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Xenophone

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rrmoderator
xenophone said:


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. .

How soon and how does this relate to other group teachings about the end time? Is there a teaching about the Jesus Christians ruling the world?

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Dave McKay

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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.

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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.

No, I was definetly not brainwashed. I believed in what I was preaching. I agree with you on this, Dave. I feel that (with exception of children) people need to take responsibility for their choices, and not blame a group or anyone else.

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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.

You make a point that Jesus was negative on what he called "the World". The JWs are also negative when they talk of Christendom. However, the problem I see is that to the JCs, "the system" includes what amounts to every organisation (and person) apart from them. I feel that when it got right down to it the JCs belief is that they are the only ones following Jesus, because everyone else is a miserable slave for money. Basically, the JCs say that "The System" includes society, academics, military, government and religious organisations in general. Where did Jesus or his followers say that these things were evil? IMO it seems like when "The world" is used in the Bible, it's refering to an unGodly spirit, rather than to any particular form of establishment.

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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.

I agree with you, Dave. It's wrong to let money blind us to God.

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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?

Yes, I did occationally go along with other JCs to attend a church service. No, I didn't express desire to go to any church while I was with the JCs.

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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.

This isn't the problem as I see it. It's true that at times we would attend a church, but it was mainly so that we can influence them, rather than have them influence us. In other words, what we were really after was to try and get to individual members of the congregation and win them over to the JCs. In reality the main church service was generally not what we came for. To us, what was important was the mingling before or afterwards where we have an opprotunity to "witness" to the church members. Also, it was common place to mock people who we saw on their way to church on Sundays, thus reflecting the negative attitude we had on them.

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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?

I think that your relationship with the Quakers appears to be a good thing.

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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?

When I said that these things were "stigmatized" I meant that they were passively discouraged, though not technically forbidden. I wouldn't really know whether other charities give a greater percentage of their income to their causes than the JCs, so I can not compare the two on that level. The comparison really is about who is more productive or effiecient with their funds. My vote is on the registered charities. As you said, World Vision is a good one, and there are others like it, e.g. OXFAM. You then ask me about my chartible contributions... this seems odd for someone who (rightfully) teaches about not broadcasting one's charitable contributions.

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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.

Again, I feel that how the group viewed marriage was stigmatized. If the group felt a married couple was getting too close to eachother the married couple would be pressured to spend time apart just to prove that they could "forsake" eachother. In the same respect, there was the compulsory annual three month seperation for married couples. A married couple having a child was even more looked down upon than marriage. I was pratically on par with backsliding.

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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.

I agree with most of what you say here, Dave. Of course I believe that God comes before anything. Perhaps it is just my own understanding which has evolved, but I believe that God is one with His Church, just as Jesus prayed that He would be. I no longer think, as I did in the Jesus Christians, that the gates of hell have prevailed against the church, and that all that is left after almost 2000 years, is the small community of faithful Jesus Christians.

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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.

See, I now believe that Christianity IS a religion, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. It is the correct religion. I find that, particularly in your comics, you present churches as a caricature. As if they have their traditions in place for the express purpose of showing everyone outside their organisation how superior they are. For me I now see that those traditions are there to help remind them of God. Yeah sometimes people can get self righteous, but that is only because they strayed from the original goal.

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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?

Perhaps you didn't recieve it, but I did already tell you in an email I sent to you about a month ago that I feel it was very wrong what Joe's family did, and that they should be taken before the courts and put to trial. If they are found guilty, then they need to be punished in order to help them reform.

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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.

I know that persecution is still going on every day. In recent era Christians were killed and oppressed for decades under communism. Even today Christians particularly in Africa and Asia are being imprisoned for their faith. I feel the difference is that those are Christians who don't go looking for persecution.

This is all my opinion, and people can either take it on board or not. I'm not trying to back anyone into a corner. Again, I did learn a lot from my time with your group, and I don't regret having been a member.