#edir macedo

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazilian church wins court battle to remain open despite coronavirus

Pastor said church would remain open as Bolsonaro dismissed virus as media ‘fantasy’, while Brazil has 654 confirmed cases

A major evangelical church in Brazil has won a court battle to remain open despite warnings that large gatherings will help spread the coronavirus.

The ruling came days after a prominent bishop from another evangelical church told followers not to worry about the pandemic because the devil was trying to create fear.

Religious leaders around the world have closed places of worship to help slow the spread of the virus, but many evangelical and Catholic churches remain open in Brazil, where seven people have died from Covid-19 and there are 654 confirmed cases.

Even before Thursday’s court ruling, Pastor Silas Malafia, head of the Assembly of God Victory in Christ church – and a vociferous ally of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro – said his church would stay open.

Bolsonaro, who recently dismissed coronavirus as a media “fantasy”, has provoked widespread condemnation by defying medical advice and making public appearances with crowds of supporters.

In an Instagram video, gospel singer Ana Paula Valadão attacked churches for staying open and suggested they wanted to keep receiving donations from the faithful.

More than 1,500 people attended a service at Malafia’s huge church in Rio de Janeiro, on Thursday said Alexandre Camargo, a pastor at the church. “It is a spiritual hospital for us,” he said. The church is not filled to capacity, hand sanitizer is provided and worshippers stay more than one metre apart, he said. 

Brazil’s biggest evangelical church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, is also still holding services, (and providing soap and water and hand sanitizer, telling people to keep their distance and avoiding prayers involving physical contact).

Its leader, Bishop Edir Macedo, told followers not to worry about coronavirus in a WhatsApp video. “There is an economic interest behind this whole coronavirus campaign,” he said, claiming a campaign of fear had been created by the devil.

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[o-noivo-e-suas-promessas2]

Como VENCER suas

GUERRAS

pela FÉ

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s evangelical church preaches the Bolsonaro revolution

A Thatcherite message of self-help, hard work and strict discipline fits well with ‘prosperity theology’

Many religions promise believers a glorious life after death, but blessings are bestowed much faster at Brazil’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: results are guaranteed as soon as you leave the Lord’s house. 

Up to 10,000 worshippers pack the Temple of Solomon, the church’s headquarters in the gritty São Paulo suburb of Brás, for the two-and-a-half-hour Sunday morning service. An outsize reconstruction of the Old Testament landmark in Jerusalem, the Brazilian version comes with creature comforts King Solomon would not have recognised: air conditioning, cinema-style seating in padded chairs, giant screens, a sound system worthy of a rock concert and a giant underground car park. 

The gospel, preached by self-styled bishop and church founder Edir Macedo, is “prosperity theology”, a Thatcherite message of self-help, hard work and strict discipline. The values promoted by the Universal church and its evangelical siblings are not just reshaping Brazil’s religious beliefs, but also its politics. The first clue comes halfway through the Sunday service, when a reference to the country’s far-right president is dropped in. 

“I am sure that President [Jair] Bolsonaro will do an excellent job because he is the only president of the republic who is consecrated by God,” bellowed Mr Macedo, to applause.

Experts estimate that more than a fifth of Brazilians are now evangelical Protestants, while the once-dominant Catholics are forecast to become a minority of the population by 2022. The new religious landscape is reflected in Brasília, where 118 legislators belong to the evangelical caucus, including the president’s son Eduardo. Most of them back Mr Bolsonaro, who was born a Catholic but rebaptised in the Jordan river in Israel by an evangelical pastor in 2016.

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[allthebrazilianpolitics]

So, in Brazilian feminism news, billionaire Evangelical bishop Edir Macedo has said that women, until they marry, should graduate only high school and not enter college, and used his own daughters as example. On a cult session, he said:

“I told my daughter, ‘you will study until high school. Then if you want to go to college, it’s your choice, but until your marriage you will be just a high school person’. Because if she was a PhD and had a high degree of knowledge and met a boy who had a low degree of knowledge, he would not be the brains of the relationship. She would be the brains instead, isn’t that so? And if she were the brains, it would not serve God's will.”

He also said:

“A man has to be smart, because if he’s not the brains of the relationship, the marriage will be doomed to failure. But that is not what is taught today. What is taught today is: ‘My daughter you will never be subject to a man. You will not be subject to a man’. So, fine, you'll be subject to unhappiness. Because there is no family, there is no happiness, with the woman as brains and the man as body. It is failure. There must be women in the cult here who know what I'm talking about: there are very intelligent women who don't know where to find the brains. Isn’t that true?”

Macedo owns the second largest TV network in Brazil and is the founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which has millions of adherents.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

So the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has granted a diplomatic passport to this billionaire evangelical pastor... Just because? I mean, they claim it's for charity work he does abroad but many leaders from other religions or even other churches do that too so that seems like some religious favouritism to one (1) church but go off I guess

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazilian Evangelical Bishop Granted Diplomatic Passport

Diplomatic passports are usually only given to those representing the interest of the country abroad – diplomats, the president, or military on missions.

Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Ministry (Itamaraty) has granted diplomatic passports to evangelical bishop Edir Macedo, founder and leader of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and his wife, according to the Official Registry. The authorization for the issuance of the diplomatic passports was signed by Minister Ernesto Araújo at the end of last week.

“This Ministry understands that, because they are leaders of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which benefits, among others, Brazilian communities in dozens of countries, the applicants carry on a continuing activity of relevant interest to Brazil, which requires numerous trips abroad and justifies the issuance of diplomatic passports in their name,” said the note issued by the Itamaraty.

In addition to being the leader of the Universal Church, Macedo is also the owner of TV Record, one of Brazil’s largest TV conglomerates.

Hours after the publication of the Registry, lawyer Ricardo Amin Abrahão Nacle filed a popular action suit in the Federal Court of São Paulo.

According to the lawyer, it is “unquestionable that the owners of one of the largest television networks in the country do not develop any mission or continued activity of special interest to Brazil for which they need additional protection represented by the special travel document,” said the suit.

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[allthebrazilianpolitics]

In Jair Bolsonaro’s New Brazil, Far-Right Evangelical Billionaire Edir Macedo’s Media Empire Is Being Exploited to Intimidate Journalists

The highly likely ascension to power of far-right extremist Jair Bolsonaro is already unleashing a climate in which journalists who are critical of him and his movement – including several writing for the Intercept – are being subjected to an aggressive campaign of personal investigation, attempted intimidation, and thuggish scrutiny of family members.

These attacks are being orchestrated by the media outlets owned by a far-right, scandal-plagued, evangelical pastor-billionaire, Edir Macedo (universally known as The Bishop and founder of the sprawling Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), who is now an explicit supporter of Bolsonaro. Macedo’s vast media empire – one that includes the nation’s second-largest TV outlet (Record), online portals (R7) and various other news agencies – is now being flagrantly abused to impose punishment and retaliation against journalists for the crime of reporting critically on Bolsonaro, his movement, and Macedo’s companies.

On Saturday (Oct. 13), The Intercept published, in Portuguese, an exposé on how journalists inside R7, a huge online portal owned by Macedo, are “hostages” to their owner’s agenda, barred from publishing negative stories about Bolsonaro and generally forced to sacrifice their journalistic integrity to serve Macedo’s extremist political agenda. Written for the Intercept by the Brazilian journalist Leandro Demori, the article was based on reports from distraught R7 journalists who spoke anonymously. The article went viral in Brazil, quickly becoming one of the most widely read Intercept articles of the year. On Thursday, in the wake of that reporting, the long-time chief of Record TV’s flagship news program, Luciana Barcelos, resigned.

Ever since publication of Saturday’s report about R7, the captive operatives inside Macedo’s media conglomerate – those who once functioned as journalists but have now been forcibly converted into Bolsonaro warriors – have been intensively investigating not only the journalists at the Intercept but also our families. In a very short time following our report, they scrutinized the personal lives of Demori’s parents in a small town in the interior of a state in southern Brazil, Santa Catarina, raising issues that have nothing to do with Demori or his career, dating back to 1992 when he was only 11 years old. They dug into Demori’s distant past to find pictures of him in his early twenties.

They sent emails to The Intercept with a series of questions containing implicit accusations, insinuations of fabricated scandals, misrepresentations about my husband’s finances (a Rio de Janeiro City Council member from the same party as Franco), and various other questions premised on false accusations. In the e-mail they sent us, they used public information about my husband’s assets and election spending to insinuate wrongdoing, ignoring other equally public information that was easily accessible in the same venue that disproved their malicious version.

Less than two days after publication of The Intercept’s exposé of the abuse of R7’s journalists for pro-Bolsonaro propaganda, that outlet – on Monday, Oct. 15 – published a reckless, falsehood-filled attack on the journalists who provide the Intercept’s reporting.

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Banco Digimais, de Edir Macedo, é alvo de operação da PF; R$ 670 milhões são bloqueados

Fundador da Igreja Universal e proprietário do Banco Digimais está entre os investigados em apuração que envolve suspeitas de fraude financeira, manipulação contábil e ocultação de prejuízos milionários. Pela Redação | A Voz do Povo em Tela A Polícia Federal deflagrou nesta terça-feira (23) a Operação Miragem, que investiga um suposto esquema de fraude financeira envolvendo o Banco Digimais,…

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