I'm howling mfs be there on Saturday all day good for them I just wish it wasn't blasphemyOne of my oldest cousin is in this shyt…he tried to bring me in one time I went to visit
And just like the brehs mentioned in the thread, they pulled out the Bible and grab random bible verses to make their pointI was likeI am deep in this heathen shyt don’t waste your time
He took his mother to their service (she is Apostolic faith) and she was livid to find what her oldest son had become…the women sit separate from the men.
At the beginning I think they ran his pockets cause his wife said something to that effect but I don’t know if he is still giving them a lot of money.
Also, he can’t miss that ALLLL DAY church service on Saturdays
If he is in another area or country he always looks up if they have a church there so he won’t miss service.
Anyways, they also heavily target US military members.
But yeah…is a cult…the family stopped talking about him and this cult..it rarely comes up…i
Guess as long as he is good we don’t care and he is a grown ass man.
@Mystic

They tried to get me years ago. Had a co worker deep with one of there churches.
The first time I went they don’t tell you what they believe. They just play biblical hop scotch with you and bring up verses that make you think. I remember they said the latitude and longitude lines resemble prison bars because earth is a prison.
Anyway I went home and googled the church and yeah found out about the Korean guy.
From the perspective of a non-believer, there's not much difference between Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, both are considered prophets who were preaching the word of god. I mean, at least we know for a fact that Smith definitely existed, it's so strange to me how judgmental religious people are of Scientologists, Mormons etc.
Crazy, I always thought they were just some oddball shyt that happened back in the 70/80's
That's a pretty low-info take breh.
Jesus didn't make up a fake history of the world like Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard did. Jesus didn't suddenly start a new religion based solely on his own made-up story. Jesus didn't pull blatant con man moves to amass huge amounts of property or organize thousands of followers to do his bidding.
All Jesus did was preach from his own people's religious texts, telling them why they were focusing on all the wrong things and needed to get back to the heart of the message to get right with God. He didn't try to build up his own name, he didn't try to harness the power of the tens of thousands of people he was inspiring, he just told them to go back to their own communities and get right with God. He worked to reform Judaism, not make up something new. The # of disciples he had actually staying with him or being any part of his daily life was bare minimum to spread the message.
And historians across the world, regardless of their personal beliefs, are of the consensus that Jesus was a real historical figure. The people who write, "Jesus was a myth!" books generally are conspiracy theorists publishing from their basement, they don't even work for accredited universities.
It's impossible to have an objective conversation about this when your default position is that Jesus Christ was a literal messenger of god's word.
Your statements about Jesus, that he didn't lie or manipulate are an inherently religious argument
that has nothing to do with the historicity of a possible human man named Jesus
My point is the only thing separating the perception of Jesus and Joseph Smith is time
No, I'm making the historical argument that not a single source we have show Jesus trying to rewrite history.
* Joseph Smith claimed a group of Jews fled for the New World in 600 B.C. and he created a thousand years of made-up history for them that somehow no one else had ever known about.
* L. Ron Hubbard claimed the extraterrestrial ruler Xenu brought billions of his people to Earth 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs, and now their souls roam the world incessantly.
* Jesus told people to get right with God. He did not invent any new historical events.
If you think that's wrong, then tell me what new history Jesus invented.
I know that was your "point", but it was objectively false:
* Did Jesus invent a fictional history of the world? Yes or no?
* Did Jesus plagiarize entire books of religious text and then claim they were given to him by angels? Yes or no?
* Did Jesus accumulate significant resources and a power base for himself? Yes or no?
Literally the only thing you have connecting Joseph Smith and Jesus is the fact that they were both religious leaders.
The historicity of Jesus is a separate topic, one that is almost universally agreed upon by historians. For one of many books that have been written on the subject, you could try Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazarath". Professor Ehrman is a famous anti-Christian atheist who doesn't believe the Bible is reliable, and he STILL argues that Jesus's existence is historically undeniable.
If you care to do the reading, you can additionally find out which aspects of Jesus's life and teachings most historians find almost certain, and which ones they find most likely. There are many books on that subject too, which I can tell you haven't read.
'historically undeniable'You're recontextualizing my initial comment and framing the discussion around what you can argue
, these questions are impossible to answer because Jesus (presumably) lived thousands of years ago.

That's the point, it's much easier to point out the lies and contradictions of people who lived in the modern era as apposed to a man whose life has been codified in history by the myth of major religions for centuries. There's no concrete evidence of anything about Jesus other than many people agreeing he existed, people that would benefit from perpetuating his legacy, replace him with Joseph Smith and we're having the same conversation.
Bart Ehrman is a theologian not a historian
, he's also a former Christian and respects Christianity a great deal, he's an agnostic anti-fundamentalist not an atheist.
Your initial comment was judgmental of religious people for making a distinction, I gave you valid reasons for the distinction. I'm sorry that you don't like that I can frame the argument around valid reasons, but if you have a counterargument, make it rather than just throwing up your hands and complaining.
No, they're not.
The argument you're trying to make is an Argument from Ignorance fallacy. You have ZERO evidence that Jesus did any of those things, nor is there the slightest reason to believe he did such things, but you're going to claim religious people are hypocrites just on the pure assumption that he did things like that, when your only evidence is "well, it was a long time ago so we can't know"?
If Jesus had rewritten history, then where is it? Why do Christians and Jews share the exact same history of the world, if Jesus supposedly wrote a new one? If Jesus amassed power and property, then why do all the writings about him state that he owned nothing and told his disciples not to seek money or power? Wouldn't writing stuff like that have made them look bad when they were doing the opposite?
It's logically incoherent to claim that there's any realistic chance Jesus did any of those things when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.
This is nonsense.
No matter how many centuries pass by, we're still going to have the Book of Mormon and its alternate history. Without it we don't have Mormonism at all. So even if 2000 years pass by, we'll still have direct evidence that Joseph Smith made up an alternate world history.
Where is Jesus's "Book of Mormon"? If Jesus had written an alternate history of the world, wouldn't it have been an important part of the Christian faith? Yet no such book exists, nor do any claims like that appear anywhere in the New Testament or any of the other sources on Jesus. He never tried to rewrite history like Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard did. If he had, wouldn't at least ONE of his early followers have included that info in their writings about him?
And the people who wrote all those accounts of Jesus around 20-70 years after his death, why would they have portrayed him as poor and as commanding his disciples to give away their money to the poor if that wasn't what Jesus did? If they were self-serving, then wouldn't they have written that Jesus wanted them to be rich? Wouldn't they have written that Jesus wanted them to have power, instead of having Jesus explicitly tell his followers not to seek power? And since these books were written within a generation of Jesus's ministry, if they blatantly contradicted the wealth and power that Jesus's movement had gained, wouldn't everyone who read them be able to see those contradictions immediately and discredit the movement?
You have to use your head here. Historians study ancient texts, even biased ones, in part by analyzing the intentions of the author. And there's no reasonable interpretation of the New Testament writings by which your imagined story would make sense.
He's a religious studies professor, an activist critique of Christianity, and a historian. His PhD was on the history of the development of the New Testament books and the apocrypha writings that followed, he teaches courses on early Christian history, has written multiple books on history, and serves as the editor of more than one academic journal in history as well as the Encyclopedia of Ancient History.
He's not an atheist? You probably should get more familiar with subjects before trying to argue them. You clearly are just trying to google this as you go so you end up dead wrong.
In Ehrman's own words, he considers himself an agnostic because such knowledge is impossible to hold certainly, but also an atheist because he doesn't believe in God at all:
"Do I *believe* that there is a God? No, I don’t. I especially do not believe in the biblical God, or in the traditional God of Jews and Christians (and Muslims and so on). I simply do not believe that there is a God who created this world (it is the result of forces beyond my comprehension, but it goes back to the Big Bang, and we are here because of evolution, and I exist only because of some pretty amazingly remote chances/circumstances…); I don’t think there is a divine being who is sovereign over this world who interacts with it and the people in it, who answers prayer, who brings good out of evil. I don’t believe it. So I’m an atheist."
When we die, we go to the great big convenience store in the sky