General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: God Is So Not Pro-Life [View all]TheBlackAdder
(28,186 posts).
How better than to think you are better than others by claiming that the Holy Spirit either lives with you forever, or enters you to convey messages to your family or congregation? Instead of God being on the outside, they now entice people to pretend they speak in tongues (glossolalia) as proof of the Spirit's appearance and God is now part of them--living in them.
Pentecosts believe that if they speak in tongues, and a least one person understands what they are saying, they have a confirmation that the Holy Spirit entered them. At that point, the HS remains until death. Everything the person does is sanctioned by God, so no matter what they do, they will be sitting by the right side of Jesus in the afterlife. This puts pressure on others to speak in tongues, because if people in the congregation don't, that means they are not worthy of the HS yet, placing the others above them socially. That whole ACTS snake-charming thing is another oddity, since ACTS was added to entice the snake followers of pre-Christian following to accept Jesus and Mary. Before Jesus, there was a Mother and Son snake pair that shared similar characteristics.
At least the Charismatics, originating in a 1960s skid-row like California hippy church, doesn't pretend that the Holy Spirit remains in the person for the rest of their life. The HS only appears to deliver a message and leaves the person.
Divine inspiration is another funny thing, as there was a cult movement in the 1970s to claim the Bible was a creation of divine work, and when that was dis-proven, they claimed it was divinely inspired, since human's wrote it--not directly from God, like Moses' tablets. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, was formed after a few hundred pastors signed onto it. The problem was, almost all of the educated doctorates did not subscribe to it because there are over 300 errors and contradictions in the Bible. These educated religious scholars and leaders were given ultimatums to either subscribe to it or resign or be fired. Almost all of them left the church leadership of the universities and secondary schools where they taught. This caused a vacuum of intelligence and a bunch of charlatans entered to fill the void, making up stuff along the way. Scammer televangelists and pastors ran amok, and now there are over 4,500 Christian church variants in the US, because they all want their own flocks to control and fleece. Seed money scams and other trickery entered, since the decision was made to allow anyone who received the calling to become a pastor.
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