It is strange growing up in CS. I don't remember much being said about it before I was eight. There were times when it was the farthest thing from my father's mind, but when all the children were ages, 11, 9,8, 4, and 1, we moved our of the city and onto a farm near a very small town. My mother told me years later, that he had decided to buckle down and live CS. His three oldest children were of an age where they could begin to understand things, and given the growing isolation he enforced, I think he had decided it was time to get us away from the influences of the world. His motives were love and concern for us, he was strict but not violent. And I loved the farm and the animals. I consider that I had a good and happy childhood.
I know now that God brought me into the world and into that family, and that religion, for his own purposes. and so, I am grateful.
Growing up CS does not come without its long-lasting repercussions. There is a sense of dread when touching certain memories, a darkness, almost as though a part of your past was haunted. For children growing up, especially in a community where the first two questions that were asked of the new kid were, "Where does your father work?" and "Where do you go to church?" It was a church going community, predominately Lutheran, but also Methodist and Baptist. Very few Catholics---they congregated in a couple of surrounding towns. So, there was the stigma of being different, odd.
But how does a child live amidst reality, a very material world, experience that world with joy and happiness, as well as sickness and sorrow and death, and at the same time be taught that it is not real? It is all an illusion and one can with their mind make it all go away.
CS claims to be the absolute truth and for a while I believed it was. As a teenager and young adult, I knew it wasn't. I gave assent to it as long as my father was alive and for a brief time out of loyalty and love after he died when I was twenty. Then I abandoned all religion. One good thing that came out of the CS experience was a recognition that there had to be such a thing as absolute truth I went on a quest to find it. Traditional Christianity, what little I knew of it was not on my radar as my teaching had embedded in me that it had already failed. Both my parents were brought up in traditional Christianity. I eventually came to the conclusion that even if I came across the absolute truth, I would have no way of knowing that I had.
That of course turned out to not be the case, and it was in the very place I had never looked.
With that background in place, in my next post I will give quotes that show just how deadly and unchristian CS is. It can be very deceiving to a person who does know the basics of Christianity, because it uses the same words. However, those words mean something entirely different from the Christian and Bible usage. I will have to take the quotes from The Kingdom of the Cults, as I threw away all my CS books within the first week of my conversion. And I hate throwing away books! They are the only books I ever through away. (Well except for some Hagin and Copeland books and tapes my sister gave my mother. Who by the way, came to Christ late in life.).
And add to it if need be. I don't know if it has anything that will bring out the deception of the word usages.
