by MichaelAllen » Tue Jun 30, 2015 5:13 pm
A few months old of a thread, but I'll throw in my story.
Growing up, I learned to distrust authority early on. I won't detail my family history, but there was a lot of impact on all four of my grandparents from the economic depression, who were all born in the early 30s. Lots of child abuse (and I DON'T mean swatting a kid who is disrespectful).
Anyway, my parents were both very unstable mentally and emotionally... and this made them really cling to churchianity.
My mom's parents were from the Churches of Christ (CoC), which was 1/3 of the Restoration movement (aka Stone-Campbell movement). My dad converted from the Nazarene church.
I grew up going to church three times per week. It was our duty to do so. Looking back, it was a system of repression and groupthink dynamics. The CoC, even till this day, is a denomination that really is rooted in scripture - even though they don't understand it. You can go to a CoC today, and as long as it isn't one of the progressive suburbian churches, you will hear a sermon that comes with scripture references. There are no creeds of any sort, and there is no official hierarchy of government beyond the local assembly... however, they were masters of groupthink dynamics. The CoC is affiliated with several colleges and universities & preaching schools all over the country.
I was one of these kids that actually listened and paid lots of attention to what was being said.
Very early on, I mean... probably late junior high or early high school... I began having questions about things like, "If God commands that all people undergo a conversion experience or suffer an eternal conscious punishment in the never-ending BBQ pit called "hell," then why didn't he, in his omnipotence, see to it that all the peoples of the world heard the gospel?
When I was a younger kid, they taught us in our Sunday School class that the good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell... but as I got older and listened to the sermons, I could hear it more and more clearly as to what they REALLY believed... If you don't place membership at OUR congregation according to our opinion on the conversion experience (or another CoC in another town if you reside elsewhere)... then you are going to receive all the wrath of almighty God and will suffer in the fires of hell for all eternity.
So... essentially, we were to look upon all of the other people in our community as being bad? or lost? Equating bad and lost I thought was a real riot, because as I got older and became more aware of some of the people in our congregation and their inability to keep their pants on around other people's spouses, etc... well, it was the beginning of my cognitive dissonance. They also had some real screwy dogmas about having instruments played during church - they believed that the New Testament exclusively endorsed vocal music and none other, and that if you used other types of music, it was akin to putting a swine on the altar in the Old Testament.
They believe, of course, that salvation is for every upright walking hominid, and they believe that the law was done away with.
This point about the law being done away with gave me a lot of problems trying to patch things up in my brain, and connecting everything together. First John says, sin is violation of the law. Second, Paul says that those considered justified before God keep the law. Third, if the law is put away, how can there even be a concept as sin? Fourth, what was all of this old law, new law they were talking about...
Then, I realized after coming into CI what these people believe... they literally believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and passed out copies of the New Testament, (even though most of those events hadn't happened yet... I mean, from Acts through Revelation). They literally believe that there is this massive change in the program of God, and so when Paul says to Timothy: "Study to show thyself approved..." to these NT only types... it basically means, "Timothy, just keep reading this letter over and over again, all the scripture from Genesis through Malachi needs to be put away. This is the new playbook. And I'll try to get you a copy of Ephesians while you spend the next three years reading this letter over and over again. Oh hey, btw, Matthew's got a new gospel coming out soon, I've heard it's gonna be awesome!! I'll try to get you one of those too."
It is asinine. Only the saddest of simpletons could really believe this stuff... but they do.
As my conviction about my religious upbringing waned (at one of the brotherhood's affiliated universities, no less where I was taking one Bible class per semester), I had become a reservist in the Marine Corps. I drifted away from the scope of the groupthink dynamics and just got fed up with it. I started focusing on politics. It was late 2002, and I was getting disturbed by how badly our president and his advisors wanted to go to war in Iraq. I started really getting upset about it, and this isn't typical Marine Corps behavior. Marines love to fight, and so I couldn't say anything about it in that venue.
In 2003, I was finishing up in school and began dating my now wife. I started into conspiracy theory with the JFK movie by Oliver Stone, which led me to suspect that the Iraq war had something to do with the military industrial complex also. I went active duty in late 03, and by 2004-05 I knew that 9/11 was a set up. In 2006, I became aware of the international bankers, and it was the speech by Benjamin Freedman at the Willard Hotel that made me aware that the problem was jewish in nature. By 2007 I was off active duty and my wife had finished law school and we had trekked back to her home town.
August of '08, I saw something on youtube about Pastor Ken Gregg in Tennessee, and then I was listening to an AM radio station and heard some guy bashing jews and it was Pete Peters. I quickly gravitated away from that camp after 8 months or so. It was sometime in early '09 that I reached out to Pastor Mark Downey and he advised me to watch out for those who were trying to slip in universalism. From there on it has been all about meeting folks and learning different viewpoints on scripture. I guess it was sometime in 2010 where I heard Bill on some mp3 lighting up Jim Condit over Adolf Hitler's supposed "jewish" ancestry.