At the end of the Bible there is a very serious and threatening warning to those who misuse what’s inside it to hurt others or pervert scripture for their own means. It goes directly to the heart and doesn’t mince words – if you take the words out of context and corrupt the central truth it contains, you are in for some serious spiritual trouble.

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”

Revelation 22: 18-19

There you have it, plain as day. Don’t mess with this book, use it out of context or pervert its teachings.

This is also the reason many people get so meaninglessly confused about specific Bible verses and cite apparent “contradictions” and/or quote complaints about hypocrisy, cruelty or scientific inaccuracy. Scripture is something that must be studied, and read in its context, because although the message of wisdom it contains is relevant for all time, the culture and times in which it was written was different to the one we live in today. That wisdom is about human nature and our historical relationship with God, which never changes.

But there are groups who claim to be a denomination, sect or misunderstood branch of legitimate Christianity that often trap or mislead those who are spiritually seeking. What they teach is blatantly fraudulent and blasphemous, and in some cases, utterly ridiculous. It often goes under the banner that there is a conspiracy by the mainstream church to suppress their claims so it can promote its own power-seeking agenda. If only it were that grand and dramatic.

To understand what we mean by a Christian cult or perversion, we can turn to Walter Martin, the pioneer of the Christian counter-cult movement.

“By cultism we mean the adherence to doctrines which are pointedly contradictory to orthodox Christianity and which yet claim the distinction of either tracing their origin to orthodox sources or of being in essential harmony with those sources. Cultism, in short, is any major deviation from orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith.”

Many of these movements come under the “restorationist” umbrella, meaning they claim they are restoring the original spiritual doctrines and teachings of Christianity that have somehow been tampered with and lost, despite all the scientific and archaeological evidence that scholarship presents to the contrary.

Or more simply, this is what happens when man re-interprets God to be the way he wants God to be, and remakes Him in his image. The resulting chaos and damage ruins lives.

Gnostics and the “lost” gospels
Gnosticism is the source of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” that are mentioned in TV and film (e.g. The Da Vinci Code, Stigmata) that claim to depict another side of the New Testament story and Christ himself. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. The widespread belief is that there has been a conspiracy to suppress them.

Only they aren’t gospels at all, and they are freely available for anyone to look at.

Gnosticism is comes from the Greek word “Gnosis”, which refers to secret, hidden and esoteric spiritual “knowledge” available to all from the experience of God. The various Gnostic belief systems revolve around humans being spiritual souls created by the evil Demiurge (the Abrahamic God), and trapped in an evil material world that can only be escaped from by such secret knowledge. Gnostics identify Christ as the embodiment of the second (good) God who brought that secret spiritual knowledge to earth.

Gnosticism developed heavily in the first few centuries after the events in Judea (i.e. Christ’s execution and the apostolic missions) and hence battled for prominence with the early Church. In some cases, the two belief systems merged. Above all, the central idea of Gnosticism (a knowledge superior to and independent of faith) made it welcome to many who were half-converted from paganism to Christianity. According to Gnostics, faith was for the multitude, knowledge for the few.

The so-called “Gospels” were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and have been dated to several centuries after the circulation of the traditional gospels, which were documented abnormally near to the time of the events they describe. Very few copies exist, in comparison to the tens of thousands of New Testament manuscripts. Their resemblance with the main synoptic gospels comes from the authors openly quoting and borrowing from them, not because they were controversially different views of the early Church teachings, as portrayed in the movies. Gnosticism adopted Christ as one of their central figures, and included the New Testament in their own “Gospel” writings.

The Gnostic “gospels” allude to concepts and ideas that are obviously Gnostic in nature and go against the teachings of Christ, who spoke in simple parables to ordinary people, and taught of a single God who welcomed all rather than a select few. All of them, including the Gospel of Thomas, failed the 3 main tests to become a part of the Bible. None of them were written by apostles, eyewitnesses or have any apostolic authority, they are not congruent with the rule of faith (i.e. orthodox teachings of Christ), featuring the teachings of another religion and they were not in continuous usage and acceptance by any of the early churches.

“Young Earth” Creationism
More of a naive stupidity than outright perversion, creationists take the Genesis story absolutely literally. They believe God created the Earth in 6 24 hour days 6,000 – 10,000 years ago, and that evolution is in direct contravention of the Word of God as a lie concocted by the Devil. Some even ho so far as to claim dinosaurs were also the Devil’s schemes to test people’s faith.

This claim has absolutely no validity whatsoever and believers are almost always in militant denial of simple facts of science. Creationism is not a science by any normal description and should not be treated like one. The “days” in the metaphorical account of Genesis refer to “ages” of time representing billions of years and it is the only religious scripture that correctly orders evolution as we understand it today through science. Evolution and natural selection are the engine and mechanism of God’s creation, and science is the study of creation. As far as a religion is true, it will always be synchronised with our scientific understanding.

These people belong in the same class as those who believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. It is asinine in the extreme and they should be written off as ignorant and naive, with no exceptions.

Jehovah’s Witnesses & the Watchtower Society
Founded in the late 19th century by Charles Taze Russell and also known as the people of the Watchtower Society, Jehovah’s Witnesses have a uniquely paranoid view of Christian scripture that is such a radical departure from the original Biblical context that it cannot be considered as related to orthodox Christianity. Because absolutely anything that doesn’t come from the Watchtower is from the Devil, you won’t find many of them looking critically of what they believe. The Devil is everywhere and all powerful in these scared and frozen minds. And let’s face it, they’re very, very annoying.

Like Muslims, they believe there is one true God (called Jehovah) and no Trinity, and Christ was killed on a torture stake as a Son (but not the incarnation) of God and that He was not physically resurrected. Apparently only 144,000 chosen people will be God’s chosen priests on a new second earth and there will be no afterlife, including no hell, but just eternal extinction. They assert any symbols are a form of idolatry (e.g. the pagan origin of the crucifix), that believers must be politically neutral in all matters despite believing the beast of Revelation to be the United Nations, and reject transfusions of whole allogeneic or stored autologous blood or its primary components.

Amusingly, their prediction of the end of the world as being in 1914 and it’s flawed chronology is the first in a very long list of “prophecies” that have never happened. Not so funny is the other long list of children who have died needlessly in hospitals because their dogmatically religious parents have steadfastly refused to allow them life-saving blood transfusions, or have had their claims of sexual abuse silenced by elders. Leaving the cult itself results in being totally disowned, or excommunicated, and If you sin, a “tribunal” of elders tires you for your actions to determine your guilt and subsequent punishment.

The blasphemy of the Watchtower crowd is fundamentally based in its selective interpretation of the Bible and their own apostasy. What started as a bible study group has somehow morphed into a conservative authoritarian sect with beliefs that have gone so leftfield as to constitute a wholesale re-working of Christian doctrine. All you need to do is take one look at the miserable bastards who knock on doors “witnessing” with their children dressed in suits to know the Devil spends his time writing their magazines.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons)
The first and only thing that needs to be said about Mormons is they, presumably accidentally, added an extra letter to their real title– there is an extra “M” in the middle and it should read “Moron”. They are unusually fundamentalist and considered heretical by the Church, as what they teach is not only quite ridiculous, scientifically laughable and theological ludicrous, it is in no way in harmony with the original teachings of Christ, as they claim it is. That is an outright lie.

Mormons believe that after Christ’s ascension, he reappeared to the early inhabitants of North America (where else?) and divinely-inspired teachings were recorded on golden plates formed around the idea of a great apostasy. In 1820, Christ appeared to their modern-day prophet, Joseph Smith, and an angel called “Moroni” helped him translate the writings on the plates into the English “Book Of Mormon” as an additional scripture to the New Testament. Their “scriptures” are compounded with the Apocrypha and another main text called the Pearl Of Great Price.

Aside from the direct accusations of Smith’s polygamy, failed prophecies and wealth-seeking, no-one has ever seen these golden plates other than pathetically poor and compromised eyewitnesses (which are also strikingly similar to the well-known Kinderhook hoax story) or been able to historically validate anything that he claimed in these writings. Most scholars regard Smith’s works as blatant plagiarism of 4 specific books (Views of the Hebrews, The Wonders of Nature, the Bible and the Apocrypha). Even the organisation’s controversial practices of baptising the dead, violent suppression of dissent, openly-admitted sexism, racism and homophobia doesn’t seem to phase ordinary Americans who subscribe to what these history-rewriters preach. Scholars and scientists dismiss them outright.

Mormon belief structure asserts there was a council of Gods (not one God), God was created and has a physical body, humans pre-existed as spiritual beings and can become gods, and that God organises pre-existing matter (goes against modern cosmology). Amongst their scientific absurdities are the logical impossibility of multiple gods and God Himself being created, matter being eternal in direction opposition to the Big Bang, direct inaccuracies about the emergence of metallurgy and agriculture, and mostly interestingly, claims about the inhabitants of North America that are wholly refuted by modern DNA analysis and molecular biology.

Roman Catholicism
It might seem strange to include Roman Catholicism as a heretical sect of Christianity, but when it is scrutinised, its practices and beliefs are not in harmony with the Bible and arguably verge on blasphemy. Its roots lie in Rome, which was the catalytic place for Christianity becoming a world religion. When it was adopted by the Roman Empire as its official religion, it spread all over the gentile world but the Church became a political power that vied for religious and political control all over Europe. Protestantism arose in England in direct opposition as an attempt by Henry VIII to reclaim political control of his country.

Catholics believe salvation is only possible through their denomination (Christ taught it was through Him), demands confession and penance because Christ’s sacrifice was not enough by itself (when Christ taught of God’s forgiveness), excommunicates members (all are acceptable to God), proclaims hierarchies of deadly sins (all sins are deadly), encourages members to acquire “Indulgences” to earn God’s grace (He gives it freely), include the Apocrypha in their scriptures (despite it being unreliable and alluding to Gnostic concepts), is lurid with arguable idolatry due to its penchant for gold and powerful symbols and teaches of unbiblical esoteric concepts such as stigmata. The process of transubstantiation (i.e. a priest supernaturally turning bread and wine into flesh and blood by blessing it) is blasphemous enough on its own.

Indeed, one look at the Bible is enough to surmise that almost all of the errant practices of Catholicism are explicitly forbidden by Christ himself.

Perhaps the most controversial practice of the Catholic church is its veneration (or quasi-worship) of Mary and angels as the recipients of prayer as intercessors to Christ (Christ taught only through Him), and their claims that she was a virgin all her life (scripture records she had children) and ascended to heaven (scripture records she died naturally). There is no biblical basis for their concepts of purgatory or the “rapture”. They also mandate an infallible Holy Father (Pope – a title only for God) as God’s representative and demand that priests remain celibate and unmarried, despite the first “Pope” (Peter) being married with children and God specifically ordaining marriage for them. History records that the behaviour of many of these Popes has been suspect at best – the current one was a member of the Hitler Youth.

But for ordinary people, the Catholic church is responsible for the mass torture and killing of thousands of people through the Inquisition, hoarding Nazi financial proceeds from the World War II Holocaust and deliberately suppressing the systematic and serial sexual abuse of children by its priests, whilst simultaneously teaching (falsely) that sex is only for the static purpose of procreation and contraception is immoral. Most everyday Catholics themselves admit that their lives are spent fighting guilt the Church has imposed on them, when Christ taught of hope and forgiveness.

The only difference between a cult and the Catholic church is a matter of money and political power. Its beliefs do not reflect orthodox doctrine, and in some respects go directly against scripture and the spiritual teachings of Christ himself.

Church of Christ Scientist (Christian Science)
Christian science has a “unique interpretation” of the Christian faith, according to its 19th century founder and alleged prophet, Mary Baker Eddy, in the book that forms of the backbone of the sect, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”. Although not as deviant as others and flatly rejecting mysticism, the Church of Christ Scientist teaches that the reality of God denies the reality of sin, sickness, death and the material world. Eddy’s calling to found the “Church” originated in her believing that she had received a personal healing simply from reading the Bible.

Although members can apparently seek independent medical treatment, most tend to follow the doctrine of “medicine” that is gained exclusively through prayer, as they believe almost all physical ailments have their root in negative feelings and thoughts. The issue might seem moot in the case of consenting adults, but verges into manslaughter when members who are parents deprive their children of vital medical attention (e.g. Twitchell case of 1980). Another famous case involved the lead singer of Metallica, James Hetfield, relating how his parents both died of cancer after refusing to seek traditional medical treatment.

The Church Science Journal also famously promotes the “healing” of homosexuals, and has a death rate twice that of the national average. They do not diagnose disease, and do not believe in things being contagious and or death being anything other than an illusion, so they will not avoid one another to avoid infection. Their theology teaches that evil is unreal (i.e. a rejection of dualism), that God is Father and Mother, a differentiation between “Jesus” the man and “Christ” the divine manifestation, atonement for sin is unnecessary, Hell doesn’t exist and that Christian Science is a “refinement” or “clarification” of the essence of Christianity. All of these beliefs directly contradict biblical scripture and Christ’s simple teachings.

Scripture clearly states that Christ never healed in the same way twice, and that God works through the hands of doctors just as He may violate natural laws to intervene supernaturally. The most well known quote about Christian Science is attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who famously said “Christian Science is neither Christian nor scientific”, which sums it up perfectly.

Charismatic Toronto Blessing
In 1994, an evangelical church (Toronto Airport Vineyard Christian Fellowship, or TACF) in Toronto gained notoriety for the bizarre behaviour of its congregation, who claimed to have received a blessing of God’s Holy Spirit that manifested in wild madness and strange animalistic and uncontrollable behaviour. Other charismatic churches began following these ”revelations”, with many others publicly claiming they had experienced the same “blessing”.

The most common described behaviours included hysterical laughter (or “holy laughter”), physical spasms or jerks, falling to the floor under the Holy Spirit’s power (aka “slain in the Spirit”) and speaking in tongues. Other less common behaviours include manifestations that resembled roaring like lions and barking like dogs. In its most visible form it overcame worshippers with outbreaks of laughter, weeping, groaning, shaking, falling, ‘drunkenness,’ and even behaviours that have been described as a ‘cross between a jungle and a farmyard’

This phenomenon has a name and has been studied scientifically – it is called mass religious hysteria or religious ecstasy, as experienced in crowd situations in other non-religious contexts. There is no evidence or theological basis that it is a “gift” from God or has a specific spiritual purpose that enhances and/or furthers the Kingdom of God as described by Christ. Paul wrote to the Church of Galatia that the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  None of which sound anything like the crowd madness of Toronto.

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From seeing all of these organisations and their perversions, it can be easy to believe the claims that the common message, teachings and history of Christianity and its scriptures did indeed somehow become corrupted over time. But it is equally important to understand any religion of prominence will suffer fractional splinter groupings and sects that form by taking core spirituality and changing its edges. You must satisfy yourself as to the integrity of the Bible by independently investigatingthe historicity and archaeology, because understanding how it has been preserved explains how precious and marvellously strong Christ’s life and teachings are. The naive, ignorant and weak will fall for the cults, but true spirituality requires critical thought, honest examination and a discerning mind.