Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
This is my argument. "The church isn't this and that", all these straw men to take our eyes off of Jesus. Then to save you from the boogeyman they give you the "new and pure" church, which is NOT THE STRAWMAN!! Hurray!! Now we can just love Jesus! Right!?
Wrong. We merely created a new non-strawmen entity, based upon our imagination, and selective response to our modest sensory input. "And the last state of the man was worse than the first." Ineed, not trusting in the all-seeing and all-knowing God, we trust our feeble perceptions. We look around and perceive multiple assemblies, and declare, "division". How do we know God doesn't look around and see multiplication? Why, because we don't want to, is why - we only see what we want to see.
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A strawman is exactly what it is, and it's all too easy to fall victim to this kind of tactic. Especially as Christians, we want to stand for what is right, and also stand against whatever contradicts the Bible. Unfortunately, manipulative leaders know how to use people's resolve to stand for what's right to their own advantage, in order to provoke a desired reaction.
Enter Lee. There was no end to his talk about "degraded Christianity." He told LC members exactly what "other Christians" believed. No one questioned such a view. The resulting strawman was constructed effortlessly. Some of the early LCers came in dissatisfied with other Christians groups. Thus, the attacks against other churches resonated with them. Those like me who grew up in the LC never saw for ourselves what other Christians were like. We were told what they were like and we had no reason to believe otherwise because we looked up to those leading us.
What was missing from the whole equation was a validation of the things being asserted.