Celebrity Chef Tony Brown of Spokane Is Former COG Member

Inside Eyvind, the next project from Ruins' chef-owner Tony Brown 

By Jacob H. Fries

A feel good story for the day!

"The idea of a celebrity chef, I think, is completely ridiculous," Brown says, laughing at the cheffy hashtag #truecooks and the associated (though totally impractical) line of apparel. "That stuff to me is just bullshit. ... Maybe I'm selling myself short, but my job is to cook for people, and they give me money."

His no-bullshit perspective has been shaped by an unusual journey to this point. Born in Eugene, Oregon, he was raised inside the conservative Worldwide Church of God, described by some as a "doomsday cult," and he left home at 15 (after his family had moved to Spokane). He dropped out of high school a year later, got his GED, started at Spokane Falls Community College and found himself working in kitchens. He later got married and moved to Chicago, where he continued cooking and studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. They had a daughter, moved back home to Spokane and promptly got divorced, Brown says.

It is always great to read these stories considering the church used to preach from the pulpit that anyone who left the church would never be successful in life.  God would remove his blessing from them and they would be forever punished for their bad decision.

Read the entire story here:  Inside Eyvind, the next project from Ruins' chef-owner Tony Brown

More can be found here:

Chef Tony Brown honors the magical realism of Disney illustrator Eyvind Earle with forthcoming restaurant

Fun Sabbath Facts : An Inconvenient Truth About "Prophesy Comes Alive!"

Prophecy is the life blood of many churches.  Without it and their explanation of how soon, shortly and how far the night  is spent edging us ever closer to the Second Coming etc, they would have little drawing power.  Fear and concern for "what's going to happen to me" is a great motivator towards finding a suitable religion that will cover all contingencies. 

Ever Christian has been told and shown that there are hundreds of prophesies in the Old Testament that point to the first and second coming of Jesus.  This is a core belief and all the proof needed to live lives in anticipation of not having to put up with real living very long.  It won't be long now has been going on a very long time however as we all know, over the past 2000 years.  

As we all know, the New Testament is the sequel to the Old.  But consider this.  How hard would it be to look BACK into the Old Testament, knowing it's "prophesies" on many topics unrelated to Jesus and write a rather mythical account of Jesus life which would match what the OT already said?  That, of course, would look very much like the OT predicted Jesus when in fact the story of Jesus was written by mining the OT for scriptures to write the story.  It would be very easy to do and actually was what was done.  

In Matthew's birth narratives of Jesus , Matthew writes A story of Jesus birth circumstances based solely on Old Testament Scriptures.  Matthew's version of Jesus birth in no way matches Luke's story. It is obvious neither read or heard of the other's story when they were inserted into the Gospel's to quell the problem of "We were not born of fornication" circulating about Jesus real birth circumstances.  Matthew made the OT mean what it never meant to write his story of Jesus. No one knew Jesus  real birth circumstances either in time or place, so he wrote one. In doing so it looks like the Old Testament prophesied everything about Jesus long ahead of time. 

None of the following have anything to do with Jesus nor are they future predictions beyond the lives of those living at the time.  Prophecy is for THEM, not us generally in their lifetime to address their own stresses and fears.  Many OT prophecies failed to come to pass for them as well.  

1. 1:22-23            the birth of Emmanuel  (It means "God IS with us" 
2. 2:5-6                the coming of a shepherd from Bethlehem
3. 2:15                 God’s son being called up out of Egypt
4. 2:17-18            Rachel’s lamentation for her children
5. 2:23                 One who shall be called a Nazorean

For example, #1.    The passage in Isaiah is about a child being born THEN who would be called "God IS with us" meaning the not to worry about the Assyrians wiping them off the map.  Matthew tweeked it by making Emmanuel mean "God with us" which was not the intent of Isaiah's words. Matthew simply used the story to write his own and in doing so makes it look like Jesus was prophesied, and by a virgin at that, again tweeking the text for his own ends. 

Each one of these OT scriptures did not originally mean anything near what Matthew updated them to mean for his story of Jesus.  Originally the out of Egypt story was about Israel, not Jesus but Matthew had the family fleeing to and from Egypt to escape Herod's murderous rampage against the innocents because it made a great story but not necessarily history.  He needed a Herod story to go after Jesus just as Pharoah went after Moses as a baby.  Luke never heard of such a thing and his version of Jesus family has them going back to Nazareth peacefully after 40 days of ritual purification etc.   

Simply put, it is prophecy historized and NOT history prophecied.  Since the early Christians were a spin off of Judaism, what better way to win them over to Jesus than to show their very scriptures predicted him by using them to write the Jesus story.  This technique, not understood by Western Christians and probably disturbing to them if they did is how we get the idea that the Old Testament propehcied everything in Jesus birth and death , down to his final words (Psalm 22)  , earthquakes, darkness and resurrection.  

The fact is that no one knew either the actual birth circumstances of Jesus, not the date nor the place, nor the events surrounding it, nor those of his death.  Try harmonizing the two Gospel accounts of Jesus birth and four of Jesus death and see how far you get.   They are not eyewitness accounts. They are cobbled and woven form Old Testament scriptures that originally did not mean what New Testament authors made them mean.  It was a writing style of the times but not literally true.

Occam's Razor

 "For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable."

In other words, the most simple explanation is usually the more correct one

I hope those who find reading longer explanations of interesting topics burdensome will find this to the point.

COG White Bwana's Fighting For African Souls

It is always fun watching Church of Gods battle it out amongst themselves over how many souls they can add to their groups. Today in the Church of God we have two self-appointed leaders who think they are doing the best work that has ever been accomplished in Africa. The battle is going on between Almost-arrested, but not-arrested Bob Thiel and Dingy Wade Cox. Both have the same acronym, CCG.

Thiel claims he is drawing in thousands and thousands of members in Africa to his improperly named "continuing" Church of God, while Wade Cox says he is also bringing thousands in Africa into his improperly named "christian" Churches of God.

Wade CoxJanuary 13 at 6:32pmWell God has been dealing with the churches in Africa this week and we suspect there will be increases following now in Africa. We had church groups leaving the Armstrong offshoots and asking to be inducted to CCG in East Africa and in Benin in West Africa this last week. So also people in Brazil and elsewhere.

The fun thing about all of this is that these Africans they are both so desperate to convert are the same people who have jumped from one COG after another and from one Seventh Day Adventist Church after another. Whoever has the money gets the newest converts. Of course, both of the white Bwana's think they are the new saviours of Africa with their own version of the "truth."

Several years ago Dingy Cox claimed that he had converted 1/2 of the entire African continent into his group. He was widely mocked and proven to be a complete fool. That still has never stopped him as he tries to poach SDA's and other COG groups for followers.

It is also equally sad that there are probably sincere people who are desperately looking to follow Christ, but they will never find him in either of these two silly personality cults.

With any luck, these new converts will bankrupt both of these splinter cults. One can only dream.