[polygamous sect] chapel in the house of prayer

[Update Friday evening: one or two were a little confused whether this post was condoning this sect or was opposed. Vehemently opposed of course - these are not Christians - they're paedophiles in this blog's opinion.]

We've all by now seen the lurid details of the polygamous sect in Texas and I shan't be repeating them:

The ranch and compound are owned and run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is a sect which broke away from the Mormon Church when it banned polygamy more than 100 years ago. Inside the ranch they still practice polygamy.

The sect's prophet is Warren Jeffs, a self-confessed polygamist who was jailed last year for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who married her cousin. Authorities have kept the ranch under surveillance since it was bought by the sect five years ago.

It seems, according to this article that things are being handled better here than they were at Waco.

It's worth looking at the proliferation of sects spawned in America. As the whole gay and feminist movements show - there is a fiercely protected freedom of action in America which the rest of us don't always understand. So all sorts of weird things are going to be tolerated, except by the good ole boys.

But there's something more when it comes to Christian sects. Just as Islam, whether rightly or wrongly, has violence associated with it, so Christianity definitely attracts very weird thinking.
In scripture it would be characterized as tares among the wheat and the advice in the gospels is to wait until the harvest and then cut them out.

Daniel Defoe wrote, in 1701:

Wherever G-d erects a house of prayer, the Devil always builds a chapel there and 'twill be found, upon examination, that the latter has the larger congregation.

It stands to reason. If Christianity is correct, for the sake of argument, then the Devil exists. Therefore he would be hell bent on destroying the redemptive power of Christ in people's minds. Therefore one of the best ways is creating strawmen who are putting views and focussing on passages and generally being obnoxious, to the extent that people who haven't read it up themselves will turn against it in droves.

So, instead of focussing on the faith, hope and charity part, they zero in, for example, on homophobic and red-necked passing references and make, of them, the whole focus. This is a twisting of the message but suffices to turn people away from any possible redemption.

As I say, "if Christianity is correct" and that's outside the scope of this post to either prove or disprove. But certainly passages are seized upon and taken out of context and even bloggers are good at doing this - one blogger was fond of biblical images to push his strange philosophy last year but most people saw through that. The Crusaders did that. A noble idea twisted in its execution.

This is the eternal cross [forgive the reference] that Christianity has had to bear - the false prophets, the wolves in sheep's clothing, the real message twisted and presented as some sort of parody of pious rectitude, always scheduled to be Swaggarted at some stage down the line to reinforce the real message that the redemptive power of Christ is bunkum.

And the aping is amazing - from the pipe organ to the pseudo biblical blessings, the other side has it all down pat. That particular blogger made a comment on a post a long time back that he actually preferred the paraphernalia, the regalia and the flim flam to the original gospel message itself. He preferred the ritual to the mental adjustment required.

So it will always be. The true Christians are few and it is next to impossible to keep to the path and still be a human being. I by no means lay any claim to being a proper Christian.