Joel Osteen's Megachurch Gives Collection Plates To Congregation Including Hurricane Victims

A video of a service held on Wednesday at Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church shows collection plates passed around the congregation which included victims and evacuees of Hurricane Harvey among others. This comes after the pastor was essentially forced to open the doors of his megachurch when he faced massive criticism on social media for canceling service and locking the doors, refusing to shelter evacuees. 

In the video of the service, the mention of “several hundred” evacuees in the audience is made, towards the beginning, by Lisa Osteen, Joel's sister and an associate pastor at the church, pointing out that the victims have "financial needs" and that everyone should pray for them.

She also preaches about how the future of these displaced people holds wonderful things. She asks those who have been affected to stand up and the others to hold hands with them and offer support and quite a few people in the hall can be seen raising their hands or standing up. 

Towards the end of the video, after Lisa finishes, people can be seen moving through the aisles, carrying a pile of collection tins and passing them around, seemingly asking for donations, as the band starts playing. 

Needless to say, the video was not missed by people on social media who wasted no time in expressing outrage that the pastor was asking for money from a community that has recently suffered losses of their belongings and homes in the flood.

How much damage North Korea's hydrogen bomb would have done?

What is a hydrogen bomb?

Hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs use fusion, the same process that powers the sun.

In a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb, "heavy" isotopes of hydrogen are forced together to release a much bigger punch -- hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful than the only nuclear weapons that have been used in warfare.

Atomic bombs use a process called fission. They split plutonium and/or uranium into smaller atoms in a chain reaction that releases massive amounts of energy.

Plutonium bombs tend to involve fairly large devices. Early nuclear weapons, such as the "Fat Man" device dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 -- which weighed around 4,700 kilograms and was a meter and a half in diameter -- were "much too large to place on a ballistic missile," according to weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis.

Miniaturizing any type of nuclear bomb so it can fit on top of an ICBM involves delicate balance between making the device smaller and not sacrificing eventual payload, which requires a lot of testing to ensure the smaller warhead is still capable of producing a devastating explosion.

Can North Korea's ICBM's reach their targets?

Having an ICBM does not mean a country can deliver any payload it wants.

Designing and building an effective intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), one that can not only fly the required range but also have any likelihood of hitting its target, is incredibly difficult in itself.

North Korea has tested its missiles on an upward trajectory. Some experts have assumed that if it can fly a certain distance upwards, firing it at a different angle could see it reach other continents.

But it's a little more complicated than that.

An ICBM is guided by a succession of rockets, which launch the missile thousands of kilometers into the atmosphere and then around the globe, before a re-entry vehicle guides the warhead down toward its target.

Some of the missile tests have failed the re-entry process, that is, they are destroyed as they comes back down and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere to hit their targets.

"If you think of a space vehicle re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, they have heat protectors to stop it from burning up inside. The speed at which a missile comes through the atmosphere creates an enormous amount of air pressure and heat," Martin Navias from the Center for Defense Studies at Kings College London told CNN earlier.

Each stage of that process is incredibly involved and requires intense testing to get right. Even North Korea's very active missile program took almost two decades from when it first began testing long-range rockets to having an apparently functional ICBM.

Once the warhead is small enough to not affect the ICBM's range, another key question remains. Lewis asks: Can the nuclear weapon survive the shock, vibration and temperature changes associated with ballistic missile flight?

The only way to answer that question is with yet more testing, ensuring that the missile itself, the nuclear device, and the re-entry vehicle all work correctly, and are still working by the time they get to their target.