Just What Do You Mean ... Church Culture?
One of the things
that’s desperately sick about the COGs is the culture. It is a deeply
dysfunctional culture that fosters and facilitates abuse. Everyone
in the world grows up around other people who are users and abusers. We
have to put up with our dysfunctional families, fair-weather friends,
and governments
that rob you blind. But not everyone has a church abusing them on top
of all that. Armstrongites are gluttons for punishment.
It’s one thing to recognize that the COGs have abusive tendencies, but it’s another thing to define it in such a way that you can see the pattern, understand what those tendencies are, and where they’re coming from. I find it necessary to do this so I can get the tentacles unwrapped from around my mind and heal.
So, where did the culture of the COGs come from? I think that many leaders would haul out the phrase “God’s government” and start declaring the culture of the church is 100% biblical. Well, if it’s so biblical, then why is it so dysfunctional and abusive? Why are the COGs so full of hypocrisy? While the COGs might PREACH out of the bible, the CULTURE of the church has little to do with the bible.
So then where does it come from? The culture of the Armstrongist churches was not woven from the fabric of the bible. It came from Herbert Armstrong and from the society of his times.
Herbert Armstrong was born in middle America (Des Moines, Iowa) in 1892. His family was of Quaker background, known today as the Friends Church. The Quaker movement began in the 1600’s with the express intention of restoring the original faith and practices of the first century apostolic church. (Sound familiar?) In a sense, when HWA decided to get religion and found the Radio Church of God, he was returning to his Quaker roots. But this is the obvious theology, which is just the decorative window dressing, not the form and structure. Where did the steel undergirders come from that hold the structure up?
The power structure of the church, the government hierarchy, if you will, was always stated as being Jesus Christ, and then Armstrong, and then ministers and then regular members in a government where power and authority flowed from the top down, just like a monarchy. Apologists today will point toward the bible, and Jesus Christ as a king to argue that HWA was trying to create the “’government of God’ here on earth” within the church. However, if you suppose that Jesus Christ is not the head of the Armstrongist churches, then suddenly it’s not a benevolent monarchy anymore, it’s a fascist state.
But there’s a better viewpoint on Armstrongist churches that sheds much more light on the dynamics driving them: the nuclear family. The family is also a top-down structure, but borne of natural necessity, not fear. HWA preached that God is in the process of creating a family, and he claimed that the church was “the bride of Christ” or a part of “’God’s spiritual nuclear family’ here on earth.” I don't dispute that there is biblical support for the idea that God is making a family. However, unless God is making a horrendously dysfunctional “family,” as HWA created within his church, the culture of Armstrongism has nothing to do with God or bible necessarily, regardless of the theory.
In Victorian society, into which HWA was born, until the cultural revolution of the sixties, children were expected to be respectful of their parents, women were expected to be submissive, and the husband was expected to be the dominant head of the family. These were times when the media presented the father figure as someone who knew what was best. To be fair, these values are rooted in the bible and come from a religiously-centered society. But since people are people, there’s a darker side, too.
For thousands of years, within the context of society, men have had a lot more power than women did, and this created an environment in which women were very dependent upon their husbands. During most of HWA’s lifetime, there was a stigma attached to being a single parent, or being a divorced woman, and the prevailing sentiment was that women should not earn a living outside the home. There was a paternalistic view that men go off to work and do important “men things,” while adult women were not very intelligent, little more than glorified children, really. Women were expected to be subservient and children were expected to be “seen and not heard.” In reality, some men were dictators who were not so benevolent and wives and children were easy targets for abuse. If a wife was abused, most people would assume she had done something wrong, and that she somehow deserved it. For the wife who HAD to escape, she wouldn’t usually have a lot of options to support herself. Overlaid on top of all this was a hypocritical whitewash as everyone pretended to be happy and that there were no serious problems. But the façade of “Leave It To Beaver” was never anything more than a flimsy fiction. Who believed that crap even when it was new?
This is not just a description of American society from a bygone era, and the traditional nuclear family from those days (which the COGs still advocate today as the model nuclear family, whitewash and all), but also the culture of the Radio Church of God, a.k.a. Worldwide Church of God. (The hundreds of splinters are all daughters with a strong family resemblance.) This stands to reason, too. It was the culture in which HWA was born and raised, it is the culture in which the church originally formed, and there is a biblical interpretation to back it up. What else would you expect? But while they claim they got these values directly from the bible, they didn’t. They got them from “the world.” The proof is that they also incorporated the dark side, wholesale.
From a church culture standpoint, the ministry are the “husbands,” the children are the children (obviously), and everyone else is the “housewife.” As the “housewife” the members are basically the minister’s bitch. This is why ministers demand an inordinate amount of unearned respect from members. This is why they expect subservience and paternalistically look down on them all as glorified children. Many of them in the past have presumed to tell the membership that their only access to God is through them, thus preaching a doctrine of dependence. And all the while, they have the nerve to call themselves servants. They are merely setting themselves up as the dated father figures from yesteryear, complete with the paternalistic mysogeny. The membership has aided and abetted them by buying into the model and playing their assigned role. The liberating thing from this understanding comes from recognizing what everyone is really doing and realizing that you have a choice.
To pretend this is some kind of righteousness makes my stomach turn. They would have you believe that they are modeling the “coming government of God” here on earth and thus preparing everyone to play a role in the real thing when it arrives. BARF! That is not what is going on at all. In truth, “ministers” are just a collection of Willy Lomans: sad sack salesmen with a dwindling client base who are attempting to repackage something used as though it is new, and then selling it for more than it’s worth.
If you’re buying what they’re selling, then I suppose it’s also easy to believe this is all “godly” and “biblical” too. But all of it is “worldly” albeit a pre-1960’s world, to which it is possible, if you are foolhardy enough, to attach a certain amount of nostalgia. There are some places where this model does agree with biblical principles, but this is accidental, because the model was taken from a Christian society, not because HWA got any of it from the bible.
One of the problems with the culture is that the cultural values are more important than the biblical ones. If you violate all the commandments in the bible, you’re just a sinner, like us all. But if you violate cultural values, you are promptly disfellowshipped as though you had committed the unpardonable sin. Obviously I suppose you have, though not in a biblical sense. Which begs the question, what are these churches teaching? Are they teaching people not to sin, or are they teaching the opposite? Or perhaps COGs are just societies dedicated to a particular brand of nostalgia? Or maybe it’s just whatever keeps the money coming in. However you look at it, the bottom line is, you can sin all you want, just so long as you keep the cultural commandments.
In the mean time, American society has marched on. There have been vast changes to the prevailing societal values, expectations, and norms, and I would agree, not all for the better. But Armstrongism has stayed anachronistically fixed in the past, like a cultural time capsule, as though the hypocritical society of middle America 100 years ago were somehow the pinnacle of godliness. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
Just as surely as so many COGs want to recreate WCG in its heyday, if it were up to them, I suppose they would also take the whole world back to recreate Victorian era America. That’s what they’re expecting the millennium to be like, I guess, where God comes back to Earth and forces nostalgic American values upon the whole world? If I were given a choice between that and the lake of fire, I think I’d rather take the hot bath. Who in their right mind would want to live inside of an eternal “Leave It To Beaver” marathon?
That makes me curious, besides Sabbath vs. Sunday and holy days vs. holidays, what else did Herbert Armstrong have to rail against in 1934, when the cultural values of the church were identical to the cultural values of America? Perhaps a better question is what a Quaker preacher would have had to rail about, seeing they don’t even have the difference of Sabbath and holy days like the COGs do? Oh, nevermind, the Friends Church, like the Amish, are probably dedicated to preserving and recreating the culture of the 1600’s! Get thee hence!
As time continues to march on, society will continue to change, and, like the Amish, the COGs will also continue to get further and further out of step with the world around them. They will seem more and more odd, their solutions will seem more and more out of touch, and their client base will continue to dwindle. Meanwhile, they will continue to bicker and argue and divide. Soon, the last embers of Armstrongism will blink out and grow cold. Amen.
Andrew
It’s one thing to recognize that the COGs have abusive tendencies, but it’s another thing to define it in such a way that you can see the pattern, understand what those tendencies are, and where they’re coming from. I find it necessary to do this so I can get the tentacles unwrapped from around my mind and heal.
So, where did the culture of the COGs come from? I think that many leaders would haul out the phrase “God’s government” and start declaring the culture of the church is 100% biblical. Well, if it’s so biblical, then why is it so dysfunctional and abusive? Why are the COGs so full of hypocrisy? While the COGs might PREACH out of the bible, the CULTURE of the church has little to do with the bible.
So then where does it come from? The culture of the Armstrongist churches was not woven from the fabric of the bible. It came from Herbert Armstrong and from the society of his times.
Herbert Armstrong was born in middle America (Des Moines, Iowa) in 1892. His family was of Quaker background, known today as the Friends Church. The Quaker movement began in the 1600’s with the express intention of restoring the original faith and practices of the first century apostolic church. (Sound familiar?) In a sense, when HWA decided to get religion and found the Radio Church of God, he was returning to his Quaker roots. But this is the obvious theology, which is just the decorative window dressing, not the form and structure. Where did the steel undergirders come from that hold the structure up?
The power structure of the church, the government hierarchy, if you will, was always stated as being Jesus Christ, and then Armstrong, and then ministers and then regular members in a government where power and authority flowed from the top down, just like a monarchy. Apologists today will point toward the bible, and Jesus Christ as a king to argue that HWA was trying to create the “’government of God’ here on earth” within the church. However, if you suppose that Jesus Christ is not the head of the Armstrongist churches, then suddenly it’s not a benevolent monarchy anymore, it’s a fascist state.
But there’s a better viewpoint on Armstrongist churches that sheds much more light on the dynamics driving them: the nuclear family. The family is also a top-down structure, but borne of natural necessity, not fear. HWA preached that God is in the process of creating a family, and he claimed that the church was “the bride of Christ” or a part of “’God’s spiritual nuclear family’ here on earth.” I don't dispute that there is biblical support for the idea that God is making a family. However, unless God is making a horrendously dysfunctional “family,” as HWA created within his church, the culture of Armstrongism has nothing to do with God or bible necessarily, regardless of the theory.
In Victorian society, into which HWA was born, until the cultural revolution of the sixties, children were expected to be respectful of their parents, women were expected to be submissive, and the husband was expected to be the dominant head of the family. These were times when the media presented the father figure as someone who knew what was best. To be fair, these values are rooted in the bible and come from a religiously-centered society. But since people are people, there’s a darker side, too.
For thousands of years, within the context of society, men have had a lot more power than women did, and this created an environment in which women were very dependent upon their husbands. During most of HWA’s lifetime, there was a stigma attached to being a single parent, or being a divorced woman, and the prevailing sentiment was that women should not earn a living outside the home. There was a paternalistic view that men go off to work and do important “men things,” while adult women were not very intelligent, little more than glorified children, really. Women were expected to be subservient and children were expected to be “seen and not heard.” In reality, some men were dictators who were not so benevolent and wives and children were easy targets for abuse. If a wife was abused, most people would assume she had done something wrong, and that she somehow deserved it. For the wife who HAD to escape, she wouldn’t usually have a lot of options to support herself. Overlaid on top of all this was a hypocritical whitewash as everyone pretended to be happy and that there were no serious problems. But the façade of “Leave It To Beaver” was never anything more than a flimsy fiction. Who believed that crap even when it was new?
This is not just a description of American society from a bygone era, and the traditional nuclear family from those days (which the COGs still advocate today as the model nuclear family, whitewash and all), but also the culture of the Radio Church of God, a.k.a. Worldwide Church of God. (The hundreds of splinters are all daughters with a strong family resemblance.) This stands to reason, too. It was the culture in which HWA was born and raised, it is the culture in which the church originally formed, and there is a biblical interpretation to back it up. What else would you expect? But while they claim they got these values directly from the bible, they didn’t. They got them from “the world.” The proof is that they also incorporated the dark side, wholesale.
From a church culture standpoint, the ministry are the “husbands,” the children are the children (obviously), and everyone else is the “housewife.” As the “housewife” the members are basically the minister’s bitch. This is why ministers demand an inordinate amount of unearned respect from members. This is why they expect subservience and paternalistically look down on them all as glorified children. Many of them in the past have presumed to tell the membership that their only access to God is through them, thus preaching a doctrine of dependence. And all the while, they have the nerve to call themselves servants. They are merely setting themselves up as the dated father figures from yesteryear, complete with the paternalistic mysogeny. The membership has aided and abetted them by buying into the model and playing their assigned role. The liberating thing from this understanding comes from recognizing what everyone is really doing and realizing that you have a choice.
To pretend this is some kind of righteousness makes my stomach turn. They would have you believe that they are modeling the “coming government of God” here on earth and thus preparing everyone to play a role in the real thing when it arrives. BARF! That is not what is going on at all. In truth, “ministers” are just a collection of Willy Lomans: sad sack salesmen with a dwindling client base who are attempting to repackage something used as though it is new, and then selling it for more than it’s worth.
If you’re buying what they’re selling, then I suppose it’s also easy to believe this is all “godly” and “biblical” too. But all of it is “worldly” albeit a pre-1960’s world, to which it is possible, if you are foolhardy enough, to attach a certain amount of nostalgia. There are some places where this model does agree with biblical principles, but this is accidental, because the model was taken from a Christian society, not because HWA got any of it from the bible.
One of the problems with the culture is that the cultural values are more important than the biblical ones. If you violate all the commandments in the bible, you’re just a sinner, like us all. But if you violate cultural values, you are promptly disfellowshipped as though you had committed the unpardonable sin. Obviously I suppose you have, though not in a biblical sense. Which begs the question, what are these churches teaching? Are they teaching people not to sin, or are they teaching the opposite? Or perhaps COGs are just societies dedicated to a particular brand of nostalgia? Or maybe it’s just whatever keeps the money coming in. However you look at it, the bottom line is, you can sin all you want, just so long as you keep the cultural commandments.
In the mean time, American society has marched on. There have been vast changes to the prevailing societal values, expectations, and norms, and I would agree, not all for the better. But Armstrongism has stayed anachronistically fixed in the past, like a cultural time capsule, as though the hypocritical society of middle America 100 years ago were somehow the pinnacle of godliness. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
Just as surely as so many COGs want to recreate WCG in its heyday, if it were up to them, I suppose they would also take the whole world back to recreate Victorian era America. That’s what they’re expecting the millennium to be like, I guess, where God comes back to Earth and forces nostalgic American values upon the whole world? If I were given a choice between that and the lake of fire, I think I’d rather take the hot bath. Who in their right mind would want to live inside of an eternal “Leave It To Beaver” marathon?
That makes me curious, besides Sabbath vs. Sunday and holy days vs. holidays, what else did Herbert Armstrong have to rail against in 1934, when the cultural values of the church were identical to the cultural values of America? Perhaps a better question is what a Quaker preacher would have had to rail about, seeing they don’t even have the difference of Sabbath and holy days like the COGs do? Oh, nevermind, the Friends Church, like the Amish, are probably dedicated to preserving and recreating the culture of the 1600’s! Get thee hence!
As time continues to march on, society will continue to change, and, like the Amish, the COGs will also continue to get further and further out of step with the world around them. They will seem more and more odd, their solutions will seem more and more out of touch, and their client base will continue to dwindle. Meanwhile, they will continue to bicker and argue and divide. Soon, the last embers of Armstrongism will blink out and grow cold. Amen.
Andrew
Trust the ACoGs to put the cult into culture.
ReplyDeleteThis is the same phenomenon those of us who have had the opportunity (not really the right word here in context) to observe the same phenomenon in corporationw.
The WCG was the ultimate of Church Corporate under Herbert Armstrong. Think more the 19th century and early 20th century robber baron Corporation where paternalistic corporate owners had intimate control over worker's lives in a highly stratified hierarchical structure of absolute authority. Unless you get that people in the church were just "employees" of the corporation, you won't really understand the culture.
Robert Jackall in his book "Moral Mazes" (a venue I experienced first hand as a misfortune 50 corporate manager) revealed what is that what is right and moral is what the guy above you wants from you.
Unfortunately, the WCG was full of all sorts of requirements, making it clear that what it wanted from its "employees" was complete dedication and an absolute adherance to the laws and rule of the corporation.
The corporate ethic, if you will, was that the end justified the means which meant that the "worker" had to pull out the stops in order to make everything work according to the standards and policies of the corporation, whether it be keeping the Sabbath, managing the tithes or even how to dress for the corporate services and conventions.
Many of the laws and rules were actually impossible to keep fully and sometimes were in conflict. People did the best they could, but it was resource intensive for the "worker" to abide by all the expectations. Maybe you didn't have enough money for your children's shoes, but the Building Fund really needed that money for the "gun lap" of the work. This sort of conflict could only be partly fulfilled as obligations mounted and there was always something which suffered from trying to cover everything with insufficient resources.
If this sounds impersonal, it is meant to. The WCG Church Corporate was an "it" -- a "thing" -- and as such had no humanity whatsoever.
I understand there are new color pictures of Hitler's life. It personalizes him. Just as the color pictures of Herbert Armstrong personalized him to the masses of people who provided him with the good life and what he wanted, without his having any regard to the sacrifices people had to make so he didn't.
So how was Armstrong even going to recreate the "government of God" when he obviously couldn't even govern himself? And how arrogant and conceited do you have to be to presume you know what form it should take? Doesn't the Bible say the "government" will be on Christ's shoulders not any other man's? So it's going to take God himself to restore His "government" in the affairs of mankind. Besides didn't Armstrong originally advocate church government should be local and decentralized, but then went to the opposite extreme and created a "divine dictatorship" like other cults of modern "churchianity"? Didn't Israel have various forms of government throughout its history like theocracy, kritarchy, hierocracy, monarchy etc? So which is most approved by God and why would you even attempt to pattern church government after that of a civil nation when Christ's Church isn't a nation perse? And if his own family was so dysfunctional is it any wonder, then, that his legacy has been one of broken homes and splintering churches? Perhaps the saying, "as the family goes, so goes the nation" is just as applicable to the ACOGs as well.
ReplyDeleteThat makes me curious, besides Sabbath vs. Sunday and holy days vs. holidays, what else did Herbert Armstrong have to rail against in 1934, when the cultural values of the church were identical to the cultural values of America?
ReplyDeleteBritish Israelism.
If you go back to the documentation of that era (including the Autobiography) you will see Herbert's insistence that it was the key to understanding prophecy (it was the key to his being a false prophet).
It was a hearkening back to the 18th century when an insane Canadian got it all started. Talk about legacy.
This was old stuff.
Armstrong used it to put a wedge between himself and the Church of God Seventh Day. The real issue was that he wanted to be in charge and the CoG7 just wasn't interested in his being in charge.
He waved the "You are probably right" letter in front of everyone like a Matador waves a red cape in front of a bull (with little effect). It was his ego: He HAD to WIN!
Without British Israelism (and railing about the SINS of the United States and British Commonwealth bringing on the Great Tribulation), the false prophecies, a little bit of humility and a spirit of cooperation, there would have been no WCG and history would have been very different.
Douglas Becker is right on point IMHO regarding the influence of the robber baron age and Herbert Armstrong and the WCG. I would add that from the robber baron age grew institutions such as “the company store”, “the company picnic”, “the company town”, and even “the company school”. Applied in WCG practice from the robber baron age, there was the Church commissary (the company store), Church socials (the company picnic), Big Sandy and Pasadena (the company towns) and Imperial Schools and Ambassador Colleges (the company schools).
ReplyDeleteOne very important point about the robber baron age (which Douglas alludes to implicitly) is that each of the robber barons was monopolists within their respective industries. Herbert W. Armstrong was a very young man when U.S. antitrust laws were enacted, and “trust busting” was occurring. For example, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was broken up into smaller competing oil companies.
Like the robber barons of his youth, Herbert Armstrong himself was a monopolist. His industry was the religion industry. Armstrong created his own “fear religion” brand of religion. His robber baron church was “the one and only true church”. His robber baron brand of fear religion was the only way to escape the Great Tribulation. His robber baron church brand of religion was the only way to eternal life. At the time, there was no other competition for his brand type other than the competing Church of God Seventh Day from which he splintered, and perhaps the Seventh day Adventists from which the Church of God Seventh Day splintered.
My youthful recollection of listening to Herbert W. Armstrong at the Feast of Tabernacles on numerous occasions when he gave his life story was that he always told us that he had wanted to be a millionaire before his calling. In fact, I remember him quoting in his life story sermons a contemporary business person from the 1920s who once said, “Herbert Armstrong is no ordinary man”.
For good or bad, time has proven the contemporary business person cited in Mr. Armstrong’s sermons to be correct (if there ever was such a person who said that about Mr. Armstrong) – otherwise we all wouldn’t be here visiting this website today.
Richard
Thanks, everyone: You have inspired me to begin a series of articles and are providing me with great material -- you can have a look see at
ReplyDeleteThe Future Kingdom of God Looks a Lot Like Foxconn.
Excellent and accurate article! Kudos to Andrew for some really astute observations.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, I was on a road trip to and from one of the northern cities in my territory. While driving, I listened to an inspirational message on Christian radio. One salient point made by a speaker was a clarification between the meanings of the words "heresy", and "apostasy". Apostasy was defined as "teaching less than what the Bible teaches", while heresy was said to be "teaching more than what the Bible teaches." By this definition, Armstrongism was most certainly heresy, and lent itself very effectively to the ministers as a control vehicle.
A very high percentage of Armstrongist teachings were extrabiblical theories and personal opinions of HWA, which he labeled as being restored truths.
The prevailing "culture" of WCG and the splinters was not only dysfunctional, it also fomented toxic level hatred which persists decades after one has left the group and sought recovery.
BB
You guys are correct about the corporate nature of the beast and HWA's likeness to a Guilded-Age industrialist robber baron. Ministers do think of themselves as mucky-muck corporate executives and members of the old boys club, with perks and expense accounts, exemption from the biblical mandate of saving second tithe, homes provided rent-free, cars provided by fleet, etc. And who are the members? They're the employees. Except that you don't get paid for your work, you have to pay into the corporation to support it. Brilliant! The robber barons would have been even richer if they could have engineered the reverse human resources finances that Herbert Armstrong did. Taxes? What taxes? We're tax exempt! I know this isn't perfect in it's analysis in that there were also (under)paid employees who were not ministers.
ReplyDeleteIt's also like these pyramid "direct marketing" schemes. The difference between a pyramid scheme and a legitimate business is that the people who are served by it are virtually all third parties to it, while in a pyramid scheme, every "customer" must also be an "employee." The corporation feeds internally off of itself with a series of transfer payments up, and the distribution of goods and services down. And of course, with the setting up of entire company towns, the robber barons created some something akin to a pyramid scheme.
There is something incestuous about "direct marketing" schemes. There's no such thing as an "arms-length" transaction. Whatever it is that is wrong with "direct marketing" is also wrong with the COGs. If anyone can do the reveal on exactly what that is, I would be appreciative.
And though those structures are also replete with abuses, I wanted to address the culture dynamics, which exercises a sort of tyranny even over one's emotional responses. What could be worse than the forced happiness of 1950's America?
And all of this is so I can get to live my millionaire lifestyle. What? The bible? Who? God? What are you talking about?
Oh my! I just realized that you could also equate churches to prostitution rings. One guess as to who are the prostitutes and who is the pimp. No wonder the bible makes the symbolic comparison between religions and whores.
ReplyDeleteHWA was an advertising man. He failed in all other aspects so he found a "product". He packaged it, hawked it, made you feel like you couldn't live without it. And he sold it to the ususpecting masses who wanted to be special and have a direct relationship with God. The Islamic religion is like that too. The very word Islam means "submission". If you follow the rules, die for your cause you go straight to paradise. In that light, I don't think the COG was ever a part of christianity at all. You hear COG rail about those who preach a false Christ. What about the false Christ they preach? We've all said it 100 times on this blog, that Christ didn't come to bleed people dry, scream at them when they made mistakes or build an huge monument to himself. If Christ wanted huge monuments, we should all just go back and be Catholic, they had the first one. Why reinvent the wheel over and over.
ReplyDeleteGreat article Andrew. I thought I was the only one that thought there is an actual culture here and something is terribly wrong with it.
The best analogy to the Armstrongist Church Corporate Culture is the Mafia.
ReplyDeleteYes, Douglas, the Mafia! One of the Mafia related films of decades past (possibly "The Valachi Papers") depicts a Mafia initiation ceremony as the inductee holding a burning rag, while stating (paraphrase) "Thus may I burn if I ever betray the family!" Perfect match.
ReplyDeleteThere have been times over the past three decades when I've also likened WCG culture to bacteria culture. They do seem to come from the same Petree glass!
BB
Excellent article. But let us go further.
ReplyDeleteThe COG's are the obstacles that make it difficult to take up the all-encompassing challenge of freedom, justice, equality, and the pursuit of life with full dignity. They always have been.
People, beasts, and plants belong to distinct classes, and all exhibit special qualities and peculiarities. Unfortunately, Armstrong’s special quality was that he wanted us to believe that he was a moral exemplar. How stupid did he think we were?
The best answer comes from HWA himself. That is, if you paid careful attention to his indecent manuscripts, you'll indeed notice that he was bereft of any intelligent view on pretty much any issue. There's no need here to present any evidence of this, examples can be found all over the Internet. In fact, a simple search will quickly reveal that in Armstrong’s limited horizon he himself was the important object. As a sequence to this self-conceit, he imagined that the world could only be happy only when his army of mindless insects and, gruesome ministry was given full rein.
Armstrong’s ill-bred morals rotted out the minds of his followers. Once that was accomplished, he replace such people with compliant, controlled, and, above all, obedient robots. Those who would never think to disseminate as widely as possible all of the information we have regarding his unbalanced, offensive vituperations.
To further rot the brains of his mindless followers, he rescued Victorian values from the rubbish heap of history, dusted it off, slaped on a coat of cheap sophistry, and marketed it as "original."
HWA and his "beast power" unified Europe is also from the days of his youth. If you go onto google newspaper archives you can read stories about this remake of Rome.
The Rome make over, the beast power, unified Europe, was nothing more than a cut and paste from the headlines of the day into his childish "Plain Truth Magazine."
The man was a fraud, a fascist, a sociopath, and a child molester all wrapped into one. The Devil himself!
"Child molester". Please inform me about this, is it true? What evidence exists?
ReplyDelete