is all a sham. However, people’s loyalty to their religion–any religion–often has no connection to reality. As one Mormon said to me, “I have a warm feeling inside when I read the Book of Mormon.” I said to him, “Your religion is like a lovely skyscraper. It’s massive and beautiful in a hundred ways. But there’s one thing it lacks: it has no foundation.”

You have to dread that day in the future when the leaders of this religious scam stand before the Lord of Heaven and Earth and give account for the con they have run on millions of people. The fault, in my mind at least, is with the leaders. They are the deceivers.

Pray for them. Some of us can remember when Armstrongism was another cult attacking Christianity and presenting itself as the only truth. When founder Herbert W. Armstrong died, the leaders made some tough decisions and announced where he had been wrong, and then did the unthinkable, they brought their movement into the fold of the faithful. So, it can happen.

What a discovery that will be, when their people learn the Holy Bible is the Truth and that is all they need. They don’t have to join our Baptist churches either. Just having them putting their faith in the Jesus Christ of Scripture and the way of salvation as taught therein, that will be enough.

What a joy that would be for some Mormon to be combing through the wreckage of his faith and find a treasure placed there long before, the Holy Scriptures. Like the woman in St. Bernard Parish, our Mormon friend has been living with this treasure in his house all along but not benefiting from its wealth.

When someone who knows the Scripture is born into the Kingdom, it’s like a homeowner who goes into his attic to comb through his treasures and keeps finding new things among the old. (My paraphrase of Matthew 13:52)

One thought on “Making discoveries in New Orleans

  1. …….I found it odd that you brought up the Mormon bit …Channel A&E had a show on a few years back that I wish everyone in the country had watched…Briefly, heres the deal..In the state of Nevada, the Mormons own the largest bank system in the state and when Las Vegas started the gambling trade, the church told their members not to have any dealings with them …but one guy said I need the business as I am the only local dairy around and if you would allow me to do business with them, my tithes would triple..The church decided to make an exception…Later as the town grew, many of their members wanted to get jobs in the industry but the church said “if you work there, you can’t go to church here”..When the donations and attendance went down to about 50% of what it was formally, the church said “we’ll let you work there as long as you are not actually dealing cards or handling any part of the gambling”..Problem solved…Keep the money coming in and you can hold any job there now..And then came the biggy..The largest banking system mentioned earlier, owned by the Mormon church, got into the business of financing new gambling construction and now hold mortages on every new building in town that had to have extra financing…again as long as the profits went to the church…At a funeral for one of our neighbors, I was introduced to what was identified to me as a Bishop in their church and I had just watched this show about a week or so before and I ask him if he had a moment to talk to me and when he di, I ask him to explain how they could reconcile this with Bible teaching..The more questions I put to him, the more uncomfortable he became until he finally excused himself as having to go greet some people who had just came in ….I did get a chance to ask him if he read the King James version of the Bible and he said he did so I asked him to explain to me ( hey, I’m an uneducated countryboy) how they get around the last verses of Revelations where it tells us ” Woe be unto ye who would add or take away from this book”…Not sure if thats the exact words but close enough..After stuttering for a moment, he stated that the book of Mormon was not an addition to the Bible but just a guide to understanding it…..OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKKKK……I think…If I have this right according to them, I can do anything I choose to do as long as I keep funneling 10% to the church..Sorry folks…I don’t buy it ..Neither should you…Chas McKeever

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