[UntoHim]

Originally Posted by Ohio

But ... otoh you know that LC folks were characterized with Jim Jones and the mass suicide. That was the sole intention of those books. Families were totally spooked about loved ones. Fear, not research or factual evidence, was the basic tool they used.
Listen, I lived through the hell of those two books and the damage it did to the gospel outreach to my friends and family.

I don't think that characterizing the LC with Jim Jones was the sole purpose of the this particular book. Of course there was a natural link between the two because of the timeframe, but that was the LC movement's fault as much as any of the "cult-busters". The LC was very secretive in general towards outsiders, and extremely uncooperative with Christians apologists. It made us look bad in front of the general public, and even worse to those Christians seeking to understand the inner workings of the group, and to verify our claims that we were just "ordinary Christians".

We are just delving into the beginning of the book, but so far I don't see any attempt to use fear as a tool or anything like that. So far it seems they did do a lot of research. As I noted recently, everything that has been quoted so far is actually surprisingly dead spot on. It seems they spent enough time around the group to see through a lot of the coded language. It was around this time that the Local Church produced that little booklet "The Beliefs and Practices of the Local Churches". This little tract was more of a work of fiction than a true description of the believes and practices. For example under the Q&A section, to the question "Who is your leader" the answer given is:Our unique leader is Christ. We have no official, permanent, organized human leadership. Furthermore, there is no hierarchy of any kind and no worldwide leader. We regard no person as infallible, and we do not follow anyone blindly. Duddy et al saw right through this smokescreen. They knew exactly who Lee was to the members and that he was the SOLE, unquestioned leader of the Movement.

I have a feeling that the more we delve into this book the more we will see that these guys actually did their homework. Yes, they probably made mistakes along the way, exaggerated certain things and maybe even did so in the wrong spirit, but in the end what we should be concerned with today is what they wrote true and factual? In some cases it may be, in other cases there may be some inaccuracies. But I think it will be worth our time and effort to got through it chapter by chapter and let the book speak for itself.

Thanks again to NFnL for taking the time and effort to guide us through this.