The

The Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

And I'm still, whoa.

On today's Stone Quire, we are going to be discussing the subject of religion. What is a religion?

This will be the beginning of a three-part arc where we discuss religion in specific terms.

We'll get into in a minute.

In the second episode of this arc, we're going to be discussing specifically Judaizing and

Gnosticism within Christianity, because those are two key examples of false religions that

have been inserted into the practices and beliefs of many of us today.

And the final third episode in this arc is going to deal specifically with apostasy.

We're going to deal with the fact that much of the New Testament speaks directly to Christians in the church in terms of falling away. There are a lot of things

that we today read as pronouncements that we think, well, that must apply to pagans because

it's talking about people going to hell. When you look at in proper context, it's clearly

talking to Christians in the church who have or are falling away and will be damned because they have lost the faith

that was given to them. So this is going to be an arc that's going to be a lot of law. There's

not going to be a lot of good news in this for us. And the reason that we're tackling it is that

this is fundamentally about the state of the church today. As we look at all of our churches,

you know, multiple denominations, they're all in varying states of this decay. And the distinction

that we're going to highlight today with the definition of religion is specifically going

to exclude what God you're talking about or what practices you perform. It's going to focus

entirely on what is your moral compass? What is the origin of the right and wrong that you hold to

in your heart and in your life? Because there's a degree of passion that we bring to our morality,

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