Posted by Jaypeeto on March 21, 1999 at 18:02:04 {MW/mrDAKQdkdU}:
Hadn't paid any attention to the much-talked-about
witnesses.net site, so I decided to go on over and have a look.
Believe me, I'd much rather visit H2O.
The witnesses.net basically bored me to death.
I noticed that there
was a "thread" on "apostasy", and I said to myself (and I've been "out" for well-over
a decade....well-over!), ya know, ((before going to the thread)), I'll bet 5 dollars that the whole thread is going to be filled with dialogs along
the lines
of "this, that, and the other,"...i.e., utterly predictable with very few exceptions.
I was right. The slave this and the slave that, and how wrong it would have been for the people before 1935 to have taught the great crowd had an earthly hope before the slave revealed it and so on and so on and so on.
The place is basically vapid.
Utterly predictable.
I try not to get angry over groups like this one and the LDS Church and ultra-fundies, and at the individual members, I don't get angry. I've "been there" "done that".
Difference is, nowadays, I know that all these groups which claim to be the restoration of the faith of the first couple of centuries are, basically, lying
about that. Moreover, they are spreading that lie to the public door-to-door (not just the JWs, either).
And why are they, the rank-and-file, doing this?
Because they are told to and (as the witnesses.net posters in the apostasy thread so blatantly pointed out) they believe that those telling them to spread this are "specially-appointed" by the Lord, or his "slave," or whatever, and that if they DON'T spread all this, they will have no salvation.
I don't fault the rank and file (except to the extent that they IGNORE historical evidence when it is presented to them clearly, but that's rare).
I fault the "slave."
These people have access to the exact same historical resources as I do. As
anyone else does.
They know full well that their basic doctrinal system was never held in the first couple of centuries, thus they know full well that ***nobody*** fell away FROM an ancient form of LDS-ism, or fundie-ism, or
Watchtowerism either. Thus, unless they have single-digit i.q.'s, they can put 2 and 2 together and realize that when they send their sheeplike ones out to pull people out of their churches, telling them that their church is an
apostasy from an ancient form of their particular worship, that that claim is
a lie.
I believe in freedom of religion.
If people want to claim that God is a lump
of Goat-Cheese, that is their perogative.
But when they, who
have access to the historical writings, send their flocks out to claim that the ancient CHURCH taught that God is a lump of
Goat Cheese, and apostasized from that, THAT is another matter entirely. You're now going off the
table of
"freedom of belief" and onto the table
of libelling your neighbors.
This, to me, is extremely serious.
And THIS, I believe, should be subject
to libel suits. It's too bad that here in the USA, in a libel suit, it's not enough
to prove that your opponent lied about you, you have to prove "malice," which is highly subjective.
Jaypeeto