Not sure if the historical character did or didn’t. But the above was an inside reference to a previously banned poster of the same name, parodizing his posting style. Which it’s okay that you missed considering you just joined last month.
The real Dio would never have backed down the easily. It usually took mod intervention, two pit threads and an ATMB thread.
I was renouncing/recanting my own teaching.
And a crowbar.
A number of people who founded or led ex-gay ministries have subsequently changed their minds, although I don’t think any of them were being actively fraudulent to begin with (deluded or in denial, yes, but not attempting to defraud).
It would be a huge stretch to call him a religious leader (except on a very small scale) but Sam Kinison started off in his father’s footsteps as a fire and brimstone Pentecostal preacher. Obviously that didn’t stick.
Jaroslav Pelikan was an ordained Lutheran minister who went into academia, eventually becoming one of the world’s greatest experts in the history of theology. Along the way, he decided that Luther was wrong and converted to Greek Orthodoxy.
Well, not so much a recantation but an admission of fraud: L. Ron Hubbard-founder and chief prophet of the “Church” of $cientology. He once stated “If you want to make real money…found a religion”. He also once described his church as “a new way of making slaves”.
That wasn’t public, though. What you’re speaking of is more in the realm of hearsay.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but it wasn’t something he wanted anyone to know about once Scientology got rolling.
Notice that there are several different possibilities that are being mentioned here:
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Someone who sincerely founded a religious system but later decided that his ideas were wrong, so he denounced those ideas and left the religion.
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Someone who never believed the ideas he espoused but just played along become it was expected of him and because it made it easy for him to get money/sex/power/whatever, but then he eventually announced that he never believed in them and his followers had been swindled.
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Someone who created a cult around himself just as a joke which somehow got taken seriously, so he later told his followers that they were fools for believing what he said.
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Someone who sincerely joined a religion and became a minister in it (although never a founder or a major innovator), although later in life he rethought his positions and decided that the religion was incorrect in most of its ideas, so he decided to leave it.
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Someone who advocated a philosophy sincerely which he later thought his followers had distorted, so he denounced what his followers had turned his philosophy into.
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Someone who sincerely advocated one religion but left it because he was forced to.
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Someone who sincerely believed in a religion that he was a leader in and who later in life greatly rethought his positions and then completely changed the religion to conform with those new positions.
And there are some cases that are combinations of these possibilities.
Rare if ever… too profitable, easy, profitable, corrupt and profitable 
There is the interesting case of the former Danish priest Thorkild Grosbøll who famously outed himself as an atheist. The Church of Denmark tried to sack him (half-heartedly), but his parish community liked him. Grosbøll wrote he studied theology because he had always been interested in history.
He was eventually allowed to retire early and collect a pension from the Church of Denmark (which is the state church in Denmark and as liberal as it comes).
chargerrich writes:
> . . . Rare if ever . . .
That’s definitely not true. If you follow the links above, it’s clear that there are at least hundreds of clergy living today in the U.S. that have left their church. If you were to look over all history and the entire world, it would be many thousands.
I guess that depends on how you define “religious leader”. Are you including your parish priest? There are thousands of clergy that become disenchanted with their profession. But I would hardly call them religious leaders. The OP is talking about people who started or head a religion or cult.
The number of people who started a cult or a religion is much, much smaller than the number who are just ordinary ministers/priests/rabbis/monks/shamans/imams/mullahs/whatevers. If we assume that the percentage of cult/religion founders who have renounced their beliefs is the same as the percentage of ordinary whatevers who have left their religion, obviously the number is going to be much, much smaller. So in any case the absolute numbers of either founders or lower-level leaders who have left their religion is quite significant, probably many thousands over all the world and all history, but the percentage of founders and ordinary leaders who have done so isn’t very big, maybe a few percent at most.
Exactly… the pastor at your church who is not motivated by hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in “contributions for God” is a whole different story.
But find me one “evangelical leader” from say TV who heads his own church that left for a reason not listed under corruption, legality or scandal and I will be amazed.
I think Marjoe Gortner (whom I mentioned in post 2) comes pretty close to being an example.
Would the (mainstream) Mormons renouncing polygamy be an example of this? Was that after Joseph Smith died?