All these verses show that Paul felt persecuted, but that doesn't mean he was. After all, Paul was a nutty guy who claimed to have walked on 3rd heaven, so it's like with people who believe that they were abducted by aliens and then they feel persecuted.
When it comes to the prosperity gospel, Jesus is described as its proponent. Like when he praises the widow for giving her last money to the temple - it is very much “giving until it hurts.”
Under any normal, rational idea of what makes sense, it was not smart that the widow “put in all she had to live on.” It’s more logical to wonder why Jesus didn’t help her get the money back. Jesus commend a mindset that prompts a widow to give away—to a mammoth religious bureaucracy—all the money she has to live on.
When it comes to the prosperity gospel, Jesus is described as its proponent. Like when he praises the widow for giving her last money to the temple - it is very much “giving until it hurts.”
Under any normal, rational idea of what makes sense, it was not smart that the widow “put in all she had to live on.” It’s more logical to wonder why Jesus didn’t help her get the money back. Jesus commend a mindset that prompts a widow to give away—to a mammoth religious bureaucracy—all the money she has to live on.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
