The Real Trick: Doubt Your Own Mind
In 1982, the Holy Herbie dropped a bombshell Good News article: there’s a “hidden enemy” in your home, and it’s not Satan this time—it’s emotional immaturity… YOUR emotional immaturity. But lets be honest, the real enemy wasn’t your feelings; it was the cult’s agenda to make you doubt your God-given ability to think. In a piece that’s pure manipulation, Ol’ Herb claimed emotional immaturity—your natural feelings like anger, fear, or grief—is breaking families and causing misery. The fix? Control your emotions, obey the Ten Commandments, and let your mind guide you into God’s way of “giving.” Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong—it’s a con to get you to stop trusting your own reasoning and hand your mind over to a mere man: Herb himself, the self-proclaimed apostle who demanded blind loyalty while his cult crumbled under scandals.
The WCG didn’t just control your emotions—they controlled your thoughts, making you doubt your rational instincts and surrender to Herb’s authority. Your gut told you something was wrong—failed prophecies, triple tithes, predatory leaders—but the cult gaslit you into thinking your doubts were immature, not godly. Its been nearly 40 since the Holy Herb wilted, it’s time to reclaim your God-given mind and see this for the manipulative agenda it was.
The Setup: Your Emotions Betray Your Mind
The article starts with a dramatic hook: there’s an enemy in your home, causing suffering—emotional immaturity. Herb defines it as a lack of control over feelings like fear, anger, and grief, calling it a “departure from the normal calm state of rational thinking.” He says babies naturally “take”—grabbing toys and bottles—but humans must be taught to “give,” aligning with God’s law of love (the Ten Commandments). Most people, he claims, never learn this, remaining emotionally stunted because parents and schools fail to teach it. The real secret to Christian living, he says, is using your mind to direct your actions, not your emotions.
Here’s the sleight of hand: Herb makes you doubt your own mind by framing your emotions as a betrayal of reason. If you feel angry about the WCG’s triple tithes bankrupting your family, or skeptical of their failed 1972 Tribulation prophecy, that’s not your God-given intellect at work—it’s emotional immaturity, a spiritual failing. The cult didn’t want you to trust your rational instincts—like questioning why the Armstrongs lived in luxury while you struggled. Instead, they wanted you to surrender your thinking to Herb, the “apostle” who claimed to speak for God. Your doubts weren’t the problem; the WCG was, and they gaslit you into thinking otherwise to keep you in line.
The Shame Game: Your Thoughts Aren’t Godly
Herb doubles down with a tragic case study: a highly educated man whose emotional immaturity—never learning to control his moods—led to a broken marriage and ruined career. He was spoiled as a child, never taught self-restraint, and let his feelings warp his understanding, remaining emotionally and spiritually a child. Herb laments that most people never grow up emotionally or spiritually, failing to achieve God’s purpose: developing “right character” through mind-directed actions.
This is where the manipulation deepens. The WCG didn’t just shame you for feeling emotions—they shamed you for thinking critically. If your mind questioned the cult’s scandals, that was emotional immaturity, not reason. If you doubted the endless financial demands that left you broke while Herb flew private jets, that was your childish feelings talking, not your God-given intellect. The cult gaslit you into doubting your own cognitive faculties, insisting that true maturity meant surrendering your thoughts to Herb’s authority. Your rational mind was screaming something was wrong, but the WCG called that a sin, ensuring you’d trust Herb over your own judgment.
The Control Tactic: Surrender to Herb, Not God
Herb pivots to child-rearing, urging parents to teach emotional maturity from infancy by controlling feelings like anger and jealousy, and directing them toward “giving” (love). He shares a personal story: his first funeral, where he nearly broke down in fear but was “sobered” by his father’s stern words and God’s help, achieving emotional balance—calm dignity with tenderness. He insists emotions aren’t to be nullified, just “guided” by the mind into God’s law, but his real message is clear: your mind should follow the WCG’s rules, not your own reasoning.
This is the core of the con: the WCG didn’t want you to use your mind—they wanted you to surrender it to the Dear Leader. “Giving” meant giving to the cult—your money, time, and loyalty—while suppressing any thoughts that challenged their authority. The cult framed critical thinking as a spiritual failing, ensuring you’d hand over your God-given faculties to a mere man who claimed to speak for God, all while his empire was built on lies and exploitation.
The Religious Spin: True Faith Means No Questions
Herb takes a jab at other religions, claiming emotional immaturity is most apparent in faith. Some groups, he says, work up emotions into a frenzy, shouting “Hallelujah!” with no thought, mistaking emotion for spirituality. Others are purely mental, rejecting the Holy Spirit. True spirituality, he argues, comes from the impersonal Holy Spirit electrical-like force, given only to those who obey God’s law (Acts 5:32), and is “sound mindedness” (2 Timothy 1:7), not emotional frenzy. The emotionally mature, he says, express controlled joy and sympathy, but never let emotion—or independent thought—substitute for spiritual obedience.
Here’s the rub: the WCG redefined spirituality as blind obedience to Herb, not God. If your mind questioned their legalistic rules and rituals—you weren’t being rational; you were being unspiritual. If you thought critically about Herb’s failed prophecies or the cult’s financial scams, that was your immature emotions, not your intellect. The cult didn’t want you to think for yourself; they wanted you to doubt your own mind and trust Herb’s instead, even as his leadership caused the real suffering: families split by disfellowshipment, lives ruined by financial draining, and faith shattered by lies. The WCG gaslit you into surrendering your cognitive faculties, all while claiming it was for your spiritual good.
Trust Your God-Given Mind
The WCG’s “hidden enemy” wasn’t emotional immaturity—it was the cult’s agenda to make you doubt your own mind and surrender your thinking to a mere man. Herb wanted you to see your rational instincts—your doubts about failed prophecies, financial exploitation, and predatory leadership—as a spiritual failing, ensuring you’d trust him over your God-given faculties. But your mind was right to question, and your emotions were right to scream. Stop letting the cult guilt you for thinking. Reclaim your cognitive freedom, ditch Armstrongism’s hidden agenda, and trust the mind God gave you to see the truth.
Hidden Enemy or Hidden Agenda? © 2025 by AiCOG is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0
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15 comments:
The article would be improved if it provided a reference to the original HWA article. At minimum, the title and year/month of the Good News. Eg:
There's a Hidden Enemy in Your Home!, Herbert Armstrong, Good News Magazine, February 1982.
According to Herb ".. but humans must be taught to “give,” aligning with God’s law of love (the Ten Commandments)". But Herb knew that relationships were two way. So there's the video of HWA having a audience with former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, telling him that there's the two ways of give and get, yet he was lying through his teeth to the man. Other denominations do the same since they are charities. But it's not biblical, and from the supposedly one true church.
Didn't someome once say that if you feel compelled to lie, the best method is to keep the lie relatively close to the truth? If you examine some of the cliches with which we are all familiar, it becomes easy to see how HWA sold some of his lies. As an example, the defense attorney who determines to defend himself, only to discover that he has a fool as a client. Why? He cannot be emotionally objective. Then, there is the description of humans as having the body of an animal, and the mind of a god, which is crippled by human emotions. The "Spock" syndrome, Vulcan adherence to logic, independent of the aforesaid emotions. In the case of Herbert W. Armstrong, you also have the Substitution Axiom, things equal to each other are the same and can be substituted for one another. That's a good one, because it's what got us regarding HWA as, and taking his words as if he were God Himself!
But the greatest damage was that HWA's edicts regarding immaturity of human emotions actually stunted members' growth, preventing them from reaching the maturity which he claimed to be stimulating. He aspired to do all of our thinking for us! How is this for an example? When you are in business, one skill which is required for success is the ability to negotiate. Following my exit from WCG, I had to spend years developing negotiating skills, or even realizing that successful negotiation is one of the beneficial traits of leadership. Negotiation with authority cannot exist in a government from the top down system. It was certainly not allowed by the parental units in our WCG household while I was growing up, or at church, or Ambassador College. Bad enough for your church to usurp your financial security. Some of their other crap was downright career-killing!
BB
As is so common in discussions like these, there's a half-truth being manipulated.
It is true that we shouldn't be so quick to trust our own minds. They are fallible instruments, easy to deceive and easily controlled by others with a deceitful agenda.
However, while I should be careful about trusting my own mind, this means that I should be even MORE careful about trusting the mind of my ACOG minister, prophet, or apostle. God gave me a mind, and it would be blasphemous to assert then that He doesn't want me to use it. But I should use it carefully, not uncritically accepting HWA, or MAGA, or secularism, or whatever.
There's levels of confidence in decision making. In criminal law there's the high standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" to the lower standard of proof in civil cases, where matters need only be proved on the "balance of probabilities"
Isn't the answer found in Exodus 20: 3 Thou shalt have no other gods BEFORE me. 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor SERVE them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. Simples!
Agree. Going over ancient 1982 magazine material is achieving nothing but looking old.
Oddly enough, so many of the people who were "called" (heh!) into Armstrongism were really not capable of deep thought, and consequently their lots in life were actually improved under the tutelage of Herbert W. Armstrong!
HWA dumbed down the ways in which he exercised his authority, and tailored it specifically to these people. And, that ended up repressing and dumbing down the smart ones who asked the deeper questions. I recall sitting in Bible Study, and hearing some of the questions that came up, like "Is it OK to eat all-beef hot dogs if you lust after pork ones?" Or, "Is it OK to date an Italian?" And then, the classic of all times, "Why did Ezekiel complain to God about having to eat human dung, and ask if he could eat animal dung instead?" The minister even got into the dumb and dummer act on that one. He went into great detail about how the human digestive system was so much more efficient in eliminating poisons. Nobody noticed that Ezekiel hadn't asked about eating dung, he had asked about cooking with it!
We constantly see people right here, thinking they are defending Armstrongism with horrible grammar, bad spelling, and no rudimentary knowledge of sentence structure, punctuation, or the purpose of the paragraph. In the middle of a serious discussion they will refer to a "medafor". It's embarrassing.
There is nothing odd about using a 1982 church magazine article when Armstrongism still uses those concepts today to brainwash followers. Using old articles like this ticks off Armstrongists who try and gaslight the past. It no longer works.
Who used the word odd?
The Mormon Church uses some of the same techniques as HWA. There was a commonly used expression in the Mormon Church that said, "Once the decisions have been made, the thinking has been done." In other words, the members are not to question any decisions made by their leaders. And of course, Ellen G. White claimed to have received visions from God. This put an end to any argument or questioning on the part of the members.
What a joy you must be to live with.
May the Lord have mercy on the 'lesser than' ones who share the earth with you 10:32. How life must be tough being a literary genius amongst imbeciles. How perfect you must be having the ability to decide others thinking capabilities. Wowzers, what a gift to have.
But perhaps, when you've got a free moment from judging the imbeciles, you could consider that commentators are not retired, nor on computers, nor sat in offices. That comments have been written on phones and the comment space allows no comment preview capabilities.
Dare I mention the danger that targeting grammar in an argument is lame and shows the other person you've run out of bullets to fire. Belittling others usually happens amongst children but amongst adults I see what a desperate low mark it is. Now that's embarrassing.
I agree to a certain extent, Dude. I mean, nck as an example is totally brilliant, but when he first made the scene here, you could barely understand a thing in his posts for all his spelling errors. I did later attribute that to possible use of one of the less option-rich cellphones.
But there is also the irony one experiences when witnessing primitive thinking along with the poor spelling and grammar coupled with the arrogance normally learned through Armstrongism. I've always been patient with those less gifted, in fact in my profession I have to find a way not only to properly teach them, but also to relate, hopefullnas a long term friend. What bugs me is that, caste systems aside, the arrogance in their beliefs which Armstrongites are taught is very often misplaced. Wherever I go, one of my intentions is always to learn. Some of the people who are arrogant in their ignorance should aspire to that same, sometimes humbling goal. It's a better fit.
Hopefullnas ? How embarrassing 4:56 to be condescending to the others whilst you make spelling mistakes like that.
Must be the two faced living having an effect. John Elliots sermons of no effect?
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