Living Church of God Education Classes: How To Waste A Year Of Your Life

That fun loving Jonathan McNair, who got his job because of nepotism, is back encouraging the young men of the Living Church of God to waste one year of their lives, taking classes he helped design. Seriously!  Why?

Living Education

One of the most common questions asked about our on-site program in Charlotte is this: “Why should a young man take a year out of his life to come to Charlotte to study the Bible? That won’t help me get a job.” This is a good question. For a young man, whether just leaving high school or in the young adult years, his focus should be primarily on acquiring skills, knowledge, and experience. Without these three elements, he won’t be able to lead and provide for a wife and a family. But here’s a challenge to you as a young man: Don’t get so caught up in the rush to make a living that you forget the importance of learning how to live. This is what makes Living Education unique. Your local community college, the university you’d like to attend, or the apprenticeship you’re applying for will not teach you how to live. We will. Give us one year and we’ll give you a foundation for a lifetime. What about young women?  We’ll address the benefits of Living Education for you next week!—Jonathan McNair

Is Rod McNair going to teach a class on how to find demons in nursing homes among the elderly? Or how about teaching the young men that they can't be proper witnesses of the gospel unless they have an org chart telling them who is in charge and what to believe.  Will they have a class on how to malign church members characters and reputations, from the pulpit, like they did the Scarborough's?

Next week we will be blessed by the highly encouraging message from McNair to the young women of the church on why they should attend for a year.  What better place to learn how to cook for their husbands to be or to learn how to set a pretty place setting for dinner.  Oh the joy!

Is This The Greatest Sex Book Ever Written, After The Bible?

So says Gerald Flurry:

Educator Herbert W. Armstrong authored the greatest book about sex of all time, after the Bible. It is called The Missing Dimension in Sex. “Now comes the big truth!” he wrote. “Sex was designed and created in humans for purposes other than reproduction—for purposes totally foreign to animal or plant life! But the world has continued in unhappy and wretched ignorance of these glorious and God-bestowed purposes!”

Mr. Armstrong wrote this near the end of his life. He knew and lived God’s purposes for sex, and he yearned to rescue mankind from the pain and suffering that comes from using sex the wrong way.  The Beautiful Truth That Would Solve The Sex Scandals

Herbert Armstrong did nothing of the sort!  The first issue of this book came out in the 1964's as God Speaks Out On The New Morality.  Charles Dorothy and others at Pasadena contributed to the book.

Then to dump the 1960's theme, the name was changed to The Missing Dimension in Sex in 1971.

Then, like Herbert Armstrong was prone to do, he took all credit and reissues the book under his name in 1980.

Who can forget those kinky pictures!  It was the Worldwide Church of God's official book of porn for the teenagers!

Anyway, back to Gerald Flurry's idolatrous take on the book is:

Look around. It is plain to see that humans have sex for reasons other than just reproduction. Some of these reasons are perverse and should be avoided altogether, or sex scandals may result.

“Now reproduction, merely as such, is, of course, common to animals and plants, as well as humans,” Mr. Armstrong continued. “But, in humans, reproduction has a sacred and God-plane meaning not applicable to any other kind of life!”

With animals, reproduction is nothing more than reproduction. With humans, reproduction points to a marvelous spiritual parallel. Human babies are very different from animal offspring. Only humans are born as heirs of salvation—heirs of God! Marriage, family and sex have God-plane meaning!

People have sex so they can become god's.  Who knew!   Oh, and that it might be pleasurable as something other than for reproduction.  Unless of course you were Rod Meredith and Gerald Flurry and sex was dirty (most of the time).

According to Flurry, sex is essential for salvation. Forget Jesus, a good romp in the sack will bring salvation.

Humans are not animals! We can be spiritually begotten by receiving the Holy Spirit, and then spiritually born as sons of God! No animal or angel has such a potential!

Satan works diligently to hide God’s purposes for sex from the world because they point to our salvation. He wants to hide God’s plan of salvation, which is all about family.

That's because you are going to marry Jesus and become a god!  Woo Hoo!

“This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (verse 32). These principles apply to physical marriage, but mainly they are about spiritual marriage (Revelation 19:7). We can marry Christ, if we obey Him today. Physical marriage and sex prepare us for that glorious future.

For a book that was supposed to illustrate godly sex, the church was sure filled with some of the biggest sex fiends imaginable, starting with Herbert himself.  Sex was the biggest occupier of time in the church hierarchy.  From Garner Ted's G3 flying  whorehouse, to Rod Meredith's frequent visits to the Le Sexxe Shoppe in Old Town Pasadena (only for research, of course), and how can we forget the wife swapping ministers. the child molesters, stalkers and rapists in the church.

Just one more sad legacy of the "One True Church" that was supposed to be practicing first century Christianity.

Why is the Church of God Fertile Ground for Baseless Conspiracy Theories?

There is one gospel message that many in the Church of God are good at and that is spreading conspiracy theories.  Due to the endless stream of sermons, articles and videos pumped into the minds of church members on the "Prince of the poser of the air" who was actively seeking to thwart humanity in every aspect of life. Church members found the bogeyman hiding all over the world in books, TV, movies, papers, magazines, music, businesses, religion, and in the minds of every human on the earth, except of course, in the enlightened  COG members.  They and they alone could see though all of the corruption and subterfuge going on the world around them.  Satan was busy as hell and they were having none of it!  Expose him and his agents of darkness with  everything you could. So stories were dreamed up, exposes created, all breathlessly whispered or broadcast on Facebook as truth.

Case in point is the photo above circulating on various COG members Facebook pages and on conspiracy laden  conservative Christian pages.

One of the hallmarks of the Church of God is that it always claimed it NEVER lied about things to the membership or the world.  It was all God's truth directly inserted in the mind of Herbert Armstrong and every single minister that ever preached a sermon.  Yet, church members post crap like the above picture on their blogs and FB pages in self-righteous indignation.  Never once do any of them ever check into the facts surround some conspiracy.  If there might be the slightest grain of "truth" in the story then it is good for posting.

Matthew Herper from Forbes Magazine writes about this controversy:

The fetus-derived cell line we’re talking about was created around the time I was born. This is 35-year-old technology. And it is widely used in cell biology. And there is no way you’ll consume them or that the cells would cause any health problems.
The cells, called HEK 293 cells (that stands for human embryonic kidney) were taken from an aborted fetus in the 1970s in the Netherlands. Bits of chopped up DNA from the adenovirus, a virus that causes a pretty severe cold. The kidney cells were forced to take up bits of DNA using a technique invented in 1973 that used a calcium solution. The resulting cells don’t act much like human cells at all, but they are very easy to work with and have become workhorses of cellular biology. That’s why they’re used in the development of drugs and vaccines. No new fetal tissue has been used to keep the cell culture going; the use of this cell line isn’t leading to new abortions.

A tiny company called Senomyx has been working to use this new technology to create food additives. Senomyx has isolated receptors found on cells that detect taste, and added them to the HEK cells. This allows them to test thousands of potential taste additives to see whether they might taste sweet or savory with a speed that would be impossible with human taste testers. Synomyx has announced collaborations with Pepsi, Nestle, and Coca-Cola.    Famous Food Companies Caught Using Aborted Babies for Flavor Additives