CRN.Info and Analysis

Remember what I wrote that to watchdoggies agreement is everything? Well in the wake of the language dust-up Mike Ratliff writes:

Those of the religion of Human Reason debate deceitfully. They focus on words and logic, but since faith is outside of Human Reason and totally not understandable by an unregenerate mind, they cannot see it nor grasp it. When we reason with them using words of faith, they hear an unintelligible language and reject it as nonsense. What we see as our Spirit-filled walk unto personal holiness, they see as hypocrisy and us being judgmental because we point out that they are mired in their flesh instead of being led by the Spirit. We become frustrated because it appears they are just being hard headed. However, they really cannot grasp the truth because their hearts are hard and God has not given them the ability to understand it by His Grace. Tragically, their religion of Human Reason also gives them false assurance they are right and we are wrong because, after all, to them we are speaking nonsense. They have a religion, but it is one of their own making and it is not Genuine Christianity. Because of that, they also use the tactics of the world. That should be no surprise to us since they are conformed to the world, they will be like it. Here is an example of these tactics exposed by my friend Ken Silva.

Get that? If you don’t agree with Mike on the language issue its because you’re not really a Christian and you’re going to hell. The more I read the watchdoggies the more Roman Catholic they become as Pope Mike speaks ex cathedra and ex communicates everyone but the people on his blogroll. I just hope the watchdoggies are as corrupt as their Roman Catholic forefathers and let my son pay an indulgence to spring me out of eternal damnation.

Is anyone else shocked that Mike Ratliff would make the issue of particular words as central to Christianity as something like the resurrection?

Ken has been emailing me, and has recently stated his preference for publishing all of them. So here you go. There’s everything with nothing held back or edited. Start at the bottom and work your way forward for chronology, the bit from Chris Lyons was emailed to me by Ken, for some reason.

Edit:
The reason I posted this was because Ken let me know in his final email that he was going to post them himself and I wanted to make sure they were posted un-edited and without commentary.

After all the back and forth with the watchdoggies over language issues I learned at least three things about them.

Their culture is their ultimate authority
Oh, I know they’ll say different, and they’ll tell anyone who will listen that scripture is their ultimate authority, but it’s simply not true. Their culture absolutely and totally dictates everything about their worldview, including their view of scripture. The hermeneutic they use to interpret scripture is their culture. Instead of using scripture to shape their culture, their culture shapes their interpretation of scripture, which is why you get such goofy “Biblical” teachings as pews are Godly, and chairs are not, and it’s also why you get such obvious contradictions such as condemning a song that uses PG-13 language while canonizing Luther who used much worse than PG-13 language.
What makes this so tragic is not just the abuse scripture suffers, but that there’s absolutely no chance of reform, after all, if your culture is handed down to you by God Himself, what could possibly need reformed?

Agreement is the only thing that matters
When it comes right down to it they don’t care what scripture says, they don’t care about unity in Christ, ultimately the only thing that matters is that you agree with them. If you agree with them you’re in and they’ll say good things about you and allow you to comment on their blogs (so long as you nod yes like a bobblehead). But the second a point of disagreement is reached you get the boot. Forget about commenting on blogs, emailing, or communicating in any way at all. In fact, forget about being addressed as anything less than dirt on the bottom of their shoe, which is directly related to the next lesson I learned about watchdoggies.

They value status over truth
Ever wonder why so many of their posts, comments, and miss-ives are peppered with “as a pastor and a teacher…”? It’s because they value status over truth. The question isn’t whether or not a position is true, the question is what is the status of the two sides. This is a great example:

The Nathan who works with Erwin McManus authored even Hitler has his tactics comparing CRN contributor Steve Camp, a fine upstanding Christian, to Hitler

See, the emphasis isn’t on whether or not the comparison is true, it’s on Camp’s status. We’ve commented before on the guilt by association tactics that are in almost constant use by watchdoggies, this is probably why. The point isn’t to get to the truth of the matter, it’s really an argument about the status of the individuals involved.

*update*
I think I’ve just been threatened by Ken Silva. I just received an email that says:

A polite admonition to be careful about running with the big dogs there Tim, you could get yourself hurt.

Ken

This week Chris Lyons and Tim Reed discuss what it means to be worldly. Download it here. There’s a few spots in it that are a bit spotty, if you can’t stand to listen to that kind of audio quality just fast forward a bit.

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