Bringing people to God - and then letting them down

So, as usual, I watched 'House' last night. The patient of the week was a 15-year-old faith healer - and I want to talk about him. Yes, I know he's fictional, but he's also typical.

See, he may well have actually believed he was healing people. Being the intstrument of God's love and mercy, as he put it. I give him that. I give him, too, that he really believed that God put a tumor in his head in order to talk to him. I give him his whole 'if God did big flashy miracles there wouldn't be any faith' argument, even though I really have a lot of problems with it - I'll give it to him as something he really believed.

But you see - then he went and lied to House. He told him, "God wants you to invite Dr. Wilson to your poker game." And he told him that when challenged to tell him something that the boy couldn't have found out from observing House; told him in a context where it explicitly meant, not 'God wants you to be nice to your friend,' but 'God told me about the poker game, that Wilson wants to play, and that you won't let him, and God wants you to invite him." And that wasn't true. He found out about the poker game and Wilson's desire to join and House's disinclination to have him from someone else and lied to House.

He lied to House to prove to him that God talked to him.

Lying for God. There is a certain type of religious person who does that a whole heckuva lot.

They justify it as 'bringing people to God'. (We'll ignore for now those who do it to attack those they perceive as their enemies; that's a different pathology.) They lie to people so that they'll start worshipping God, so that they'll have faith. Because, I guess, it's better for them to come to God any way at all than not to.

But that faith is based on a lie. In fact, it's not faith at all - it's based on proof. False proof, but proof. A person 'brought to God' that way - let's say, House believed God spoke to the boy and started going to church - has come because he's had substantial proof given to him that God is real. And then he finds out that it was a lie - House discovers Wilson's girlfriend told the boy, not God - and he discovers that what his faith was based on doesn't exist. The proof is false, so the premise is false. He rejects the messenger, he rejects God. He leaves. And, I gather, is lost.

After all, what is faith? It's believing without evidence. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we are told that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. Jesus told Thomas that they who have not seen and yet believe are blessed. So a person who comes to God because he's been given proof haven't come with faith, and thus when the proof is disproved he, having no faith, has no belief.

So when someone lies to bring a person to God, they're are setting that person up to leave.

So why do they do it?