The stories continue to flow out of the Living Church of God daily on the abusive techniques the LCG is using against its members.
When will Rod Meredith, Richard Ames, Doug Winnail and others stand up and say we are sorry, we have been wrong and we want to correct our mistakes? None of us here can ever imagine this happening. Rod Meredith and crew instead are digging their heals in and blaming this site and others for the discontent of their members. We have not caused the current crisis in the LCG. The members are coming to this blog and others because the LCG hierarchy will NOT listen to them without labeling them as heretics and kicking them out for bad attitudes.
Interestingly enough, the following letter was posted on James Malm's blog today. It is about the racist polices of the Living Church of God towards African-American members. Meredith continues to enforce the racist polices that he learned under Herbert Armstrong. Those racist ideas came directly as a result of the abominable teaching of British-Israelism and its white superiority.
The Living Church of God cruelty kicked out several African-American LCG members over this very issue. They brought forth their objections to it and out the door they went.
The letter on Malm's blog states:
I attended lcg church for aproximately eight years. I am a black man who attended sabbath services faithfully. I would always follow along through the scriptures with whom ever the speaker would be, and in doing so, I would only study what had been taught by way of lituriture that he would refer you to. Mr. Roderick Meredith would sometimes start fist pounding saying things like: “check up on me, check out what we say in the pages of your own bible”; or things like “brethren, we must warn our peoples”. Sometimes shouting and fist pounding. And we (blacks) heard this so much that we started talking among ourselves saying; “now wait a minute! Where are we in the scriptures? Surely whites are not the only ones in the bible! But thats all they’d stress”. So after so much talking over time, I started praying and asking our Lord; “why are we as a people looked down upon as we are, and even in the church, why are we persecuted more than any other people in this world”? Once, a time while taveling home from a feast site; I had two passengers riding who were of Phillipian desent. Somehow the races became the topic of conversation, I was blown away when the back seat passenger said: “you see Kennie, you people are from Ham, and this is why you all are under the curse!” I was almost angry enough to pull off the highway and put her out of my vehicle, but Jesus would not have done so. But this is what was and is still taught at lcg, that white people are the true Israelite people; as HWA has stated that his grandmother is on the lineage of King David; the throne of David even now sits in Wales! I was wow’d when I heard all this jiberish from Doug Winnail. But, when I heard him at our congregation speak about marriage, I just really was done. To say things like, people should stay with their own kind is not God like. I fill that he was sent there just to relay that message to blacks, to stay with your own.
So I then refused to invite my eldest son and his family to the church because his wife is white. But after alot of talking and praying about these things, I started to search the scriptures for myself, and low and behold, the Lord directed me to places in the bible that I had never been before! Scriptures that Mr Meredith, Doug Winnail, Richard Ames, and a host other ministers constantly danced around or quickly skimmed over picking and choosing always in certain areas of the Bible to get their point across, but never, never, not even once out of eight long years did they even remotely touch on certain scriptures.
He then goes on to write about his own interpretation of how the 12 tribes were formed by skin color. He falls into the same trap that Meredith is in. If the kingdom truly is what Scripture says it is, then this is what it will be like:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal. 3:28
In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him Acts 10:34-35
That also applies to race. Caucasians are not superior to blacks, Caucasians are not superior to Latino's, Asians, Indians or anyone else. Its irrelevant as to what a persons skin color is. If the kingdom is about finally being at rest with God, then what significance does skin color have to do with it? For Meredith, Armstrong, Craig White and others it is important that whites occupy all leadership positions in the kingdom. According to them every single "hero" in the Bible, every prophet, every apostle, and every true convert were white.
20 comments:
BullSh-t level at defcon 1.
Most persecuted people?
What a joke.
Look around the world and see who is persecuted for real.
It isnt the COGs, for sure!
I agree Anon. There are certainly far more Christians being persecuted around the world than this man. However, when you are a black COG member sitting in church and hear the racist bullshit of British Israelism then it is easy to see ones self persecuted.
As Armstrongism 1:1 says,
"I have fought the good fight, I have finished off the races..."
One of the many recent insanities in the Charlotte LCG involved a bright, articulate, well-groomed black guy who was very ambitious to advance into the ministry, but got caught in the middle of conflicts between the racist Rod Meredith and the politically correct Doug Winnail.
Winnail was so desperate to groom a clean black Uncle Tom, to counter perceptions of LCG racism, that he favored the guy over several far more competent and ambitious deacon-wannabes and sermonette-men, even after it became clear that the guy didn't believe several core ACOG doctrines.
When jealous congregation members went to Meredith to complain about Winnail's favoritism of the sharp young black guy, Meredith put the brakes on the guy's advancement. Then, as soon as he realized LCG wasn't going to hire him into its ministry, he started spreading his Black Jesus ideas as widely as he could, and he managed to convince several non-white Charlotte members of his ideas.
This partially stems from the Armstrong model for Bible study. Machine gunning of scriptures just to illustrate or "prove" whomever's point, and usually reading British Israelism into it all and filtering everything through the Old Covenant! That's why Armstrongites perceive things as they do. If you read the Bible as you would any other book, you come away with a completely different understanding than what you get from the practice of "proof texting".
The real question should be are there actually even any white people in the Bible? I believe the notion that there are is based on an artificial construct. Armstrongites make the typical Middle Eastern types upon whom the Bible is based into Indo Europeans through their British Israelism, and suddenly, everybody is "white", most ridiculously Manasseh and Ephraim, whose mother was Egyptian!
You might say that the Romans were white. But, in Armstrongism, Italians are called "gentiles", possibly because their skin tone more closely matches that of Arabs, some of the Jews, Assyrians, and Armenians. So, using the Bible to support white superiority is a real stretch! As nearly as I can tell, we ain't in it! However, Christians are, and they come in all colors.
BB
More convincing data that Armstrongism is totally wrong and shouldn't exist.
Strange, the CoG7D doesn't have this problem (think "Whaid Rose").
At best these people are fallen from grace at worst, they never got that high in the first place.
Only a racist would come up with the concept of a "chosen people." It's that simple. My own theory, is that in the biblical schema white=good and black=evil, so if your skin is white, this signifies god's favor, and if it's black, this signifies god's stigmatization.
Skin color is more or less related to what latitude you're adapted to live at (though this is not perfectly so).
So, the famously pale people in the British Isles are 60-80% R1b, but the Kirdi people of northern Cameroon who are 90-95% R1b, are black, not white!
$64,000 question...of what race was their near-east Asian R1b patriarch ancestor? ??? Those who migrated to northern Europe lost their pigmentation, and those who migrated to sub-Saharan Africa gained pigmentation.
The upshot, however, is that the different morphologies of the "races" isn't even necessarily an indicator of one's ancestry. Given enough time, a man can have great...greatgrandchildren that are no longer of the same "race."
"Slavery in antiquity was this: "You lose. Our civilization has conquered yours. You now work, you the victims, you work for us. You are machines from now on. You work under our lash. You build our system for us. You build our walls, you dig our canals. Woe to the conquered." You can easily see how it happened.
It is only with the arrival of [Abrahamic monotheistic] religion that it is said in holy books, certain people are born as a race or people to be the masters and others to be dispensable, either to be slaughtered or when most of the slaughter is done, for the remainder to be kept, often female, as slaves. In every holy book from the original holy books of the Jewish people to those, wrongly adopted, in my viewpoint, mistakenly adopted by the christian religion, to the koran, to the book of mormon, slavery is mandated, and those who are born into it, usually by a different colored skin, are clearly, plainly, identified, usually as the sons of Ham or some such nonsense. Pseudo-ethnological garbage. That's what's different.
So, in the waning centuries of this foul system, it is true that some christians out of conscience turned against it. Wilberforce is one of the best known. William Lloyd Garrison who later became a secular humanist is another very famous case. But it was never not the case, and this is what Abraham Lincoln pointed out with such irony and bitterness, it was never not the case that all the justifications for slavery were religious too. And that all the leaders of it, and all the profiteers of it were taking their texts and their authority from the holy scriptures. That's what you can't get out of. And that's what you can't accuse the Babylonians and the Sumerians of doing."
— Christopher Hitchens
i grew up a black man in the original wwcg and also briefly attended lcg as an adult; is there racism there? certainly; but i never allowed their behavior to deter me from core beliefs.
i honestly believe i could have been a minister in lcg if i played the game but i never was a team player kind of guy. i later was booted out from lcg because of certain aspects of my appearance that i refused to change.
years later i discovered their facebook page and i began posting numerous comments on racism in the lcg; they did not like my postings and eventually deleted them all and blocked me from any further posts, which i found rather comical since none of my posts were derogatory or profane, merely critical of the way they ignore racial problems in america and how their webpages and literature are generally eurocentric.
"I was blown away when the back seat passenger said: “you see ... you people are from Ham, and this is why you all are under the curse!”"
That is a very racist thing to say. The LCG member is most justified to complain about and expose this disgusting and bigoted attitude.
***
Forbidding interracial marriage in America was always done as an attempt to keep African Americans in an oppressed and subservient condition. It was always done to shame them and to viciously and falsely accuse them of being somehow "inferior" to white Europeans in order to justify and minimize mean spirited behavior against them.
This was true under slavery, Jim Crow segregation and today among some people who refuse to change their ways.
To insinuate that "people should stay with their own kind" is a terrible and bigoted thing to say.
Armstrongites who condemn interracial marriage say that practice came from the Bible. Why should we believe them? I am persuaded that even this is untrue. I am persuaded that this practice came from the particular kind of slavery inflicted upon African Americans in days gone by.
Forbidding interracial marriage is a vicious social scar upon society ultimately springing from the horrors of slavery inflicted upon African Americans.
Slavery had long existed since ancient times but the particular kind of slavery inflicted upon African Americans was especially nasty and horrifying as those innocent people were ripped away from their home and taken over an entire ocean to a life of slavery never to see home again.
It is most shameful that some Armstrongites continue to refuse to overcome the painful legacy of these atrocities and continue to perpetuate abusive behavior stemming back to those frightful events.
Wake up, you who are supposed to lead LCG! Forbidding and/or denigrating interracial marriage is a terrible thing to do. Stop it right now.
When Living was still Global they had a young black minister who believed that the side locks Jesus may have worn were dreadlocks.
He taught a kind of Rastafarian Jesus and that Israelites were Africans transplanted to the holy land.
Complaints to HQ made no difference. The guy only left when he converted to another religion entirely. He had been a complete jerk as a minister and had a lot of contempt for the congregants.
It showed many that the ministry at HQ didn't care what their outlying people preached as long as those tithes and offerings kept pouring in.
Anon 3:46 said "Only a racist would come up with the concept of a "chosen people." I would suggest that it would be racist only if they were chosen because they were said to be superior to others. Israel, as I understand it, was not chosen because it was better or bigger than other groups. Also, I have written to Randy Kobernat of the letter answering department of LCG and asked several times how the ten tribes could have been lost when II Chron 35 Israel and Judah celebrated Passover together. In Ezra 2:2 and I Chron 9:2 they are seen back in the land of Israel. He has yet to respond.
Anon 3:22, you are exactly right. Also, in Zech. 7:1-3, two men are dispatched from Bethel (a city in the covenant land of Ephraim) to ask of the priests and elders in Jerusalem if God's people were to continue to mourn and fast in the fifth month, commemorating the anniversary of the captivity and exile. This is set shortly following the end of the captivity. These men, having returned to their covenant lands, are named Sharezer, and Begem Melek, which are Babylonian names!
By that point in time, neither the Assyrians, nor the Babylonians had the power to continue their subjugation of the Israelites and Jews, and all captives were released to return to their homeland.
The lost ten tribes did not become lost as a complete racially or genetically pure community that exists today having forgotten their identity and customs, waiting to be discovered. The lost ten tribes became lost to assimilation! Some travelled south at the invitation of righteous Kings of Judah to avoid the sins of Jereboam the son of Nebat, and were assimilated by the Jews, as were the Benjamites, and Levites. Others were assimilated through the diaspora.
The British people were already a homogenous melting pot of Picts, Celts, Normans, and Anglo Saxons by the time the new world was being colonized. It is ludicrous to assume that there were distinct, genetically and racially pure Manassites, and Ephraimites present in England by that time in history, and if even if there had been, the melting pots have continued the assimilation process throughout the past 4-500 years. White people, though some might claim to have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, are in reality "Heinz 57" in their geneologies.
As history progresses, the theories embraced by and taught by Herbert W. Armstrong, used as his hook for coercion, become more and more untenable. As of right now, they have been relegated to "flat earth" status for those concerned with reality. But, don't expect any current practitioners of Armstrongism to acknowledge that. They are still waiting for the Germans.
BB
Meanwhile the COGs are like "we're going to be persecuted... someday... anyone? Hey, we're right here! You can persecute us if you want to! Really! Uh... guys?"
the genetic mixture factor is also true for european jews, but they still are considered jews; its all subjective.
"One of the many recent insanities in the Charlotte LCG involved a bright, articulate, well-groomed black guy who was very ambitious to advance into the ministry, but got caught in the middle of conflicts between the racist Rod Meredith and the politically correct Doug Winnail."
It is of note that the man referred to in this post was not an "Uncle Tom" and had enough self respect to leave LCG after being offended over and over and over again. It's called integrity and character. I have a lot of respect for him and his wife having the courage to call wrong behavior wrong. So many others in LCG know things are wrong but just swallow hard and maintain the status quo. There is an epidemic of cowardice.
Tyranny reigns when good people stand by and do nothing.
Anon3:22-
"Anon 3:46 said "Only a racist would come up with the concept of a "chosen people." I would suggest that it would be racist only if they were chosen because they were said to be superior to others. Israel, as I understand it, was not chosen because it was better or bigger than other groups."
The kingdom of Israel fell in 720. When that happened, Judah, which had only been a backwater of Israelite hegemony previously, had an influx of people who fled the Assyrian horde, and rose to a position of prominence in the region it had never occupied before. This is when the OT began to be written as political propaganda to make Judah superior to Israel and both of them superior to their neighbors.
Israel and Judah were two separate Canaanite dominions that had never been united before. The OT was written to unite these two now-coexisting populations with a common, but false, history, to honor the old places of worship in both regions, to create a sense of "us vs. them" ("chosen" vs. "not chosen")in relation to the immigrants newly settled in the Israel territory by the Assyrians and of Philistia (all of which Judah wanted to annex), but most of all, to create a legend about the superiority of Judah over Israel, by claiming that the gods they held in common had since old times given the "scepter" to Judah, and by creating the tale of an amazing Judahite king (David).
And perhaps you didn't read the Hitchens quote, so I'll belabor the portion that's relevant to your above quoted statement:
"It is only with the arrival of [Abrahamic monotheistic] religion that it is said in holy books, certain people are born as a race or people to be the masters and others to be dispensable, either to be slaughtered or when most of the slaughter is done, for the remainder to be kept, often female, as slaves. In every holy book from the original holy books of the Jewish people to those, wrongly adopted, in my viewpoint, mistakenly adopted by the christian religion, to the koran, to the book of mormon, slavery is mandated, and those who are born into it, usually by a different colored skin, are clearly, plainly, identified, usually as the sons of Ham or some such nonsense."
Now, those "holy" texts were intended as a polemic against the neighbors of a late monarchic Judah with ambitions to slaughter and enslave them and take their lands, just as any other ancient state with ambitions would have done. However, with that comes the propagandistic "superiority" also common to every other ancient state with ambition. The difference is, people have taken them out of context and misunderstood them, and thought that such polemical propaganda was actual history containing universal truths, such that they applied at all times to those fortunate to identify themselves in the text as "superior" or misfortunate enough to be identified by others as "inferior."
"[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts." —Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.
Slavery in the OT was not like slavery in the U.S. One became a slave to pay off debt. You could not abuse a slave (more accurately an indentured servant), kill them, etc. When the debt was paid you had to give them money to start their lives over and a "slave" could choose to remain with the servant. Some are in the same position today. They can't retire because they are in debt and can't afford to retire.
"Slavery in the OT was not like slavery in the U.S. One became a slave to pay off debt. You could not abuse a slave (more accurately an indentured servant), kill them, etc. When the debt was paid you had to give them money to start their lives over and a "slave" could choose to remain with the servant."
You're cherrypicking. That only applies to male Hebrew slaves!
What about female Hebrew sex slaves? (Or wives, same difference...)
Exodus 21:
7 If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do.
8 If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,[a] he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her.
9 If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter.
10 If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights.
11 If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.
What about foreign slaves?
Leviticus 25:
44 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.
45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.
46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
Can you murder a foreign slave? Absolutely! Just say he "lingered" for a day or two..
Exodus 21:
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result,
21 Notwithstanding, if he continues a day or two, he shall not be punished, since the slave is his property.
Busted!
So much willful ignorance.
Hello our "Black Friends", I am glad you went to the scripture's to find your answer, which is the correct one in Gal 3 and Acts 10. There will be no difference between white, black, gentile or jew, you will be rewarded individually on how much you place your efforts to God and Christ. That is what the New Testament TEACHES. This is what was understood under Mr Armstrong, who visited all nations. I don't know what LCG's teachings are at this time. But certainly
HWA had the view of the Bible. I hope the lady in question thanked you for the ride, she obviously did not have a good understanding of the scriptures. So many make comments about the Bible they never read. Remember you are Christ's bought and paid for, he will never let you be persecuted beyond measure and you are a "Spiritual Israelite". Don't let others discourage you, you will surely be rewarded, may be even more so when you will lead your people to Christ in the Millenium. After all Christ through God the Father created all of us.
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