After a careful review of the entire book, "The Doctrine of Fellowship," it became abundantly clear that it was necessary to remove it from our site. During our review we learned that the articles Bro. Julio Scaramastro used were edited versions. He did not take the articles in this book from the original magazines, but from reproductions. Thus, his work, colored by those articles, proceeded from a false premise regarding the nature and structure of fellowship.

We know Bro. Julio believed that the magazines he used "faithfully reproduced" the articles of our pioneer brethren (for example on one occasion, we were witnesses to his reaction to an edited section in an edition of Elpis Israel. He was extremely upset that the section had no notation of the edit, nor who was responsible for making the change.) We cannot speak with certainty for our sleeping brother, but from what we knew of him, it is highly probable that the conclusions bro. Julio draws in this booklet would be different if he were not effected by the editorial bias present in the only articles available to him at the time he penned this book.

Even the children of darkness recognize taking a man's body of work, altering what he has written, and then not identifying those alterations as alterations, is unconscionable.

The difficulty begins when any person attempts to edit (or clarify) someone else's work, even with the BEST of intentions, they will introduce a certain amount of bias; it is an inevitable consequence of the "thinking of the flesh." Researchers call this "Confirmation bias."

 

According to Wikipedia

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

"Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses... People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations)."

The Wikipedia definition acknowledges the effect of Confirmation bias "is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs." The Truth is most certainly emotionally charged and some of our perceptions of the Truth have become deeply entrenched beliefs, which may or may not be based on actual fact. This is why Christ warns:

"... Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Matt 18:2-4

Children have no preconceived ideas, no bias; they are unpresuming, modest, without any sense of superior thinking. A child can receive the milk of the word with all readiness of mind and heart. This is not the case with adults. Not being able to overcome preconceived ideas is the biggest obstacle to learning the Truth in our day.  Unfortunately, "belief perseverance" affects all of Christadelphia as much as it does the world.  Above all we must look to the Truth of the Scriptures and pray for right understanding.

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On this site we prefer to use exact quotes, the exact article, the exact title, attributed to the correct author. To that end, we are in the process of posting the original documents from pioneer brethren, in their unaltered, and unedited state. We intend to post those original articles, with their original titles for your perusal. In the meantime, you can locate them on-line, or in Christadelphian Works from Libronix, or the Christadelphian Bookshelf on DVD.

 

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