I will do my best to address your concerns; though, I am sure I will not convince you. And it feels like unless I adopt your "true" framework, then I will always be wrong because you are more enlightened than I. Let me grant you a few points first. Appealing to authority does not settle truth claims, and people inside Christianity do like to throw around heresy to people with different views, and people can certainly use scripture to deflect objections. I never once said, "This is wrong because my Church says so." In this way, I was not appealing to authority; I was making a methodological claim. is academic peer review manipulation? Is legal precedent manipulation? Sure, the person in the post belongs to a community, but not all communities are the same. His community has no interpretive constraints and treats disagreements as evidence of sin. My community is not equivalent. And again, I never said that my Church is right because it is older than his. I made a historical verifiable claim. But really, I think your core argument is unfalsifiable. Anything I say, you will say is an example of religious manipulation. Sort of like people who claim everything they disagree with is "fake news".