Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, June 05, 2008 12:54:27 PM
The founders of our form of government deliberately adopted the First Amendment to recognize that we have a God-given (or natural) right to free speech, and to encourage the examination of ideas through public discourse.
Yet, there are many ways people with something to hide seek to thwart free speech, including abusing copyright laws meant to prevent the theft of intellectual property, not to stifle criticism of ideas communicated through media.
Jill Martin Rische has written a book called The Kingdom of the Occult to examine occultic practices and the organizations and individuals who promote them, and to compare occultic practices and the ideas derived from them to what the Bible teaches.
The book is going through the fact-checking, approval and permissions processes and so it hasn’t been published yet. Apparently, Mrs. Rische is having some trouble thanks to those who will do anything to prevent us from having a critical reference work about their practices and teachings. You would think people would be happy to have their own teachings distributed to a wider audience, but apparently they don’t if the person discussing them doesn’t agree with those teachings. It is very telling that they are trying to prevent analysis of their teachings.
I am eagerly awaiting the book, based on how useful I found The Kingdom of Cults, originally written by Mrs, Rische’s father, Dr. Walter Martin. Kingdom the Cults was a groundbreaking work examining various cults, especially their contrasts to Christian doctrine and practice. As such, it became an important source for researchers looking for information on cults and a helpful tool for Christians who wanted to know what the differences were between Christianity and any given cult.
It is worth noting here that Dr. Martin was a skilled (and entertaining) lecturer and teacher, mentoring and inspiring countless subsequent countercult and Christian apologetics researchers, writers, and speakers. He was extremely effective at clarifying exactly how various world religions, cults and religious movements deviated from orthodox Christianity, and why we should practice Christianity and reject the others. Because of his work and its effectiveness and influence, Martin became a target for cultists. Their attacks on him, however, do little to effectively counter his demonstrations of the errors committed in the teachings of the cults. While it is understandable that cultists seeks to protect the reputation of their founders by attacking Walter Martin, because without their founding “prophet” their cult loses meaning - Christianity is about Christ, not about Walter Martin, so attacks on Martin do nothing to change the truth about what he demonstrated: that their cult’s founders and successors have mislead them.
I realize that Townhall.com is mainly about conservatism, not Christian doctrine and practice, and that we have a wide variety of participants here, some of whom are likely to want to attack my praise of Martin. But I believe we can disagree on theology and practice and whether or not your religious leaders were/are right, and still work effectively together to promote conservatism in politics and governing.