OFRs

OFRs: Obviously Fake Religions

Obviously, for someone who is inclined towards/has a fundamental presupposition of Naturalism, they're gonna think of every religious worldview as "obviously fake".
And while someone of that perspective may allow themself to criticize all religion, that same individual may abhor the thought of someone of one religion criticizing another religion -- because no illusion is superior to another. That's akin to self-superiority -- or so some naturalists and postmodernists think. But that's a whole different subject. Let me get back to the initial thought I wanted to share.

When it comes to the search for answers -- trying to see which worldview actually describes reality and not settling for a useful delusion, as J. Warner Wallace says -- there are some eliminations that are SUPER easy to make. Extremely more so than others!

If someone holds to the beliefs one one of these systems, or their train of thought is influenced by it, some evidence with citations would hopefully overcome any emotional attachment and allow them to cross it off the list of possibilities:


LDS, FLDS, RLDS
Mormonism--both mainstream and non-mainstream--says it's a restoration of early Christianity. If there's evidence that shows what early Christians believed and the central/non-negotiable details are denied by Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and their successors then why side with LDS doctrine? If there's anything supernatural or important about Jesus at all, it has to be the original claims.

The textual history of the New Testament shows that there could not have been any wholesale tampering (later adding by people with theological agendas); kind of like how we now have an Open Internet, early ancient copies of books and letters of the NT existed throughout the Roman Empire. That means no central, controlling authority to gather up all the manuscripts, do a redaction or heavy edit, and burn all the older ones. (And it also means this was totally different from a game of telephone with one single branch of communication.)

Paleographers and other scientists have been able to study manuscripts and Textual Critics have made assessments which intellectual Protestants (and other thinking Christians who share their exact Gospel message) are happy with. For example, if a marginal note found its way into the body of text among one branch of manuscript tradition, that bit can be identified as not original. If a line or word was skipped by a scribe, that can be identified. Other things such as non standardized spelling make other "issues" non-issues.

And if we're gonna say that we know anything at all about Greco-Roman history, that means we have some confidence that the works of the ancient historians weren't entirely rewritten by insidious people later on. And those works are very sparse compared to the number of copies of Bible manuscripts (and are more distant in terms of the proximity of the earliest copies to the time of their original autographs).

The definition of what a Christian is, and the main non-negotiable details of their belief, are found by reading passages of that uncompromised Bible in context. The historico-grammatical method. And we can see from the writings of Polycarp (a student of the Apostle John) and his students that they were in line with the essentials of the original info--if not with every single secondary matter as well. They would not consider every last denomination and congregation corrupt, as Joseph Smith claimed God did prior to Smith's founding of a totally separate spiritual worldview.

The Essential Differences

-The Beginning:
Christianity has an eternal maker of all things material and immaterial. An unembodied mind of sorts which was the First Mover or First Cause. (See the Kalam Cosmological Argument.) This Creator is said to be the only being of its kind and no one will progress to "His" level. This is totally different from matter and intelligences being eternal, "material spirits" entering mortal probation, and billions of men from other worlds being exalted to Godhood--and one of them organizing Earth.

-Further Uniqueness:
Every human being is also described as person, but THIS being is said to be tri-personal. Thinking of the word "personality" helps for me. Think of how you have your personality: your characteristics and peculiarities. The words person and being aren't synonyms--they refer to different aspects of existence. So think of how odd, yet not irrational, it would be for one being to be multiple persons (but not in a disorder sort of way--real separate persons, not simply personalities). Sounds crazy but it's not a contradiction.

-Afterlife:
Christianity always held to there being only either fellowship with God or punishment from God between death and the resurrection, and both continuing after the resurrection. Your immaterial self either in heaven followed by a physical place of paradise on a restored Earth, or in Hades/Sheol followed by a physical Gehenna--both known as Hell since the time of the KJV translation.

(The definition of Heaven here is the immediate presence of God. Before Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection, Paradise was spoken of as a segment of Sheol. Sheol means "the grave," so the spiritual "location" of all the dead was the same--some in comfort and others in anguish (see the parable of Luke 16). So the word Sheol referred to a general place of the dead before it was partially emptied and became simply the intermediate stage of those waiting for final Judgement.)

Mormonism has spirit prison, heaven, and a plethora of possibilities after the resurrection: Hell (for satan, demons, and ex-mormons), the Celestial Kingdom (a state of being either an angel or a God over your own planet, depending on your worthiness), and the joyous Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms (for all others...Yes, that includes the worst of the worst).

-The Linchpin ~ Justice:
Moral crimes can't be swept under the rug no matter how much good deeds one has done. That's not how justice works. Christians believe the people in heaven do not deserve to be there. They did not earn their way. Jesus took their punishment for them, and they trust him. (The second person of the trinity entered flesh to fulfill prophesy, suffer, satisfy justice: the Levitical system, Isaiah 52-53, and Romans 3:25 and Hebrews 10:20 in context.)

Real Christians live a changed life of obedience, good deeds, and preaching because of being rescued from Hell--not in order to be rescued from Hell. Salvation being about something other than worthiness doesn't mean one can stay being joyously immoral--the sign of an actual believer is that they don't like their sin. The third person of the trinity makes them want to battle with sin. Christians can "fall into sin" but can't dive into it and swim hundreds of laps.


...Oh, and Native Americans aren't Semites.



Islam,
Christian-Veneered Universalism,
the Prosperity Message
etc...
To be truthful, any religious or spiritual group/system of thought which highly regards a figure with the name "Jesus", but makes the same mistakes as the LDS officials, is an OFR. (I say that because of the Liar, lunatic, Lord (Master), or Legend saying: without cherry-picking parts of Jesus one likes, one is forced to take either the whole pie or no pie at all; see Exodus 12:1-10 and John 1:29. So one may attempt borrowing the "nice morals," but logic says they shouldn't bring Jesus into the picture while doing that.) Just do your own research and see if anything from the paragraphs above apply. Even apply those standards to individual Christian congregations.

Is Christianity an OFR? No. Is it an FR? I don't know. My way of classifying OFRs is that there's evidence of deviation from original sources, a provable motivation for crafting it, and/or no type of lynchpin arguments (about justice, logical morality, or origin). Asserting that something was made up without providing evidence is just an unfounded opinion.


News2urEars
November 14, 2013

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