Quote:
Originally Posted by Drake
Could there be a situation like that were a brother made a correlation? Sure. Is it a practice? Nah.
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In my experience I would say it is way more than a correlation but maybe not quite as far as a practice.....but it gets close.
I can second (or fourth?) this by adding that I grew up hearing these kinds of things many times also:
"So and so left the church and now they have a child born with disabilities."
"So and so left and their plane crashed and they died."
"So and so left/was negative and they now have throat cancer."
Those are all statements I have heard in the LC said about real people. Note that these are not statements expressing that the person left and their life went downhill because of something they themselves did. The negative outcome is always something outside of any human's control indicating that it was God's punishment.
This is a very real atmosphere of fear cultivated in the church. Even when I was younger and knew I wasn't on the best of terms with the Lord, most times when I would drive home from saints' houses I would essentially expect for a car to t-bone me as I drove through an intersection because that is what God does if you are not 100% for Him or the church....."waiting for the other shoe to drop on backslidden ones" as it were. Those kind of thoughts and fears (that still pervade my mind today) are only created through repetition and reinforcement.
I can surmise that some localities exist where these kind of things were not said, which explains Drake's experience, but I not only heard these statements within a locality, I also heard them in the live trainings spoken by the co-workers. I know some people can hear things spoken and disregard them as "bones not for consumption", and I wish I was that way, but some people, like me, have a more sensitive trusting disposition and grow up taking things to heart because we weren't raised to discern and question, just to accept and trust blindly. Then when we get to a point where we realize we can discern, we have decades of misrepresentations about God to surgically extract from our very cells!