[Illbay]

Evangelical christianity has a pretty bad record of wolves in sheeps' clothing. Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Robert Tilton, Robert W. Armstrong...

And those are just the high-profile cases.

IMO, the problem is systemic. Anyone can set themselves up as religious demagogues, and make good money doing it. In fact, that was the hit on Tilton: He decided in college to go into the "evangelical religion racket."

There's no accountability and no standards. The Bible can mean what he says it means (I imagine the Thompsons were thinking "spare the ROD and spoil the child").

It's a mass of confusion and ripe for corruption. You see it time after time after time.

[crystalk]

The alternative would be to have a law, and try to have the government decide who is a Christian and who isn't, and no one wants that.

Jesus said to let the false ("tares") grow together with the good wheat until the harvest at the end of the world. At that time, He says, the angels will gather the wheat into the Lord's barns, but will bind the tares into bundles to be burned.

No matter how many tares you can see, there is plenty of good wheat there too, to be sure.