Exposing the underbelly of Armstrongism in all of its wacky glory! Nothing you read here is made up. What you read here is the up to date face of Herbert W Armstrong's legacy. It's the gritty and dirty behind the scenes look at Armstrongism as you have never seen it before!
With all the new crazy self-appointed Chief Overseers, Apostles, Prophets, Pharisees, legalists, and outright liars leading various Churches of God today, it is important to hold these agents of deception accountable.
Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders
My OTHER favorite Church of God prophet has been busily parked at his kitchen table cranking out new books, making videos by his pretend "fireside" and uttering prophecies about the impending doom to hit humanity, particularly those living in mythological British Israel nations and those who happen to be part of the various Churches of God. No matter how hard he tries, he still cannot get his little kitchen-based ministry off the ground so that he receives a steady income stream. Unable to claim miraculous dreams and double blessing, like my other favorite prophet does, he struggles along hoping that someone will buy one of his books or heed his message and send him some desperately needed money.
The problem that Chief Pharisee James Malm faces is that most COG members are sick and tired of the lying false prophets in their midst. They are tired of sending money to unemployed wanna-a-be's, and especially tired of those who bastardize the law making it more important than grace.
While subject to various military and political calculations there is good reason to expect the general regional Middle East war to begin in mid to late February. I plan to begin recording now with the first program to be about the imminent conflict and its purpose and aftermath to be published on 24 Jan, just ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan 27th.
That one News Prophecy program is scheduled to be followed up by a series “From Sinai to Jesus” about the reason for the captivities and covering the remarkable fulfilled prophecies of the rebuilding of the temple and city and the inter testament history up to the ministry of Christ.
It does not take a talking jackass to tell us that there is trouble in the Mideast right now, but it has nothing to do with the prophetic belching done by Church of God liars right now.
It's very difficult for humans to say the words "He/she/they died." What a marvelous number of euphemisms for death we have. We pass on, croak, kick the bucket, go home, expire, succumb, leave, meet our maker, go to our reward, get wasted, check out, eternally rest, are a goner, end, bite the dust, get liquidated, terminated and annihilated. We CROAK! (Thanks Tonto!) We give up the ghost, make the change, transition, get mertilized, go to to the other side, fall asleep, get taken, rubbed and snuffed out. We depart, transcend and buy the farm. We are feeling no pain, lose the race, cash in, cross Jordan and go with the angels. We get done in, translate into glory, return to the dust, wither away, give up, take the long sleep and a dirt bath. It can be curtains, a dropped body, six feet under and out of our misery. We find everlasting peace, new lives the great beyond, ride into the sunset and that's all we wrote. But in plain fact, we are dead.
All of religion is predicated on the fact that we have to go somewhere after death. "We" being everything from our spirit and energy to our mind and ethereal body. We like it better if there is a good place for the nice ones of us and a bad one for the jerks. Although the idea of reincarnation lends itself to allowing everyone their spot after having learned lessons along the way many times over.
Western Churches spend your lifetime convincing you that their understanding is THE only understanding of what happens when we die and usually provide you with a program whereby you can leave your worldly goods, you know the ones they told you in sermons not to store up on, to them. I have seen many a family outside the particular denomination of the one who "went home" have to face the fact that all the goodies went to their church and not their family. Let's make a rule that if a person gives a church their stuff after they die, and sons or daughters protest, the Church has to give it back to the family. This will help the church to practice what they preach and give that which actually belongs to a family to the family it actually belongs to. Beware of Churches who have a program for you to "honor God with your death," or "Your will, a way for you to continue giving after you die," program. The money given to the Church will be mis-spent and it would be more satisfying to have your kids mis-spend it than your church,( no matter what Dave Pack says.)
It's funny how if you ask someone about quantum physics, how evolution works or universes are born, , it's such an unknowable mystery in the final analysis, at least for now. But ask a religious person about what happens after death, and pfffft...that's easy. We go to heaven, they go to hell, we get reincarnated often, we are deader than dead, we wait in the grave until Jesus returns, we rise in a physical body, we rise in a spiritual "body", we this and that as if they knew and the truth is that they don't. Westerners would never question the Bible as knowing what happens after death even though one can find all of the above mentioned in one form or another in the pages of the Bible. Like Humans, the Biblical understanding of death evolved into what we see in the Evangelical Christian Church today.
The Catholic Church has gotten good at adding new places the dead go, such as unsaved babies, or the unborn or the not quite saved types, but it's all a crap shoot. Because we can come up with questions like "well what kind of God would throw an innocent child in hell for not knowing.....", we have to figure out new holding pens for such categories of people. They are not real mind you, but they help us cope.
Missionaries rush to save the lost before they die while admitting, in some circles that if they left them ignorant, a loving God would automatically translate them into heaven upon death. I mean, they can't help it they were born in New Guinea or the Great Plains. I loved it when Geronimo was asked by the General who hunted him down and imprisoned him in Florida if he wanted to go to heaven when he died? Geronimo asked if the General was also going to be there? "Why of course," came the response met by as simple "Then no" by Geronimo.
Hell would indeed be for many having to spend eternity with those that drove them nuts in this life! I mean, do you really want to spend eternity closer than ever to all the people in your church, including the same pastor day and night forever! I think not! Heaven just might seem like one big endless potluck of boring people who are still pretending to be what they never were back on earth. It would be an eternal obligatory Thanksgiving or Christmas with the relatives that most never wanted to attend anyway! Nope, if I get to go to heaven, please God, let there be quiet places where no one can find me and those I want to be around. You know, kinda like we can do down here if we choose.
My quirky sense of symbolism caught up with me in my pics of a downtown Greenville Cemetery.
I saw a lot of death as a minister. Sometimes it was after the fact long enough to just bury someone in a nice funeral service in a nice setting. Sometimes I found myself standing at the edge of a river while they searched for a lost one or taken to a morgue to roll the dead body of a child or friend out of a drawer for a private family look. I even dug a grave once on a farm while we waited for family to arrive for a quick same day funeral and burial. I've picked up the cremains, ugh what a word, of people I had just talked to a few days earlier, now reduced to about 10 lbs. of gray sand. I have transported the neatly wrapped body of a newborn to another city in the backseat of my car, as the couple could not afford for the funeral home to do it.
Since writing this article, I have seen two out of three brother's in law die, a Nephew hit by a train, the loss of both parents at just under a 100 who died of evidently nothing much according to the Doc and the accidental death of my sister, a nurse, on the way home from work. And finally to be followed by my former wife and boys mom of Glioblastoma, an always fatal brain tumor just last year. When I belatedly posted her obituary on the Ambassador College site, not knowing I could, I was immediately attacked in the "sorry for her loss" comments by a zealous former AC student and now ministers wife (of another denomination I surmise) as the SOB she knew I was because she knew was in touch with my ex etc. I had just come from going to Grandparents day with her in her final month and a tearful talk on the back patio about our experience together and my own regrets of all things church and the pressure it put the family under for years. We made our peace.
This is all I need to know for purpose. It is enough and it is true
I have no illusions about my own passing in time. No wait, my own death. Unlike others who either worry for or can't wait for me to find out there is a Lake of Fire, I am quite at peace with having had the conscious human experience and all that made me up, save for the conscious part, which indeed is still a mystery, of elements forged in the cores of exploding stars over billions of years. Not a bad beginning at all!
Once I had visited a mother, just socially, who spent much of the visit recounting the talents, skills, and beauty of daughter, which is normal when a parent is well pleased. I specifically remember thinking on the way home "how would she cope if she lost that daughter, who was the center of all the mom lived for? When I got home, the phone was ringing and I was returning to the hospital where this young woman had just been brought fatally run down at 18 miscrossing a street. Tough stuff.
More quirk...
As a hobby, I took up paramedic skills. I learned why so many paramedics are overweight and smoke like chimneys. Pure stress. Most paramedics are wonderful caregivers but face the most horrendous of human deaths often. They eat and smoke too much and party way too hard. I don't blame them. I won't relate what I have seen. Just know that I have seen it. Death at it's worst. A Soldier could certainly top that.
The point seems to live in the moment, staying both out of the past of our lives, where we tend to store our anger and hurt, and also the future, where we store our anxiety and all that is unknowable. No one knows what happens at death. Just to say that is to stir the pot of religious surety. I know, no one but YOU.
There are some great stories of past lives recalled by some with uncanny detail. Hmmm, could be. Even the Bible gives the account of the blind man who caused the disciples to ask if the man's blindness was the fault of his parents or his own sin, "that he was BORN blind." We at least have to admit there is room there to question that if one is born blind due to sin, the sin must have taken place in a previous life. No other explanation is possible. Some in the early church believed in reincarnation. General George Patton was famous for his knowing where he had fought as a Roman Soldier in a previous life, while fighting again during WWII in Europe. He wasn't kidding and no one made fun of him either.
When my parents had my brother who ended up O2 saturated back in the day before someone figured out nitrogen was also a part of the breathing experience and then blind, deaf and unable to speak, their Presbyterian minister told them "well you must have sinned in some way for God to allow this." So it's an age old leap to false and judgmental conclusions on the part of those not so affected.
There are stories of those who have left their bodies in near death experiences only to return and recount the experience in detail that only a, well "Ghost" could give. They got recalled to finish their lives evidently and everyone who experiences such a thing never again fears death. Well worth the experience if only for that little peace of mind, I'd say.
The Gospel of John presents a risen Jesus who exhibits all the signs of one who survived a sure death and came back a changed man. It's the "Jesus survived the crucifixion view that grew from there.
Stories abound of those who were given organ transplants donated by those who have died, only to mysteriously acquire the deceased's taste in foods, books or familiarity with topics never studied in their own lives. This would give credence to the idea tha cellular memory can be passed on. Whoa..pretty inspiring stuff and not just a little bit spooky.
Crass religions make big bucks off the masses who need to purchase their places in the Kingdom of God. I remember once shoveling a drive buried in feet of snow for a woman who then paid me in Catholic indulgences. They gave me a full 90 days less in Purgatory. I told her I was Presbyterian. She smiled and closed the door. I almost shoved the snow back into the drive.
I'm glad that so many can be so sure they know what happens at death. Some just know because they read it in the Bible never thinking that even that book is just another attempt by humans to figure this out. Some just know it's true because it's "true for me." Some feel that it just has to be true or what's the point. One cannot just die for nothing after learning all this stuff in life. And some just know what they know is true because somehow even science can prove it so.
As I mentioned earlier, my brother in law died just two days after he was told he might live another three months. My boys mom was told 16 months and she died in three. If there was ever an example of a mind saying, "uh, no, I believe I need to go now," that was it. They just left, and I believe on their own terms. Or maybe they passed on, or went home, or bit the dust, or left this world, or got mertilized, transcended, lost the race, cashed in, got translated into glory, are on heavenly shores, out of their misery, carried by Angels, found peace, went into the zero point field, the great beyond, rode into the sunset and that's was all he wrote. I am not so arrogant to think that I know. But we all spend our lives wanting to know, hoping there is (that's what faith is) and fearing the "if not".
Personally I assume that because I did not notice or mind not being here the first 14.5 billion years of our Universe's existence, I won't mind or notice it after my death as it expands out into thin nothing or implodes to bang again. All that we are, were and perhaps could be in some way again, will always be in the soup. And if perchance there is a Deity, He/She/It and is not of the Hebrew cultic kind that will like me enough, I'm sure, to include me in Plan B. :)
Symbol is something I have thought about for a long time. It goes back to studying marketing, branding and the use of symbol to project power, wealth, influence, solidarity and belief. The COGs love to criticize others for the use of symbols. An obvious example is the cross. The COGs say that the cross is a Pagan symbol that goes back to the worship of Tammuz in Babylon and other various Pagan connections. The COGs also mock the use of the cross as a symbol because it was a Roman instrument of cruelty and death. The "reasoning" goes that if Christ was killed with a machine gun or an electric chair, would Christians wear those around their necks?
It shows a fundamental ignorance of what symbol is, how it functions and why. The question I would ask is: Does a symbol define its meaning, purpose and use for people or do people define the meaning, purpose and use of a symbol? The obvious answer is that people define symbols. A symbol in and of itself cannot ascribe anything to itself. With that in mind, does it make any logical sense to try and attribute Pagan meaning to the cross for a people who decided that the cross represented the sacrifice and resurrection of their Savior? It does not.
Because individuals define symbols, it is an arrogant offence to tell someone else what a symbol should mean to them. Try going up to someone with a tattoo and tell him what his ink means and you will probably get a deserved punch in the face. And yet it is what the COGs do constantly in their "gospel" message and wonder why the church continues to shrink.
A day can be a symbol we attach meaning to. God defined what the seventh day was to mean to Israel. Saturn is a planet as well as a god and is commonly attributed to be a symbol of Satan. We even call the day "Saturday" and go to worship God on "Satansday" but if anyone was to try and use the kind of reasoning we do concerning the cross, for example, against us, we would be offended. We don't worship Satan or Saturn and they have nothing to do with the Sabbath and the God who defined its' meaning in the Old Covenant...as far as we are concerned.
When the COGs are criticized for having "Winter Family Weekends" at Christmas time, they get offended. It has nothing to do with Christmas as far as they are concerned and they are correct. Yet! They will turn around every December and tell Christians who observe Christmas that they are celebrating a pagan holiday and somehow bolstering an ancient practice of roasting babies in fires and eating them like Babylonians or Canaanites did 4000 years ago or supporting drunken sexual orgies practiced at this time of year by Greeks and Romans 2000 years ago.
With no Sola Scriptura establishing time as a symbol in the New Covenant, Christians were free to set aside any time they chose for religious purposes. The Gentile Christians who were regularly assaulted by Jews and Jewish Christians about the Old Covenant, the Sabbath and circumcision, naturally developed an aversion to Saturday and an affinity toward Sunday as a day to get together since Paul started the custom to gather offerings for Jerusalem on Sundays and the Christians knew Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday.
I know Sunday-keepers today elevate Sunday in the way Jews elevate the Sabbath. But the early Christians did not transmigrate the symbolism, meaning and purpose of the Sabbath into another day (Sunday). Neither Christians, nor Pagans observed any day as a day of rest. Later generations of Christians chose to define what Sunday was to them and how to use it. Rome imposing its will and meaning on Sunday observance has no bearing on what it meant to Christians for 300 years beforehand.
It is interesting that the two annual observances that Christians did create was:
1. Celebrating the Resurrection (called "Easter" later)2. Celebrating the Incarnation (called "Christmas" later)
Both observations are practiced annually by Christianity but largely ignored by COGs. I don't think I have ever heard a minister rehearse the Incarnation in a sermon. And the only time I hear sermons concerning the resurrection is to simply try to prove that a Friday crucifixion-Sunday resurrection is wrong. Look at what Paul says in I Corinthians 15:1-4
"Now brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to Scriptures, that he was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures."
Paul says this is the most important part of Christianity and this is exactly what is embodied in the observance of Easter and Christmas every year. The COG's two annual main focuses are on Jesus being the Passover Lamb acknowledging His death and His prophetic return as King of Kings. Not saying this is wrong but is it any better than a focus on the Incarnation and Resurrection?
Focus on prophecy was confusing people in Thessalonica (II Thess. 2). Paul and Peter both had to walk back their false assumptions about the immediacy of prophecy. COG focus has always been Old Covenant (Seventh Day) and Prophecy (Adventists) which, in my opinion, has only brought back into focus, first-century confusion caused by Jewish Christians, no matter how well-meaning.
If you consider Judaism and Mainstream Christianity at opposite ends of a spectrum, the COGs seem to exist somewhere in a confused middle because they refuse to articulate a clean break from the Old Covenant. Supposing all three positions miss the mark, where is the sweet spot? Some think it's inching closer to Judaism. We see it in a growing Hebrew Roots Movement. I know some here would say completely off the spectrum. I personally lean closer to mainstream Christian scholarship and historical research instead of HWA's 6-month library study but fully realizing fundamental flaws in Catholic and Protestant doctrines.
I think if Paul were around today, he would be telling us all to leave each other alone about the observance of days. I feel no inclination to observe Easter, Christmas or Sunday but I also see no benefit in harassing well-meaning Christians that do. Some may say I am wandering too far off the COG farm but I would just ask anyone with eyes to see if they see the churches of God growing in grace or knowledge or in fruits of the spirit? Have we set any better of an example of what Christianity should be than Catholics or Protestants? Since growth in the "work" was established as a measuring stick by HWA, is there growth in the works being done by the petty, infighting, AC alumni we call ministers?
The unpleasant truth is we are the descendants of an Adventist Movement started 176 years ago on the foundation of a false prophesy and that has continued to provide additional false prophets along the way. Are we really "the" church or are we just "a" church? Are we really a church or are we the dying aftermath of a personality cult? If we are a dying remnant of a cult, can we be salvaged and reformed into a church? Should we seek to be grafted back into the parent church started by Gilbert Cranmer? Will the church of God movement as it exists right now, spread a Sola Scriptura gospel to the whole world and usher in the return of Christ?
"Receive one who is weak in the faith, but not to dispute over doubtful things...Who are you to judge another's servant?...One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind...He who observes a day, observes it to the Lord; and he who does not observe a day to the Lord, he does not observe it...But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother?" --Romans 14:1, 4, 5-6, 10
I think everyone under the fundamentalist umbrella trip over themselves because they all declare Sola Scriptura but no one actually abides by it rationally, nor accept that Scripture does not plainly answer many questions. Approaching the Bible with a spirit of grace allows us to accept our vast ignorance and resist telling everyone else what's what. Sola Scriptura in the hands of narcissists and psychopaths is a "thus sayeth the Lord" cat o' nine tails in each competing and divided church of God that demands their work be your god, their thoughts be your meditations, their cross be your burden, their days be your idols, their private interpretations be your doctrines and their every precious heresy be your sin; sucking the free will out of hapless souls over doubtful things.
Gerald Weston used his Winter Weekend message to attack tattoos and vaping again. But I digress.
