Why? Who benefits from this? The 'church' who loses followers? The followers who lose solidarity? Or, people like you. Who want to paint the church and everyone in it as evil and are whining about how hard that is too do in real life?
Mostly the followers, really, because it eliminates some blatant and massive hypocrisy from their beliefs. That very tangibly improves the actual faith side of the equation, even if it doesn't do much for the more primarily social aspect. It'd also help people like
me, who has great respect for most of the basic teachings of the great spiritual figures of human history and would
really rather like it if folks would be upfront about how they're relating to the legacy of those folks.
As for G-Flex, I think he just wants to make it easier to actually
separate the people in the church that
are evil (or at least terribly obsolete) by most standards from folks like you, who seem considerably more chill about things. It'd be a lot easier to tell the rotten fruit from the edible stuff if the edible stuff would stop putting itself in the same bin, so to speak.
I'll admit, the whole "I'm going to call and associate myself with X faith, but hold to basically none of the actually tenants of it, and actually practice Y" thing annoys the blazes out of me, too. It's very prevalent (The absolutely violent schism between a lot of evangelical Christians and the actual teachings of Jesus, ferex), and understandable if you're looking at it the way you're presenting it, Cript, but for folks that actually think 'good faith' (i.e. actually practicing the belief system one openly purports) is important, it's very much
not good faith. It's doublethink, hypocrisy, and a terrible and pervasive contribution to sentiments against religion. It'd make folks on the outside a lot happier if everyone in the inside'd play it straight.
Can we go back to making fun of doomsayers now?
We're waiting for the december deadline to get down to some
real mocking
In the meantime, anyone heard anything about someone doing something massively idiotic in preparation for the end of times?