Re: Victory Outreach and others that abuse The Bible
Date: June 19, 2011 08:01AM
Good luck. The trouble is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can pick up a Bible and start a church. It's called religious freedom, but it means we all have to be careful.
As a long-time observer and sometime participant in the Christian scene, I am amused at all of these little denominations all claiming that they alone have the true interpretation of Scripture and all else are charlatans. "We believe the Bible and only the Bible," one person told me; "those other groups you were in, were not correctly interpreting the Bible."
Ok. Fair enough. But what is the standard here? Where is your yardstick? Everyone mocks Harold Camping because he made a prediction that turned out to be false. But you know what, I rather respect Mr. Camping. He made a clear, concise, unambiguous prediction. A no doubt about it, no waffling prediction. Yes, now he is backpedaling. But he had the guts to put his reputation on the line. And we can now say that he is wrong because what he said didn't happen. Guess what, that's science. Science makes predictions, science is falsifiable; if a scientific theory says X should happen and X does not, we know that that theory is wrong and not to go chasing after it anymore. You can't do that in religion. I can say you are wrong and you can say I am wrong, but unless one of us makes a specific, concrete statement that can be proved true or false, we are really getting nowwhere.
That is not to say there aren't abusive churches because there are, and it is definitely buyer beware when it comes to some of the newer ones. This is where personally I think those of us who are agnostic or atheist have an advantage, because, not believing in any of them, we are not likely to be sucked in.
So I don't even know where you would begin to start to address this problem.