Did you know that Joel Osteen is kicking it old school now? And by old school, I mean Old Testament. Straight outta Hebron!

The new-agey motivational speaker preacher at Lakewood Church took a bizarrely old-fashioned approach recently when he advised his congregation against eating both pork and seafood, saying that "...for our health's sake, we have to be willing to make some changes."

He further explained his newfound nutritional path to salvation with deeply theological phrases like "back in the Bible days" and "this is kinda gross" before launching into a detailed diatribe about the inherent filth and evil associated with porcine digestive tracts.

He appealed to his followers, "I know some of you love pork chops. You love ham and cheese sandwiches. I grew up on all that. I love...bacon." (The marked pause makes me think Joel doesn't really love bacon.) But that they should follow the example set by his family -- who now eats turkey bacon -- and give up pork "to honor God."

He goes on to declare that his congregation should also avoid shellfish: "Shrimp, crabs, clams, oysters, lobsters..." because they eat the "excreetment [sic]" of other animals.

One can only assume that someone inadvertently left a Bible in the men's room at Lakewood, opened to Leviticus, and Joel -- since he hadn't brought his copy of The Six Figure Speaker with him that day -- read it to pass the time.

And having little to no theological education -- by his own admission -- nor context within which to understand the Old Testament's strictly-defined dietary laws, Joel interpreted the Bible's weird front pages that no one ever reads to mean that pork and seafood should be off-limits to Christians. Because, clearly, other Biblical scholars have been mistaken about this for years.



Good work, Joel! I look forward to your next sermon, wherein you discuss the segregation of women into red tents during their scary menstrual cycle each month. In the meantime, I'll be eating a SCCOLBLT. That's a shrimp-crab-clam-oyster-lobster-bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, Philistine.