Discuss Anonymous's answer to: Can anyone tell me about Surrendra Gangadean? Is his religious organization a cult? Is Surrendra Gangadean a Charlatan?

As a former member of Westminster Fellowship (WF), I can confirm much of what anon posted above. However, the sentence: "He dissects families, ends lifelong friendships and dictates who his members have contact with[,]" evokes a picture of a much more menacing authoritarian than is actual. He is an authoritarian, (I'm currently being shunned by WF's membership), but the members of WF are mostly autonomous.

Also, I don't think Gangadean knows his material is complete B.S. I think he believes what he teaches, i.e., Rational Presuppositionalism (RP). Insofar as much of what is claimed by RP can be known to be probably false, (and I think that many of RP's claims can be known to be false full stop), this makes him a poor philosopher, not a charlatan.

However, the perceived threat of hellfire, (or--in this case--unmitigated, everlasting meaninglessness, boredom, and guilt), for failure to believe some proposition is an effective means of psychologically coercing belief in that proposition. RP ratchets the psychological stress induced by this threat to its extreme by positing that the inability to show the logical necessity of both God's existence and the truth of Christianity in less than 20 minutes is a sign that you are in a state of spiritual death. At the same time, RP encourages its proponents to believe that they are in possession of not only the truth but that the truth they possess is grounded in the strongest form of justification possible; i.e., logical necessity deduced from a chain of reasoning that starts from indubitable, incorrigible first principles; this, in turn, encourages the proponents of RP to patronize their opponents and to uncharitably and expeditiously dismiss their opponents' views as incoherent.

Surrendra's authoritarianism is only part, (and perhaps even a small part), of the explanation for WF's cult-like qualities. WF is cult-like because once one accepts the core theses of RP he becomes the most tightly-wound Calvinist possible, almost incapable of entertaining the thought that he, (or Gangadean, or Owen), might be wrong.