It's not religion that blinds and binds them, it's greed.
"agreed"

Absolutely, but religion and money have always been pretty close bed mates. The holy roller, evangelical, and fundamentalist strands of every religion since time immemorial have been the preferred vehicle for chicanery, fraud, scams, etc. Religion is all about **belief** usually most popular in the face of adverse reality. So it is not hard for the con man to use religion for his or her own purposes as has happened throughout recorded history and will probably keep happening.
That is not to say that religion is necessarily bad, but that
those who put their faith in a personification of religion (church leader) need to watch their wallets and try to separate faith and belief from fiction.
Unfortunately more than wallets... Jonestown was a guy that wanted to get into politics and used christianity as a way raise up a group of rabel-rousers to show his influence.. not a lot of people survived Jonestown. The problem is that the Bible is easily cherry picked to support any cause. I'm sure there are those who feel that this thread is 'persecution' and that persecution is a sign that they're doing the right thing and 'the enemy' is against them. That's how you get statement to the effect that (paraphase) "Wow, we must be scaring the bejeezus out of the big banks, look at how they're attacking all the GAW sites! Dig deep folks, buy more XPY!" ... when the sad reality is that the GAW sites are just badly built and run like crap.