The Apostle Says: Stop Sending Money To Your Sinful COG HQ!

Poor Herb just cannot get a break anymore.  Dissidents have picked at him for years. Ministers and members have rebelled.  Now the latest Apostle is claiming Herb started watering down the gospel and doctrines starting in the late 1960's.  Of course there is the proverbial bogey man that caused it - Stan Rader.  Rader caused HWA to slip further down that slippery slope into grievous sin.

The Apostle writes today:

You should also know that there was very little real difference between GTA and his father, Ted’s ouster was a political maneuver arranged by Stan Rader and come over Ted’s sexual problems rather than doctrine.  You should also know that the major COG Groups today only pay lip service to HWA and have actually made many changes to his positions.   In fact they SHOULD be willing  to grow and change and should have never paid lip service to him in the first place.  Instead they have paid lip service to him as if he were a god while continuing on the path of more and more doctrinal laxity and lukewarmness.

HWA was always all about the money and always ran the church as a business, and his way of dealing with the financial crisis was not to cut back on his friend Rader, but to loosen the baptismal requirements that he had been using before about 1969.  After that time a gradual loosening came about as first one thing and later another went by the wayside.  The fundamental requirement had always been loyalty to HWA so they were just loosening the degree of doctrinal understanding that they required.

That is to say, if they agreed with whatever HWA said than they were acceptable.  Herbert himself watered down doctrine greatly after the late 60 including such things as buying food and drink on Sabbath, traveling on Sabbath, attending pagan religious activities like christmas was allowed by him, he changed from one extreme to the other on D & R allowed birthdays etc etc.

In fact the Tkach changes were only the natural end result of HWAs process of becoming personally lukewarm for doctrine and zealous for numbers and money; into what the COG Groups now teach.

The Apostle is trying to warn the COG's that they are grievous sinners because they eat out on Saturdays, might watch some TV or go to the park.  Gone are the days of having to dress up in "sabbath wear" while at home whenever the broadcast came on.  Gone are the days eating cold leftovers on Saturdays when you got home from an incredibly long and boring church service. Gone are the days of having to eat dried beef sandwiches on stone ground whole wheat bread and carob cookies while during home on the long 150 mile trip.  Of course having to drive over 300 miles for church services was not considered a sin for some reason.

Today all the major groups pay lip service to the Sabbath as they routinely pollute it, by buying in restaurants, going on extensive travel and fudging on the Sabbath  and Holy Days

Disgusting sinners!  Vile reprobates!  You deserve to be thrown in the lake of fire! Filthy commandment breakers!

So how does the Apostle plan on stopping this grievous abuse of the sabbath?  He wants members to stop sending in money to these organizations.

These people are about M O N E Y and are lax on doctrine.  As long as people pay or contribute in other ways they will tolerate a great deal.  Stop contributing, or make waves so that others may be influenced and watch how quickly they act. 

While he doesn't say it, you can bet he wants that money sent to him so he can perform his mighty work of warning to the church!

All of this is enough to make me go out and buy a McRib on Saturday.  Might as well kill two birds with one stone......maybe that's three considering that money is going to a pagan business when it should have been sent to a True Church.

Does Gold Hoard Prove HWA Was Right!

Have you ever read a National Geographic article, looked at it's pictures and immediately found that it supported your understanding of Herbert Armstrong's teachings?  Most of us no longer do that, but there are still splinter cults of Armstrongism that look to these kinds of stories to legitimize their teachings.

The National Geographic has an article up about a hoard of gold and jewels that were discovered in a farmers field in Straffordshire England.  You can read the article here:  The Strattforshire Gold Hoard and see the fascinating pictures here:  Strattforshire Gold Hoard pictures

One day, or perhaps one night, in the late seventh century an unknown party traveled along an old Roman road that cut across an uninhabited heath fringed by forest in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Possibly they were soldiers, or then again maybe thieves—the remote area would remain notorious for highwaymen for centuries—but at any rate they were not casual travelers. Stepping off the road near the rise of a small ridge, they dug a pit and buried a stash of treasure in the ground.

For 1,300 years the treasure lay undisturbed, and eventually the landscape evolved from forest clearing to grazing pasture to working field. Then treasure hunters equipped with metal detectors—ubiquitous in Britain—began to call on farmer Fred Johnson, asking permission to walk the field. "I told one I'd lost a wrench and asked him to find that," Johnson says. Instead, on July 5, 2009, Terry Herbert came to the farmhouse door and announced to Johnson that he had found Anglo-Saxon treasure.

I guess when an Armstrongite sees the words. "Anglo-Saxon, he immediately thinks of HWA and his British Israelism myth that he plagiarized from "Judah's Scepter Joseph's Birthright", by JH Allen.  This book and Dugger and Dodd's, "The History of the True Religion" were important WCG "historical" documents when I came to Pasadena.

The History of the True Religion was used to legitimize HWA's standing as an ordained minister who was supposedly in direct lineage from a long line of "true ministers" from the time of the Apostles.  JH Allen's book was used to legitimize the existence of the Church.  But it had a more insidious history in the church though.

During HWA's six month bible study in a public library, he was exposed to the books popular from the mid-1880's to the 1930"s.  This was also the time period in which the British Empire was winding down in it's colonial conquests.  British and American libraries were filled with a myriad of books describing those conquests and some even trying to prove them by Scripture.  There were scores of British Israelism books in print and there was even a British Israel Society in existence during HWA's study phase.  Many of the books tried to prove the existence of the British Empire as directly inspired by God through the lineage of Joseph and the wanderings of the 12 tribes.

Numerous books were also in print at this time on Pyramidology and how the Great Pyramid of Giza was reportedly built by Joseph as study in future prophecy.  The Ambassador College library in Pasadena was filled with these books on pyramidology. Some even had HWA's had writing in the margins.

These books and more were all in public libraries that HWA used when he was doing his equivalent study of a semester of school. It also goes to show that HWA did NOT originate British Israelism.  He just copied all he could from other people and claimed it as his own.  It quickly mushroomed as a proof of the Bible and that God was working through him.

The trouble with all of this was that hundreds of books had already been printed refuting British Israelism.  This caused Meredith, Hoeh, and others to have a knee jerk reaction and to double their efforts in legitimizing the half balked theory.

We have all see the result s of that theory in Armstrongism. It was and still is used to legitimize racism in the church and in society around them.  It is used to claim that God hates intermarriage and will separate all races from each other in the kingdom. I guess that scripture of there being neither Jew nor gentile, male or female does nto apply to this, but I digress.

Anyway, back to the present day and the National Geographic story. The COG splinter cult  The Knock is all hyper that the article PROVES beyond a shadow of doubt that:

Saxon Gold Treasure found in Central England – of Sythian Origin – Evidence of the Lost House of Israel!

Say what?  No where in the National Geographic article does it say any such thing!  Armstrongism once again is jumping to conclusions to make the story fit the mold they want it to.  Usually though, they are just deliberately lie knowing that the uneducated COG members are usually too lazy to do any in depth research into the story. Far too many COG members are willing to let others tell them what to believe.

So yet again, we see items from history being slipped into COG history as legitimate proof of HWA's claims.  It didn't work back then and still does not today.

Idiots In The Pulpit: Dancing Makes The Lord Cry