In the 1970's Worldwide under Herbert Armstrong had one chance to grow up. The Systematic Theology Project, under Dr. Robert Kuhn and others, had the potential of bringing WCG into the modern world. Systematic theology is "a branch of theology concerned with summarizing the doctrinal traditions of a religion (such as Christianity) especially with a view to relating the traditions convincingly to the religion's present-day setting."
HWA crushed it in his ignorance and arrogance and condemned the WCG and all it's splits, splinters and slivers to a continuation of the ignorance and arrogance we see today in so called theologians such as Dave Pack, Gerald Flurry, Ron Weinland , Robert Thiel and a host of wannabes. None of these men are trained in the rigors of theology and history much less that of good science done well. And yet they know it all...just ask them
Theirs is the Chaotic Theology Project and it won't end well for any of them.
Herbert Armstrong, as well as these clones (get it over with...clowns) of his, view themselves only as the source of final truth. I can not imagine any of them ever sitting down with the great minds of cosmology, physics , paleontology or any other hard scientific discipline and daring to tell these men and women how it all was back in the the garden where "there were two trees....." If they did they would be met with the derision they deserve and put nicely in their theological, scientific, philosophical and historical places.
Dr. Robert Kuhn went on to continue the quest for real answers to real questions in the real world we see around us.
Kuhn first came to prominence in 1972 when "Why the Vast Difference between Animal Brain and Human Mind?" appeared in The Plain Truth magazine published by Ambassador College, an institution of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). The WCG's Systematic Theology Project[6] was coordinated by Kuhn, but later banned by WCG Founder Herbert W. Armstrong. Kuhn severed his connection to the WCG and its affiliates, including the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation (classical music concerts, featuring musicians including Vladimir Horowitz and Luciano Pavarotti), which Kuhn had created and managed.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9StMQ79LtEvlrskzjoYbQ
Robert Lawrence Kuhn[1] (born 1944) is a public intellectual, international corporate strategist andinvestment banker. He has a doctorate in brain research and is the author and editor of over 25 books. He is a long-time adviser to China's leaders and the Chinese government, to multinational corporationson China strategies and transactions, and is a frequent commentator on China politics, economics, business, finance, philosophy and science. He is a columnist for China Daily and South China Morning Post and appears on the BBC, CNN, China Central Television, Bloomberg and other major media. Kuhn is the creator and host of the CCTV News show Closer to China with R.L.Kuhn.[2] Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of the public television series Closer to Truth, which presents scientists and philosophers discussing fundamental issues (cosmos, consciousness, philosophy/religion).[3] His essays are featured on LiveScience.com and Space.com.[4]
Kuhn received a bachelor's degree in human biology from Johns Hopkins University (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1964, a PhD in anatomy / brain research from the University of California at Los Angeles' Brain Research Institute in 1968 and a master of science in management as a Sloan fellow from theMIT Sloan School of Management in 1980.[5]
Dr. Kuhn's work can be found at:
27 comments:
Worldwide church of God can not grow up if God do not call the people in it. That church was not business but religion organization. Only Satanic church are growing up because he deceived people to believe rubbish, like Catholic and orthodox, Jehovah witnesses and Pentecostals.
The theme of this evokes certain images. Like Bernie Madoff actually becoming a legitimate financial consultant, Charles Manson becoming a respected mainstream spiritual advisor, or actors Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul (Starsky and Hutch) graduating from the L.A. Police Academy and becoming actual detectives.
The fact is, transformation between fake, pretend, or scam, and legitimate is nearly impossible. The finished product would always be questionable. It's why under the later Tkach corrections, the "new" WCG failed to become a serious endeavor. Once certain things became verified and realized, it was obvious that there were others who had decades of experience in teaching and applying those things, others who had not been exposed to all the toxicity.
The STP was a baby step when perceived from an evolutionary or growth standpoint.
HWA knew that the original scam he had designed and created would go on quite successfully, as is, and unimproved. Even baby steps would have diminished its potential. Any attempt at legitimacy would have robbed it of its power. Witness what happened to Ambassador College as a result of accreditation. Once that promised, deliberately unreachable goal was realized, the college did not last long at all.
BB
Anyone know what year Khun quit hwa-wcg?
Byker Bob probably never heard of Erik Estrada from Chip fame.
This week I was talking to consultants experienced in succession in family businesses.
I believe 90% of WCG problems would be very recognizable in any family firm.
You have the founder. Stubborn uneducated entrepreneurial type breaking all established rules. Business grows big. Managerial type needs to take over to get some order in the chaos.
HWA unfortunately mixed up "image or drawing power" with "education and managerial skill", and of course "faith, instead of planning." A great example to every stuffy rusted manager. But you gotta know when to quit. No cardinals should be appointed above the age of 75 and yes even a pope can retire. There should be a multitude of advisors with real legal powers and of course a set of possible successors to the founder.
HWA was so right to never trust anyone educated in the WCG system. He trusted on the best of the best. In his case Arthur Andersen. Well, we know what happened there.
When I read STP for the first time it felt like I had acquired some of those mediaeval transcripts burned by the inquisition and found centuries later by Dan Brown in some old archive in Naples. After reading it I just concluded that it was a somewhat boring attempt by someone with an actual education to bring some structure into the whole shebang.
In that sense indeed it could have been "WCG's chance to grow up from an entrepreneurial to a more manageable edifice. HWA recognized it for what it was. It would take away his "special calling" as a "media entrepreneur for God."
When Tkach hired BBDO for WTM markets one could easily sense that the original "gut feeling entrepreneurship" had gone. This search for markets warranted comparative Nielsen figures to Chrystal Cathedral etc. HWA would never compare himself but search for and live his unique selling proposal.
nck
Khun was a typical WCG asshole!
Ilija Korac is delusional.
Nicely stated NCK
Nck ~ I never met or knew Erik personally, but I was fairly close to one of his ex-girlfriends.
We did have to deal with an Erik Estrada imposter or impersonator back when I was working security at the Academy Awards. I thought it was strange when "Erik" walked up the red carpet in his CHiPs uniform blowing kisses to everyone and throwing his gloves up into the bleachers, but failed to stop him. Security at the entrance to the auditorium busted him, because he had no tickets for the event. It actually made the L.A. Times. The media did not like the fact that there was security or rules they had to follow and took potshots at us whenever they had the opportunity. In this case, there was a little blurb stating, "You could tell who the security guards were the evening of the event. They were the ones wearing sunglasses at night."
BB
nck said: After reading [STP] it I just concluded that it was a somewhat boring attempt by someone with an actual education to bring some structure into the whole shebang.
My impression also, only that it was accompanied by additional radical reform that infuriated the salesman from Des Moines.
It takes a lot of skill to financially tap a legendary Confidence man like HWA. But Rader & Kuhn appear to have done it: AFAIK they were both not only on the payroll, but cajoled the old man into funding their AICF - with all its personal executive perks that accrued to Rader & Kuhn (and others?)
Kuhn, though educated in biology, moved to finance by the 80s, then later consultation, writing, and television production. His M&A firm was acquired by Citi Corp for $200m in 2000 (perfectly timed, just before the Dot-Com crash.)
We think of key people like Rader, HWA, Tkach as being rich - and indeed they are/were, but Kuhn's net worth must be greater than all these combined!
Thank you very much.
I love the quotes you introduce. Especially the Estrada story.
But hey. Dr Kuhn has been invoked. So there must not be room for further idle chit chat.
In the end the STP, WCG and all our existence is an attempt.
Dr Kuhn probably knew early on that all life stems from one cell. That cell splits and multiplies in another identical cell. Therefore the ultimate purpose of life is the sharing, multiplication, continuation and perpetuation of information.
It is no coincidence that Dr Kuhn ultimately made his great fortune from Mergers and Acquisitions. Which is one way of defining life and the perpetuation of motion.
As an expert in brains he knew that information is passed and accessed through electrical impulses. Every cell knows and talks to every other cell. They exchange a thousand bits of information between them per second. Cells group together, forming a giant web of communication which in turn forms matter.
.
Cells get together, take on one form.
Deform. Reform. makes no difference, it’s all the same.
Then he met HWA. The great philosopher on the “human potential.” Working from material buildings adorned with sculpures named “Aspiration.” Through “spirit” he tried accessing previously unexplored cerebral zones.
Now the basic stumbling block for growth in perception is that humans consider themselves unique, so mankind rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness.
‘One’ is their unit of measure, but it’s not.
All social systems we put into place (like a church) are a mere sketch. One plus one equals two, that’s all we’ve learned.
But one plus one has never equaled two. There are in fact no numbers and no letters. We’ve codified our existence to bring it down to human size to make it comprehensible. We’ve created a scale so that we can forget the unfathomable scale of our existence, the universe our brainpower.
But if humans are not the unit of measure, and the world isn’t governed by mathematical laws, what governs all that?
Try and film a car speeding down the road.
Speed up the image infinitely, then the car disappears.
So what proof do we have of its existence?
TIME gives legitimacy to its existence. Time is the only true unit of measure. It gives proof to the existence of matter. Without time, we don’t exist.
Time is unity.
(re: the true significance of 1975, time cycles, the movement of the stars and the timetables in the book of Revelation, Or, why this very night ministers will claim that God has chosen “a place” to gather in “unity” on his “specific time.”)
The tree of knowledge however is so huge that mankind was and perhaps is still not ready for it. We’re so driven by power and profit. Given man’s nature, the comprehension of all knowledge might bring us only instability and chaos.
The true facts however are that ignorance brings chaos, not knowledge.
Therefore the ancients stated that God is not the author of confusion. The feud about the systemization of the acquired body of knowledge of WCG was therefore, in the greater scheme of things, a reflection of this paradox.
nck
Dennis, thank you for another excellent post! There is so much to learn for the curious, questioning mind. Discoveries will continue to develop through research, exploration and experimentation of exceptional human minds that have a need to know.
Religious sects and Bible study produce nothing of value.
How long will it take for religion to go away?
Time as we know it is relative to Earth. God is not bound by the time-space continuum. "A day is as a thousand years" cannot constitute specificity. It is an ancient and primitive way of expressing how an omnipresent being would experience relativity, but could also be literally true of a huge planet, or one with extremely slow rotation, assuming the planet rotates around a single sun. Yet, ignoramusses use this as a constant equation in order to arrive at "6,000 years for man, 1,000 years for God" patterned after the human week in an effort to figure out the unknowable time of Jesus' return via mathematics.
God is not the author of confusion? Of course He is! On numerous occasions (Tower of Babel), He authored confusion and inflicted it upon His enemies. Jesus used it, too. That was the stated purpose of His parables which He later privately shared with the disciples so that they would not also be confused. And, entropy (confusion; random state) is one of the natural states frequently found throughout God's creation. There are statements in the Bible which originally applied to one specific set of circumstances, and literalists lift them and turn them into all-purpose paradigms. Anyone who ever read the childs book "Epaminondas" knows better than to do this. Some day, hopefully we can get past all of the cliches. But, hey, "Let the dead bury the dead!".
Regarding Dr. Kuhn. Like other church luminaries, we tend to permanently claim and embrace him as our own. But I wonder what value the good doctor himself attaches to his Ambassador experience. Seems like by this point in time, that would constitute a very small blip on his employment history, and career in general. The fact that he shifted from brain science to high end financial consultation would seem to support that line of thought. He may even be like some of the rest of us who disguises or fails to mention what we have now come to call "Embarrassing College".
Also, the drive towards power and profit are simply man's only means of engineering his own security. The problem inherent in that is that in order for humanity to work as a successful ecological system, there must be varying layers of intelligence and skill sets. Not all layers are capable of wielding power or creating profit, so consquently the rich and powerful who are also healthy both mentally and physically generally are the ones who come closest to security.
So many yet persistent things which we were taught in the past are just plain wrong!
BB
MEST, nck! Matter, energy, space, and time. That's one thing that L. Ron Hubbard got right!
BB
nck, 7 of 9 couldn't have said it better, except that she would have pointed out that even as nothing can exist if it has no time, it also couldn't exist if any of the other dimensions are absent.
For HWA to acknowledge the correctness of anything in the STP would mean that he was not who he claimed to be, God's end time spokesman who God revealed lost truths to. The same with the Pope. Once you acknowledge an error in one area of theology you open up the flood gates.
A comment on these two statments
Religious sects and Bible study produce nothing of value.
How long will it take for religion to go away?
I believe it is unlikely that religion will ever go away. I can believe this is due to the fact that religion is the foundation for morality in human behavior and the hope of a life that is built on what is defined as unselfish love. When properly understood the biblical writings that are the foundation of the Christian faith offer a way of life that is worth living and gives hope of an eternal existence. Whether this is truth or fantasy makes little difference for the common everyday people sharing an existence together.
Looking at the world today I would say the biblical teachings should be revealed and promoted to create an awareness of unselfish love. AB
Read the article "What Science HAS Discovered About the Human Mind"
It explains why HWA's booklet was not scientific and why HWA should have known that the booklet was not scientific.
https://hwarmstrong.com/church-of-god-info/Animal-Intelligence.htm
IIija is right this time. I've said it here before. Time has run out so God has basically stopped calling people. Point to any other church world wide where the average age is 74. It's a old farts church.
Here is an example of the pure nonsense HWA wrote in his booklet on the Human mind, which is refuted in the article "What Science HAS discovered about the Human Mind".
HWA: "... the chimp's brain is slightly smaller [than ours]." (p. 4)
GL: To say that a chimp's brain in only "slightly" smaller is rubbish. The chimp's brain is only 1/3 the size of a human brain! That's a big difference. Why would Armstrong call that only "slightly" smaller? Was Armstrong trying to prove that the difference between humans and chimps must be spiritual, since our brains are (supposedly) only slightly different? Did he intentionally minimize and ignore brain differences in order to promote his view?
There is a LOT more in the article. Very informative.
And do you think a bunch of decrepit old farts would get by in Petra?
The guys in the video are following idiotic academic fads and don't have clue and have all been totally debunked. When will they ever learn? Get your head out of the mainstream media lie machine. I used to work for people like that. I was not impressed, and not intimidated. They lie and cheat and steal and back-stab and lie and cheat and steal some more. They are crooked lying ditto-head biased apes drunk on their own self-satisfied egos.
"It's a old farts church."
Better than a young fart organization. I prefer the wise to the arrogant.
Will religion ever go away?
No.
You cannot prove that no God exists.
People need hope in an afterlife, and they need to believe in justice. i.e. the good will be rewarded and the wicked punished. And science can determine laws of nature but not why nature exists in the first place. Some things are unknowable by science, so there is always room for faith.
Sorry. It's Gamaliel. Armstrongism was and is a man-made religion, it was time and date-stamped, and has now passed its expiration date. God is calling plenty of new Christians, most of whom are not mentally defective. He just never did call them to the falsely so-called "truth". That was all imaginary.
BB
Well,
7-9. Well it my attempt to upgrade the quality of comments if we are adressing the real deal. The Chinese are reading this thread after all.
Therefore despite the barrage of gems I will adress the comment: "Also, the drive towards power and profit are simply man's only means of engineering his own security."
The Chinese will agree that they cannot breathe in their cities if this continues.
Therefore I (nck) have lately studied another aspect of the human experience and the revolution of altruism.
"For generations, we have believed that man is driven by ruthless self-interest. But over the past decade, this idea has been increasingly challenged. New research from fields as diverse as political science, psychology, sociology and experimental economics is forcing us to rethink human actions and motivation.
There are strong biological reasons to believe why group co-operation may beat being selfish. Young children exhibit spontaneous altruistic behaviour with one year olds demonstrating the ability to form and commit to a joint goal with adults. There are countless examples of selfless behaviour in nature. Female lions will suckle other lions cubs, birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk and mice will starve rather than hurt other mice.
But if altruism is intrinsic in man and we can all benefit from acting in a selfless manner then a society structured around altruism should be possible. Best-selling author Matthieu Ricard is pioneering a new movement which uses cooperation to address global challenges. His works is now taught at Harvard Business School and has influenced everyone from the CEO of Mars to the economist Jeffrey Sachs.
My point. Personal "security" can also be achieved if the group or group layers as you call it work together to ensure that.
I guess it is possible in smaller scale social groupings. Interested in how the circular economy will work out through technological advances. Perhaps the Robots will share some of their profits if they put us out of work. Their algorythm must not deem us expandable. I like how both Noah and Moses negotiated that premiss of being expandable or even a detriment, with the all knowing Intelligence.
nck
8.42PM
Don't take it personally. About 20 years ago, the Holy spirit put the words into my mind of "brace yourself to become an old fart." That was good practical advice. And finally here I am, an old fart.
PS last week I discovered that the lead singer of the B grade girly group (Those Darlins) died from cancer. She was only 28. Worse things can happen than becoming old.
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