This is nothing new when you were trapped in a JW household growing up. Those fuckers are pathologically opposed to exposure to anything even resembling a different perspective or thought pattern.
This is something you see time and time and time and time and time again in any kind of social circle that has a competitative structure, especially in religion.
The constant focus on being better than your peers, being more extreme, it combined with loosing track of anything but “winning”, even when there is no way to objectively “win”.
In this case, these guys change the rules at a whim, trying make them and their followers look better than the rest. This sounds an awful lot like the deadly sin pride…
Pastor missed the whole point. Don’t stoop to the level of sinners, be holy and devout, and you will prosper. On top of that he takes a positive message and makes it a negative message (do this and you will be rewarded vs don’t do this or you will be punished)
I listened to a lot of Christian genres, especially rock and metal but stopped when I discovered secular bands with deeper, more meaningful lyrics, and better sound.
One can only take the same “I am terrible, he is worthy” themes repeated over and over before you gotta move on.
The Crucified was hard core when I was in high school. That song Pure by Superchick is pretty catchy. Jeff Buckley has some okay stuff. His cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah is clean. Unfortunately I think that’s about it. That’s the end of the list for Christian music that I like, other than choir music. I listened to a guy named Joel Weldon out of necessity when I was really young, but after discovering secular music I realized just how boring he was.
No, that’s not true. One of the key signs of a cult is that it doesn’t have many members. One of the key signs of an abusive religion is that it cuts the victim of from their support structure, whether that religion be a cult or a larger religion. You seem to be talking as though the word cult meant abusive religion. I can assure you that though many religions are abusive, an equal proportion are both small and large, cult and non cult. Most victims of religious abuse are not in cults, because most religious people are not in cults. When you mix up cults with abusive religions, it becomes hard to tell the difference between the two, and you make it harder for people to see the abuses committed by larger religions.
Jesus’s crew is often described as “sinners and prostitutes”. He died next to two thieves.
As an excommunicated Catholic, let me tell you about some of the stuff I had to learn in theology. There’s this parable of a wedding party in some gospels, where a rich guy holds a wedding, all his friends fail to RSVP, nobody comes, and so he invites in people off the street. That parable is taken as meaning: even though God was originally a god of the Hebrews, some subset of those chosen people betrayed God in some way known only to the original audience of this sermon two thousand years ago. So now this god was going to be a god of everyone, and the new Christians were the metaphorical people invited in off the street.
If this Mark Burns idiot had ever learned even a bit of Christian theology, he would know that associating with outsiders is encouraged, especially associating with [people consider to be] sinners. He is quoting an Old Testament text, which is thoroughly overridden by New Testament text.
He’s also citing it wrong – it’s “Psalm 1 1:3” not “Psalm 1-3”.
Why would they use a rich guy as an allegory for the lord, tho? It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, so why are the Hebrews and elohim the rich people in this allegory?
His view is hardly unique. I was constantly told both of these things growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church. I watched as more than one friend burned their music collection, refusing to let me have it because they’d be negatively influencing me.
Yeah I’m a different excommunicated catholic and yeah a ton of Protestants don’t understand anything about Christianity. It’s not all of Protestantism, plenty like the Quakers know what’s up. But there’s a strong strain in Protestantism of folks like fundamentalists who just seem to Bible bash and do selective reading of the worst parts, who think that its possible to fully believe every word is literally true as though this Jesus fella had a revolutionary idea of speaking metaphorically and that literal interpretations of every word of the Bible doesn’t get you with the most self contradictory mess.
if you believe with 100% of your being that if someone doesn't accept Christ as their personal lord and savior they will spend eternity burning in hell and saving me isn't your number one priority ... you're fucking evil or you don't really believe that shit.
Or they understand that hell is not eternal torture. John the Disciple said:
This lake of fire is the second death. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.
–Revelations 20:14.5-15
How much more clearly does it need to be said? He says it’s the second death. We all know what death is. You have to redefine the word death for the argument of eternal torture to make sense. Yes, it’s eternal punishment, because death is eternal. Not being granted eternal life is the punishment.
The word hell is translated from the Hebrew word Sheol, which means grave or place of the dead. So you have the original word that literally represents death, and you have Jesus’ disciple John saying it’ll be death. And yet people think a loving god known for his grace is now going to torture people forever rather than just not granting them eternal life like he talked about throughout the entire new testament?
The modern concept of hell didn’t become common until hundreds of years after Christ’s death. Unfortunately I don’t remember the exact period, but the meaning has been twisted for the purpose of manipulation and power, and then popularized by fire and brimstone pastors in the 18th and 19th centuries. I did a ton of research on this subject as a young adult because the whole thing didn’t sit right with me. It seemed very suspicious, given every other message in the new testament. Anyways, I came to the conclusion that hell as it is taught today does not exist in the scriptures. If you aren’t in the book of life, then you are thrown into the lake of fire where you die, and remain dead forever. You will not be tortured in hell forever. You will be dead.
Isolating people from external points of view is how abusive partners and cults maintain control over the victims. If such a person/organization lets their battered spouses or indoctrinated teens talk to “the outside” they risk questions that lead to answers they don’t want. If you find someone in your life demanding you disconnect from others, immediately take a long hard look at why they are pressuring you that way. People who genuinely want the best for others and try to be part of that aren’t afraid to operate “in the open” under scrutiny.
To be clear, I’m not saying a healthy relationship has to constantly air out dirty laundry as it were, just that forced isolation is a huge red flag.
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