Exposing the underbelly of Armstrongism in all of its wacky glory! Nothing you read here is made up. What you read here is the up to date face of Herbert W Armstrong's legacy. It's the gritty and dirty behind the scenes look at Armstrongism as you have never seen it before!
With all the new crazy self-appointed Chief Overseers, Apostles, Prophets, Pharisees, legalists, and outright liars leading various Churches of God today, it is important to hold these agents of deception accountable.
Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders
You could also substitute "The Apostle Paul" for "Armstrongism" here. He taught all those concepts to the people of his times. Just sayin' :)
1. Condemned his Past whether it was actually Judaism and if Paul was actually a Pharisee of the Pharisees, which seems doubtful historically.
2. He (and James,Peter and John) had people believing in the immediate return of Christ to the point of forsaking marriages and relationships and all that goes with "time is short"
3....making living in the present lives they actually had and are now quite long over impossible as well.
The ideas that HWA played off as well as all Evangelical and Fundamentalist type Churches has always done these three things to their followers. Throw in "all things Common", which in the NT lasted but a short time when Christ failed to return soon and more wealthy people who weren't about to go for all things common, and you got history repeating itself in the all the Wildworld of God Churches to this day.
Prophecy-based churches induce members to live in times other than the present. Those which teach Christian living and good family values in the present largely avoid critical pitfalls. Armstrongism even went further by teaching the progressive degeneration of mankind, meaning that life’s experiences in the present were becoming progressively inferior and leading to the collapse of society as we know it.
There needs to be balance. Humans need to pay attention to the lessons from the past, and to plan for the future (being careful to avoid self-sabotage) but to primarily concentrate on living in the present. When this equation becomes out of balance, success in any of the key areas of life becomes either difficult or impossible.
There was plenty of heresies and adoption of pagan beliefs in the past "early church" and added on to by the Great Whore Cult of the Catholic Church to rightly condemn. Second, if you don't believe in the coming Kingdom of God, then mankind has no hope or future and no Savior. Third, I have no problem living in this chaotic, deceived planet, knowing there is eventually a good ending for most of mankind.
RCM used to believe that people were healthier and the women better looking 2000 years ago. I read an interesting book on the history of mathematics and one of the pioneers in the 1700s did a study of birth to death statistics in a local village and found the median age of death was about 22. Can you imagine living in a time when half the population did not make it to adulthood? Dr. Germano - who seems to be much more of a true scholar - taught that life was not easy, and that Rome stank so bad you could smell it from miles away. There are a lot of problems today, but in the western nations we live in undreamed of luxury compared to our ancestors. I still believe in God, but I also believe I don't know as much as I thought I did.
"RCM used to believe that people were healthier and the women better looking 2000 years ago."
Metro Goldwyn Mayer believes that too.
I believe that the transition from hunters to agriculturalists posed all kinds of new problems. People living together in close proximity causing new diseases. People living in proximity of animals causing other terrible dissease. Agricultural people tend to be shorter than hunters, therefore the women transitioned to bearing children with a lot of pain. Floodings became a real problem, where hunters would just walk away, the livelihood and early settlements of farmers would be annihilated etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
Thus the book of Genesis starts with many curses unfolding on mankind.
Hunter gatherers would never had the time or cooperation available to end up on the moon or snapping pics of Mars and looking for life. ....or Snickers bars😊
I’ve got news for you. Life is hard for every human being living on planet earth. The chief problem is not corruptness, although that element is sometimes present. The problem is that everything we need or attempt to accomplish is plotted against its own timeline. The timelines do not generally coincide, so we end up massaging and compensating to extract what we need for ourselves and our families. As an example, the timeline for our bills may not track with our paychecks. The life timeline of our automobiles may not track with our budgets. Any entrepreneur (risk taker) is vividly aware of the angst this creates in life.
14 comments:
Man.
That sounds like the next Viking chieftain meeting an anglo missionary.
nck
You could also substitute "The Apostle Paul" for "Armstrongism" here. He taught all those concepts to the people of his times. Just sayin' :)
1. Condemned his Past whether it was actually Judaism and if Paul was actually a Pharisee of the Pharisees, which seems doubtful historically.
2. He (and James,Peter and John) had people believing in the immediate return of Christ to the point of forsaking marriages and relationships and all that goes with "time is short"
3....making living in the present lives they actually had and are now quite long over impossible as well.
The ideas that HWA played off as well as all Evangelical and Fundamentalist type Churches has always done these three things to their followers. Throw in "all things Common", which in the NT lasted but a short time when Christ failed to return soon and more wealthy people who weren't about to go for all things common, and you got history repeating itself in the all the Wildworld of God Churches to this day.
Prophecy-based churches induce members to live in times other than the present. Those which teach Christian living and good family values in the present largely avoid critical pitfalls. Armstrongism even went further by teaching the progressive degeneration of mankind, meaning that life’s experiences in the present were becoming progressively inferior and leading to the collapse of society as we know it.
There needs to be balance. Humans need to pay attention to the lessons from the past, and to plan for the future (being careful to avoid self-sabotage) but to primarily concentrate on living in the present. When this equation becomes out of balance, success in any of the key areas of life becomes either difficult or impossible.
BB
There was plenty of heresies and adoption of pagan beliefs in the past "early church" and added on to by the Great Whore Cult of the Catholic Church to rightly condemn.
Second, if you don't believe in the coming Kingdom of God, then mankind has no hope or future and no Savior.
Third, I have no problem living in this chaotic, deceived planet, knowing there is eventually a good ending for most of mankind.
ummm, The Called don't have a problem with any of that...
RCM used to believe that people were healthier and the women better looking 2000 years ago.
I read an interesting book on the history of mathematics and one of the pioneers in the 1700s did a study of birth to death statistics in a local village and found the median age of death was about 22.
Can you imagine living in a time when half the population did not make it to adulthood?
Dr. Germano - who seems to be much more of a true scholar - taught that life was not easy, and that Rome stank so bad you could smell it from miles away.
There are a lot of problems today, but in the western nations we live in undreamed of luxury compared to our ancestors.
I still believe in God, but I also believe I don't know as much as I thought I did.
"RCM used to believe that people were healthier and the women better looking 2000 years ago."
Metro Goldwyn Mayer believes that too.
I believe that the transition from hunters to agriculturalists posed all kinds of new problems. People living together in close proximity causing new diseases. People living in proximity of animals causing other terrible dissease. Agricultural people tend to be shorter than hunters, therefore the women transitioned to bearing children with a lot of pain. Floodings became a real problem, where hunters would just walk away, the livelihood and early settlements of farmers would be annihilated etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
Thus the book of Genesis starts with many curses unfolding on mankind.
nck
Hunter gatherers would never had the time or cooperation available to end up on the moon or snapping pics of Mars and looking for life. ....or Snickers bars😊
"Metro Goldwyn Mayer believes that too'
Ha! good one!
Dennis. I am neither.
But I would trade both mars amd snickers with both the hunters and the farmers adding a fair margin for the effort.
Nck
It is chiefly the corruptness of society that makes life hard for the Armstrongist, or anyone else, who tries to live a moral life.
Dennis: Q...are there Mars bars on Mars...then skip the Snickers bars?
I’ve got news for you. Life is hard for every human being living on planet earth. The chief problem is not corruptness, although that element is sometimes present. The problem is that everything we need or attempt to accomplish is plotted against its own timeline. The timelines do not generally coincide, so we end up massaging and compensating to extract what we need for ourselves and our families. As an example, the timeline for our bills may not track with our paychecks. The life timeline of our automobiles may not track with our budgets. Any entrepreneur (risk taker) is vividly aware of the angst this creates in life.
BB
Post a Comment