Isn't it great to have so many intellectuals in the Church of God who know nothing about science, anthropology, theology, archeology, etc., and yet think they are instantly authorities upon everything? The church is sooooooooooooooooo blessed to have sooooooooooooooooo many amazing men as its leaders!
Ronnie Weinland, CURRENTLY the only COG leader to be a convicted felon, imagines himself a highly intelligent minister of old covenant theology and thus capable of weighing in on the destruction of the dinosaurs and plant life.
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the multitude in them. On the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it [set apart for holy use and purpose], because that on it He rested from all His work which He created and had done” (Genesis 2:1-3).
Although it is explained in much greater detail in the literature from God’s Church, many people think that this account of creation being spoken of in Genesis 1 and 2 is about the time when God created the earth and universe itself. That is simply not true. The earth was created at least hundreds of thousands of years, and perhaps even millions of years earlier. That should be easy to understand by scientific evidence itself.
Living creatures and plant life existed on the earth after it was first created, and there is an exceedingly vast amount of fossil evidence to this truth that exists all over this earth. However, people have not known that Satan at one time destroyed all life on earth after he had rebelled against God. The devastation he brought happened in an instant as he tried to destroy the earth itself.
Satan possessed the power to rip apart vast regions of the earth, shaking it off its normal orbit and rotation, as well as completely darkening the atmosphere itself. As a result of what happened so quickly within the atmosphere of the earth, temperatures dropped so low that plant life and animal life froze completely within an instant.
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Do not fear ...
Nuclear Winter will cure Global Warming.
The earth was created at least hundreds of thousands of years, and perhaps even millions of years earlier.
What an ignorant idiot! Depending on what you take to be credible evidence, there's an argument for an Earth approximately 6,000 years old, or at least newer than 12,000 years. And there's an argument for an Earth roughly 4.5 billion years old, give or take 100 million years either way.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO evidence, from the Bible, or from any branch of science, that would place the creation of Earth in the range of "hundreds of thousands" to "millions" of years before the events of Genesis 1. Weinland is just making things up as he goes along.
Armstrongites have always focused way too much time, energy, and attention on a subject about which there is scant information in Scripture (Satan and his minions). In fact, the founder of the movement gleaned from those few passages an entire historical narrative regarding the angels who sinned and made it a part of "The Incredible Human Potential." (Most of which NEVER happened!)
They just never seemed to fully comprehend the fact that Satan was a being of very limited ability and means whom God used to achieve his own ends/purposes. They imagined Satan as a being of such immense power and menace that he presented a real and present danger to God's plans, and the people whom he had chosen to receive salvation. Instead, on the few occasions where he is actually mentioned in Scripture, Satan is portrayed as a jealous and bitter entity who had been rejected and excluded from participating in God's plans, and whose only recourse was to snipe around the edges at what he was powerless to impede/prevent!
I loved the flood cartoon, but Weinland at least had enough sense not to suggest that the dinosaurs had perished in the flood. Whether or not, Satan was responsible for any of the mass extinction events that have occurred down through the eons of time that life has existed on this planet is purely a matter of conjecture - there is nothing definitive about this in Scripture. Indeed, it's a bit of a stretch to suggest such a narrative based largely on the premise that the earth became chaotic and void!
I don't mind SPECULATION about what happened in the distant past - even scientists and atheist engage in such speculation from time to time. After all, it wasn't too long ago that Dennis suggested that Satan's lightning-like fall from heaven "was an Astro theological explanation of the Planet Venus and the puzzling rise and fall it, as an inner planet, experiences in all its pre-sunrise brilliance." If that was the case, then what about Satan's fall being a symbolic representation of the Chicxulub impact event that actually wiped out the dinosaurs? Now, wasn't that fun? Even so, we simply do not know if any of these events were actually related to each other!
The important thing to remember is that Christ has defeated Satan, evil, and death. He resisted Satan's temptation to sin and triumphed over him and it. In a real sense, Satan is already an asterisk or a footnote, just marking time until God finally ends his misery and destroys him in the lake of fire!
Ah yes, the WCG "recreation" idea.
Frankly, I never sweat the creation stories because the writers were not eyewitnesses. (never mind that biz of creating plants before sun and all that.) It's obviously not a narrative you can glean a lot of factual info from, so I don't see much point in quibbling over it (or basing a particularly forceful presentation on it).
While the Hebrew cultural mindset of ancient days isn't particularly clear, many cultures around the world have notions of previous ages with different lifeforms - the Greeks, the Aztecs, the Polynesians, etc.
In the Doctor Who series "Earthshock" from 1982, a spaceship from the future went back in time and crashed into the earth's atmosphere causing the destruction of the dinosaurs.
The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct!
Weinland is nuts. He wrote:
Satan possessed the power to rip apart vast regions of the earth, shaking it off its normal orbit and rotation, as well as completely darkening the atmosphere itself.
Do ANY churches, ACOG or mainstream, teach that Satan has less power now than he had 65 million years ago? If Satan killed the dinosaurs, why hasn't he killed the masses of humanity? Weinland (as usual) makes no sense.
"Armstrongites have always focused way too much time, energy, and attention on a subject about which there is scant information in Scripture."
Truer words were never spoken! Look at all that they built around a few verses on Nimrod! They even gave him Semiramis as a consort when she was not ever mentioned in a single text associated with him.
RSK, the creation narrative was chiefly important to Armstrongism because of one thing, the sabbath! And, it is probable that the sabbath was backwritten into the creation story by scribes with an awareness of Moses as they revised the ancient texts during the Babylonian captivity, or later by Ezra.. It is no secret amongst textual scholars that what we call the Old Testament had gone through several revisions to bring it into the form which it held during the time of the second temple, which is largely what we have today.
FWIW, if I remember my WCG speculation correctly, the idea was that the casualty of life on Earth in that period was a byproduct of the "war in heaven", not a matter of "Satan" opting to destroy the Earth itself. BUT, if you're willing to buy the premise of this heavenly war, I suppose either idea is plausible. Like the creation stories, there's not a lot of useful detail to the concept.
Mind you, in our case, HWA and lackeys had to reconcile the finds in geology, paleontology, etc with the Bible narrative. This same basic problem exists all over Christiandom. They have one of two options: say "It's not totally clear from the Bible what exactly happened" and fear that it's a weak response, or they can claim to be know-it-alls and cite various finds and incidents that support theories they find more palatable.
Maybe it's like that scene in The King & I:
"Your Majesty, the bible was not written by men of science, but by men of faith. It was their explanation of the miracle of creation, which is the same miracle – whether it took six days or many centuries."
It seems to me that this only becomes a problem when you want to make a sacred talisman out of the Bible and say "It says it! God did it! That does it!" Which, if you're doing that, suggests to me that you're not quite thinking critically.
I just had a look at a UCG website that hosts an online magazine called "Beyond Today." I had a look at what they believed about dinosaurs. It is pretty much what I believed on my last day as an Armstrongist back in about 1995. The writers spent all their time on the intricacies of the Gap Theory as applied to Genesis 1:1.
I read responses to several questions on dinosaurs in the magazine, and the writers never got around to considering the real question that weighs on people's minds. And that question is: How could a benevolent and beautiful God create a monstrosity such as T Rex? T Rex wasn't a charmer. He was your worst nightmare. The UCG magazine did not touch upon this so I have no idea what their hypotheses regarding this would be. So, their dinosaur picture is very incomplete.
An answer I heard in Spokesman Club was that God created the dinosaurs so we could have fossil fuels to run our advanced civilization. Well, yeah, but did he have to create a world full of monsters to do that. What's the fascination with the noisome? So, that answer flops.
So, I will tell you what I think that it is. You knew this was brewing. When God created the Cosmos out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), the Cosmos had to be, in its final state, a moral reflection of the perfect and benevolent God. A good tree bears good fruit. (Creatio ex nihilo is an argument for Universal Salvation through appropriate response to Christ but that is another story.) The sequence is this: First, the creation then the Cross and then the recreation. Jesus spoke of the renewal of all things - the Apokatastasis.
So, T Rex will undergo transformative renewal. Maybe he was intended to be a colorful little bird that flitted around among the trees and bushes and delighted everyone. But the Cosmos went awry or was made subject to vanity. And Jesus came and made it possible for the Cosmos to be fixed and in the course of time Jesus will fix it. Everything has its righteous, constructive and beneficial place in the Apokatastasis. And that is why there was a T Rex and why there will be in the future and why he will be way different and live out his intended purpose.
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I heard HWA state many times that the creation involving dinosaurs, big lizards, and other of what he termed "disgusting creatures" were Satan's creations. So, when Satan destroyed it all, he was destroying his own work. Too much fairy tale involved in that theory for it to be considered rational, imo.
Personally, I believe that God used controlled or cultivated evolutionary processes as His tools of creation, and that such things as dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, huge sabre toothed tigers, and dodo birds all had a purpose in the evolutionary processes which prepared and refined the planet for mankind. Can I prove that? No. It's my gestalting of elements from religion and science, and makes sense to myself, and also to others for whom Bible literalism raises too many problematic questions.
I remember my poor faithful mother telling me once "Satan and his demons could have planted all those (fossils) to trick people away from God."
Even at ten years old or however old I was at the time, I had to chuckle at that one. Seemed like way too much work towards a goal that didnt require such measures. Not just the dinosaur bones, but the plant leavings, the tree sap, the preserved mud, the ubiquitous mollusks, the trackways, etc?
But as an aside to your comment, now that you've mentioned the "disgusting things" remark, I wonder if the term "dinosaurs" brought up images in HWAs mind akin to the Crystal Castle depictions.
Well, Nile crocodiles arent pretty. Komodo dragons arent pretty. Camels arent pretty. Opossums arent pretty. We've never dined with a T-Rex - for all we know, he dressed like Jesse Ventura's more flamboyant moments. :)
Yup, thats true. Much easier to claim their sabbath doctrine was binding if you could link it to creation week instead of Moses or Sinai.
The age of the dinosaurs has one outstanding feature - at that time the earth was utterly hostile, flora and fauna, to human beings. I think that is the major point. I do not know how dinosaurs entered upon the scene technically but, clearly, they were a part of an anti-human campaign. I also believe that all creative power resides in God solely. He is the Creator and not one Creator among many. But what he creates can be abused - after all, look at climate change. Maybe T Rex was one of the first GMOs.
I do not think dinosaurs were disgusting per se. What was disgusting was the predator-prey cycle implemented as their means of survival. Without the predator-prey cycle they would have been just big lumbering, funny, vegetarian creatures. And as for the Spokesman Clubby answer about fossil fuels, most of our fossil fuels do not come from dinosaurs but from ancient algae and other tiny sea creatures. Dinosaurs play little role in fossil fuels.
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RSK,
I've heard folks suggest that God created the fossil record! Once again, ignorant and ridiculous speculation that would make God a deceiver! And where do we find in Scripture that Satan and his demons were endowed with creative powers? Scripture strongly implies that they have the ability to twist and/or pervert what God has created, but I don't find ANY support for the notion that the Creator shared his ability to create with those beings! According to Scripture, that's simply NOT what they were designed to do (think messengers and agents of the Divine Will).
Ah! You should have heard the explanations 15 years ago when we became aware of an ancient Phoenician temple that predated Solomon's temple, but was exactly like it. Some old guy opined that since Satan knew what the temple in heaven looked like, and since Solomon's temple was a replica of that, it would have been easy for Satan to copy it in advance.
Once most people decide what they are going to believe, they usually spend the rest of their lives collecting information which supports that. When we point out that they are relying on theories, the usual response is, "Well, that's all science is! A bunch of theories!"
9:47
Since spiders are between creepy and terrifying I wonder if Satan created them?😊
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