Sorry about my insensitive post earlier. I’ve deleted it. I’ll try to keep in mind that the real questions people have are often behind the questions they ask in public. Thanks for your openness.
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Yep. And then some of them decided to tour the country selling their books and parenting wisdom despite the fact that they’d only been parenting for a few years, and their kids had an immense amount of pressure to live up to the image their parents had been selling of them because now their entire family’s livelihood and reputation was riding on the children fulfilling the roles they’d had no consent in making. 
Phew! (This is why I sympathize with Joshua Harris.) And a lot of less-famous families jumped on the bandwagon along the way…
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Yes, I do, too. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Evangelical society seems to favor certain, charismatic persons nowadays. There are roles for that, but they set up up for failure, often, too.
I like the lyrics for “Dream Small” (my wife recommended them to me) by Josh Wilson. Josh Wilson - Dream Small Lyrics | AZLyrics.com
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I like what the late Christopher Hitchens said about that differentiates a religion from a cult. A religion is just a cult that has survived long enough, and accumulated enough members to achieve takeoff velocity.
About the death cult idea, the Old Testament God needed animals to be sacrificed for him to forgive sins. Hebrews 9:22 “In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
Christianity doesn’t refute the idea of God needing something to die in order to forgive sins, it just introduced a new idea to end the need for constant animal sacrifices. A human sacrifice. A final sacrifice of a perfect, sinless human so our sins can be forgiven. And communion is a repeated reminder of Jesus’s death. 1 Corinthians 11: “24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.””
I’ve heard many Christian, from the past and in the present wish for the world to end, because it will be glorious, or wish for their own life to end so they can go to a better place. The apostle Paul was one. Philipians 1 “21 For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. 22 If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23 I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24 but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”
I agree, and I can’t. Regarding the cult definition, that’s sort of true.
The difference in cultural nuance seems to be abuse.
Have you noticed that every single ideology of the world that gauges things to be worthwhile–be it a nationalistic or other secular one–operates on whether something’s worth dying for? There’s a huge difference among the concepts of sacrificing one’s life for one’s enemies, for one’s friends (a big difference between Christ’s and many other ideologies), and killing others.
Thanks.
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I was thinking more of this definition:
cult
/kəlt/
noun
noun: cult ; plural noun: cults
- a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
“the cult of St. Olaf”
- a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
“a network of Satan-worshiping cults”
The first definition seems to fit with christianity considering that practitioners show devotion and veneration towards jesus.
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This seems to me to be a (if not the) critical worldview question that Christians have never quite managed to come to terms with. Paul (and just about every new believer back then probably) were all earnestly sure that the end of history was around the corner on the scale of a human lifetime. They were wrong. And today Christians have only succeeded in “squaring that circle” by readjusting in their own mental framework what “long time” really means - on scales that were beyond the realm of possibility to the minds of these early Christians. But here’s the thing: our adjustment now has often only equated to: “well of course it wasn’t just a couple decades or centuries from their time then! We now know instead that it was really a couple thousand years - and we are now convinced that it is we who are living in end-times.” And the irony of that (merely-displaced) conviction completely escapes modern day end-times enthusiasts. In some ways the early church people were already ahead of so many today in that they did start to come to terms with how wrong their own eschatological expectation was and they began to realize “hey - we’d better start writing some of this stuff down and gathering together what’s been written, because the people who remember all this are getting old and dying!” So they managed to start settling in for the long haul. And we have our Bible, thanks to their humbling course correction on this very question.
It’s an astonishing irony that people today seem to be having the same or even more trouble settling in for a long haul. I think it quite plausible that Paul would have spoken somewhat differently about marriage and care of world than he did had he known just how long history had yet to stretch beyond his own lifetime. Even as it was, I think people misappropriate Paul when they play him off as being entirely “anti-world.” Even for an end times guy, he still had plenty of domestic concern about how people care for each other both within the community as well as without. He did encourage labors of love.
But for all that, you are correct, Tim, that so many believers today have written off any need for investment in this life, and they have plenty of scriptural exhortation to find for that kind of encouragement. What they ignore in doing so, however, is the depth of meaning it has that the incarnated Christ chose this world as the setting for meeting us, and chose this world as the setting for us learning to care for and disciple each other. While rust and moth do indeed destroy ill-hoarded wealth, it is yet the sharing out of wealth in loving expenditure that makes for a this-worldly investment that reaches up into eternal New Kingdom importance.
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There is an alternative to this juxtaposition you have described between end-times and long haul, though I certainly agree this “merely-displaced” way of thinking is rather rationally deficient. The alternative I am suggesting is that the end-times is a persistent condition of humanity plagued with the inherently self-destructive habits of sin. I perceive it has always seemed like the world was about to end and it was in fact always ending, because the changes just kept getting bigger and more dire all the time. Thus for most of history we have been trying to manage one huge crisis after another. Though perhaps there were a few brief periods of relatively peaceful complacently as well – a little quiet before the next storm. I think maybe there is only justification for thinking about a “long haul” if we accept that it only going to get worse with even more radical changes than ever before.
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Thought this might belong here.
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Some other things that kind of go with the death cult theme. There is no such thing as overpopulation, because that command to be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it is still to be obeyed. There is no limit on it.
The world is ending soon, so we don’t have to protect the environment for the long haul.
Limbaugh, that a lot of Christians listened to, said “God didn’t grant us the ability to mess up the environment.”
In the YEC point of view, all of the carbon from fossil fuels we did already, and will in the future release into the air, wasn’t carbon buried over millions of years. It was all present in the environment the year before the flood and the Earth didn’t overheat then because of it.
The anti-Christ will institute one world government, so they oppose anything like the U.N. because long term plan of the devil is to use it for evil. (I thought the tribulation has to happen before Jesus returns. Why block Jesus return?)
And for some reason, God is in favor of the 2nd Amendment. There are only so many shooting because the devils is trying to wear us down and get us to agree to disarm.
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Very good one! Thanks
Well - given your impressions of what “Christianity” is, you should turn your back and run in the other direction. And as you do so, you’ll find there are many of us who were already ahead of you in leaving the lies behind. Choose Christ instead.
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Interesting, thanks for sharing. The quote from the former member of NXIVM was thought-provoking, about how “nobody joins a cult” – they join a good thing then and then realize later that they were conned. There’s certainly no shame in looking for a good thing or for a way to help make the world a better place. But so often that leads to tribalistic mentalities – as if people often have a hard time deciding they’re doing a good thing without some group of “them” to blame for the bad, and then it has the potential to snowball from there.
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Thanks for this. It is both instructive and encouraging, particularly the last paragraph.
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