UCG has some "papers" submitted to them that they are going to be discussing. Not a single one of these is of any actual importance.
Project 54: Age of the Universe: Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is a popular belief, and it can be compelling on the surface, but it collapses billions of years of recorded data into a space of 1,000 years before the flood. Many forms of dating the earth are dismissed. The Achilles heel of the YEC is the speed of light and the diameter of the universe being 27.2 billion light years across. YEC also doesn’t consider the rebellion of Satan and his demons.
Project 46: Unleavened Bread Services for Seven Days: Proposed that Mr. Armstrong made a bad decision to reverse his custom of holding daily services during UB. (Actually it was more of a localized custom [i.e., Ambassador College] done for a brief number of years.) There is no scriptural directive for daily offerings as there is during the FOT.
Project 11: Passover and the NTBMO Are on the Same Evening: An opinion has been making the rounds that Israel kept the first Passover, staying in their houses all night, and somehow also spoiled the Egyptians that night, and traveled with their animals to assemble at Rameses that night and all marched out of Rameses all on the same night. That idea attempts to be reinforced with a first century Jewish tradition of the time of the killing of Passover lambs. Believers of this concept attempt to impose events from during the Sinai Covenant onto the observance of the New Covenant Passover. First Corinthians 11:23 cuts through it all as it states, “The Lord Jesus on the same night He was betrayed took bread . . . ” We keep the New Covenant Passover. We teach what Scripture teaches and observe accordingly.
14 comments:
'UCG has some "papers" submitted to them that they are going to be discussing. Not a single one of these is of any actual importance.'
Yeah - is the universe 6,000 years old or Billions of year? That has no bearing on anything, has it?
For political reasons, all conservative doctrinal changes like these ones from zealots are DOA. You're also not going to see them signing up for not eating at restaurants on sabbaths and holy days, and many others.
For financial reasons, UCG wants to move in liberal directions, not conservative ones. They want to make it easier to sell UCG to the masses, not harder. And the more they can swell their ranks by selling it to the masses, the better pension they can count on. The people running UCG aren't getting any younger yaknow.
Project 11: Passover and the NTBMO Are on the Same Evening:
This raging controversy has been a long time in Christianity. I first encountered it as a 24 year old pastor in Ohio where a member was obsessed with how and when to keep the Passover. Long story but it ended with police being called to services to calm him down and his threatening to put me on 60 Minutes over this stupid issue. That was the popular thing to do in the day.
The problem is that the Gospels give different times in the texts for events. Matthew, Mark and Luke say one thing and John another. (I have no intention of opening this can of worms here. I'm sure others here will)
It was my first lesson in how divisive and church ripping contradictions or at best , not easily discerned accounts of the same events can be. The Gospels are rife with contradictions. They are NOT eyewitness accounts, the names being affixed to anonymous Gospels decades later. No Gospel claims to be an eyewitness account and you never see, "And then Jesus and I went to Galilee", or "Then Jesus said to me..." etc. They are more passion plays than anything with much cobbled together from OT scriptures instead of any actual observations on the scene. Nuther long story but fascinating. All of the birth credentials of Jesus are made up from OT scripture as no one has a clue when or how Jesus was born etc. The Passion accounts are equally muddled in chronology and events portrayed.
The Gospels are not like four views of the same accident as often goes the analogy, unless the analogy goes like this:
"Wow, that was quite a crash between those two cars"
"Yes, but it was a car and bus stupid"
"Um..excuse me, truck and bus"
"What crash?"
sounds like they're on the right track with those 3 items...
the young earth folks are really messed up...
while it would be permissible to have services every day of ULB, there is no biblical mandate for it...
and people like Dankenbring keep the passover/ntbmo thing all stirred up...if they would just THINK...(I know that's asking a lot)
'UCG has some "papers" submitted to them that they are going to be discussing. Not a single one of these is of any actual importance.'
Yeah - is the universe 6,000 years old or Billions of year? That has no bearing on anything, has it?"
LOL I enjoy the reasonings of the Creational Evolutionist, Young Earth Evolutionists, Old Earth Evangelicals, Evangelical Crelutionists and all those who believe they can both believe in Creationism and Genesis 1.
Very much like those who think they don't have to take the story of Adam and Eve literally not realizing then they don't have to take Original Sin literally and thus the sacrifice of Christ too literally.
But all of this is covered on the "Surprising God" Blog where humans come up with their religio-scientific mixes and surprise God ....and man. :)
It's official. The papers are useful for lining the bottom of bird cages and wrapping fish. Also recycle. Other than that....
Concerning the age of the universe, well, it's eternal. It has always existed. No need for creation or a Creator. It has always been. A new theory. The math works better than other theories. Still under peer review (a euphemism for 'cover up' since it doesn't fit with the mainstream, but eventually... and by the way String Theory is unnecessary, glad you didn't ask). Nevertheless, the visible universe is 93 billion light years wide and current estimate is 156 billion light years wide (counting what we can't see with a hasty thumbnail estimate). It's actually infinite, but forget that, since nobody here can imagine that (while some CAN believe in an infinite God for which compelling evidence is somewhat lacking and whose record in the Bible is, at best, irretrievably garbled in an exercise in inspiration gone wrong).
Moving on, if you are going to somewhat believe the record (not on compelling evidence of course) you can ONLY conclude what Orlin Grabbe knew back in 1974 that the Lord's Supper was kept on the 13th of what we call Nisan, the Passover and the beginning of the Days of Unleavened Bread began on the 14th and the Night to be Mostly Much Observed by ancient Israel and not Gentiles, occurred on the 15th. Of course, this totally ignores Chronicles in the Old Testament proving conclusively that the Israelites were NOT captive in Egypt and there was NO Exodus. This renders the whole topic moot, so keeping the Days of Unleavened Bread based on a nonevent is rather silly. And by the way, it's easy to prove the Jewish Calendar wrong, since not even they believe in it.
Just because a paper has been submitted doesn't necessarily mean that what the paper's conclusion is will actually be implemented by the COG.
There is no evidence that the universe is eternal. If it were, it would have long ago succumbed to entropy. Nothing is known from physics that counteracts the effect of entropy so that the Universe would be rebuilt and re-organized after becoming totally entropic. The universe had a beginning although it is difficult for time bound creatures to imagine. At that "beginning point" there was no spacetime.
While Armstrongists accept the great expanse of time for the age of the universe, they lose it by incorporating their concept of the Satanic rebellion into the scheme of things. There is nothing in the geologic record that indicates a halcyon period when the earth was first created "to be inhabited." And this period abruptly disrupted by a great upheaval associated with the rebellion. We find catastrophism but it does not fit this theological model.
I recall a discussion many years ago with a friend in high school. He had stated that his family had recently converted to Catholicism. That was almost a buzz word for people attending the WCG because of HWA's teaching on the whore of Bablylon, so I asked my friend how he liked the Catholic Church. He said that there was much more ritual and ceremony, things that were required and expected of them, and that these gave much greater depth of meaning to their faith.
I always recall that conversation whenever we hear and discuss the increasing amount of involvement and extra duties involved in Armstrongism. Extending the FOUB will accomplish exactly that. Unfortunately, most members will probably equate extra activity, extra obligation with greater depth and understanding. This, in a church that has already overwritten the Old Testament holy days in such a ham-fisted manner as to make them all about their own little group, and to make an egotistical man's plan into "God's Plan", and that man into an apostle. DUH!
BB
Well, you know, the old saying: Ignorance is no excuse.
Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.
For those whose minds are limited to the belief that there is nothing beyond their opinions:
So there.
Troglodyte.
The Big Bang is not considered to be a one time event. It is a repeating cycle. The doppler effect as it relates to perception of the light emitted by moving celestial objects is actually observable to the naked eye, let alone through powerful telescopes.
BB
Just considering the possible outcome of the research - New Truth!; it dies a quiet death; it maintains the status quo; like the STP it gets canned and the evidence destroyed.
Decades ago at a first or last day ULB service, an elderly lady mentioned how members used to meet each day of ULB. She was scant on details, and no one else seemed to know about it, which left people speculating on what about used to happen...
Hoss, I can answer that. I think it was 1965 in Portland, Oregon. Herbert Armstrong and Loma were there for the whole week of the Days of Unleavened Bread. I rode up in the elevator with Loma Armstrong. I seem to remember there were two services every day.
And near the end, Hebert Armstrong announced that there would be NO MORE WEEK LONG SERVICES during the Days of Unleavened Bread... "Spokane can stay home!" he said rather emphatically, and mentioned, I think, two other cities.
So that was the end of that. I had attended the very last week long Days of Unleavened Bread before my very first Feast of Tabernacles at Squaw Valley.
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