TVradioguru said:
But, since you're so quick to defend a "Christian radio" preacher bilking people out of their life savings or potentially their lives, would you also defend the likes of someone like Jim Jones? Had we seen a warning, should the Justice Department have intervened before many lost their lives at Jonestown?
Your understanding of what i am protecting, what I am protesting, differs from how a view my stance. Thus, I have a problem. I need to express my view so that we can see my view the same way. That does not mean that you will agree with my view... it means we will both accurately understand how we differ.
If Camping had relocated to parts of Idaho or Montana where there is room for non-standard people to find themselves a sanctuary... or maybe The Ozarks of northern Arkansas which through the years has provided space where wack-a-doodles await some spectacle-of-the-universe event, then I would look more favorably on your comparison of Camping and Jones. David Koresh gathered his followers in a compound near Waco and there is apparently some evidence that the fire that took placed when the compound was raided was a suicide action by Koresh. I can see comparing Koresh and Jones.
I am not a defender of radio preachers. I once ran a preach-and-teach radio station with wall-to-wall programming by Chrisitan ministers and groups. I was up to my belly-button in "Gospel Yackers". If you were to go back and read every thing I have posted on Radio-Info through the years and watch for the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) comments, you will note that
I am not a friend of radio preachers as we know them today.
Part of the founding of this country was, of course, entrepreneurial. Europeans looking for a place where colonies could make them some serious bucks. Their plan worked because there was a ready supply people eager to populate such colonies in order to escape European communities where religious belief and flavor were dictated by the government... in a somewhat civilized version of third-world countries today where the term "war lord" is in vogue.
When these pilgrims, these immigrants, these refugees came here they first tried to create settlements favorable to their own beliefs. Collectively they soon realized they were on the verge of creating "Europe Junior" when it came to jamming religion down people throats, so they established a concept of giving religious thought a freedom to roam, to range, to be what it wanted to be when it grew up.
Today we are facing those issues all over again. There is this "orange haze" in our thinking that religious freedom is great as long as you want to be a Protestant, a Catholic or a Jew. But when you go down to city hall and apply for a permit to build something where people will gather to study and worship as a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist... and in some commuities, as a Mormon, all hell breaks loose. People show up at city council meetings with hand lettered posters and a lot of angry shouting. If we tolerate this and encourage this, in the coming years mobs will show up to protest the establishment of a Baptist Church that is part of the wrong Baptist Church, or the wrong Catholic order, or the wrong branch of Judaism.
If Camping has violated laws regulating fraud, do what is happening to John Edwards: let the prosecutors take him to court. Not because his theology is bad... but because he broke the fraud laws the same way a hearing-aid salesman might commit fraud; the same way a quack doctor submits phony Medicaid claims and commits fraud.
I dug my heels in on this topic because so many in the various forums about Camping are expressing themselves in a way that indicates they want to tar-and-feather him because he has non-standard theology. Fine! Let's go after Mike Huckabee and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye because they have bad theology when it comes to end-times theology. No, I don't think so.
Go after anyone who while "wearing the garb of the church and religion" commits fraud, not those who commit bad theology. Other than being presumptuous and setting a date, most of what Camping teaches matches up with what is taught in accredited theological seminaries across the country.
If you want to "see the fur flying" start a campaign to shut down college and seminaries that teach bad theology. :
And the gist of our conversations in these forums is that the FCC is vanguard that should kick off this campaign.
