Dennis On: "I Still Have Hope"

I'll let this be one of the shortest "articles" I have written.  I love this video. 

I love the message and I still wish it were so. 

 

For all the skepticism on origins and content, one would be a fool to not want this to be true.  

 

The world is really screwed up. 

Leaders are finally being challenged politically as religious leaders are 

by those like us who have had enough. 

 

Maybe it is people that make things happen after all. 

 

When in WCG, I stayed way too long because the hope of the message was still bigger than the stupidity of the administration.  

 

Then the stupidity won and it was time to move on. 

 

So to prove I can get to the point....I love this video. 

 

It still bring tears to my eyes.  

 

I still have hope.  

 

I just can't prove it and don't trust anyone to tell me how it all is anymore.

 

Season's greetings to you all however you perceive it.  

 

I love you all for the journey you have been on and have so freely shared.

 

Den

Interracial Dating In Armstrongism

Felix has a great letter on his blog by a GenX black member who grew up in the silliness that is Armstrongism. Armstrong and various other cult ministers always loved to preach that they were 'turning the hearts of the children to their fathers'. Nothing could be further from the truth than that comment. Armstrongism destroyed countless lives, families and the beliefs of tens of thousands of members.

There has been a slew of stories flooding the internet over the last several years by people who suffered under the putridness of Armstrongism. This story is just another in a long list of stories on how morally bankrupt the entire belief system of Armstrongism is. And of course the nay sayers come out of the woodwork and accuse these people of all kinds of lies. Most appalling is the extreme amount of racism that filled the church. I have loved watching Armstrongites over the years deny that there was ever any racism in the cult.  Some of the biggest proponents of this seem to have gravitated towards Rod Meredith and Gerald Flurry.

Another "Second Generation XCGer Speaks Out

19 07 2009

(Editor's note: We have on Gavin's blog heard the testimony of Sienspirit, a young woman in her mid-20's discuss her time being in the Worldwide Church of God (historic, orthodox and evangelical periods) and discusses the ripple effect of the church's destuctive policy on medical care which hit directly at home with her. Though members from the splinters came out from the woodwork (let's say) to spew their venom by suggesting that her testimony was exaggerated at best and fabricated at worst or that she was another second generation whiner who could not take any responsibility for her life and the most childish and infantile suggestion that Sienspirit was not the most attractive of appearences (I actually liked her hair done in the third segment of the video and I really do think she has an Alyson Hannigan-American Pie fame, thing going on but that's just my humble but complementary opinion), I thank God she had her defenders and I will proudly add my name to the list. Until Anderson Cooper gives people like her some prime time, Youtube and other internet media will be the route. I have also said some time ago have desired to hear some more stories of relating to an African American (or Canadian or Carribean) experience in Armstrongism. Well I didn't need to look to far. My brother's friend in Y.O.U. days has a story and it is a unique story. This brotha was an independent thinker from the get-go and trust me this guy has proven that there IS life after the WCG and more abundantly. I hope all will enjoy this different kind of perspective.)

On the family side, things began to sour. My father got fired from his good paying career because he refused to work a Friday night shift that he was scheduled to work. Then he tried to call the church lawyer using the "religious freedom" card. The lawyer in our church stated that he can't help him and hung up the phone rudely. In my opinion, losing a career in the manner my father did was irresponsible. As I look around me at church, the YOU group my brother was in were nice kids outside of church, but in church a collection of disinterested teens that did not care about church. I was in YES. I dutifully completed the bible lessons and I got my YES certificate from the minister-a stiff as a cardboard Englishman. I admit his daughter was cool to me because she was coming to church with yellow hair and openly criticizing the church current doctrines. I recall when word got out that she was pregnant, the self-righteousness of many people felt it was their right to openly criticize her. Using names like "*#$%@", members (particularly the single men) started to quote this line about "be you not unequally yoked". That service was just bizarre. I felt sorry for her. I saw in tears outside the meeting hall (a very old public school in another end of town) I said to her, I do not condone in this behaviour". I then decided it was time for me to "go on strike with the WWCG".

My biggest complaint with the 'church' was the policy on interracial dancing. My brother and I were not allowed to go because of this reason and I quote "The Worldwide Church of God view is that interracial dancing can ignite sexual arousal in black men so we don't allow black men to dance with someone outside their race." The minster went on to say that it was OK to call a black person "@%#%#@". The two statements are the most ignorant, short-sighted, ridiculous statements I have ever sat through in my life. This was said in the middle of church! Recall that my family was the only black family in the congregation. I threw a temper tantrum like former tennis star John McEnroe in his prime at church and to this day, I am very proud of myself for speaking out in the middle of church! I got some lashes from my father for it when I got home, but I felt strongly that what the minister said was racist. It became the 'hot-topic' in the church district I resided in. The minister tried to "smooth things over" but the mere sight of him entering my parents house would make me want to toss him out in the manner like Philip Banks did to Jazz on the 90s sitcom "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" television show-throw Jazz out of the house!

The minister came to my parents' house to explain how SEP works, how I would be a "leader for the black kids". I told him I am no role model for anyone. The minister assured me that those rules were done away with, realized they were rules that created sensitivity issues etc. I went to camp, first dance they had, no interracial dancing (not even in dance class!) I remember the camp director. I never liked this man because in a YOU track meet earlier this summer, he made comments about black people that I felt were insensitive. I sat alone by the lake. One of the girls' counsellors found me and asked why I was not dancing. I told her why. She was SHOCKED to find out the rule existed.

My experience dealing with hypocrisy, racism (not just with Caucasian people but other black members of the WWCG were racist towards me due to my refusal to date their daughters and being called a "sell-out". For those that do not understand a "sell-out" is a black person who "acts white." By that I mean young black males like myself who do well in school, do well in extra curricular activities and are decent in character. For instance there was one young black woman who thought it was her divine right to go up in my parents face after church one and state this in a nasty attitude that was evident in some black women back then. I quote "You have raised beautiful whitechildren". I know most who read this may not understand but I will state that was very hurtful towards my mother. My reaction, some CHOICEwords for this young woman), church leadership (and I have not even touched on the doctrinal side of the Church in this retrospective look) and the two-faced attitude of most of the members I came into contact with.

He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain...........

From Days, Vol 2

Cast amongst the unbelievers, the long discussions with the priests had been excruciating. It had caused great concern in the family, particularly with his mother, that as he turned 13 he began to express doubts. Their family had been ridden with the deep fears and insecurities that came with fundamentalist Christianity; and had swallowed whole the propaganda from the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong and Garner Ted Armstrong. They had been blessed by God, and told the truth, here at the end time. The bottles of stored water mounted in the cupboards. And all was lost, lost, when he couldn't reconcile his own stirrings with the strict proscriptions being hailed down upon them.

Was he really going to go to hell? For what exactly? Why was God so unmerciful, so cruel. Why didn't he care about those he was condemning to death. He wrote his first major poem, about this fearful God and the queues of the condemned. They snaked out through stone pillars and under arching stone walls, they spilled down mythical steps and they kept on coming, hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses. Oh if only they had been good, instead of being here, facing their destiny, their death, their judgement.

Was he really going to die, just like them, just because he had the precocity to doubt. Just because he demanded to be convinced. Just because God didn't make sense to him any more, in his young, adolescent, longing brain. He didn't want to go the church on Saturday's any more. Saturday was yet another point of difference with the mainstream churches. They had chosen Sunday, the Roman day for worshipping the Sun God, and had betrayed the Lord. All around them was corruption. Mini-skirts were creating headlines. The Rolling Stones really were of the devil, even worse than the Beatles. Licentiousness surrounded them.

He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain, he would be forced into a suit. He would sit in the back of the car, silent, tearful, the welts stinging on his legs and on his back, inside a gale of tears and regret, unable to see any way out of this living nightmare that was his life. He hated the suit he had been forced to wear. He hated his parents, who kept beating him so badly, all because he didn't want to go to church. And he hated God, for being such a fascist, forcing him to believe when he just didn't want to. Why so cruel? What did he care whether he believed or not?

But the belts snaked out until he was forced, literally forced, to recant and don the suit and get in their Holden, and sit in the back with those storms of tears inside him, and watch sadly, sullenly, as the brick green and red colours of the suburbs flowed by, as they exited their narrow winding street with its demonic trees and eternal rusting, its sandstone caves and the heat filled secrets of the bush. The only time he began to rally was when the suburbs became the city, and his interest sparked up. What would it be like to live here, or here, what was it like behind that door, or that one, were they happy?

And after the beatings and the long drive and an insanely boring service, where Ezekiel and Isaiah and a thousand other ancient horrors thundered from the pulpit of the Petersham Town Hall, after the thunderous virtues and the neatly dressed families sitting ram rod strait, their hair combed and their ears clean, after it all his concerned mother would drag him around for a special conference with the priest. He was excruciatingly embarrassed. What business of anyone's were his own myriad doubts?

He sat there and had what he thought were relatively advanced theological discussions, where he set out to prove that God did not make sense, that he shouldn't be imposing all this suffering on mankind, that if he really was a kind and compassionate and all knowing being he wouldn't be inflicting all this pain. The priest quoted scripture, and together with the priest, in a back room of the town hall, the family knelt and prayed for his salvation, for him to be rescued from evil thoughts, from doubt, from the wider world.

He didn't want to be rescued from evil thoughts. He wanted to escape the nightmare that was his life; the beatings, the brutality, the overwhelming despair, the gusts of emotion that crippled him. It was here in these painful days that he developed the philosophy that was to live with him throughout much of his adult life: he didn't want to feel anything at all, because to feel anything was to be hurt.