The RCC is the mother church, formed over 300 years after the death of Christ, in circumstances ripe for the foretold and developing apostasy, it’s descent into the most evil behavior is clearly visible in history, stepping completely outside of the guidelines that Jesus set, they gained power over even the kings of the earth. Power, as we know, corrupts.
All organizations are susceptible to corruption, and the inflicting of harm upon others, including your own organization as testimonies of former members expose. The challenge becomes at times to see the good in them. And that goes some ways to explain why many don't associate with church organizations. Hence the purpose of this thread. Sometimes the bad outweighs the good.
What Jesus said to the Pharisees applies equally to the religious leaders of Christendom, founded not by Jesus Christ but by imposters who claimed to represent him.
I absolutely agree what Jesus said to the Pharisees applies to many of these churches and their leaders, placing legalism over compassion. In fact, I have remarked that if Jesus were to see most of what is represented by the right wing conservative fundamentalist flavors of the Christian religion, he would be amazed how it's the same thing still. "The legalists you have with you always," he'd probably quip.
Yet all of them think they are the chosen ones, who need to save the rest of the world for Jesus.
2 Peter 2:2-3 is Peter’s warning about this very thing.....Judaism would find its equal in Christendom...all spawned by the “mother” church....
“2 However, there also came to be false prophets among the people, as there will also be false teachers among you. These will quietly bring in destructive sects, and they will even disown the owner who bought them, bringing speedy destruction upon themselves. 2 Furthermore, many will follow their brazen conduct, and because of them the way of the truth will be spoken of abusively. 3 Also, they will greedily exploit you with counterfeit words. But their judgment, decided long ago, is not moving slowly, and their destruction is not sleeping.”
I see that applying to all these churches springing up everywhere, each claiming to have the truth of God and everyone else is wrong and lost. Using all the right words, but leading down a path of substituted their religious beliefs and ideas for the actuality of Love. They use all the right words, but do the opposite of what they mean.
There will be an accounting. Their teachings have not changed, even though their more abhorrent behavior finally did.
Two people hearing the same words, can come up with two entirely different meanings. It's the ones who do harm that show their interpretations of the words come out wrong. So the teaching may remain the same, the words are the same, but the hearing of the words also remain the same. Not everyone who hears the words, gets the words.
So it matters less whether the words are the same. It's the field upon which the seeds are sown that actually matters.
Yes and we understand why his writings were discredited.....still the evidence of the truth he exposed is undeniable IMO.
That doesn't make sense. If his ideas were discredited, they are deniable. Not undeniable. That would make them right, when they are not. "His ideas may be discredited, but he's still right", is not a rational statement. Discredited means he was wrong.
Actually 98% of what they teach is absolute lies. If you have studied the Bible you will clearly see that what happened to the Pharisees was repeated by an apostate church, drunk with its own power and demonstrated in its anti-Christian conduct.
I have studied the Bible quite a lot over the decades. But I would clearly disagree that 98% of what the teach is lies. Same thing with the Pharisees in Jesus day. They didn't teach lies. They taught the truth, but themselves did not understand it and caused others to stumble as well.
"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."
The issue is not the teachings. It's the teachers themselves! Same thing applies to every religious group, including your own.
For many centuries it was the only “Christianity”, just as Judaism was the only religion of the Jews in Jesus’ day. (With a few offshoots) But the church also took a very dim view of any who disagreed and showed them what it meant to say anything against the church....certain death following torture to procure a “confession” was the result
Yes, sentencing someone to death for not going along with the group is pretty unloving and unchristian. Did you know that shunning others is the 'sanitized' equivalent of stoning someone to death? Shunning, on a deep primal level, is the equivalent of a death sentence, being pushed out of the group with no family or friends to support you? In the old days, when your village cast you out, you had to fend for yourself without support or protection, and it essentially translated into them being cast out to die.
So, in casting stones at the RCC, you have to ask if your group has ever done anything comparable to burning heretics at the stake with its own members it casts out? Isn't it really all coming from the exact same place, whether you burn them or shun them?
The Jews were guilty of the same conduct when they persecuted Jesus and his disciples and orchestrated the murder of their own Messiah.
I see churches crucifying Jesus all the time, such as those good God-fearing, Gun loving Trumpians who attacked and killed police officers and said a prayer to Jesus after they invaded the Senate chambers. Yes, Christians kill the Christ too. They certainly crucified him anew on Jan 6, and in all the years leading up to it, as the fruit of their hearts. Didn't they?
Burning humans alive was the reflection of the “god” that Catholicism worshipped, whom they taught burned souls alive eternally in a fiery hell. That was not the God of Abraham or Jesus Christ.
Yes, I've always found the image of a violent God to be incompatible with the God of Love. But it seems a lot of Christians see God as violent, such as imaging how Jesus will come back and slaughter scores of humans causing blood to flow for 200 miles, a horse-bridles deep the whole way. Lovely thought. Frighteningly violent behavior for the Jesus we read about in the gospels. But a lot of Christian worship that image of the Christ, and live their lives like that, hating others, shunning others, condemning others, judging others, trying to "save others" to that.
It was time for the reawakening that Daniel had spoken about for the “time of the end”....a “cleansing, whitening and refining” was foretold (Daniel 12:4, 9-10) because Christ was due to return as he promised, and a small group of men from different denominations of Christianity were preparing, all driven by the same strong desire....to clean up their worship so as to be ready when Christ’s “presence” was manifested...not in a supernatural display, but discerned only by world events, all occurring within one specific period of time as a prelude to the final judgment. (Matthew 24:3-14) Only then would the reality of Christ’s presence be obvious. The “time of the end” would be a time of judgment and separation....with every human alive at that time having opportunity to respond to the global preaching that Jesus said he would support. (Matthew 24:14; Matthew 28:19-20)
You have probably heard all of this, but where does that put you now? Where do you see yourself in this scenario?
Yes of course I have heard of all of this. I find it even more misguided today then I did back when I was trying to believe it when I was part of a group saying those same words.
All of this is part of that history in the United States of mid 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Great Disappointment, that Christ did not return as expected on Oct 22, 1841 was the beginning. Following that, all these little groups were born, trying to regroup themselves and figure out what really was supposed to happen. That's the soil out of which the JWs were born, as was the group I joined up with in my early 20s seeking for a path to God. Lots of "we've got the restored Gospel" type movements arouse out of that time period. That was of course over 120 year ago now.
It was pretty clear that these were culturally motivated religious expectations, and every little flavor of belief found some little hook they could seize upon to set themselves apart from the rest. It was a marketplace for "last days" religions to crop up and grab a little piece of the pie after the fallout of the Great Disappointment. America was quite the fertile ground for new religious sects to spring up, each claiming they had found the truth that the RCC has lost as if fell into apostasy.
All of them were claiming this. I saw a clear pattern emerge from all of that. But to keep this brief, I find myself coming to this quote from Jesus.
"The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
... People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them."
But running after them, joining up with them, finding the "right church", and all of that around the turn of the 20th century, is doing exactly what Jesus said not to do. The kingdom of God is already in your midst, or 'within you' or 'inside you' as the Greek puts it.
It is our individual response to “the good news of the Kingdom” that is the divider between the saved and the disobedient. As much as we might think that God should cut people some slack, we are all telling him who we are every day of our lives. If we accept and practise what God condemns, then how can we qualify for citizenship in his Kingdom? According to the Scriptures, the one thing that God requires of his people is obedience. We don’t get to dictate to the Creator....he has absolute authority to dictate to us. If we defy him, what do we think might happen? Doesn’t the Bible tell us very clearly how unwise that is? How many Bible examples do we need?
I see Grace being a lot more of a factor here than you seem to.
