Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Church of God Spiritual Terrorist Blames Fires In California and Deaths Upon State of California Attacking the WCG in 1979



The liars and self-appointed spiritual terrorists that make up the leadership of so many of the Churches of God love to lay the blame on others for all kinds of ills in society when their own churches are cesspools of corruption and spiritual deviancy.

From Dave Pack to Bob Thiel to James Malm to Gerald Flurry, these spiritual terrorists work overtime to devalue God, their followers, and especially Jesus by taking no accountability for their own spiritual perversions that they try to pass off as truth every time their open their mouths.

This is the latest from the deluded liar based into Edmond Oklahoma, Gerald Flurry.  Every disaster that happens in California happens because the State of California dared to file a lawsuit against the church in 1979.

The Camp Fire is hardly a campfire, and Paradise does not quite live up to its name. The town in Northern California has been almost completely burned to the ground in less than a week.
Starting on November 8, the Camp Fire has scorched almost 120,000 acres in Butte County. However, it is not the size of this blaze that has attracted so much coverage and attention. Previous fires, such as the Carr Fire earlier this year, have charred more than double that area of land. What makes this fire stand out is its deadliness.
The fire has killed at least 42 people, making it the deadliest fire in California’s history. The previous record was 29. The official death toll could yet rise, as hundreds of people are still missing. Most of the bodies found have not yet been identified. Of the three whose names have been released, the average age is 63. Paradise is mostly a retirement town, making it likely that the average age of victims will remain high.
Beyond the Camp Fire’s deadliness, its destructiveness has also set a new record. The fire has reduced the town of Paradise to ruins, destroying over 7,000 buildings—the vast majority were homes. To put this into perspective, the previous record for destructiveness was set only 13 months ago. The Tubb Fire of October 2017 destroyed more than 5,500 structures—1,500 fewer than the Camp Fire.
Fires further south are also posing grave threats. The Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles has killed two people and burned over 90,000 acres. Smaller blazes, such as the Hill, Lynn and Rocky Peak fires, have also started recently.
President Donald Trump announced in a tweet on November 12 that he has approved a major disaster declaration for California, allowing the state to use federal money to fight the flames.
What the president and many others do not realize is that God will not bless California or save the state from its fiery plight at this time. In fact, He is doing the exact opposite. California has been experiencing one disaster after another for decades.
In his 2003 article “Is California Under a Curse?”, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry pointed out that California’s problems go much deeper than wildfires. Multiyear droughts, crippling debt and eruption of racial tensions in the early 1990s are just a few of the problems that California has struggled with. Out of all the states in the union, why is this state especially suffering so intensely?
In his article, Mr. Flurry pointed to the unfounded lawsuit that the state launched against the Worldwide Church of God and Pastor General Herbert W. Armstrong in 1979:
In an overt attack against Mr. Armstrong, the state of California, through the attorney general’s office, launched a massive lawsuit against the wcg in 1979. On January 3, that office initiated a sudden, armed assault on the Pasadena headquarters in an attempt to claim ownership of the Church’s property and assets as well as its continuing income—in violation of the U.S. Constitution. A receiver, secretly appointed by the court, tried to take over and operate God’s Church. Completely false, outrageous and baseless allegations of financial mismanagement were made—despite financial and all other required records having been regularly and voluntarily filed. No evidence of wrongdoing was ever found, and on Oct. 14, 1980, the attorney general dropped all charges and dismissed the case. Later, the higher appellate court ruled that the lawsuit was without foundation.
California is the only state that ever attacked Mr. Armstrong and his work. Actually, it attacked a lot more than that. California really attacked the living God!
The wcg was headquartered in Pasadena, California. While the wcg was under Mr. Armstrong’s leadership, God’s message was preached in California more than anywhere else in the world. But California rejected that message and actually attacked the Church! After Mr. Armstrong died, the very Church that he raised up rejected the truth that God had given through him.
God tells the people of Israel—the modern-day nations of America and Britain—that if they obey His law and live according to His way of life He will pour out great blessings on them. On the flip side, if they reject His way of life, terrible curses will come upon them. (Read Mr. Armstrong’s free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for proof of the modern identity of Israel.) These blessings and curses can be found in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Some of these blessings have to do with the weather. For example, in Leviticus 26:4-5 and Deuteronomy 28:11-12, God promises favorable weather conditions like rain in due season and productive farmland. But if the people do not follow God’s way of life, then God says that He will inflict drought and other weather-based curses (Leviticus 26:19-20; Deuteronomy 28:16-18, 24).
In Isaiah 29:6, God says that He will punish Israel “with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.”
We see a “flame of devouring fire” in California today! We have also seen curses in other states, such as hurricanes Michael, Harvey, Sandy and Katrina. Mr. Flurry warned in his article that the intensity of the curses on California are a sign of things to come for the rest of the peoples of Israel—and the whole world. He wrote:
When meting out punishment, God begins at His sanctuary (Ezekiel 9:6). The Church Mr. Armstrong founded no longer follows most of the doctrines he taught! In principle, God begins where His own sinning Church is, especially their headquarters in Pasadena. And in general, that principle applies to the state where God’s sinning headquarters is. So it is fitting that God begins the worst part of His punishing America in California. The headquarters of God’s own sinning, Laodicean Church is there.
Is there a connection to what is happening in California and God’s work through Herbert W. Armstrong? The whole world must come to see that there is! California was saturated with God’s warning message more than any other state. Mr. Armstrong also warned the whole world. Now God is going to humble Israel and also all of mankind.
If Gerald Flurry would stop whoring himself at his altar to Herbert Armstrong and started to actually follow that dude he is too embarrassed to even mention, he might find a saviour filled with mercy, grace and peace, all qualities totally missing in his church. If Flurry actually knew that inconvenient dude he would not feel the need to constantly be proclaiming his creature "christ"  is coming back because it is really really pissed and wants to kill off most of humanity because the world has rejected Mystery of the Ages and Herbert himself.

The same goes for Bob Thiel, the biggest psychotic narcissist the church has seen in decades.  Even the vain-glory of Dave Pack and Herbert Armstrong combined cannot match the putrid narcissism of Bob Thiel who has never seen such a magnificent COG leader in church history as he does every time he passes a mirror.  Thiel, like Flurry, believes that every fire, hurricane, volcano, tornado, and earthquake that happens is a sure sign his god is pissed at humanity.  Like Gerald Flurry, Bob Thiel has whored himself out to the erroneous teachings he learned from the past and thus envisions his god as this pissed off old dude parked on his ass in the third heaven who is just itching to obliterate all of humanity in order to prepare  a place for Thiel and his minions to rule the world from.

These spiritual deviates spend every waking minute terrorizing their followers with lies and new ways to bastardize scripture in order to use it as a weapon for their eternally pissed-off gods. This is what happens when all of these legalistic fools masquerade as God's most favorite men as they reject the very one they should be following.

Can you imagine any of these fools practicing love, grace and mercy? Can you imagine any of these spiritual terrorists getting off their self-appointed delicate asses and getting their hands dirty helping clean up Paradise, Malibu and Thousand Oaks? There were homes of church members and former members in all of these places that burned to the ground.  What greater way to show love than to go help a former COG member reconstruct their lives? What a shining example these men and their churches could make.  Do any of them have the balls to do such a thing?




24 comments:

  1. Claiming God is punishing California because of the 1979 receivership is childish vindictiveness. This is what happens to people who live in ivory towers. They are treated like royalty and with kid cloves, thinking it's the real world. I've seen it in work bosses.

    If anything bad happens to a member, the ministers habitually hijack the event, claiming it's because the member "didn't obey." It's Pavlovian conditioning 101.

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  3. It is scary how alleged Christians can think like this.
    I've encountered it before when a storm happened soon after HWA died. People openly wondered if God had sent the storm because Herbert had died as some kind of punishment on mankind.

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  4. If California were an independent nation it would be about the eighth most wealthy nation on the Earth. Not only is it extraordinarily nasty, vicious and vindictive to make this accusation during California's time of distress. It is also utterly absurd.

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  5. "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

    And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." Ezekiel 16:49-50

    i lived in cali for 11 years, and it was the worst experience of my life: the homelessness, poverty, violence, oppressive government, brutal cops, high cost of living, pollution, urban blight, gentrification, overcrowding, racism, desolate landscapes, you name it...

    in addition to all this you have the extreme rich living off the backs of the poor, ignoring their suffering; stealing land and resources, enslaving migrant labor, exploiting working class people, perpetrating injustice, you name it...

    and the political class lays around like a filthy bovine chewing its cud after having grown fat eating at the trough of graft...

    all these things and more go on while the people continually blaspheme God and deny His existence...

    it is Written: "But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a man)

    God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?" Romans 3:5-6

    it is also Written that even as God Punishes us, rather than repent, we will double down and curse His name: the problem is human nature; we would rather die than admit we are sinners and repent...

    c f ben yochanan

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  6. It takes 39 years for God to punish California for a 1979 court receivership. Mr. Flurry is all full of shit. Oklahoma has earthquakes, no doubt God is punishing the PCG. California has had earthquakes and fires for all of human history. The fires are deadly because so many people live in California. Much of California is a semi arid climate. Dry conditions and Santa Ana winds create firestorms.

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  7. What would it take for God to remove the "curse" from California?

    Is it a 40-year curse, that will end 1/3/19?

    Do state leaders need to repent? Which ones? The Governor? Attorney General?

    Do they need to offer incentives to lure GCI back from North Carolina?

    It's easy to find and claim the source of the problem. Quite another to offer a Biblical solution.

    P.S. Since he mentioned Hurricane Michael, what did Florida do to WCG or PCG to bring that?

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  8. Oh please RL. You know the drill. ALL Californians need to repent and you need to call upon them to do so since I am here in the belly of a whale.

    nck

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  9. This is a trivial fire of no consequence. It is certainly not a disaster of biblical proportions. Wait for half the state to die, then we'll know God did it.

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  10. I will bet my disability check that Oklahoma being in "tornado alley" is god punishing 6-pack Flurry & his PCG!

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  11. Flurry is misinformed and just plain inaccurate on so many levels in this that it is surprising that even his members would take this seriously.

    First, the receivership resulted from concerned members of the WCG, who had perhaps naively planned on remaining members of WCG, attempting to force reform of the church’s then flagrant financial mismanagement and misconduct. These concerned members hired noted attorney Hillel Chodos to orchestrate the process. Apparently, the State of California recognized the merits of their claims, resulting in the imposition of receivership. The State of California did not single out HWA/WCG for persecution. The State of California responded to facts brought to their attention by the attorney hired by actual church members. The noble goals of these members never were achieved. Obfuscation and lobbying on the highest levels, and a new interpretation of state law were the results, and there were massive casualties amongst the church ministry and membership. A virtual witch hunt ended the careers of totally dedicated ministers, such as C. Wayne Cole.

    The law of unintended consequences took over in many ways, and ultimately, even took its toll on Stanley Rader. Gerald Flurry ignores 90% of what actually happened in the receivership case in presenting his dumbed down explanation of the receivership.

    Secondly, the Bible gives many examples of punishment. Single offenses bring singular punishments. Continuing offenses bring continuing punishment. The people being punished are made to know why they are being punished, otherwise the punishment cannot possibly bring repentance or correction.

    The California of the Beach Boys’ era was a magical and wonderful place. The beaches were clean and uncrowded, there were stull wide open spaces quickly accessable to a motorcycle enthusiast, and the music of the era on the radio was just awesome. This all began to come to a close sometime during the 1980s with overpopulation, and the population density that it brought. Just before I left, it got to the point where if you were making a call in Santa Monica, and didn’t begin your return trip to the San Gabriel Valley before about 2:30 PM, you could expect to waste about three hours on the freeway. I left the state in 1992, because even though our company office was then located in a very desirable Orange County beach city, life as we knew it had completely changed over the previous 25 years. I left immediately following the Rodney King riots, and just before the freeway leveling earthquake.

    BB

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  12. Anonymous 7:58 AM said...

    "This is a trivial fire of no consequence. It is certainly not a disaster of biblical proportions. Wait for half the state to die, then we'll know God did it."

    Right. With your god it's full-out genocide or nothing. He does love him some genocide.

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  13. Part II.

    These fires have brought some interesting facts to light. It is not unusual that there would be a Kardashian angle to any news events of this space in time. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s home was spared from destruction by fire, and it was no accident. Their homeowners’ insurance carrier employs its own private fire company, well trained, well funded, and well-equipped, and their efforts are what saved the Kardashian-West home, while others in the same neighborhood burned to the ground. An executive from that insurance company explained that statistically, there has been an uptick in their losses due to the frequency and intensity of natural disasters brought on by global climate change. Civil firefighters are dedicated to controlling and extinguishing wildfires. It is a holistic attempt, such that they do not target specific homes in a way that a privately owned company can. Firefighters employed by an insurance company, therefore, are the only way in which the insurance company can gain control over their losses. I am sure that we will also find this type of surgical loss-prevention applied to other natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes.

    Here is one thing I do not understand about Flurry, and the other purveyors of Armstrongism. One of HWA’s frequently preached precepts was that man through sin and greed often brings on his own punishments, as a natural consequence. The Apocalypse is intended to be God’s final lesson to man that man’s way does not work. We now have a super abundance of actually measurable evidence that global climate change is real. The hired-gun scientists of major industries which cause greenhouse gases, and pollute both land and ocean, have put up a smokescreen which is wearing very thin, as glaciers and ice caps continue to recede and disappear, permafrost has gone squishy, and islanders watch as their coastlines begin to move inland. Insurance companies are acknowledging climate change in their loss-prevention plans, shipping companies are planning cost-saving routes through the North Pole as the ice has cleared away, and oil companies have even benefited from milder temperatures, and have revised their long term plans.

    Why is Armstrongism not preaching climate change as being part of their Apocalypse? Why do they continue to blame natural disasters on the idea that people who live in affected areas are more sinful than others, and are therefore singled out for special punishment? Why do they continue to thunder 3-5 years, when in fact the process is more gradual? We’ve noted in the past that in adhering to their bogus “6,000 years for man” doctrine, they shrug off the fact that today is 5 Kislev, 5779 on the Hebrew Calendar. People can readily know these things, because they are available on the information super highway with a few simple mouse clicks!

    All things considered, Flurry’s latest missive perfectly illustrates how and why Armstrongism was time and date stamped for 1975. The questions that can be asked these days which totally invalidate their beliefs are far too simple. They need to adjust in order to avoid the death spiral for their movement!

    BB

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    1. in the book of Revelation it says that God will destroy those what destroy the earth: it is a scientific fact that our changing climate is the result of manmade pollutants in the air, as well as the massive deforestation that is going on, to name a few things...

      indeed you are correcf that such man made changes are rooted in the love of money, political and social apathy, and incompetence, all of which are spiritual matters, all of which come from demonic influences...

      i have posted in the past about the hothouse theory, in which scientists suspect that at any time the climate may undergo a suddem, catastrophoc and exponential increase in temperature and reduction in the ozone layer...this kind of occurrence is spoken of in the book of Revelation...

      indeed our current situation is the result of our rebellion against God, and the punishment is fitting, and of our own making...

      c f ben yochanan

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  14. Lets be rational! It is real easy to say that this or that bad thing happened to a person or group of people because of some perceived evil action that warrented God to punish them. The truth is it is impossible to know as humans why God allows what he allows. Just maybe bad things just happen, not because there is an angry God punishing but for other reasons not related to any bad behavior by anyone.

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  15. The wildfires are destroying California because of legalizes marijuana.
    Or better yet.......

    The wildfires are destroying California because Bob Thiel is a false prophet.

    Which would God hate most?
    1. The false prophet
    2. The thousands who never heard of HWA and his theologically twisted bullshit

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  16. Byker, your naivete is surprising. Who was behind the "concerned members"? Members who believed in the church's teachings, including the teachings about government, would never think of suing. It was supporters of Garner Ted who were hoping to bust WCG with the lawsuit.

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    1. No naivete involved, 10:03. Although I was not part of it, I knew about the lawsuit long before it was filed through my friendship with John Trechak. Believe me, John and those in his inner circle had no fondness for GTA. For one thing, GTA was widely perceived as being a spent force by that point in time. His extracurricular activities had rendered any chance for his broad-based or unifying church leadership to be impossible. I will grant you this: He had become an all-purpose scapegoat for anything that went wrong in the church by that point in time.

      I also disagree with your opinion about the behavior of members who believed in the church’s teachings and government. There were members who believed that HWA had mentally left his own church following Loma’s death. There were those who had misgivings about him having hidden GTA’s iniquities for so many years. Others resented Stan Rader and thought that he was controlling HWA. There was an attitude on the part of some of “let’s wait for God to clean it all up”, but many were frustrated because they knew church members who had been taken care of through third tithe that were suddenly told to go on welfare, even as HWA’s art collection, table ware, and financial support of his unconverted family became public knowledge.

      GTA did do some mighty bad things, but he didn’t do half of the things for which he was scapegoated.

      BB

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  17. Retired Prof
    Have you ever read the bible cover to cover? If you had, you would know that in the OT God committed many of your so called 'genocides', with explanations repeatedly given. Unlike yourself, God gives the highest priority to peoples salvation.

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  18. God is angry. I would be too. In fact I am. So are most people.

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  19. Wow, according to this reasoning, California shouldn't have had fires prior to 1979. But they did have fires before 1979! So confusing! LOL!

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  20. BB
    It's a common belief that Herb fell away after Loma's death. I believe Acts 20,29 is applicable to Herb in this instance.

    Acts 20:29 "For I know this, that after my departing (ie, Loma's death) shall grievous wolves (ie, Herb) enter among you, not sparing the flock."

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    1. Herbie and Teddy also seem to bear curious resemblance to the characters in verses 19-21 of Dylan’s “Desolation Row”

      BB

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  21. Moses intervened for Israel with God. Jesus told John and James that they were wrong to want to call down fire from heaven to destroy a village that would not receive them.
    There are many examples in the Bible where God's servants would plead for their nation and other nations.
    God expects us to be merciful and loving, not vindictive.

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