WHY RELIGIOUS MANIPULATORS GET AWAY WITH IT

Religion is full of people who won't admit they should quit and work to dismantle it for it is untrue and dangerous.  Some defend evil religions in case their own dodgy faith gets into the firing line next.  All these people provide an ambience that helps the manipulators plot and scheme.

If you want to fool people with your religious pretensions and use them as enablers of your lies the following is what you must do.
 
Tell them that what you say is God's truth and that if they believe, this belief is a gift from God and is supernatural. In other words, make them think that God is telling them in their hearts that what you say is true. They treat your word then as God's. This creates a suspicion that those who say God is telling them something different are unreliable and a possible threat and the distrust in them makes one listen better to one's own religious leaders. And nobody wants to say that God revealed his truth to them and then have to admit that they were wrong!
 
Tell them that you dispense God's truth and his sacraments. They will feel then that to doubt you is to doubt and offend God.
 
Tell them that you are their father and friend and servant.
 
Be charming - all good con-artists need to turn on the charm.
 
Tell them about saints who do good etc - in fact no organisation however evil or deceitful will succeed unless it does enough good to make people want to support it. And if a Christian is identified by their actions it follows that very few professed Christians really are Christians and they get away with it by pointing to saints and heroes - it makes a good distraction from their own failures and omission.
 
Make them feel you have the relevant education to pastor them.
 
Give them something that passes for evidence and logic and do not admit that you are cherry-picking the evidence you use to shore up your religious and doctrinal claims.
 
Do not let them see your bad side or apologise promptly if you make a mistake.
 
Encourage the fear in the flock that if you, their minister or leader, is exposed then that will tarnish them and the religion as a whole. People tend to neglect the fact that colluding with a perpetrator of evil is what really tarnishes the group at large. It denies the victims their right to be heard and protected and their right to justice.
 
Encourage the fear that even if there are flaws in the religion, not having a religion, or not having the one you are in or even a similar one, will be worse and society will or could fall apart. It seems that this fear is the main driving force behind the power religion has. It leads to sectarianism and intolerance and indeed IS sectarianism.
 
If the religion teaches that tacit approval of evil or untruthful religionists is wrong then don't mention that teaching. 'The Lord said to Moses: "Rebuke your neighbour frankly so you will not share in their guilt."' Leviticus 19:17.
 
When a religion teaches or does evil and is unchallenged, it starts to feel confirmed in the rightness of its malevolent cause. The bystanders are acting as if its evil is justifiable. Passivity changes the bystanders themselves, too. Doing nothing says they don't feel at one with the victims or their suffering. They have made a distance between themselves and the victims and the longer they enable the harder it is for them to close the gap and meanwhile they make others as bad as themselves. They all start saying, "What has it got to do with us?” They will add, "We’ve got enough problems of our own right here.”
 
Many people are biased and like to feel they do more good than they actually do and want their dodgy goodness validated and sanctioned by others and especially by religion. Religion is evil precisely because it appeals to people who need a placebo for their imperfections and even their dark side and tries to satisfy this appeal. Consider how many in a Catholic Church say the Lord's Prayer and say they forgive as they have been forgiven when they in fact hate other people. They feel good about going to communion and praying. If religion claims to be God's channel for forgiving and healing sin and it isn't it is in intrinsically a placebo for vice and its goodness reflects man's love of goodness not as it is but as he would like it to be.
 
Know and play on the fact that many people suffer from a prejudice that favours supernatural belief and gives it more rights than other beliefs: "When religious people do any evil or tell any lies, religion is not to blame. When politicians do evil, politics is to blame." That only leads to religious people getting special rights instead of everybody being treated equally by the law. If religion is human it is nonsense to say it is never to blame.
 
Make sure it is commonly known that some members of the faith are very intelligent. People forget that it does not matter how intelligent somebody is, what matters is if they are right or wrong and you can be very smart but bad at assessing your faith for truthfulness. Intelligent people routinely disagree so intellectual members of a faith gives no reason at all for bestowing any credibility on it. Intelligent people are adept at coming up with ways to fool themselves that nonsense is true. Nobody is free from bias and prejudice. Nobody.
 
When religious labels such as Catholic or Protestant or whatever and no concern is shown for what the person actually believes this label is given out of a political motivation. You don't have to be a politician to be political. If you don't care what X does or believes and still give him a religious label then why do your religion not take responsibility as a religion for the bad things he does? If you have a free society that people participate in by being good you might not be to blame as a religion but when you use labels, and especially stupid labels, you are to blame. You associate the bad person with you and link yourself to that person by stamping a religious label on.
 
Know that people favour an evil person who enables evil and hate a less evil person who directly does evil. People do not judge fairly. The one who lets an attack take place gets little condemnation compared to the one delivering the blows.
 
Religious leaders can be like terrorists who engage in peace-talks while they refuse to put the gun and the bomb away. The talks are really about making their cause look more attractive because it looks like they are really interested in peace.
 
By telling themselves that God and hence God's rules come first so if they break the law or otherwise do harm it is not because they break the law or harm but because they have to obey God. That is how they rationalise and feel okay about what they do.
 
When God lets babies suffer terribly that can make you feel less bad about how you neglected your own children.
 
People are more merciful to evil doers when they think they are living up to what they see as the facts. Religion claims that its doctrine is factual. If religious dogma is fact it makes no sense to allow religious freedom. Truth and facts are necessarily narrow.
 
People enable evil pretty often so they will be desensitised to pastors who enable evil. When you enable the homeless to starve to death by giving no money to homeless charities or by voting to keep a political system that has little or no interest in feeding them you will still feel good about yourself for you don't and cannot see exactly who this harms and what it does.
 
If a religion's evil is thought to be a thing of the past people cease to be shocked by it and hypocritically imply they are okay with it as long as it happened ages ago. An example is how Jesus and his fawning priests are venerated despite his plainly taking responsibility for the murders commanded by God in the Jewish law.