I found this book at the library and looked to see if church of Christ is in it but found Mormons! They are a hate group and of course they will say that is anti Mormon! Well good! I love it and the Jehovah's witnesses are in it to

Oh boy. This ought to be good. Written in 1965 by a Baptist minister, of course. That automatically makes him an expert in religious beliefs. Those Baptist have to kill off the competition. And away he goes, beating them down, brother. Haul that cash to the bank. :-) My god is better than your god always sells.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/12/2018 11:00PM by SusieQ#1.

Written by Walter Martin of the Christian Research Institute.

Yep and I just saw it and thought this looks good,

Always check out the author. What are their biases?

Nightingale Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Always check out the author. What are their
> biases?


Oh ya. Big biases! Baptist minister? You kidding me? Took me less than five minutes to read his own words, comments on the book, read a review, and know that he is playing to the unhappy members of other groups. It's the same old game of my god is better than your god, and not only that, you poor thing, you're worshiping the wrong one. Just buy my book and get yourself straightened out. Who said: "There is a sucker born every minute." Was it PT Barnum?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/2018 12:41AM by SusieQ#1.

And his denomination was Baptist. He had an encyclopedic mind, and had a daily call-in show, "The Bible Answer Man." In the book, above, he covered a number of cults with historical, psychological/sociological, ecclesiastic (i.e. leadership) and, especially, doctrinal. That was his focus--doctrine from a Protestant/Reformed/Evangelical point of view.

Regarding LDS, Martin was a bit of a break-through writer. He took the Tanners' research and packaged it for a larger Christian readership, first in Kingdom of the Cults and later in The Maze of Mormonism. Many Christians (and others) knew there was something wrong, even weird about LDS, but did not know just why until Martin.

His books are pre-1990 temple rite, and dated for this and other reasons. There are more current books out there, available through Tanner's UtahLighthouse ministry bookstore. Martin was important to my conversion and early discipleship, along with Billy Graham and Charles Colson. I still have, and treasure, a copy of Kingdom of the Cults he signed for me at a lecture I attended.

I'd still like to read it,and, in this case, don't care about author bias. I don't have to agree with the author to enjoy the book.

I remember an an old baptist minister tell me this when I asked him what he thought about the mormon church (as a mishi). His only reply was "it's the kingdom of the cults." I just smiled and said good day and walked away.

I think there is a tendency to conjure up all kinds of weird images when the term cult is used. In Chapter 1 Martin defines his use of the term by quoting Dr. Charles Braden, emeritus professor at Northwestern University, thus:

"By the term cult I mean nothing derogatory to any group so classified. A cult, as I define it, is any group which differs significantly in some one or more respects as to belief in practice from those religious groups which are regarded as the normative expressions of religion in our total culture."

Connotation matters a lot though. The term cult does have an inherently negative association. That's a big part of why adherents of any group strenuously object to the word being used to define them.

On another note, when I mentioned author bias above I was thinking of a time when I was reading a lot of religious material to try and figure out what was 'true', back when I thought it would be possible to essentially go church shopping and buy the 'real' (true) thing as opposed to all the wrong ones I kept hearing about. Walter Martin was one of the authors that well-meaning EV friends piled me up with.

I find that for me I want to know objective information and then make decisions from there. If a person has a strong opinion combined with promoting their own belief or church or group or book I am still interested in learning about it but I always want to know what their angle is - not that I impute negative motives to them but many do have inherent, and usually fairly obvious, biases. It colours the conclusions they draw that they then pass on in their material.

I learned this from (1) Deciding independently as a young teen that there can be only one church that is "true" and by definition then all the rest are not true and I wanted to find the right one, which I actually thought was sensible and possible. Growing up in a benign comfortable vaguely Christian-oriented environment skewed the search for truth to only Christian groups. (2) Joining the JWs because of the prompting of friends. (3) Attending fundamentalist EV church at the prompting of friends, after leaving JWs. (4) Attending Mormon meetings with work colleague/turned friend who sent missionaries to me, who succeeded in convincing me to get baptized - which I profoundly regret now (and friend ceased the friendship when I quit the church).

So finally, somewhere along the way I learned to check the source of the information you are evaluating. And verify material and source.

That is all.