Ex-COG Member Slits Throats of Daughters and Self, To Avoid Tribulation (Updated)

More damaging proof that the extreme beliefs of Armstrongism is dangerous to one's health and mental well being!  Her husband is a well established dentist in Pasadena area.  Truly a sad situation for this entire family! They were church members in Pasadena for many years.  Where they went after the break up of the church I don't know.  WCG/GCI doesn't preach this kind of stuff anymore so I imagine they are with  one of the splinter groups.(Verified in the comments below that they are no longer part of COGdoom)

ABC News Story

KTLA News

Cops: Woman Tries to Kill Children, Self to Avoid 'the Tribulation'

Lyn Benedetto was booked at Lancaster Station on $1 million dollars bail.
Watch Cheryl Getuiza's report.

Lyn Benedetto (Handout / March 19, 2011)

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KTLA News

2:51 p.m. PDT, March 19, 2011

ktla-palmdale-woman-attempted-murder

Palmdale (KTLA) -- A woman slit her daughters' throats before slitting her own early Friday evening, claiming that "the Tribulation" was going to occur and she wanted to prevent them from suffering through it, officials said.

Lyn Benedetto, 47, reportedly told her daughters to lie on a bed and proceeded to take a knife to their throats.

The suspect then took the knife to her own throat before driving the victims to an unoccupied friend's house to die.

Lancaster Station deputies responded to a call regarding an "assault with knife" at about 5:32pm from the owner of the residence where the victims had been taken.

The victims and the suspect were found and the location, and the suspect was subsequently arrested.

The victims were treated at Antelope Valley Hospital for moderate though non life-threatening injuries and released to custody of Department of Children's Services.

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Antelope Valley News has this posting similar to above, except it includes the comment that the chidlren said their mother did it to them becasue she was scared of the tribulation:

The victims stated their mother  Lyn  Benedetto, 47, believed “The Tribulation” was about to occur and she did not want them to suffer by going through it.   AVNews

The Dilemma of Non-Believing Pastor's

Dennis sent me this link to an interesting paper on non-believing clergy. It is great insight into several ministers who share their stories about how they came to doubt their belief in the God they were brought up with and in the stories that they had been taught as literal.

I knew a few ministers in Armstrongism  that also held these similar beliefs, yet they continued on. There are a couple in UCG and a couple in LCG that I knew that felt this way.  You can imagine the wrath of god that Meredith would reign down on them if he knew.

Some of the guys from UCG are so entrenched and wrapped up in the church that they see no logical way out. They know they will loose everything, houses, homes, families and most importantly friends. It's that intimate contact with friends and co-workers in the faith that keeps them in place.

It is truly a struggle that is obviously quit painful.

Newsweek Article 

The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks. As their profiles reveal, even their spouses are often unaware of their turmoil. Why don’t they resign their posts and find a new life? They are caught in a trap, cunningly designed to harness both their best intentions and their basest fears to the task of immobilizing them in their predicament. Their salaries are modest and the economic incentive is to stay in place, to hang on by their fingernails and wait for retirement when they get their pension.


Confiding their difficulties to a superior is not an appealing option: although it would be unlikely to lead swiftly and directly to an involuntary unfrocking. No denomination has a surplus of qualified clergy, and the last thing an administrator wants to hear is that one of the front line preachers is teetering on the edge of default. More likely, such an acknowledgment of doubt would put them on the list of problematic clergy and secure for them the not very helpful advice to soldier on and work through their crises of faith. Speaking in confidence with fellow clergy is also a course fraught with danger, in spite of the fact that some of them are firmly convinced that many, and perhaps most, of their fellow clergy share their lack of belief.




What gives them this impression that they are far from alone, and how did this strange and sorrowful state of affairs arise? The answer seems to lie in the seminary experience shared by all our pastors, liberals and literals alike. Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God. It is interesting that all our pastors report the same pattern of response among their fellow students: some were fascinated, but others angrily rejected what their professors tried to teach them. Whatever their initial response to these unsettling revelations, the cat was out of the bag and both liberals and literals discerned the need to conceal their knowledge about the history of Christianity from their congregations.

Some Lutheran Humor

Here's some Lutheran humor for those god-forsaken (just kidding) ELCA Lutherans that have contacted me.  You also can picture the guy in the white shirt as a COG member and still find the humor in it.  Know it all biblical literalists always are fun to pick on.