It's not as if the churches don't have to work though. They invest in lifetimes in order to collect the properties bequeathed to them from dying parishioners, having to put up with baptisms, marriages, funerals and the tiresome weekly sermons that everyone jokes are too long, but will complain about if they were omitted altogether.

It is not as if people in other countries are unaware of the large percentage of faithful that appear to be duped here on a regular basis. With their better familiarity with our politics - as compared to the average citizen - they must surely marvel at the recent importance the so called "religious right" has within the Republican Party that has dominated American politics for the past seven years. It would be easy for them to associate our president with any other rural sounding evangelical huckster - yet the damage they seemingly cause is not to the scale of what Bush has accomplished.

The burr that triggered this diatribe was supplied to me this morning while I was reading Mother Jones on line. The "top stories" tickler at the top of the home page read, "Where Would Jesus Drill? - Evangelical preachers claim that a giant oil find in Israel will usher in the end of days. Enter the con men." A bit hard to resist taking a peek at that wouldn't you agree?

The article re-investigates a penny stock play known as the "pump and dump" scheme. A publicly traded shell company is purchased and misleading claims are then announced to potential investors to drive up the share price as the founders sell off at a huge profit.

While probably more difficult, but not impossible, to do under the noses of normally astute investors, the scheme seems to work well for Christians when Biblical passages are invoked as evidence. The article indicates how evangelical hucksters justify exploration and claims of huge profit potential utilizing Biblical passages that many believe indicate that the largest oil reserves in the world will be discovered beneath Israel and that this will trigger such aggression from neighboring Arabs so as to bring about the "end of days". And they use Christian media to get their message out to the millions of faithful just waiting in their armchairs with checks and pen in hand.

If you are chuckling, stop. It is true. Investors have invested millions of dollars in Ness Energy International, Inc. (web site) and watched as the value of their shares have dropped to $0.02 per share as of this writing. All seemingly perfectly legal as the stock trades publicly as OTC:NESS.

The questionable company stock was highlighted back in 2002 by Robert Church as a "dead fish" at LongandShortReports.com.

• Ness Energy is unusual even for an OTC-BB stock. The company's promotions and stock sales have all centered on the CEO "Hayseed" Stevens' claims of having the gift of "Biblical Prophecy". Mr. Stevens claims that Bible passages have "revealed" to him the presence of an enormous oil field beneath Israel's Dead Sea and that he has been chosen by God to discover this oil. He envisions that its discovery will lead to the draining of all Arab oil fields, precipitate Armageddon, and lead to the Second Coming. This is not a story heard in your typical Sunday school.

I told you not to chuckle. The Mother Jones article I mentioned is a bit more in depth, more current and discusses other, similar companies that are spending millions looking for "Zion's Holy Profits". It explains how influential the Christian media network can be in support of evangelical hucksters and just how gullible the evangelical Christian who longs for Armageddon can actually be.

• The history of biblical oil prospecting is filled with quixotic quests and colorful characters, starting with Weslie Hancock, a wealthy California man who in the 1960s dreamed that Jesus told him he would find black gold in the Holy Land. He sunk his entire fortune into two dry holes. In the 1980s, Andy Sorelle, a World War II fighter pilot and petroleum engineer, collected as much as $25 million from churchgoers who believed they were buying an interest in his well; he bored down to 21,500 feet, deeper than anyone had ever drilled in Israel, before hitting a thick slab of limestone that showed traces of oil. Across the Bible Belt, the faithful braced for a gusher. On The 700 Club, Pat Robertson reported that Sorelle was about to tap "the largest oil field ever discovered," a development that could "revolutionize the fulfillment of biblical prophecy." But the euphoria evaporated when some testing equipment got jammed in the hole and Sorelle couldn't conjure the miracle he needed to get it out. That's when Goldberg started receiving letters from churchgoers who had sunk their entire savings into the well. "I felt so bad for them," he recalls. "They were people who had scraped together their dollars, and when the hard times came, they had nothing."

The 700 Club. You know, Pat Robertson's gig. Pat Robertson, a man who ran for president of the United States in 1988 after three million people signed up to volunteer for his campaign.

What must the world really think of us, the most powerful nation in the world, with the best equipped military in the world with countless nuclear weapons at our disposal and such a significant portion of our population possibly stark raving mad?

Let There Be Light Crude: Zion's Holy Profits, By Mariah Blake, January/February 2008 Issue, Mother Jones.

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1.11.2007