Intelligent Quote of The Day

Want to avoid fundagelicalism? Unpaid pastors. Small congregations, including splitting them when they grow beyond 70. Minimal physical plant. Consensual decision making. Minimal doctrine. A strong bias towards spiritual growth and community development, and not necessarily numerical growth. These conditions will remove the money factor and the rules & regulations factor and keep the congregation healthy.

—Jay, expressing multiple thoughts over former church pastor’s blog, Why Churches Suck on the post written about the ugly trend of “fundagelicalism” in North American Christianity and how this trend can be stopped.

Intelligent Quote of The Day

There are those who claim that they were in the WCG for awhile but they moved on and it did not affect them.

Scientific studies have shown that liars actually do physiological damage to their brains and wipe out billions of neurons.

It is extremely unlikely that it is possible that anyone tolerating the lies, deceptions and distortions of Herbert Armstrong for any length of time could really be unaffected. It’s possible that some clueless people didn’t fully absorb the insanity, but that is sort of a problem in itself.

It appears that there are 1) people in denial who don’t seem to realize how much damage was done to them and think they have “moved on” but continue to live in a realm of distorted perception, blisfully unaware of the mental changes they have suffered; 2) people who realize something is wrong with them as a result of Armstrongism, but live in denial and move to whatever strategies to cope and 3) those who realize what is wrong and are actively pursuing recovery and helping others to do so.

…Yet again, it is time for people to acknowledge the damage done to them and for us all to pursue more healthy life styles, including getting enough sleep, pursuing balanced nutrition, exercise, avoiding lies, deceptions, distortions and maintaining effective relationships.

Otherwise, we end up as nutcases as is so evident in the extremes of zealots fallen off the sanity wagon.

—Douglas Becker declaring his “I-don’t-play” attitude with those who are mentally cruel and play mind games claiming that the Armstrongism experience did  not effect them that much, that they “moved on”. Douglas, of course proves that it’s a lie—a sick one to say the least. Go get ’em Douglas!

 

 

Intelligent Quote of The Day

If I sense you care more about your religion than you care about me, or if you’re correcting my beliefs every chance you get, I’m probably not going to trust you. Isn’t religion supposed to be about loving others? But then, I guess love isn’t a religion at all.

––The very pretty as well as  very controversial Free Believer Network correspondent and the architect of the blog  Unravel, Elizabeth Dahl Kingery pushing the buttons as always with those of the “institutionalized church”.

Intelligent Quote of The Day

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Most Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT, believe in the Bible. They believe that Bibles must be translated, interpreted, and taught according to THEIR pre-assumed dogmas and doctrines about it. Then they lie their butts off claiming they got all their views directly from scripture when all they did is use a translation which was in many ways tailored to their dogmas.

That’s why many Evangelical churches want members to use certain translations which support their views of hell, tithing, purity, and any other subject they consider to be important. Any translations which does not support their views is condemned or ignored.

—“The Scott” and his take on the Rob Bell controversy and the dishonest scholarship in evangelical and fundamentalist circles.

Intelligent Quote of The Day

The term gospel means “good news”. The idea that most people will suffer infinite torment for an eternity in hell for no other reason than they didn’t use the correct bible translation, had the wrong song book, went to a church with the wrong name on the door, voted for or against the wrong political causes, were born in a time and place when they didn’t have an opportunity to hear of Jesus, failed to achieve an unlivable standard of righteousness, or simply just didn’t kiss the preacher on the butt in the right manner is not “good news”.

—A Free Believer correspondent on  Mars Hill Pastor Rob Bell’s new and upcoming controversial  new book – Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Intelligent Quote of The Day

I think it’s important to get our facts straight in a couple areas. It’s important to note that the early Judaizing movement taught that new believers had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism to be saved. That’s quite clear from the NT record and from scholastic consensus. So non-Jewish believers doing Jewish stuff doesn’t automatically qualify as ‘Judaizing’. Only if they’re doing it for salvation.

Also as a side note, the not associating with Gentiles thing was a Jewish tradition that went sour, not a law from the Bible.

There’s nothing wrong with Gentiles doing Jewish stuff and they shouldn’t be criticized for it. Frankly, it’s a breath of fresh air after 1800 years of ugly antisemitism. You know what Paul taught in Ephesians 2, that Gentiles used to be far away and now through Messiah they’ve been brought near to the commonwealth of Israel and to the covenants (note: plural, that means the OT covenants) of promise! We’re one new man now! So why make that distinction and say “Well, if you’re ethnically Jewish they you can do this stuff, but not if you’re a Gentile.” Seriously, who’s to say who is Jewish and who isn’t? That’s a raging debate in the Jewish world too, and it’s missing the point.

The point is, what is God doing in your heart? So if God wants to give a Gentile a Jewish heart and that Gentile wants to do Jewish stuff, who are you and I to judge what God’s doing? You know what I’m saying? I mean, being ‘grafted in’ to a Jewish root might make someone look a little Jewish sometimes, don’t you think? As long as a person’s heart is in the right place and they’re not doing it for salvation, I don’t see the problem.

—Saskatchewan-based Messianic Jewish Crown of Messiah Congregation  Leader Yisrael Avraham defending the right of Gentile Believers to embrace the Jewish relics and roots of their Christian faith without being labeled a Judaizer

Intelligent Quote of The Day

Father forgive us our many sins. We are detestable, perverted, evil, out of line, wicked, lustful, people but wait a second…..? Weren’t we created in your image?

––A poster from The Facebook version of The Free Believers Network illustrating the contradictory (and schizophrenic) views of evangelical Christianity about the nature of man.

 

Intelligent Quote of The Day

“We can not extract modern ideas from an ancient book.”

This is a very short sighted, shallow, and egocentric way of looking at our world and it’s history.

Philosophy hasn’t changed much in the last few thousand years, only the current fads and fashions do. Aristotle is just as relevant today as he was in his time. The more people change, the more they stay the same, which makes ancient books very important in understanding the modern world today.

 

––A poster on the Huffington Post challenging a tired cliched argument on the validity of The Holy Bible in modern life.

A VERY Intelligent Quote of The Day

“We live in hard times, not end times.”

—The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart , on October 30, 2010 at his Rally to Restore Sanity. Good advice for all XCG’s out there.

Intelligent Quote of The Day

If conservative forms of Christianity can be criticized for clinging to beliefs in spite of mounting evidence that they required revision if not outright rejection, liberal forms of Christianity have been criticized for jumping too quickly onto cultural bandwagons, only to find their reputation …

Blogger James F. McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion and Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana giving his two cents on “peer-based” Christianity on his blog Exploring Our Matrix.