Is WBTS supremacist legalism, moralism, ethnocentrism and Gnosticism SOCIALLY destructive (as in Westboro Baptist Church, the "most hated family in America")?

by Fernando 3 Replies latest social current

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  Fernando

  (Galatians 5:2) See! I, Paul, am telling YOU that if YOU [yield to Watchtower legalism], Christ will be of no benefit to YOU.
  
  *** g79 6/8 p. 28 Why the Emphasis on Christian Freedom? ***
  "legalism" is "a denial of Christian faith"
  
  (Legalism and moralism is the making and keeping of rules, laws and codes to try and be right with God, and pursue contrived EXTERNAL transformation, instead of yielding to the deep inner natural transformation that comes from accepting IMPUTED righteousness and IMPUTED holiness instead)

  Is the Westboro Baptist Church a useful caricature of the WBTS (and how socially destructive it is)?
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  mindseye

  I don't get why you added Gnosticism in the title. The Gnostics sought esoteric inner knowledge (gnosis) in order to be saved from the Demiurge who controls the material world (Yahweh). WBTS is quite the opposite, they embrace the Demiurge (even naming their religion after him).

  Unless I misunderstood your post...
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  Fernando

  Hey mindseye!

  I know little about the Gnostics and was not referring to them.

  Gnosticism in relation to God is the false, religious and unscriptural belief that we can be right with God via the human pursuit of "absolute truth" (aka the socially destructive Plato Truth Virus or PTV that atheists refer to and substantiate with consequent poor outcomes in Western society).

  Watchtower religious Gnosticism mistranslates John 17:3 to read: "This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ."

  The correct rendering by most other Bible's and even the Watchtower's own KIT (Kingdom Interlinear Translation, Greek word-for-word): "This means everlasting life, their KNOWING you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ."

  It is the age old religion versus relationship issue/dilemma/debate.
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  Band on the Run

  You have a curious definiton of Gnosticism. I studied it in college and have continued my studies b/c it is so interesting. If anything, The WTBTS is very nonGnostic. Gnosticism rejects the physical world. The creator God is a minor, evil God. Secret teachings of knowledge (gnosis) can ignite a spark within you that it not on the physical plane.

  John 1, while not truly Gnostic, approaches it. The WT doesn't believe in individual, secret knowledge. You must believe a literal, strange distortion of scripture or else you are shunned.