If you are charismatic enough you can gain a very devoted following. I can remember watching a minute or so of Jimmy Swaggart's blubbering apology when he was caught getting together with a prostitute. His performance was comically over-the-top, but when the camera panned to the audience there were many of them with tears streaming down their faces (and not, as you would imagine, from laughter). His site boasts that even today he has a show that broadcasts "nationally and internationally to a potential viewing audience of over 80 million. The weekly Jimmy Swaggart Telecast and A Study in the Word are seen nationwide and abroad on 78 channels in 104 countries and live over the Internet."
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
