Bridge of Reason

A couple of weeks ago I had a phone call from an elderly relative. He was anxious about a text he had received warning him that his Apple Pay account was about to be closed because of ‘suspicious activity’. To resolve this situation, it said he had to click on a link that would allow him to change his password. Concerned that his Apple Pay facility was about to be suspended, he called me to ask for advice. When I told him it was a scam, he asked me how I knew. I said: ‘Because you do not have an Apple Pay account!’ We have all had a suspicious texts, calls, and emails and sometimes they are obvious scams, but occasionally they are a little more difficult to detect. Religious Scam How do we spot a religious scam? How, do we as Christians, know that what we are being told is true or false? This is an important question. Why do we believe what we believe? Have we done our due diligence in checking the facts, or do we believe something because someone who appears to know more than us (kno...

  What does ‘a different gospel’ look like? Paul, in his letter to the churches in Galatia, is ‘astonished’ that they had turned so readily to a different gospel (Gal.1:6-9) In a letter to Corinth he writes: If someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.’ (2 Cor.11:4) This different gospel uses the same language, references the same familiar ideas as the genuine. We know that our first task in a discussion is to define terms, find out what someone understands by the language they use. A different Jesus still goes by that name. The Mormon Jesus, however, is not Immanuel, God with us (Mt.1:23) but literally our elder brother from a premortal existence, the brother of Lucifer. The Watchtower Jesus is not our Creator (Col.1:15-19) but another creature, a premortal angel, and ‘the greatest man whoe...