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
Deep Time--And Why Understanding It Would Have Mattered
One of the erroneous concepts given me as a child and then as a naïve young man all caught up in the Worldwide Church of God's "Whale of a Tale" and "A Theory for the Birds" and concerned more about all things pertaining to the message of the Bible and the consequences for not understanding it and then believing it all, was the concept of Deep Time.
Deep Time in my hand: 12 million year old Megaladon Tooth. 14.5 Billion year old Iron Meteorite and thousands of years old stone tools I found in the Willamette River in Oregon just last year.
Planted firmly in my head was the idea that it all began with two people called Adam and Eve, perhaps thousands of years ago, but only thousands and progressed through the lives of a Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob sometime back in time since then, Major Prophets in the 6th Century BCE transitioning into the life of Jesus in the 1st Century CE, various Apostles, who knew everything, and then leading up to now over the past 2000 years since. That was it. That's all of history and certainly all I ever needed to know or care about.
Astronomically, the Milky Way was the entire Universe up until the 1930's when it no longer was and every lifeform on the planet was an original creation and looked just like those named by Adam in the Garden of Eden, as noted, just a few thousand years back in time.
We, as humans, were the focus, center and reason for it all and that "soon" it would all change for us either by going to Heaven (Or God forbid, HELL) or as I was convinced as a teen, culminate in the Wonderful World Tomorrow and hopefully not annihilation in a Lake of Fire for not getting it.
Hmmm....
It took way too long to appreciate the reality of deep time and all that had really transpired in all that over that deep time would lead to "our time".
Over that deep time there have been, so far discovered, 5 mass extinction events of most of the previous life on the planet over the past 3.8 billion years, though our minds don't do well with the word "billion". These life forms will never again present themselves to tell their story except in their fossilzed remains and humans will make careers finding and placing correctly in deep time. This also applies to the real origins of the human species and "US".
Two personal favorites: 400+ Million Year Old Trilobites Science notes we are most likely in the Sixth Mass Extinction event now with climate change and the stress human progress and population have put on the planet.
So what? What does any of this have to do with Banned HWA and the processing of the WCG experience that it serves? Because, to me and in my own life, the not so deep time perspective of the Bible kept me off course in that which perhaps I should more have done with my life personally. I and it kept me from following my real curiosities about it all. I was too easily satisfied with the myths and tales woven by people I never met and who's world view was not one that most would take seriously today. Except I did until I couldn't any longer.
Since time was short in the 1960's and it was all going to end, my budding interests in dinosaurs, fossils and all that I would later come to understand as Paleontology, mattered not a bit. Having grown up very conservatively Dutch Reformed Calvinist, I was already blind to the concept that there was more, much more to life and the history of it all. The lenses and filters I viewed everything with and through was "Bible Time", which is a very limited view of all that actually was the real history of our planet and life on it including ourselves.
It is too late for me to follow my bliss as they say. I will never be the Paleontologist I now know lay just under the surface of my young life. Whether I "wasted" my life in becoming versed in the story of Bugs Bunny, which I might as well have studied, or not depends on how I view it. I learned a lot and sometimes learning what you don't believe is just as helpful as what you do now believe with more evidence and based on less faith in the unbelievable.
But perhaps just one young person, male or female, might catch their own vision of wanting to do what they actually love and not be sidetracked by the pettiness and limited views of those piously convicted but marginally informed as I was when younger.
Having been a pastor for over 1/3 of what I suspect my lifetime to be, I get to share here my experience and conclusions just as all other do. Just because they don't lead me into another splinter of WCG or back full circle to my Presbyterian Dutch Reformed Roots, as it did my parents who were both Elder and Deaconess in WCG, My sister and son now somewhat Evangelical with another in Catholic mode, does not mean I have no right to share my own experience and conclusions.
It may not help most No doubt it will piss off a few here that I no longer see as they see or am as they are, but it might help one follow their passion for learning instead of getting stuck in the Bronze and Iron Age views of others real or imagined.
How long is deep time?
Deep Time is the term used by scientists to describe the vast amount of time that has passed since the formation of the universe. It is an amazing.. 13,820,000,000 years long For many of us we can almost remember back to our early childhood and maybe can comprehend the lifespan of our parents and grandparents.
Dennis, I, too, believe in deep time because I believe that with God, there is no time. Time is for our benefit. God is timeless. I also believe that God could have used the evolutionary process in his creation, the “days” of creation being a metaphor for the sequence of evolution, so to speak. Although no human can know the details, we can only guess. Myself, not being a paleontologist, I’ve never understood how we came up with the timeline we have, and I’m not that interested in knowing. I DO know that, as humans, God is beyond our understanding and anything is possible with Him. He can’t be put in a box.
Dennis, I read recently about an 84-year-old woman finally earning her bachelor's degree. Don't rule out the prospect of getting some serious training, if you really want it, though formal training (just as with ministry) may de-romanticize what you now take to be comfortable and even glorious secular certainties.
At AC, I tried to take as many secular courses as possible, a fact that was duly noticed by the faculty. The student body in general either deliberately, or unconsciously, became caught up in AC group mindset, and the trend was away from these courses, and more in favor of the Bible courses. Because only three of us students had signed up for Trigonometry, that course was cancelled by the administration. Some person or persons on the faculty decided that I apparently had a compelling need for more of the Armstrongism-based Bible classes, and I was coerced as a sophomore to take Third Year Bible to replace the cancelled Trig course.
They did not cancel my Botany and Zoology courses, however, and I really enjoyed the field trip we got to take to the tide pools below the bluffs near Pacific Palisades. Interestingly, there were also some wrecked cars at the base of the bluffs, apparently the result of someone trying to duplicate the Chickie Run from Rebel Without a Cause. By the way, the whole idea behind these "science" courses was to disprove evolution in favor of creation. Even at age 20, though I did not know the term at the time, I recognized bias confirmation, and grew bored with the official purpose of the field trip, and spent considerable time on the abandoned cars. At another "science" field trip to Shark's Tooth Mountain, beer was provided. We were allowed two cans. Our class president who was somewhat of a secret rebel himself, and a good personal friend of mine from our SEP years, conned one or two of those who didn't like beer to give one of their cans to me, because many of the students were quite naive, and had never seen anyone able to chug a whole can in one continuous motion. Yes, the field trips and dances at AC were always fun, but not always for their stated purposes!
I, too, wish that I, as a young person from a WCG family, had been permitted to attend a real college. However, because things went down as they did, I had to really fight for the opportunities to have a career which embodied the natural gifts and aptitudes with which I was born. There was about a ten year struggle, and some floundering involved, but with that has come a zest for life, and a deeper appreciation for the opportunities which later came my way.
My advice to Dennis, who by past accounts has shared with us that he did indeed have numerous hobbies, is that we often derive just as much fulfillment from our hobbies as we do from our professions. They are a great buffer, and something about which we can feel good! For the greater audience, hobbies help us to maintain momentum and equilibrium, and guide us through some of the dead patches which life presents. They relax us, and aid us in discovering and knowing ourselves in manners from which no other people can rob us. Associated with our hobbies, we usually find an entire new subset of friends and support group. We were discouraged as Armstrongites from having outside interests. This was a mentally crippling aspect of the cultic mindset, and forced maintenance of a sense of artificial urgency associated with the group. The thing is, anyone can afford a hobby, because anyone can surf the internet, or back in the day take out a library card, check out books, and read. Anyone can exercise, or run, or ride a bicycle. Hobbies need not be expensive, and they can help us compensate for areas in which we have been deprived.
We've all got regrets about missing out on certain things, and we all wish we could have done things a bit differently. Sometimes we can reach a better frame of mind by focussing on those things which we were able to achieve in spite of people, circumstances, and systems acting in our lives to hold us back. This is a pep talk (actually a reality check) that we all need to give ourselves from time to time!
I think Dennis is at the same impasse I'm caught in. It's much to late in our short lifespans to go back and get the training, then slowly make our way up the step by step process any career usually requires. I can't go back to school, major in journalism, then painfully follow the necessary career path that would make me the journalist I should have been. I'd be long dead and gone before much of that process could transpire.
We Missed that boat, but I'm thankful that I now see things a whole lot more lucidly than I did while caught in the great delusion of religion. I just make the most of the situation as it now is to the best of my ability. The "milk" spilled a long time ago. No sense wasting time crying over it.
Ken Ham, is a young earth creationist and head of Answers in Genesis. He says that science has to be understood through the prism of the Word of God. I would add, that it must be the word of God properly understood. Apologist Norman Geisler and Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer are OLD EARTH creationists. They place the creation event at about 13.7 billions years ago. They assert that the Hebrew word YOM, does not mean a 24 hour period as Ham asserts. YOM is used in Ps 90-:4, Hos 6:2 and 2 Peter 3:8 to mean a period of time LONGER than 24 hours. So the "days" of Genesis could mean a much longer period of time. When Adam names the living animals (Gen 2:19) he couldn't have done this in a 24 hour period. Young earth creationists teach that Romans 5:12 says that death did not exist prior to Adam, but the passage is speaking only of human death. There could have been billions of years of death of other creatures before Adam. The expression, "evening and morning" cannot refer to a full day since there can't be a day without daylight. So Ham is correct, that science must be viewed through Scripture, but only if the interpretation of Scripture is correct. When young Christians who accept Ham's view, go off to college and study science, they might walk away from Scripture altogether when they realize that Ham's view are incorrect. This is similar to when those of us who left the WCG leave Christianity altogether because we rejected an incorrect view of it.
"...we often derive just as much fulfillment from our hobbies as we do from our professions. They are a great buffer, and something about which we can feel good! For the greater audience, hobbies help us to maintain momentum and equilibrium, and guide us through some of the dead patches which life presents. They relax us, and aid us in discovering and knowing ourselves in manners from which no other people can rob us. Associated with our hobbies, we usually find an entire new subset of friends and support group. We were discouraged as Armstrongites from having outside interests. This was a mentally crippling aspect of the cultic mindset, and forced maintenance of a sense of artificial urgency associated with the group. The thing is, anyone can afford a hobby, because anyone can surf the internet, or back in the day take out a library card, check out books, and read. Anyone can exercise, or run, or ride a bicycle. Hobbies need not be expensive, and they can help us compensate for areas in which we have been deprived.
"We've all got regrets about missing out on certain things, and we all wish we could have done things a bit differently. Sometimes we can reach a better frame of mind by focussing on those things which we were able to achieve in spite of people, circumstances, and systems acting in our lives to hold us back." ------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for seeing the forest and not the clearcut :)
Excellent, productive and clear advice I can use!!
Here's to not letting [all those!] hold us back!
So many ways to reach that better frame of mind.
(Sorry for copying so much of your post, but it was soo good. )
I agree. I could have missed the pain but then would have to had to miss the dance. And I KNOW that I could not be where I am now had I not been where I was then. It's all connected. And I love now where I am and with whom I am sharing the rest of it with...
Kind of tongue in cheek here, but I thought that at least one kindly ACOG Splinter member would have tried to encourage Dennis by telling him that as a “second fruit” he could study paleontology during the 100 year period!
The sheer magnitude of that duration is beyond comprehension for us. How does one go from the experience of the passing of one hour, which I can understand fairly well, to the hypothetical passing of 13.8 billion years which I cannot understand at all? We are not made for such durations. Just as we are not made for the vast distances that encompass the observable universe. We cannot be appropriately impressed by it because we can not understand it.
Moreover, what do such unimaginable magnitudes mean? If the universe is a pointless physical object, not much. The distance from my easy chair to the dinner table is much more meaningful than the diameter of the observable universe.
Anonymous said... Gen. 2:19 doesn't say that Adam named the animals in one day.
Well Ken Ham says: " First, we know from Genesis that Adam named only land animals on the sixth day (and he named them before Eve was created on that same day, by the way). This means that he definitely named them within 24 hours, at most!"
Second, remember from the previous question that Adam named only “kinds” of land animals and then, only the cattle, birds of the air, and beast of the fields. Adam really named far fewer animals than we think! One more thing—Adam was the most intelligent man that ever lived. God made him with a perfect brain and a perfect memory. It wouldn’t take him long to think of the names and to then remember which animal was which! He had plenty of intelligence and plenty of time to name them all in one day!
And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
"And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
What offends me about these debatable science articles from Dennis, is that we are supposed to seriously consider his point of view. Yet he often ignores and talks past legitimate disagreement. It's a double standard. This is another Herb minister trait.
DennisCDiehl said... ""And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
"LOL :)"
"I said this. Not Ken Ham.
"July 25, 2019 at 6:29 PM"
Reminds of something(s) about COGs, invisible to some.
Anonymous said... While Gen. 1 seems to imply Eve was made on the sixth day, that's pure assumption. Though Dennis would say the entire bible is pure assumption."
I make no such assumption. I was answering someone who said that the Bible does not say that Adam, in the myth, named all the animals on the sixth day. It does say that and I gave one of the premier creationists, Ken Ham's' Answers in Genesis answer to make the point. Ham said dogmatically that Eve was created on day six. It is debatable because she comes along after all was complete. Some speculate that God gave Adam the animals as companions but that obviously did not do so along comes Eve later.
Please understand how little any of this matters in the when and how. None of it is literally true and only non critically thinking literalists need it to be to uphold their faith. Any ancestral Eve lived in Africa 230 to 100 thousand years ago give or take a day or two. Women don't come from ribs. Snakes don't walk and talk and no one who would find Cain would kill him because there, according to the story, was no one out there to do the deed.
The Bible is not whatever pure assumption is. The Bible is a compilation of various writers, some not actually the names affixed to the books, such as the Gospels, over a couple thousand years. It is contradictory in many places because of this and also made up of Prophets, Priests and Apostles with opposing views contending for their own cause. The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. Some Epistles attributed to Paul are not Pauline but later constructs by the more organized Church in later years.
Anonymous said... "What offends me about these debatable science articles from Dennis, is that we are supposed to seriously consider his point of view. Yet he often ignores and talks past legitimate disagreement. It's a double standard. This is another Herb minister trait."
I don't ignore or talk past legitimate disagreement. All disagreement is legitimate for the disagreer I would assume which is why they disagree. I know the vast majority of the scientific disagreement and the Christian literalist apologetics that go with them and , for me, they are found wanting and unconvincing. I don't have to re-entertain them every time they come up. I know, as do you, what you have already addressed sufficiently for yourself not to keep reinventing the wheel of a particular argument or counter view. No one is going to revert me back to taking the Bible literally in many of its clearly mythological content, often taken from other cultures with a Hebrew spin. That is not hard information to obtain.
Unlike some, I will not be believing, then becoming agnostic/atheist and then revert to believing again. That's just a believer on hold until they find the next religious belief they did not know about until later and suited them.
Evolution of all life in our Universe is a fact for me and the vast majority of educated humanity. It is not true for the piously convicted who cruise on their ever shrinking marginal information however and that's ok. Just don't expect me to adopt those views again.
And too, I don't need to have adopted "Herb Minister Traits". This is who I am, who I always have been and always will be without any WCG mold needed. That's a nice neat package you'd like to put me in but it's bullshit.
To quote Paul, sorta, "Herb, Ted and Rod, reputed pillars in the church, they added nothing to me." :)
Galatians 2:6 6As for those who were held in high esteem-(the Jerusalem Church Apostles) whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism-they added nothing to my message.
galatians 2:9 And recognizing the grace [that God had] bestowed on me, James and Cephas (Peter) and John, who were reputed to be pillars [of the Jerusalem church]...
"Unlike some, I will not be believing, then becoming agnostic/atheist and then revert to believing again. That's just a believer on hold until they find the next religious belief they did not know about until later and suited them."
Wow, what a slap at fellow bloggers and their intelligence.
It's one thing to cone on here and talk about where you're at now, but to start to belittle others, whether you meant it that way or not, you did.
Maybe we'd be better off with Connie back and you now gone. Or an apology to fellow bloggers who once believed, then became an unbeliever, and then became a believer again.
Actually you've just shown how closed minded you are.
No offence Dennis, but your longwinded blogposts and comments are proving for me the truth to the old proverb that “Some take way too long to say way too little.” :-p
Re the whole debate whether Christians should interpret the days of creation week in Genesis 1-2 as literal days or whether Adam and Eve were created in a literal 24 hour day or after aeons of time filled with disease and death...As a Christian I follow Jesus and thus I believe as He believed ie the words of Moses and Genesis are literal history.
The BIBLE reveals LIFE required the operation of a higher intelligence; in this respect, the scripture has the atheists beat by a mile. Godless science had the moon astronauts being isolated/decontaminated from possible alien life when returning to earth (yeah right, didn't you know "DNA molecules are spontaneously self assembling from moondust all the time"?)
We do not have any discussions questioning the existence of Buddha, or trashing and disproving his teachings.
There are profound differences between the mindset of atheists who arrived at their nonbelief through science, and that of former Armstrongite atheists. The Armstrong-based atheist is informed by simply awful experiences with the “god” that was taught, and feels an intense compulsion to evangelize nonbelief on WCG-dissident blog.
Recovery from Armstrongism is at best difficult. When a false version of God is taught, causing major damage, it is difficult to reach the point at which you no longer see this God as being behind all of Christianity, and not just a bogus cult.
Armstrongism programmed us to give particular importance to the scriptures which embodied Herbert W. Armstrong’s own warped personality - his picked and chosen proof-texts. These support an unusually harsh and judgmental God. Even post-WCG, so many of us only see the scriptures which support a “my way or the highway” God. These leap out rather than David’s loving depictions in the Psalms, or the words of the New Testament.
The most difficult part of the post Armstrong experience is to find a more accurate working concept of God, one which can restore our own functionality. The more deeply one was embedded in Armstrongism, the more difficult and time-consuming that process will be.
31 comments:
Dennis,
I, too, believe in deep time because I believe that with God, there is no time. Time is for our benefit. God is timeless. I also believe that God could have used the evolutionary process in his creation, the “days” of creation being a metaphor for the sequence of evolution, so to speak. Although no human can know the details, we can only guess. Myself, not being a paleontologist, I’ve never understood how we came up with the timeline we have, and I’m not that interested in knowing. I DO know that, as humans, God is beyond our understanding and anything is possible with Him. He can’t be put in a box.
Thanks for the post Dennis! Unlike some antediluvian members of this blog I appreciate your insight.
"It is too late for me to follow my bliss as they say. I will never be the Paleontologist I now know lay just under the surface of my young life."
Talk to a college counselor. Take courses or test out of them, get credentials and teach, write something amazing. Podcast something.
Is this just a reprint?
Dennis, I read recently about an 84-year-old woman finally earning her bachelor's degree. Don't rule out the prospect of getting some serious training, if you really want it, though formal training (just as with ministry) may de-romanticize what you now take to be comfortable and even glorious secular certainties.
At AC, I tried to take as many secular courses as possible, a fact that was duly noticed by the faculty. The student body in general either deliberately, or unconsciously, became caught up in AC group mindset, and the trend was away from these courses, and more in favor of the Bible courses. Because only three of us students had signed up for Trigonometry, that course was cancelled by the administration. Some person or persons on the faculty decided that I apparently had a compelling need for more of the Armstrongism-based Bible classes, and I was coerced as a sophomore to take Third Year Bible to replace the cancelled Trig course.
They did not cancel my Botany and Zoology courses, however, and I really enjoyed the field trip we got to take to the tide pools below the bluffs near Pacific Palisades. Interestingly, there were also some wrecked cars at the base of the bluffs, apparently the result of someone trying to duplicate the Chickie Run from Rebel Without a Cause. By the way, the whole idea behind these "science" courses was to disprove evolution in favor of creation. Even at age 20, though I did not know the term at the time, I recognized bias confirmation, and grew bored with the official purpose of the field trip, and spent considerable time on the abandoned cars. At another "science" field trip to Shark's Tooth Mountain, beer was provided. We were allowed two cans. Our class president who was somewhat of a secret rebel himself, and a good personal friend of mine from our SEP years, conned one or two of those who didn't like beer to give one of their cans to me, because many of the students were quite naive, and had never seen anyone able to chug a whole can in one continuous motion. Yes, the field trips and dances at AC were always fun, but not always for their stated purposes!
I, too, wish that I, as a young person from a WCG family, had been permitted to attend a real college. However, because things went down as they did, I had to really fight for the opportunities to have a career which embodied the natural gifts and aptitudes with which I was born. There was about a ten year struggle, and some floundering involved, but with that has come a zest for life, and a deeper appreciation for the opportunities which later came my way.
My advice to Dennis, who by past accounts has shared with us that he did indeed have numerous hobbies, is that we often derive just as much fulfillment from our hobbies as we do from our professions. They are a great buffer, and something about which we can feel good! For the greater audience, hobbies help us to maintain momentum and equilibrium, and guide us through some of the dead patches which life presents. They relax us, and aid us in discovering and knowing ourselves in manners from which no other people can rob us. Associated with our hobbies, we usually find an entire new subset of friends and support group. We were discouraged as Armstrongites from having outside interests. This was a mentally crippling aspect of the cultic mindset, and forced maintenance of a sense of artificial urgency associated with the group. The thing is, anyone can afford a hobby, because anyone can surf the internet, or back in the day take out a library card, check out books, and read. Anyone can exercise, or run, or ride a bicycle. Hobbies need not be expensive, and they can help us compensate for areas in which we have been deprived.
We've all got regrets about missing out on certain things, and we all wish we could have done things a bit differently. Sometimes we can reach a better frame of mind by focussing on those things which we were able to achieve in spite of people, circumstances, and systems acting in our lives to hold us back. This is a pep talk (actually a reality check) that we all need to give ourselves from time to time!
BB
"I’ve never understood how we came up with the timeline we have"
That's the thing about paper, or computer screens, they'll just lay/sit there and allow anyone to write anything on them.
I think Dennis is at the same impasse I'm caught in. It's much to late in our short lifespans to go back and get the training, then slowly make our way up the step by step process any career usually requires. I can't go back to school, major in journalism, then painfully follow the necessary career path that would make me the journalist I should have been. I'd be long dead and gone before much of that process could transpire.
We Missed that boat, but I'm thankful that I now see things a whole lot more lucidly than I did while caught in the great delusion of religion. I just make the most of the situation as it now is to the best of my ability. The "milk" spilled a long time ago. No sense wasting time crying over it.
Ken Ham, is a young earth creationist and head of Answers in Genesis. He says that science has to be understood through the prism of the Word of God. I would add, that it must be the word of God properly understood. Apologist Norman Geisler and Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer are OLD EARTH creationists. They place the creation event at about 13.7 billions years ago. They assert that the Hebrew word YOM, does not mean a 24 hour period as Ham asserts. YOM is used in Ps 90-:4, Hos 6:2 and 2 Peter 3:8 to mean a period of time LONGER than 24 hours. So the "days" of Genesis could mean a much longer period of time. When Adam names the living animals (Gen 2:19) he couldn't have done this in a 24 hour period. Young earth creationists teach that Romans 5:12 says that death did not exist prior to Adam, but the passage is speaking only of human death. There could have been billions of years of death of other creatures before Adam. The expression, "evening and morning" cannot refer to a full day since there can't be a day without daylight. So Ham is correct, that science must be viewed through Scripture, but only if the interpretation of Scripture is correct. When young Christians who accept Ham's view, go off to college and study science, they might walk away from Scripture altogether when they realize that Ham's view are incorrect. This is similar to when those of us who left the WCG leave Christianity altogether because we rejected an incorrect view of it.
BB 11:30 said
"...we often derive just as much fulfillment from our hobbies as we do from our professions. They are a great buffer, and something about which we can feel good! For the greater audience, hobbies help us to maintain momentum and equilibrium, and guide us through some of the dead patches which life presents. They relax us, and aid us in discovering and knowing ourselves in manners from which no other people can rob us. Associated with our hobbies, we usually find an entire new subset of friends and support group. We were discouraged as Armstrongites from having outside interests. This was a mentally crippling aspect of the cultic mindset, and forced maintenance of a sense of artificial urgency associated with the group. The thing is, anyone can afford a hobby, because anyone can surf the internet, or back in the day take out a library card, check out books, and read. Anyone can exercise, or run, or ride a bicycle. Hobbies need not be expensive, and they can help us compensate for areas in which we have been deprived.
"We've all got regrets about missing out on certain things, and we all wish we could have done things a bit differently. Sometimes we can reach a better frame of mind by focussing on those things which we were able to achieve in spite of people, circumstances, and systems acting in our lives to hold us back."
------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for seeing the forest and not the clearcut :)
Excellent, productive and clear advice I can use!!
Here's to not letting [all those!] hold us back!
So many ways to reach that better frame of mind.
(Sorry for copying so much of your post, but it was soo good. )
Not that I have the answers, but in the spirit of contributing something that may be of use to others...
https://godcannotbecontained.blogspot.com/2015/03/what-do-mass-extinction-events-tell-us.html
https://godcannotbecontained.blogspot.com/2019/07/would-your-life-have-been-better.html
https://godcannotbecontained.blogspot.com/2019/07/would-your-life-have-been-better.html
I agree. I could have missed the pain but then would have to had to miss the dance. And I KNOW that I could not be where I am now had I not been where I was then. It's all connected. And I love now where I am and with whom I am sharing the rest of it with...
Gen. 2:19 doesn't say that Adam named the animals in one day.
Kind of tongue in cheek here, but I thought that at least one kindly ACOG Splinter member would have tried to encourage Dennis by telling him that as a “second fruit” he could study paleontology during the 100 year period!
LOL
BB
Glad you found it useful, 1:39! I learned that mostly from the school of hard knocks, and it does work. :-)
BB
What happened 13.8 bya?
The sheer magnitude of that duration is beyond comprehension for us. How does one go from the experience of the passing of one hour, which I can understand fairly well, to the hypothetical passing of 13.8 billion years which I cannot understand at all? We are not made for such durations. Just as we are not made for the vast distances that encompass the observable universe. We cannot be appropriately impressed by it because we can not understand it.
Moreover, what do such unimaginable magnitudes mean? If the universe is a pointless physical object, not much. The distance from my easy chair to the dinner table is much more meaningful than the diameter of the observable universe.
Anonymous said...
Gen. 2:19 doesn't say that Adam named the animals in one day.
Well Ken Ham says: " First, we know from Genesis that Adam named only land animals on the sixth day (and he named them before Eve was created on that same day, by the way). This means that he definitely named them within 24 hours, at most!"
Second, remember from the previous question that Adam named only “kinds” of land animals and then, only the cattle, birds of the air, and beast of the fields. Adam really named far fewer animals than we think! One more thing—Adam was the most intelligent man that ever lived. God made him with a perfect brain and a perfect memory. It wouldn’t take him long to think of the names and to then remember which animal was which! He had plenty of intelligence and plenty of time to name them all in one day!
And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
LOL :)
:)
Nowhere does the bible say that Eve was made on the sixth day.
"And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
LOL :)"
I said this. Not Ken Ham.
What offends me about these debatable science articles from Dennis, is that we are supposed to seriously consider his point of view. Yet he often ignores and talks past legitimate disagreement. It's a double standard. This is another Herb minister trait.
@5:34
Ken Ham teaches that both Adam and Eve were created in the sixth day.
https://www.oneplace.com/ministries/answers-in-genesis/read/articles/six-literal-days-16279.html
DennisCDiehl said...
""And too, it was only part of the sixth day as Eve was also created then so I suspect that between the "Oh La La" effect and the Sabbath Adam had to wind it up fast and early.
"LOL :)"
"I said this. Not Ken Ham.
"July 25, 2019 at 6:29 PM"
Reminds of something(s) about COGs, invisible to some.
While Gen. 1 seems to imply Eve was made on the sixth day, that's pure assumption. Though Dennis would say the entire bible is pure assumption.
Anonymous said...
While Gen. 1 seems to imply Eve was made on the sixth day, that's pure assumption. Though Dennis would say the entire bible is pure assumption."
I make no such assumption. I was answering someone who said that the Bible does not say that Adam, in the myth, named all the animals on the sixth day. It does say that and I gave one of the premier creationists, Ken Ham's' Answers in Genesis answer to make the point. Ham said dogmatically that Eve was created on day six. It is debatable because she comes along after all was complete. Some speculate that God gave Adam the animals as companions but that obviously did not do so along comes Eve later.
Please understand how little any of this matters in the when and how. None of it is literally true and only non critically thinking literalists need it to be to uphold their faith. Any ancestral Eve lived in Africa 230 to 100 thousand years ago give or take a day or two. Women don't come from ribs. Snakes don't walk and talk and no one who would find Cain would kill him because there, according to the story, was no one out there to do the deed.
The Bible is not whatever pure assumption is. The Bible is a compilation of various writers, some not actually the names affixed to the books, such as the Gospels, over a couple thousand years. It is contradictory in many places because of this and also made up of Prophets, Priests and Apostles with opposing views contending for their own cause. The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. Some Epistles attributed to Paul are not Pauline but later constructs by the more organized Church in later years.
Anonymous said...
"What offends me about these debatable science articles from Dennis, is that we are supposed to seriously consider his point of view. Yet he often ignores and talks past legitimate disagreement. It's a double standard. This is another Herb minister trait."
I don't ignore or talk past legitimate disagreement. All disagreement is legitimate for the disagreer I would assume which is why they disagree. I know the vast majority of the scientific disagreement and the Christian literalist apologetics that go with them and , for me, they are found wanting and unconvincing. I don't have to re-entertain them every time they come up. I know, as do you, what you have already addressed sufficiently for yourself not to keep reinventing the wheel of a particular argument or counter view. No one is going to revert me back to taking the Bible literally in many of its clearly mythological content, often taken from other cultures with a Hebrew spin. That is not hard information to obtain.
Unlike some, I will not be believing, then becoming agnostic/atheist and then revert to believing again. That's just a believer on hold until they find the next religious belief they did not know about until later and suited them.
Evolution of all life in our Universe is a fact for me and the vast majority of educated humanity. It is not true for the piously convicted who cruise on their ever shrinking marginal information however and that's ok. Just don't expect me to adopt those views again.
And too, I don't need to have adopted "Herb Minister Traits". This is who I am, who I always have been and always will be without any WCG mold needed. That's a nice neat package you'd like to put me in but it's bullshit.
To quote Paul, sorta, "Herb, Ted and Rod, reputed pillars in the church, they added nothing to me." :)
Galatians 2:6 6As for those who were held in high esteem-(the Jerusalem Church Apostles) whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism-they added nothing to my message.
galatians 2:9 And recognizing the grace [that God had] bestowed on me, James and Cephas (Peter) and John, who were reputed to be pillars [of the Jerusalem church]...
"Unlike some, I will not be believing, then becoming agnostic/atheist and then revert to believing again. That's just a believer on hold until they find the next religious belief they did not know about until later and suited them."
Wow, what a slap at fellow bloggers and their intelligence.
It's one thing to cone on here and talk about where you're at now, but to start to belittle others, whether you meant it that way or not, you did.
Maybe we'd be better off with Connie back and you now gone. Or an apology to fellow bloggers who once believed, then became an unbeliever, and then became a believer again.
Actually you've just shown how closed minded you are.
Actually, he may not have a choice if Buddha becomes involved. ;~)
No offence Dennis, but your longwinded blogposts and comments are proving for me the truth to the old proverb that “Some take way too long to say way too little.” :-p
Re the whole debate whether Christians should interpret the days of creation week in Genesis 1-2 as literal days or whether Adam and Eve were created in a literal 24 hour day or after aeons of time filled with disease and death...As a Christian I follow Jesus and thus I believe as He believed ie the words of Moses and Genesis are literal history.
https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/did-jesus-say-he-created-in-six-literal-days/
I learned something today. Aetheists don't believe god exists... so they don't bother arguing about nonexistence.
But people who hate god spend all sorts of time writing against him.
Dennnis, you are not an atheist.
The BIBLE reveals LIFE required the operation of a higher intelligence; in this respect, the scripture has the atheists beat by a mile. Godless science had the moon astronauts being isolated/decontaminated from possible alien life when returning to earth (yeah right, didn't you know "DNA molecules are spontaneously self assembling from moondust all the time"?)
"I learned something today. Aetheists don't believe god exists... so they don't bother arguing about nonexistence.
But people who hate god spend all sorts of time writing against him.
Dennnis, you are not an atheist."
Dennis is a misotheist. Now we have him figured out.
We do not have any discussions questioning the existence of Buddha, or trashing and disproving his teachings.
There are profound differences between the mindset of atheists who arrived at their nonbelief through science, and that of former Armstrongite atheists. The Armstrong-based atheist is informed by simply awful experiences with the “god” that was taught, and feels an intense compulsion to evangelize nonbelief on WCG-dissident blog.
Recovery from Armstrongism is at best difficult. When a false version of God is taught, causing major damage, it is difficult to reach the point at which you no longer see this God as being behind all of Christianity, and not just a bogus cult.
Armstrongism programmed us to give particular importance to the scriptures which embodied Herbert W. Armstrong’s own warped personality - his picked and chosen proof-texts. These support an unusually harsh and judgmental God. Even post-WCG, so many of us only see the scriptures which support a “my way or the highway” God. These leap out rather than David’s loving depictions in the Psalms, or the words of the New Testament.
The most difficult part of the post Armstrong experience is to find a more accurate working concept of God, one which can restore our own functionality. The more deeply one was embedded in Armstrongism, the more difficult and time-consuming that process will be.
BB
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