Hi Prudence,
I've been checking on Wayne Bent for a few years now via
the internet, mostly reading stuff that he has posted on
his many "last"
websites. I became interested
in him because on the one hand I found much of what he
initially wrote quite insightful and on the other hand had
for some odd reason he chose to write in the style of
John's gospel. I found it useful to read his challenges to
people who claimed to be Christians and yet very likely
would refuse to be a follower of Jesus were he to have been
born today. It seems very easy for Christians to forget the
physical, historical context of Jesus and fail to see the
reasons why most people of Jesus' day did not consider him
to be a savior.
For some reason,
however, his writings began to become less useful, he
started to incorporate a lot of circular reasoning as well
as emotional manipulation to support his claims. I can only
assume that this was the result of withdrawing further from
the general public into his own cozy little group that
believed everything that he said without question. The
content of writings became much more about "us" versus
those evil "outsiders", very elitist.
He reminds me of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith. Like Wayne
Bent, Joseph Smith was pretty intelligent and through his
talents and charisma obviously inspired a lot of people to
trust him. Strangely, though, both leave behind clues that
they are not trustworthy. For example, several parts of the
Mormon scriptures that Joseph Smith claimed to have
translated from native american text contain long verbatim
quotes from the King James Bible. Anyone with a little
knowledge of language should find this extremely odd
considering the fact that the King James Bible was
translated from Greek, very different in both style and
content from anything spoken in North America before the
Europeans arrived. This mistake seems similar to Wayne Bent
writing in the style of John's gospel and producing a short
movie showing him wearing a white robe and bushy beard,
just like Jesus appears in Hollywood movies. His choice of
writing style is similarly strange. Does Wayne Bent not
realize that Jesus generally spoke to simple people in
simple terms so that they could understand him?
The style found in John was
most likely a later rephrasing of the story and teaching in
order to communicate to a different audience.
Wayne
Bent's odd style is more pronounced now than previously and
correspondingly more difficult to understand. He requires
the audience to constantly read between the lines and this,
once again, is probably the result of some kind of "cult
speak" that results when a group withdraws so much from the
public.
It would almost be
entertaining if it wasn't so tragic for the children you
mentioned who have grown up with this confusion.
Anyways, I came across your website through a google
search, part of my check up on Wayne Bent.
I'm very curious to know how and why people have joined his
group. Is there something like a personality trait that
everyone shares or some background? Is everyone from the
7th day adventist church? I'm interested because I feel
that there have been points in my life where I would have
been wide open to a person like Wayne Bent and I've never
been able to give myself fully to anything like that. I
usually become very interested in someone or something for
a short while but then very quickly I see things that make
you run. I haven't yet found a church that I'm really
comfortable with because each seems to dogmatically promote
some belief to the extreme. In my current church, the
pastor is a Bible literalist and constantly proclaims that
the solution to every problem is outlined in the Bible.
Maybe you believe this but I have difficulty believing that
a book of under 1000 pages, or any book for that matter,
could even list all possible problems let alone describe a
solution for each.
All the best,
Matt