from the "Jesus Christians" (sic) website

[cust.idl.net.au]

"Our decision to return to the whip as a form of punishment is actually based on a desire to shorten the period of punishment at the same time that we sharpen the message about punishment. Whips have been used in just about every culture, as a form of punishment, because they inflict a lot of pain without causing much more than superficial and temporary injury to the body. (We will be writing a separate article on the topic of pain, and its relation to hate/violence.)

We have already experimented in a small way with an offender in Kenya, where it is customary for police to routinely flog suspects during interrogations, and where a prison sentence usually includes 25 lashes a day for the first three days of imprisonment. A young man had stolen some things from us and sold them to buy home brewed wine. We offered him the option of receiving five lashes of the whip (and signing a paper to the effect that he had done so willingly, that it was because he had in fact stolen from us, and that he was sorry for his behaviour). He gladly accepting the flogging, which was carried out in the presence of local village representatives. The young man is now back working with us as one of our volunteers."

also see
[cust.idl.net.au]

These sensation mongers are now getting deeper and deeper into control of their followers. Their leader initially pushed them to donate kidneys, now they are into corporal punishment. They do not want the truth that corporal punishment has overwhelmingly been proven to be harmful. Suicide and murder cannot be far away. Not to mention that beatings can damage kidneys.

Update 2012: The so-called "Jesus Christians" led by Dave McKay, once called a "kidney cult" due to their penchant for transplants, apparently has a new name. It seems Dave McKay has decided to call his group the "Truth Believers". The group now has a new Web site. This strategy may be an effort to avoid the group's bad press and history of complaints.

See [www.wix.com]



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 03/09/2012 05:28AM by rrmoderator.

amother outrageous episode from the JC´s.

just to say there is also another thread on this group here at this message board and it might be an idea to copy the original post there.

They claim again and again that they are not in any way related to the Family but the Berg influence surfaces again and again. Berg believed in corporal punishment and was extremely racist. Thank you for making this public. I

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muppet
just to say there is also another thread on this group here at this message board and it might be an idea to copy the original post there.

They claim again and again that they are not in any way related to the Family but the Berg influence surfaces again and again. Berg believed in corporal punishment and was extremely racist. Thank you for making this public. I

Hi, this is my first post on this forum. I am an ex-Jesus Christian, and hope to add my perspective to things.

First off, this above quote of yours seems a bit unfair, Muppet. Just because the Jesus Christians share a similar belief of Berg's doesn't make them from the same group. Example: Lutherans used to be Roman Catholic. Lutherans believe in the Trinity, but does that make them RC?

I don't know if this whole whipping thing that the JCs are introducing is real or not. It would seem very odd to me if they did start whipping eachother, so I would think that there is more to it than the article presents.

Now as for whether or not the Jesus Christians are part of the Family, I think this can be a grey area. Many of the groups enemies exagerate the fact that the founder of the Jesus Christians used to be a part of the Family by saying that the group is an off-shoot of the Family. This is not the case. However, the group does use some teaching from the Family, as well as Family artwork and customs. In my opinion they do hold much of what the Family does/did in high regard, but the Jesus Christians certainly do not have the same lewd approach to sex that the Family does.

There are a number of things that I completely disagree with the Jesus Christians on, but I won't get into them now.

Hopefully people will visit the JCs web site to get a fuller picture of what we are trying to do. If you click on "The Cross" on our home page, it will lead you to five articles examining the theory behind the recent discussion about whipping.

It's interesting that contributors to this forum have been so quick to make false assumptions about the exercise being racist. It was actually a Black African (and a woman at that) who administered the blows with the whip in Kenya. Bear in mind that the offender was given the option of being turned over to the police, who were promising him 25 blows with a whip (and they know how to make it hurt a lot more than this little woman did) on top of a lengthy jail sentence; whereas we offered a mere five strokes, forgiveness, and a welcome back into fellowship. On top of that, one of our members (a non-Black), offered to take the stripes for him if he preferred. All of this slightly alters the hysteria that writers above have tried to generate.

Are the people posting here trying to say that it would have been more Christian to have turned him over to the police? Are they saying that they would not turn anyone over to the police if they robbed from them? I think not.

What we are looking for is a Christian alternative to the harsh punitive system in place at the moment. We are planning another 'trial' for a family that almost succeeded in murdering one of our members in Long Beach, California, next month. (Strange that the quote from our report [above] says nothing about that, since the family was inspired by a cult-buster who said that they would be justified in killing us if we came between them and their son!) Maybe some of the people on this site need to get the beam out of their own eyes before they become too self-righteous about what they perceive as a speck in our own!

Dave McKay, co-founder of the Jesus Christians, Sydney, Australia

xenophone said:

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There are a number of things that I completely disagree with the Jesus Christians on, but I won't get into them now.

Would you please get into that now?

What are the things that you completely disagree with?

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rrmoderator
xenophone said:

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There are a number of things that I completely disagree with the Jesus Christians on, but I won't get into them now.

Would you please get into that now?

What are the things that you completely disagree with?

I can try. I disagree with the JC attitude toward society. They call it "The System", and IMO they are too paranoid with how they approach what is normal in society. The end result is that some legitimate things become stigmatized ie. having a paying job, attending church, giving to registered charities, or having a family.

I also believe they put up false dichotomies which are not taught in the Bible ie. Following God vs following the Church, and Sincerity vs Religion (I believe that these things are not at odds with eachother).

IMO the way they view the outside world is like a bomb which will eventually explode. In other words, they believe that sometime (probably soon) society is going to turn on them dramatically and start persecuting them. I think this is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Having said all that, I don't think that they are dangerous.

Xenophone:

Thanks.

Very insightful contribution towards understanding McKay and the group.

Although I think that xenophone was stupid to have fallen for the trick that Rick uses on every 'apologist' (i.e. to get them to publicise disagreements, so that Rick can add those disagreements to his file of 'complaints'), I must compliment xenophone for having at least given rational reasons for disagreeing with the JCs.

So much of what others have said against the Jesus Christians has been based on personal attacks on me as the leader (without any evidence for those attacks), that it makes one wonder if the people who contribute here are even capable of going to our website <jesuschristians.com> and reading for themselves what we teach. Xenophone, of course, HAS heard a lot of what we teach, and he has arrived at different conclusions. Fine. That's his right; and he has done so after giving us plenty of time to convince him otherwise. So it is worth thoughtful consideration of what he has said.

But first, I want to ask whether xenophone was 'brainwashed' into preaching what we preach for a number of years? I think not. And I think that he would agree that he was not brainwashed. I want to make this point, because I believe that the underlying assumption with regard to the brainwashing myth is that people are incapable of taking personal responsibility for what they do and think. It's a great way to be exonerated for your own behaviour AFTER you leave a group, at the same time that you can damn the people who are still there; but it does not promote healthy dissent within the group. After all, it's easier to say later that you weren't ABLE to disagree because you had been hypnotized, drugged, brainwashed, or whatever copout from responsibility suits you. Xenophone had the right to disagree with what we teach, and he had the freedom to decide (as he has done) to leave the community when he felt that his views and ours were too different.

So on to xenophone's criticisms, which Rick Ross says are 'insightful'.

Xenophone disagrees with calling society 'the system'. Fair enough. Let's just call it society. Or what about calling it 'the world', as Jesus did? The point is, are we saying that society is always right, mostly right, half and half, or largely misled? We JCs go for the latter, and it seems like that is what Jesus was saying too. But we accept that there others at each point along the spectrum, including people who follow society blindly on everything.

Xenophone then goes on to some 'legitimate' things that he things we are a bit hard on: e.g. having a paying job, attending church, giving to registered charities, or having a family.

It's true that the JCs are pretty down on letting the love of money be our motive for anything that we do ("We actually go so far as to say that it is the root of all other evils."), and, as such, we believe that spending most of our waking hours working for money is generally a waste of a good life. However, members of our community HAVE worked in paid jobs from time to time. The JC test has always been, "Would I still do this, even if I wasn't paid for it?" So we're not against working, or even being paid for it. (Xenophone himself worked in a paid job or two while he was in the JCs.) But we are against letting the paycheck blind us to a bigger vision.

Attending church? Strange that Xenophone should say that, since we've never stopped our members from attending church services, and we've even put a little pressure on some to do so from time to time. Xenophone, did you want to attend church when you were with us? Did you ever express such a desire? Did someone stop you from doing so?

Perhaps the point is really that we attend church with a critical spirit. What I mean is that we often discuss what has transpired afterwards, and we are not afraid to be critical. That might bother some people, but I doubt that people here would honestly think that it is healthy NOT to be critical of organisations that teach things that we disagree with.

Over the past eight years, members of our group have been particularly active in attending Quaker meetings, both as members and as attenders. It's been a great experience, in that we have found both acceptance and issues with which we agree with Friends (another name for Quakers) on a level that we have never found in any other religious organisation. The word 'critical' still applies, however, in that we still critically analyse Quaker teachings and do not accept them just because they come from an organisation that some of us are a part of. On the whole, however, I think that Friends are finding that our contributions are both positive and helpful. Xenophone, can you comment on that?

The next point was a stigma relating to giving to 'registered charities'. Hmmm, that's a strange one. I think we have been criticised for encouraging people to give to World Vision (our favorite charity, because it is both Christian and genuinely committed to helping the poor, orphans, etc.), but that, on the whole, we encourage our members to give to the charitable work that we do ourselves, simply because our overheads are so low compared to those associated with most registered charities. Xenophone, do you disagree with this? Do you feel that 'registered charities' give more of your charity dollar to the needy than what happens with the JCs? and are you giving more enthusiastically to a registered charity now, than you were doing when you were part of our community and giving so much to our charitable works? Can you recommend a couple of charities for us to give to?

Finally, Xenophone says that we tend to stigmatize having a family. Xenophone would be more acquainted with what that means than would the average reader on this website. What we actually stigmatise, based on warnings from both Jesus and Paul, is marriage itself. However, we have stipulated that, thanks to birth control, people can marry and still be free to move around and work freely for God without having the added distraction and burden of caring for children that it seems were a part of the hesitancy that both Jesus and Paul had about married life. We neither forbid marriage nor having children, but our 'Virgin Army' teaching is that we feel it is better to remain single/childless than to marry/have children, if a person can handle that. Xenophone, of course, is married. I take it that he and his wife are planning to have children. That's great! But, in the words of Paul and Jesus, if you could MANAGE to stay single, that's even better. That's our position, and I think it is supported by scripture, even though it is not taught much by any of the churches I have attended.

Then Xenophone moves on to what he calls 'false dichotomies'. (Dichotomies are sharply defined differences between two parts of a whole, thus making them kind of polar opposites.) He lists following God vs following the church as the first one. The immediate question comes up: Which church? Obviously we can't follow all of them. And I'm sure that people on this website would have problems with any church that taught that following them should take the place of following God.

But I agree with Xenophone that the two are not necessarily total opposites. There are any number of things that one can co-operate with in virtually any church (including a lot of churches that this web site would brand as cults) without necessarily being guilty of going against God. But what I hope we JCs are teaching is that when it comes to a choice, the first choice always has to be God (love, truth, our conscience, or whatever is the highest revelation of God that we have) in preference to the organisation that we are a member of. I'm actually pretty proud of that teaching, because, as you know, Xenophone, we include the JCs as an organisation that must not take the place of our conscience/God/truth/love either. We have even coined a couple of words (churchies and churchianity) to underline our concern about people who put their church in front of God.

Next Xenophone talks about a false dichotomy between sincerity and religion. The problem here is in our interpretation of both terms, but especially the term 'religion'. In one place the Bible says that pure religion is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world (uh-uh, that old 'system' word cropping up again!). Such 'pure religion' and sincerity should not need to be opposites. In fact, they should have a lot of overlap. But we have tended to use 'religion' in a more negative way, referring to it as a tendency to look for ways of proving ourselves and our organisation to be superior to others and other organisations, rather than striving for more and more spiritual growth, both in ourselves and in our organisation. We see the desire for spiritual growth (in such things as love, truth, and humility) as consistent with sincerity, and the tendency to slack off and just hide behind an organisation as being more of a religious spirit. In that sense (and only in that sense) we stand behind our tendency to see a 'dichotomy' between the two.

Finally, Xenophone says that our belief that society is going to turn on us and start persecuting us is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, in a way it is. But then people persecuting us and saying that we have a persecution complex also acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The attack on Reinhard, Xenophone... would you say that is a form of persecution? To what extent do you feel that Joe's family was justified (and perhaps even forced to do it) because of our teachings?

I am disappointed by how much the teachings of Jesus have been left out of Xenophone's concerns. Didn't Jesus talk about being persecuted? You could say that his execution on the cross was brought on by all of his talk about being persecuted, and that if he had just kept his mouth shut and worked more in harmony with the established religion of his day (instead of being so critical and confrontational with the religious authorities), things could have ended up much more positively for everyone concerned. You could say that... but we would not agree with it.

Dave McKay, for Jesus Christians

Dave:

So does that mean that "Jesus Christians" did something wrong?

Or, what is that you think you should actually change to directly address Xenophone's concerns at this point?

Please be very specific and direct in your response.