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Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders
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Friday, March 1, 2013
Which Came First : Creation 6,000 Years Ago or Civilization 8,000 Years Earlier?
The Church of God has always insisted that humans started on the earth 4,000 years before Jesus with the Biblical creation story. Yet, here is a story that can cast doubt on that date. Göbekli Tepe a structure covering a broad area in Southeastern Turkey
This is a story about the structure that is 8,000 years earlier that the creation story. Armstrongists will immediately start clicking their tongues when they hear that this structure is dated by radio carbon dating. GTA and the WCG went to great lengths to debunk radio carbon dating, without success, I might add.
Strike One---
ReplyDeleteThe COG has never implied 4000 years ago.
6000 year ago perhaps.
The Bible is fuzzy on this though. We cannot know if the genealogies are complete or just highlights. The so called 6000 year plan idea is very vague and relies on just one scripture, which may be viewed as poetic in its nature. (A day is as a thousand years).
Even Herman Hoeh used to speak about pre-Adamic homonids etc, even way back under HWA.
I personally like the views of Hugh Ross, who reconciles the Bible and history, to a civilization timeline of 10-20 thousand years. Genesis cannot be used as a science book, nor as an exact history book. It is a saga, with only the briefest of details.
True growth, maturity wise, in the COGs will come when we confess that we just dont know everything... AND that this is OK! The old WCG tried to lay claim to being experts on everything, from child rearing, to marital sex, to "who built the pyramids", and every possible subject. They went above their pay grade in many areas. Again, it is liberating and mature to be able to say "WE DONT KNOW". I feel that the UCG has taken a good direction in this, and is avoiding speculation as much as possible.
The "Q and A" session after the return of Jesus will be one that I definitely will not want to miss. (Or at least I will want to order the video!) LOL!
Luv,
Joe Moeller
Cody, WY
Actually, I think he means 4,000 years before Jesus, which is what the first line of the post says.
ReplyDeleteIf UCG ever debunks British-Israelism, that will constitute taking a good direction. Until then...
As for the explanation, I think the structure was built by Neville Stevens' demons flying around in them there spaceships.
Strike one---
ReplyDeleteLearn to read!
"4,000 years before Jesus" is not 4,000 years ago, bu 6,000, unless you're thinking of Jesús, my friend from Mexico. He's in Mexico now visiting his family. It's a common mistake...
Not sure why anyone would need a Q&A after he returns or want to videotape it. Also not sure why you'd have to wait. It's not like they don't have email in Mexico!
Golbeki Tepi is one of earth's most amazing archaeological finds. Dating back to the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. On top of that, it appears the place was deliberately buried and the residents or priests just left it.
ReplyDeleteI have a very nice flint chopper and knife from Oldavai Gorge in Kenya. It is approximately 1.4 million years old and holding it is awesome . Fits the hand like a glove. Humans evolved with just the details getting filled in better and better every month.
Genesis 1-ll is all mythological . The flood may be a distant memory of a local disaster as large as the Ice Age break out of the Med into the Black sea but time will tell.
The "day is as a thousand years" in Peter is an apologetic to try and damp down the doubt and scoffing that early christians had come to when the soon coming of Jesus just never seemed to happen. The message is, "God does not see time as you do," but it is an apologetic plain and simple trying to put a good face on the obvious. Jesus is not coming back in their lifetime. Even Paul had to give up and admit that. He never said he was wrong, but he was wrong.
radio carbon dating is not as cut and dried as some would have us believe.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Neither are pregnancy tests. Sometimes they can be wrong. That's why you have to do them multiple times to be sure.
ReplyDeleteRE: Anonymous at 2:56
ReplyDeleteThe top line leader post says this specifically--
Which Came First : Creation 4,000 Years Ago or Civilization 8,000 Years Earlier?
Obviously a misprint on the Header Line. However, you owe me a beer at the "Silver Dollar Bar" the next time you are in Cody, WY.
Luv,
Joe Moeller
Cody, Wy
You are right. Was thinking about 4,000 years before Jesus time. Changed it.
ReplyDeleteWow! That's awesome stuff! This world is full of mysteries wrapped in riddles inside enigmas isn't it?! Makes you wonder indeed! Of course, I've got issues with the dating techniques myself. And so who knows if they're actually 5000 or 6000 years old? And who really cares? It's not like anyone present was there when they were built so only God knows. Anyway I'm with Joe in this regard I don't know how old these structures are, I don't know who built them or for what purpose, I don't know...and that's OK! :-) As Rumsfeld once put it: "There are known knowns...there are known unknowns...But there are also unknown unknowns..." But, boy has God got a lot of answering to do!
ReplyDelete"The Church of God has always insisted that humans started on the earth 4,000 years before Jesus with the Biblical creation story."
ReplyDeleteNo. In the 1980s, Good News readers were "treated" (I use the word loosely) to divergent viewpoints; Keith Stump pushed for Young Earth Creationism, Herman Hoeh peddled the Church's own brand of Gap Theory, and the 3rd (which I subscribe to) was, "It doesn't matter HOW we're here, what matters is WHY we are here."
That said, as of 2008, Northern Light (current version of the Canadian GN) was pushing Intelligent Design. Not sure what, if anything, came of that.
I'm amazed. It's so clear that the Bible is a collection of contrived chronologies and manufactured history built around a tribal canaanite god that was a member of a family of gods just like all the other pantheons. Yet, I keep seeing comments that clearnly show a lot of people take all this garbage as something they can place faith in and they grasp at any straw like radio carbon dating not being reliable.
ReplyDeleteC'mon, it's the most reliable thing one can possibly find. Certainly more reliable than the fictions of that priest invented book that didn't even become a set canon for the Jews until long into the common era known to us as AD.
There have been multiple civilizations that got wiped out for one reason or another and the human race has had to start over countless times often losing a lot of technology in the process and having to reinvent it.
I think the carbon dating thing comes from one comment in one sermon made off-handedly by Armstrong (or there was an old PT article by Spanky about it--which speaks for itself). By the 1980s he had actually retracted said comment (it's in one of the Feast transmissions online), but I guess it's too much to ask, that the members of the Church actually LISTEN to the man they worship so blindly.....
ReplyDeleteThe Church always said it changed its position based on progressive revelation (before the Evangelicals start in on me, I said *progressive* not REgressive back to the Constantinian Shift) and that was a sign that it was the true Church.
So, those who take ONE thing Armstrong said, and cling to it as truth, EVEN WHEN HE CORRECTED HIMSELF, are clearly not members of the true Church. In my opinion.
But Velvet, you can't believe in the inerrancy of the bible AND in radio isotope dating. It is unreasonable to accept one and not reject the other. There is no way HWA, Spanky, and every other minister could have failed to reject radio carbon dating and many other scientifically demonstrable facts besides. Their livelihoods depended upon it.
ReplyDeleteVelvet, you subscribe to the statement, "It doesn't matter HOW we're here, what matters is WHY we are here."
ReplyDeleteI agree. To the first part, I say, "It (ultimately) doesn't matter HOW we're here, but the question is damned interesting, so it matters in the short term, like one's lifetime. It's worth pursuing just to satisfy our curiosity. The way to pursue it is to keep making guesses and holding them up against the evidence (such as radiocarbon dating.) When they don't match up, the thing to do is change the guesses, not the evidence--and not ignore it, either.
I also agree that WHY we are here is important, as long as each of us gets to answer the question in a way that satisfies his or her own needs. For example, the reason I am here is to keep refilling the woodshed and drinking beer. I often say "hunting birds" in place of "drinking beer," but the bird seasons are closed now, and beer is still readily available. (It may help to give that statement an allegorical dimension.)
Ignore the facts, Velvet, believe what you want to about what HWA actually taught - everybody else does. Belief is based on an assumption anyway. Sure it is, a person grows up assuming stuff they are taught is true until they believe what they assume.
ReplyDeleteIgnoring what other headquarters ministers wrote in booklets and the church magazines as not being what HWA taught himself is a mistake. I still remember what was taught in the old 36 lesson correspondence course and if you think HWA didn't approve of all that nonsense, especially about BI, you're mistaken - hell, he invented it. Well, actually, he plagiarized it. He even preached that Hitler was still alive and living in Argentina. And, yes, he did preach that Jesus would return in 1975. It was not just some rogue ministers preaching that.
Joe Moeller thinks the genealogies aren't complete or that they are just highlights and ignores that Matthew and Luke in the gospels about Jesus' genealogy says that they are complete.
What it amounts to is that science has proved that the bible is bullshit and people are grasping at straws to keep the bible relevant for today when it actually isn't. Actually, it's 2500 year old made up nonsense.
Back before the advent of the internet, information was not quite so readily available for a person wanting to double check things published in a magazine, or shared verbally in a lecture such as a sermon.
ReplyDeleteWhat often happened was that if a good church member listened to Garner Ted Armstrong back, say, in the early 1970's, and heard his series on evolution (from which Whale of a Tale came) the church member heard Garner Ted state that radio carbon dating was highly inaccurate. Said church member accepted this as fact, not even understanding what radio carbon dating was, how it worked, or its accuracy level over specific ranges of time. These days, you'd just Google "Radio Carbon Dating", and it would become apparent that GTA, or his modern equivalent, was often questionable as a resource on matters of science.
Lesson: Never allow yourself to be lulled into a position of complacency where you no longer check or verify.
BB
Lesson: Never allow yourself to be lulled into a position of complacency where you no longer check or verify.
ReplyDeleteOh, the irony...
The measurement accuracy of carbon 14 dating is very accurate but the assumptions that are used are not provable. The environment in the past was almost certainly different such that he radioactive decay of any isotope would have been altered throughout it's life through a number of factors. Unless one went back to the past in a time machine to verify the conditions, the results of the lab tests are useless.
ReplyDeleteLess ambiguous than the previous similar post:
ReplyDeleteThe measurement accuracy of carbon 14 dating is very accurate but the numerous assumptions that are used are not provable. The environment in the past was almost certainly different such that the radioactive decay results of any isotope have been altered throughout its life due to a number of factors. Unless one went back to the past in a time machine to verify the initial conditions as well as the environmental factors that do influence the material in question by way of contamination and sequestration, the results of the lab tests are useless. All this is assuming the radioactive decay rate itself is constant, which may not be according to recent research.
Guys, that's why there is such a concept as peer review in all of the sciences. It's all part of what we grew up learning as the scientific method.
ReplyDeleteThis type of review can be totally absent from various legs of religious study, which is why believers must do what amounts to their own peer review. Had we done this, the Armstrongs would have been recognized early on as being the false teachers they were.
BB
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThe measurement accuracy of carbon 14 dating is very accurate but the assumptions that are used are not provable. The environment in the past was almost certainly different such that he radioactive decay of any isotope would have been altered throughout it's life through a number of factors.
You're grasping at straws. Those factors have been thought of and are already taken into account (factored in) and are part of the calculation. You can depend on anything up to 50,000 years old being accurately dated using C14 - no time machine needed.
"But Velvet, you can't believe in the inerrancy of the bible"
ReplyDeleteI don't, that's a heresy the Evangelicals brought in. The Church NEVER taught the Bible was "inerrant" in fact, the old Bible correspondence course lessons from the 1950s have corrections (i.e., Passover instead of Easter, during supper instead of after) to the Biblical translations that had us branded as a cult...but which I now note are incorporated into ALL modern (or nearly all) Bible translations.
The Church always taught that the Bible was written by human beings, translated by human beings, and sometimes (especially after the Constantinian Shift) blasphemous errors were purposefully inserted to drive the religio-political agenda of the god of this world.
"It's worth pursuing just to satisfy our curiosity. The way to pursue it is to keep making guesses and holding them up against the evidence (such as radiocarbon dating.)"
ReplyDeleteProf,
I certainly do agree with this (and I think the proselytizing Creationists, of whatever stripe, are certifiable), but by the time I was a teenager, the Church was nowhere near as anti-science as it had been in earlier years. Astronomy (NOT astrology) was encouraged, so were the natural sciences, and there were always articles on both in the GN and the WWN.
I was never discouraged from going to university by the Church; in fact most of the kids in my age demographic from the Victoria congregation did go on to pursue Uni. educations.
"Ignoring what other headquarters ministers wrote in booklets and the church magazines as not being what HWA taught himself is a mistake."
ReplyDeleteI agree. (I particularly like David John Hill's stuff, and I actually ran across an old article by Dennis Luker the other day.) Now, that said, I do ignore what Spanky wrote, for the obvious reasons. Same with Pack, Flurry, et al. Though they were much closer to being on the same page as the Church in the past, than they are now!!!
There were definitely some parts where the others got it wrong though. Would Spanky had been DFed if he hadn't? I don't think so. Would he have had a bad attitude to be DFed FOR, if he had been truly converted? I honestly don't think so.
I also think that Herbert Armstrong WAS wrong, and that he WASN'T always right...and that those who insist he was, and that he was infallible, were NOT paying attention. Maybe they were still too caught up in the idol-worshipping ways of the world they had come out of, and that's why they made a false idol out of him too, I don't know.
Plus there were all those who, despite the Church teaching from day one that we were and are ONLY saved by the grace of God through Jesus Christ His Son, they STILL made idols out of the law, and made it a burden (when the Bible, and Jesus, says it should be the exact opposite). And not only did they make it a burden, they made it a burden for others.
Look, guys, I realize that I am asking for a lot of flack here just because I'm a member of the Church. The only thing that I respectfully ask all of you is that you please don't make the mistake of assuming what I believe, based on what others believe or believed, or even what the Church used to teach.
I do agree with, I would say, 99.9999% of what the Church used to teach, when I was growing up (which was quite different from what the Church taught when everyone here was in; which was the generation before mine)...and even in some cases, like how Creation came about, I have no qualms in saying "I don't know, and for me, that is not important."
But I do NOT take what the Church used to teach as hard-and-fast, set-in-stone truth, like the rest of the wackos do. THEY are the ones who are missing the boat. THEY are the ones who do not understand that progressive revelation means that you change your ways and turn your feet back to the right path, once you have been convicted of your wrongdoings.
I take that very much to heart, both for the Church itself, and for myself, personally.
"heard Garner Ted state"
ReplyDelete*Mythbusters voice* "Well THERE'S your problem!"
Seriously, now. You cannot bring the Church up on ANY accusation based on anything that liberal, divisive, devilspawn (not to mention proven sexual predator) said. He was put out of the Church, and tried to take the Church down with him as he went!