The Good News

If A Reporter Asked You to Prioritize the Beliefs of the Church, What Would You Say?

There is a comment on the Silenced blog in regards to the Withering Branches of the Church of God. It poses a great question in wondering how we would prioritize the beliefs of the church if we were asked by a reporter.

I remember the reporting following the tragic shooting at LCG by Terry Ratzmann. The news team was interviewing people outside to find out the basic facts, both about the situation, and about the group. When asked about their beliefs, one woman said, "We believe in keeping the sabbath." 

That got me to thinking at the time about the beliefs that I had been raised in. If I had to pick just one representative religious belief as an Armstrongite to tell a news reporter that I held, what would it be? And what would that answer say about me? 

What do Armstrongites believe, in order of priority? I think Armstrongite's beliefs are prioritized very tribally, according to what differentiates them from others. What is interesting about this is how these priorities differ from what arguably should have a high priority. 

Ask any Armstrongite, especially a minister, to list his beliefs in order of priority, and I guarantee you, you'll get sabbaths, holy days, tithing, clean and unclean meats, prayer and bible study. All physical rituals intended to symbolically communicate to god what an eager suck-up you are. 

Not in the Top Ten? Becoming christlike, overcoming, looking out for "the least." "Oh," they might say, "that goes without saying." Sure it does. It also goes without anything else. These aren't Armstrongite values. If you corner them, they'll pay lipservice to them, but that's about the beginning and the end of an Armstrongite's thoughts about these things. And not without good reason, since these things were not on ol' Herbert's list of priorities at all. But probably the vast majority of his followers are better folks than he was. Still, as a normal, decent human being, you only have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention, and the things at the top of your list of priorites will crowd out all the things further down. 

One thing Armstrongite doctrines arguably do not do is curry favor with the deities. Even if the god of the bible did exist, there's biblical reasons, as well as common sense ones, suggesting that his priorities would be very different from Armstrongite priorities anyway. If these rituals aren't appeasing any deities, then they aren't doing the members any good, and they certainly don't do anyone else who isn't a member any good. There's only one set of people who derive any tangible benefit from these doctrines. 

Yes, that's right, the "trunk" of the Armstrongite "tree" is a set empty rituals that don't do anyone who isn't a minister any good. These rituals have long served to reinforce tribal allegiances while keeping the cash flowing into church coffers. So the COG twigs have not fallen far from the "trunk" in this regard. The doctrines are the business model.
Guys like Vic Kubik, who are eager to keep their pension's nest feathered, are desperately trying to solve the problem of how to get more people to feed cash into their system. Maybe if they had a church that had a more practical set of doctrines as the "trunk" of its "tree," they would be able to succeed at this. However, we know they're between a rock and hard place in that respect. And that's what keeps the twigs so close. That proximity is also what ensures they'll keep withering. 

I was raised to believe in "keeping the sabbath." And I did keep it back then. But when I thought about it, if I had to say I believed something, keeping the sabbath, or any other ritual that I performed for the sole reason of trying to appease a deity, well, it just wouldn't be on any sincere list.

Dennis can't help noting...An Uncomfortable Truth Of Critical Scholarship Demolishes Prophecy and Personality Based COG Split, Splinter and RCG Sliver Foolishness

Dennis can't help noting...

An Uncomfortable Truth Of Critical Scholarship Demolishes Prophecy and Personality Based  COG Split, Splinter and RCG Sliver Foolishness

Why the Book of Daniel Seems So Darn Accurate

"The impression that predictions made in the distant past were fulfilled accurately is due to the fact that the apocalypses were written after these events had already taken place, but their predictions are presented as though they were made prior to their predicted events."

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/o/old-testament-of-the-bible/summary-and-analysis/daniel

What is Truth

In a high school English class, we worked through a textbook titled, "Philosophy & Literature:  Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Commitment".  It opened with Plato's, "The Allegory of the Den"  which asserts that most individuals are victims of illusion when it comes to recognizing Truth.  At the time, I thought all of the time and effort spent on discussing what is or what isn't Truth was pretty silly, a waste of my time.

I knew the Truth, my family knew the Truth, after all our home was filled with stacks of the Plain Truth.  We had no question about what was true or false because we were members of "The Church", the one true church that Christ was personally leading through his sole end-time Apostle, HWA.  We had grown certain of this fact because HWA reminded us of it over and over again and we felt blessed to know THE TRUTH!  If his claims had not been enough, we were also living in a bubble where all those around us reinforced this concept with repeated expressions of gratitude for how 'fortunate' we were to know the Truth.

And, furthermore there were the booklets... Yes, the booklets.  My father, thinking he was doing us a favor, made a list of the 40 or so booklets that he had at the time and put columns for each one of us kids.  Well, once one brother started checking a few booklets off the list, we were all jumping head first into reading them as well.  It didn't matter what they were about, we were going to check off all the boxes. So, reading, "How to Quit Smoking" at age 10 didn't seem that odd to me.  Come to think of it, this may have been the most valuable one for me as it did make smoking very unappealing.  It's probably good that he hadn't included "The Missing Dimension in Sex" on the list.

To make a long story short, we lived in that bubble of common believers for decades without hardly having a clue that our reality was distorted in many ways.   Even with the distorted reality, our lives were pretty good, fortunately.  Most of our ministers were reasonable men and our parents maintained a balanced perspective on most issues.  They took us to doctors, they made their own decisions, they did not 'over-discipline' us, and they saved for retirement rather than giving all they had to WCG.  We also weren't pushed to go to Ambassador College.  Overall, we were lucky.  

 

Nevertheless, my bubble eventually popped.  It wasn't one, dramatic moment but a gradual deflation that occurred for various reasons.  In part, the accumulation of so many inconsistencies between various teachings and between what was taught vs. what was practiced tended to make people like me become cynical. 

You stop and think about it and realize that WCG had dogmatically taught us many things that were later changed, or once examined, proved to be completely false.  A few examples:   

1.     HWA was the first to preach the true Gospel in 1900 years

2.     HWA learned from no man and he restored 18 truths to the church

3.     God specially trained HWA for his unique, end-time mission

4.     HWA was given key to prophecy (Identity of Israel) from God

5.     HWA was highly accurate in foretelling future events

6.     The WCG was God’s government on earth; HWA was God’s sole end-time Apostle

7.     WCG was the one, true church and could trace its’ roots back through the ages

8.     All universities are bad because they turn almost all students into God denying atheists

9.     Members that were not donating enough money would go to the “the lake of fire”

10.  Petra was the place of safety, the final training ground

11.  HWA completed his work in 1972 (...but, oh, um, well, actually HWA was given a special commission to “preach the Gospel to heads of nations”)

12.  HWA preached the gospel to world leaders 

 13.  Existing members would go to “the lake of fire”; existing ministers were deceived and rebellious

14.  Doctors, modern medicine, and make-up were; divorce was unacceptable

15.  The church would not compromise 1/100% of the Truth

16. HWA’s marriage with Ramona was God’s will 

17.  Divorce was ok, make up was a non-issue, and doctors and medicine were ok as well

18.   The State of California’s investigation into fraud was “the most MONSTROUS conspiracy and attack Satan ever launched against God's Work!” 

19.  WCG knew what positions David, Moses, Joshua, HWA would hold in the kingdom of God

20.  God would not let HWA die before Christ returned; loyalty to HWA was paramount

21.   Post HWA, Mr. Tkach would lead us into the kingdom and loyalty to him was now paramount

One could have a lot of fun expanding such a list but better to get back to the point.  Other things that helped be "break the spell".  The continual splintering of the church.  After the UCG/COGWA split, it made sense to start digging around to try to determine, "What is wrong with us?"  Here I'd like to give credit to all of those that many of us had previously looked down upon.  Thank you to all of those that had caught on years before and then documented what had really been going on at headquarters to help wake up others and try to stop the idolatry of a man.  I read books like Armstrongism, Religion or Rip Off, Ambassadors of Armstrongism, The Broadway to Armageddon , Herbert Armstrong’s Tangled Web, and The Armstrong Empire and found websites like Ambassador Report, The Painful Truth, Banned, and Keith Hunt's).  I may have not appreciated some of the attitude and over-generalizations here and there, but the well documented history and thought provoking questions were eye openers.  It was time to put down the cool-aid, wake up and start smelling the coffee.

About thirty years after discounting Plato in my English class, I was ready to give him some well deserved respect.  I located the same textbook online and reread that introduction with new eyes... Yes, now it made much more sense.  The author summed up Plato's Allegory of the Den quite well - "If one has been a prisoner in a den, condemned to see only reflections of the truth, he will assume that these reflections are really true.  He will believe so firmly that he will  not believe a fellow prisoner who has escaped his bondage, has seen Truth, and has returned to inform the prisoners of their mistaken confidence in the "truth" of their shadow world."   

Exactly!  Much like those of us in the past and those still in HWA's Den.

Truth is not always so easy to discern and any given statement is not the Truth just because an arrogant man is able to confidently claim that God revealed it to him.  However, now comes the hard part... What of my beliefs are true and which ones are false?  When a man borrows from others, he may be borrowing truth or he may be borrowing lies.  Most probably, he will have borrowed some of each.  But for those who lived in HWA's Den for most of our lives, it may not be easy to rapidly discern one from the other, nor to recognize what part or our confidence comes from our present examinations vs. our bias from the indoctrination of the past. 

I must admit that when I read the Bible, keeping the Sabbath still makes sense to me.  Is that because of what the Bible says or because of my decades in WCG?  Hard to say at this point.  Like Ian, whom I respect, my overall experience has been good and I'd like to think that there is a way to make some of the basic teaching work without the corruption of the past, and most certainly without relying on or giving credit to one man.  My wife comes from a primarily Catholic country and her family had learned of the Sabbath and Holy Days completely independent from HWA, any COG, or even another splinter from the Millerites.  Just the Bible.  Is this belief Truth or error?  One day it would be nice to know for sure.  It is easy for her to ignore HWA completely.

For me, it is more complicated.  Reading HWA's own writings led me to conclude he was not sincere as others continue to believe.  Therefore it is hard to accept the position that even though HWA was incredibly flawed, God still worked through him to reveal new truth.  I could better understand that a man was going to profit from the ministry (as many do) and he got lucky with a few things that he borrowed from others.  To me, there is a big difference between these two assumptions.  A question for my friend Ian.  Hypothetically, what are the odds that a greedy, dishonest man who had abused his own child  would be the one that God would select to work with to reveal new understandings?  And for this case, the greed and dishonesty were ways of life, not just occasional slip ups.  And the abuse was not a single incident followed by acknowledgement and repentance but more along the lines  10 years of abuse during the critical, initial years of a 'ministry' while the revelations were coming from God... and followed decades later by an extremely odd gesture - the gift of a signed copy of the "Missing Dimension in Sex"  to the abused child).  Extremely unlikely in my view.  Perhaps I do need to visit you in Jamaica where we can talk face to face as we adjust our eyes to the true light outside of the Den?

God has choices.  It seems that, in terms of character, it is reasonable to assume there is a type of Bell curve just as there is for intelligence or physical agility.  Nobody is perfect for sure but there seems to be those we can confidently identify as being above average and others that are below average.  Doesn't it make sense for God to select an individual with above average character rather below average?  That would be consistent with the Bible's instructions when it comes time to select deacons and elders.  As a parent, I'd place anyone that abused their own child, lied to and stole from the poor to enrich themselves, and made repeated huge false claims about their own purpose and abilities well towards the left end of the scale.

There is a lot of gray in life but child abuse by a self-proclaimed Apostle of God seems to be one matter that remains in the black or white category.

-Kevin