Church Soup 2024: Episode 02 (Pastor Crypto Scam, Dolly Parton Worship, TikTok Rant & More!)

Welcome back to Church Soup, the greatest evangelical news show in the history of the Internet, and what some are calling the

Harbor Freight version of the Babylon Bee. I'm your host, Keith Foskey, pastor, author, humorist, and little known fact, expert in early

Hungarian cabinet making. The one about Hungarians. Nobody knows anything about Hungarians. Our top story.

A pastor and his wife in Colorado are being accused of a cryptocurrency scam which has defrauded its investors for over $3 million.

For more on this story, we turn to the Church Soup senior correspondent, Johnny Root. Thanks, Keith.

Pastor Eli Regalado and his wife, Caitlin, launched a cryptocurrency known as INDX coin and began selling it to members of their church, as well as other communities of faith, even though regulators say it was essentially worthless.

They sold their cryptocurrency through an online marketplace they created, controlled, and operated, seemingly while raising no suspicion at all.

Possibly the most egregious part of the story is when the pastor, in an online video, admits to pocketing $1 .3

million of the investors' money and using several hundred thousand dollars for a home remodel that, get this, he claimed the

Lord told them to do. The charges are that Caitlin and I pocketed $1 .3 million and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true.

So there's been $1 .3 million that's been taken out of, I think it was a total of $3 .4 million, but out of that $1 .3,

half a million dollars went to the IRS and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the

Lord told us to do. In other video statements, Regalado stated that it was God who actually convinced him that this was a safe and profitable investment venture.

So like many other false teachers before him, when things don't go his way, he just blamed

God. Wait, I think I might be hearing God say something right now. No, he's not.

These people are liars. We also reached out to Dave Ramsey for his thoughts on this story, and upon hearing the report, his head literally exploded.

Back to you, Keith. Thank you, Johnny, for that important report. Moving on to international news,

Yuval Noah Harari is at it again, this time seeking to convince his listeners that there's no such thing as God or, get this, human rights.

Human rights are just like heaven and like God. It's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around.

Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights also.

Harari is an advisor to Klaus Schwab, the chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum.

You know, it's getting harder and harder not to be a conspiracy theorist when the people who are in positions of power legitimately qualify as Batman villains.

I mean, for real, tell me Klaus Schwab isn't a living avatar of Lex Luthor. All right, before any of you run to the comments and say,

Lex Luthor's a Superman villain, not a Batman villain, listen, they're all in the DC universe. Lex Luthor's gone up against Batman before.

I know what I'm talking about. Don't come at me. Would you be at all surprised to wake up tomorrow and find out that Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari have been plotting to take over the world's supply of plutonium or building a death ray?

I mean, it is the WEF, which recently had an actual witch cast magic spells on its panelists.

Yeah, there's nothing weird about that at all.

Oh, and did I mention that they're developing a carbon footprint tracker, which is designed to track everything a person does, even down to what they eat and where they travel?

We're developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint.

What does that mean? That's where are they traveling? How are they traveling? What are they eating?

What are they consuming on the platform? So individual carbon footprint tracker.

Listen, 1984 called. It wants its dystopian future back. Well, the jerk store called.

They're running out of you. Well, at least we don't have to worry about our rights here in America with a seasoned leader like our president at the helm.

And Corn Pop was a bad dude. In more international news, a church in the UK recently held a

Dolly Parton themed worship service, which featured a drag cabaret performance.

Alistair Begg has asked if he banned grandmothers in his church from attending that event, if he would be welcomed back at the

Shepherd's Conference. In woke church news, the Reverend Carla Jean Bailey of Pilgrim Congregational Church recently took to the pulpit to define intersectionality for her congregation.

I don't remember when I first started hearing the word intersectionality.

But I can't get past the fact that one Twitter commenter stated that she looks like the female version of John Piper.

Since reading that comment, it's now impossible to see anything else. I mean, you know, you could see this lady saying, look,

Lord, at my shell collection. Staying on the theme of woke church, recently, another lady preacher who identifies as Pastor L.

began her sermon by intentionally leaving out a section of the text of First Corinthians because she said it was yikes.

And she identified the Apostle Paul as a jerk. Before we get started, I wanted to just name something, too, from the reading from Corinthians.

You might have noticed that we didn't read one part out loud, and that's because it's yikes. But really, in this letter to the

Corinthians, Paul's being kind of a jerk, Paul's being kind of a jerk, Paul's being kind of a jerk, Paul's being kind of a jerk.

As always, I hope it was a blast for her, because it certainly was a blast for me. In educational news, a school in North Carolina recently removed all of the mirrors from the bathrooms because students were taking up to nine breaks a day to film

TikToks. Okay, it's time for a new segment on Church Soup. We're going to call this the Church Soup Rant.

All right, there's nothing I hate more than public restrooms. In fact, for all of you post -meal advocates out there, one of the strongest arguments against your position is a

Walmart bathroom. Have you been in one? Trust me, things are not getting better. And I was a substitute teacher in public school for eight years.

Listen, school bathrooms are gross, okay? They are stench -infested, dungeons of necessity, and the fact that children are using them as a makeshift recording studio is absolute testimony to the doctrine of total depravity.

Also, listen, I do TikTok videos, I spend money and time on backgrounds, lighting, microphones to get the few viewers

I have, while Maddie in Greensboro is hitting 40 million views lip -syncing Taylor Swift songs six feet away from a full toilet.

I'm not bitter, not bitter at all. Maybe I'll start recording from the church bathroom. And so ends the

Church Soup Rant. As we come to the end of another Church Soup, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the passing of a great actor,

Carl Weathers. Weathers was famous for his iconic role as Apollo Creed in Rocky, as well as roles in other classics including

Predator, Action Jackson, and Happy Gilmore, as well as TV shows like The Mandalorian, Psych, and one of my favorites in the 80s,

Street Justice. Anybody remember Street Justice? That show was rad. And I say rad because it was in the 80s.

So Carl Weathers, this one's for you. In honor of his passing,

I've decided to do a special giveaway. I created the Sola Fistas shirt to go along with my denominational martial arts video.

Everyone who puts their favorite Carl Weathers movie in the comments will be entered to win a free t -shirt.

Thank you for watching Church Soup. I want to give a shout out to all of you who've been sharing news articles and using the hashtag

ChurchSoup. My inbox has been filled up lately with awesome videos and stories and I just want to say thank you and keep those soup ingredients coming.