The fear mongering continues unabated in the Living Church of God. Death, doom destruction are soon to wipe out 2/3 of the population of the U.S. and LCG couldn't be happier. They seem to salivate at the possibility. If it happens then Herb and Meredith will be proved right. So far over 70 some years and false predictions have never come to pass.
Although we cannot be sure that we are at the very end, at least the beginning stages of the horrifying droughts, fires, floods and eventual famines and disease epidemics do seem to be slowly getting under way around vast portions of the earth. As I write this, much of the western United States is now experiencing terrible drought—in some cases, the worst in more than 100 years. When rains come, they are causing terrible floods and mudslides on the formerly parched land. And the fire season is just beginning. We are going to have a lot of “worsts” over the next several years in fires, drought alternating with floods, earthquakes and other “natural” catastrophes. Get ready! We in God’s Church are virtually alone in understanding the details of these major world events!
Poor Biter Bob Thiel! LCG is the ONLY COG who understands world end time events! They have left Thiel in the dust! Meredith humiliates Bitter Bob again!
Meredith concludes with this:
Since so many of us are getting older in the faith, we should, dear brethren, truly be drawing closer and closer to God in everything we think, say and do. If we, through God’s Spirit, so discipline ourselves to do this, and specifically cry out to God for more faith, He will certainly give us that faith!
Armstrongism is aging out and slowly dying. Once Meredith dies and his son takes over LCG will rupture into numerous splinter groups.
You aren't reading carefully, so you're missing the BIG news in that letter. Meredith wrote:
ReplyDeleteWe in God’s Church are virtually alone in understanding the details of these major world events!
HWA used to say that he and WCG were ALONE in understanding these things. So for Meredith to say that he is "virtually" alone is a HUGE concession.
So, who else has this understanding? If you watch and read the same news sources as Meredith, then you know. Meredith isn't giving his readers anything they can't get better (and without the "prophecy" crap) from Fox News.
"We are going to have a lot of “worsts” over the next several years in fires, drought alternating with floods, earthquakes and other “natural” catastrophes."
ReplyDeleteThe latest soon-to-be-proved-false prophecy has been uttered! Increment the counter to 16,038!
"Since so many of us are getting older in the faith..."
Today is one more day closer to the end of the currency of these bogus ideas. While I don't wish death upon anyone, that seems to be the only way some bogus ideas go away.
"...we should, dear brethren, truly be drawing closer and closer to God in everything we think, say and do."
Translation: "You should, dear brethren, truly be drawing closer and closer to ME in everything you think, say and do." Meredith is the only god of LCG.
Can't wait to see the fallout when LCG explodes. With any hope, it will produce a new crop of people who see right through the unadulterated corruption of these organizations and their leaders and won't put up with it anymore.
Ok... lets disconnect from false prophecies and false prophets for a minute.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting question to ask.. How long before mankind unloads a full out nuclear war, germ warfare, genetic warfare, nerve gas etc etc.
Will it be within 100 years , 1000 years?
I have little faith in mankind to be that restrained. I also have little faith that we can stagger along like this for a couple of hundred years without a very bad event happening. It hurts to think about this topic too much, as we all know it would be a HELL.
Would like to hear the secular non-theological thoughts on how this would play out. Human nature is still very war like and suicidal Im afraid.
There are the hypothetical best case scenario, and the hypothetical worst case scenario. With a few notable exceptions, humans do not get to experience either of the two extremes, although gurus will attempt to exploit either in order to motivate their acolytes and followers. It has been my experience that the bottom feeders are the ones who employ negative motivation, preferring the fear facilitated by allegedly worst case scenario. Most generally, something which falls in between the two extremes ends up actually happening.
ReplyDeleteThe positive motivators can always point towards truly magnificent occurrences, such as someone winning the lottery who actually knows how to put his new found wealth to use, or someone developing a new medication that rids the world of a dreaded disease. The negative and fear based have always pointed to new worsts brought on by war, depression, or natural disasters. Filtering out either side of this equation, basing one's life on either extreme, can cause an out of balance condition. Hello, delusion. Adios, reality!
The Armstrong position is based on the extreme worst case perspective, resulting from the usage of a proven wrong theory known as British Israelism as basis for its "understanding". Once we know that the theory is a lie, it automatically follows that neither HWA nor his professed heirs could possibly be prophets, apostles, or be receiving their inspiration from God. A bogus theory cannot be the key that unlocks the mysteries of anything! This is why an escallation into their worst case scenario never happens.
If HWA had truly been of God, then the three mathematical equations which we were taught at Ambassador College as supporting the arrival of the end times in 1972 to 1975 could not have been broken. Ussher's chronology would have been vindicated. We'd be in the Kingdom right now instead of doing what we're doing!
If you choose to foretell future events, you are prophesying. No annointing or office is required for your prophesies to be determined as having been wrong, or right. You don't get to revise the events or the timeline to avoid the label "false prophet". If you claim incomplete understanding, that is on you, not God. Incomplete understanding means you really were not God's chosen vessel of communication! One strike, and you are out! The problem is, these groups do not experience correction, nor do they amend their message. Faced with continued failure over decades and decades, they continue to spew the inaccuracies of the original message as if nothing had happened. That, my friends, is insanity.
The gung ho types, the arch defenders of today, will probably become tomorrow's most disillusioned, angry and bitter ones as the promised events continue to fail throughout the future. The same train wreck which most of us already experienced is inevitable for them as well. Just as the negatives of Armstrongism will never fully happen, neither will the positives they anticipate. Correction is inevitable.
BB
Connie, mankind has been confronted with existential threats for centuries, and like the lower life form we know as the cockroach, has survived.
ReplyDeleteThe advent of the Manhattan Project presented a single undeniable existential threat for mankind, one that was distinctly different from disease, famine, and nature's cycles. About ten years ago, in another forum discussion, some of us former Armstrongites had identified and discussed at least ten additional hypothetical existential threats which had manifested themselves since the bomb.
The threat which you would fear is the one which provides an insufficient timeline during which trial and error scientific processes could identify cause, could implement a solution, and neutralize the threat. You would also fear the one which could instantly eradicate the very infrastructure and vehicles which science has created that would normally provide the antidote. We're talking about a global threat which would nearly instantly reverse mankind's progress back into the bronze age, before there was even any reaction time.
There are certainly crazy, disenchanted individuals, (suicidal psychopaths) who feel that their group has no vested interests in the world continuing as it is, and those are the types whom we need to worry about, should our new technologies ever fail to detect a sufficiently large scale effort. Generally, throughout the history of mankind, the intelligent, the level headed and rational ones amongst us have been able to exert their influences in the favor of survival of the species.
BB
Hmmm. Well....
ReplyDeleteConnie, as a long time subscriber to Analog with all that stuff that 75% of the United State population couldn't begin to understand written by scientists that are tops in their field, I can truly offer you some interesting scenarios:
1) 10,000 to 15,000 years from now an ice age will grip the earth. If you've been watching Cosmos you will know that we've had several of those and in at least one of those, the earth was frozen solid, killing all life from the planet. The one facing us in the future is destined to put a mile to a mile and a half of ice over Manhattan. Maybe in the future there will be something to remediate the situation. We could call it "The Manhattan Project".
2. About 10 million years from now, it appears that a nearby neutron star (actually a binary cluster) will be a lot more nearby than it is now and will swipe our green / blue little planet with neutron radiation, killing all life within nano seconds.
3. Any day now (although we've pretty much mapped them out and there doesn't seem to be an immediate danger -- like in the next 10 years or so) a giant asteroid could, again, strike the earth, leaving it a dusty mess or even breaking it in pieces.
4. Any day now, a massive coronal ejection could occur like it did in the 1850s (only stronger) and wipe out all electronic devices and send us back to the stone age. Many people would starve to death and there would be diseases without any modern medicines to treat them. Who knows what the wild animals would do to humanity?
5. Radical Islam could finally have its way with us. I mention this because it is not in any of the Armstrongists' world view scenario.
6. The Chinese will become the dominant super power and reduce the United States and the Commonwealth to 4th world countries or worse, thereby wiping out any prophetic prognostications of the Armstrongists. Josh Whedon is a smart guy and this is the premise for his Firefly series and movie (behind the scenes). He believes that China will achieve ascendancy and this is also the premise behind many of the Analog science fiction stories set in the future as a given. The way things are now, it seems quite possible.
7. Then we will be entering the Oort Cloud some 50,000 years from now. Who knows what the dark and debris will do to us?
8. If all else fails, about 500 million years from now, the earth will be too hot for life. Lead will melt. The seas will have evaporated. The earth will be a hot dustball as the sun goes into helium fusion stage and expands to be a red dwarf.
If there's anything that I know, its that the Armstrongists do not understand science. Not really. They may use the tech gadgets that science produces, but they don't understand the scientific method, especially about making observations. They are very bad at it. Why should they be good at it? They live in a dysfunctional venue founded by a high school dropout after his psychotic break with committing incest with his daughter the first ten years of his ministry, plagiarizing absolutely every last doctrine from either E. G. White, the Jehovah's Witnesses and G. G. Rupert, allowing his son to date rape 200 Ambassador College Coeds over 10 years (GTA's own estimate) and have the absolute gall to die on us all before one single of his predictions came true.
I wish it were true that the LCG were virtually alone in their understanding of the end time, but, unfortunately, they have 699+ other sects of their cult competing with them to have the greatest success in their failure to predict the future.
It doesn't matter if some great catastrophic event does happen soon. What does matter is...NONE OF THESE FALSE PROPHETS WILL BE READY. They are too used to creature comforts which were made possible by real people really sacrificing to those bunch of ASSHOLES!! THE END.
ReplyDeleteSorry -- red giant.
ReplyDelete