The ADD Prophet Is Back Trying To Con People Into Joining His Cult

It's another fun day in California as the Great Bwana to Africa and 100 Caucasians is back bouncing around again with his ADD narcissistic personality with arms flailing and hands flapping as he preaches to the choir on how superfantabulous his little cult is. Never in the history of the church have we had a man who claims to be an ordained preacher care so little about Jesus!

Nowhere in this multitude of topics below in this so-called sermon is there any mention of Jesus? It's all about Bob, all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No other Church of God is as miraculous and touching more people that the Great Bwana and his little band of merrymakers.

Philadelphian Gospel Proclamation Priority 

What work should the most faithful Christians be supporting in the 21st century? 

 

What was the “open door” that Jesus opened for the Philadelphians for? 

 

Did Herbert W. Armstrong say that door was for the Philadelphians to fulfill Matthew 24:14 to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom to the world as a witness? 

 

What did Luke and the Apostle Paul write about the open door? 

 

Is having literature in hundreds of languages helpful to assist in the fulfillment of Matthew 24:14, Matthew 28:19-20, Romans 11:25, and Revelation 7:9? 

 

Just what was the work according to Herbert W. Armstrong? 

 

When did he, Dr. Herman Hoeh, and others in the Church of God say the proclamation work was to end? 

 

Was that related to the Great Tribulation and a nuclear World War III? 

 

Were the Laodiceans prophesied to rise up, be the dominant Christians at the end, but with lukewarm efforts and priorities, while wanting to focus on taking care of themselves? 

 

Did the Radio Church of God also warn about that? Is the proclamation of the Philadelphian church supposed to last until about the time it is to flee to the “place of safety” in the wilderness? 

 

Are there analogies between the first and second temple and the work done under Herbert W. Armstrong and now the Continuing Church of God? 

 

What about Loma Armstrong’s two-part dream? 

 

What about proclaiming the gospel through multi-media, radio, internet, literature, and personal visits? 

 

Will Philadelphian Christians be subject to persecution when some are used by God to “instruct many” per Daniel 11:33? 

 

Did Herbert Armstrong believe a “second work” would rise to effectively finish the short work of Romans 11:28? 

 

What are some part of the “final phase of the work”? 

 

Does the Continuing Church of God have the type of fruits that Jesus pointed to? 

 

Is supporting the proclamation work showing Philadelphian brotherly love? 

 

Was “Philadelphia” to continue per Hebrews 13:1? 

 

Is necessity laid upon the true Philadelphians to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom to the world as a witness? 

 

Is this a priority of the Continuing Church of God? 

 

Dr. Thiel addresses these matters and more by citing scriptures, historical records, and more!

Can you imagine his poor followers in Africa sitting in a hot building with a metal roof that is amplifying the heat downwards as God's greatest evangelist puts on this sermon and the brethren have to sit there and listen to our bouncing Bob talk about things they could care less about? After walking miles in the heat and being wary of troublemakers along the way, you arrive at church and are subjected to this asinine preaching. They come to hear about Christ and instead hear about Holy Bob.

Quantum Physics and the Incorporeality of God: Armstrongist Anthropomorphism in a Quantum Reality

 

Creating Entangled Photons from a Helium Atom

 

Quantum Physics and the Incorporeality of God

Armstrongist Anthropomorphism in a Quantum Reality

By Scriptor

Theology must be informed by science.  Otherwise, theology will be bound to an archaic world of unrealism.  The Genesis creation account, for instance, is based on ancient Near Eastern cosmology.  A cosmology in which the sky is an arcing vault made of some kind of solid material and it is blue because there is water stored behind it and it is close enough so that birds can fly up to it and stars are little tiny lights in this firmament and one might even build a tower to reach it and God lives just on the other side of the vault.  My guess is that nobody reading this article believes this today even though it is written in the Bible.  If you never had a science course in public school at least you watched Star Trek.  The Bible content was written up during a certain period of time, by a certain people with a certain level of scientific development.  That does not limit its efficacy as a literary presentation of moral principle.  Science may change.  Moral principle does not.  This is the backdrop for this essay. 

Quantum Entanglement and the Idea of Space

Our world is a world of big stuff – rocks, trees, water.  But this world of big stuff emerges from another world of very, very tiny stuff – most of it particulate or resembling particles.  Light is composed of photons, for instance.  And this world, called the quantum world, behaves very differently than our world of large things.  This may seem irrelevant but it has very high relevancy to theology.  

Here is something that will be used in this essay that has an impact on theology but comes out of the quantum world.  It is called quantum entanglement.  Two photons can be entangled or, let us say, “connected.” These photons then may act as a pair.  An effect on one, like maybe changing its direction of spin, will immediately, in the same segment of time, cause the spin of the other to change.  They have identical, linked behavior.  The really amazing thing, something that Einstein called ‘spooky behavior at a distance’, is that it does not make any difference how far away the two photons are from each other.  One could be in your backyard and its twin could be 10 light years away and if you changed the spin of the one in your backyard, the spin on the one ten lights years away would also change identically.  Scientists don’t really know what happens here but they know it happens.  It is as if in the quantum realm the idea of space does not exist.  And in this reality of the incredibly small, Physicist believe that distance does not exist (Not all of them, of course.  You can never get agreement from all of them on most anything.)  

If you have a level of reality that is fundamental to our level of reality and distance does not exist in that fundamental reality, it has implications for whether or not God has a bodily existence in his essence.  This concern will be further developed below. 

God is Incorporeal – The Scriptures

Before we proceed with quantum mechanics, an exegesis from the New Testament concerning God’s ontological nature will give us a necessary point of departure.    Jesus is the culmination of the Law and the Prophets.   In Matthew 5:17, Jesus said “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”   So, Jesus can be consulted on all those places in the Law and the Prophets where it speaks about God because he is the culmination of the message.  He knows what the text means because he personally is the fulfilment of the words of that message including all the words that describe God as having eyes, hands and other body parts.  Jesus was semantics in being and action. 

And Jesus said, “God is a Spirit (John 4:24).”  God, in his essence, is Spirit.  But to us Spirit is something like attitude or mood.  How could a Being be nothing but that kind of Spirit?  So, Jesus explained it further in another place by using an analogy to something we know from our created world.  Jesus stated in John 3:8: 

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit…The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

From this we know that Spirit has the following properties:

1.     It has existence.

2.     It is not visible to humans. 

3.     It does not have form, as the wind does not have form.

4.     It is of a totally different category from flesh.

This has to be a puzzle for Old Testament literalists.  They must believe that God has a body and that Moses saw God.  Yet, the New Testament tells us that God is pneuma.  But humans also have pneuma.  Humans are viewed in the New Testament as being composed of pneuma, psuche and sarx – spirit, animating principle, and flesh.  In the verse above, when Jesus said “God is Spirit” the word recorded as Spirit is pneuma.  When, 1 Corinthians 2:11, Paul speaks of the “spirit in man” the word he uses is pneuma.  We then are beings with a pneuma where mind resides.  But doctors, people who can be trusted to be careful, scientific observers, have never seen a visible, formed spirit emerge from the human body at death as the Old Testament literalists would believe.  We have come to understand that Moses really just saw a theophany of God, a vision prepared by God for human discernment – like a metaphor in action.   Jesus, who should know, said, “No one has seen God at any time…”

The Invention of the Idea that Spirit as Substance with Form

In spite of the words of Jesus, in John 3:8 and 4:24, some who have fallen under the influence of Semi-Arianism believe that there is a way to support the idea that God has a body.  This is by defining spirit to be a substance that will hold form like matter in our realm.  There are some difficulties with this idea.  The first is, if God exists as a formable substance, who formed him? Is he not the only God?  If he formed himself, does that not say that in his original essence, he had no form?  

Some assert that any artifact that is in heaven, such as the heavenly Temple, is made of spirit.  While there may be formable substances that angels and other spirit beings use to fabricate artifacts, this is not necessarily true.  In the Book of Revelation, our only real window into the heavenly realm, John of Patmos saw objects made of gold and various precious and semi-precious stones (Rev 21:18-21).  John’s inspired understanding of these building materials indicates that they were composed of matter as we know it. 

Moreover, in the writings of those who support the idea of spirit as a formable substance, spirit is a single type of substance.  This is a requirement because if you want to bridge the idea of spirit as formable substance from the artifacts of the heavenly Temple to God’s supposed body, it must all have the same properties.  But that is an unproven and unprovable assertion.   Nowhere in scripture does it refer to heavenly artifacts as pneuma, but God is pneuma.  Some heavenly artifacts may be made out of some ever-enduring formable substance, something we might call “spirit” because we have don’t know what it is, but there is no exegesis that will show that God, who is pneuma, is made out of this same substance.  The term “spirit” is bandied about indiscriminately.    

God is Incorporeal – The Quantum Mechanics

Physicists speak of entangled particles, like the photons we discussed earlier, as having “non-locality.”  The quantum particles are not really bound by location and distance.  If God had a body he would be bound by location and distance. A bounded object in 3-space would model this idea.  If God were at point A in 3-space, he would not be a point B.  If God wanted to go to point B, he would have to cover some distance to get there.  And when he arrives he will be at point B and no longer at point A. Yet, photons function as if space and distance do not exist.  This means that God is constrained by distance but photons are not. 

This creates a dilemma.  Would God make particles with greater freedom than he himself has?  Or more to the point, could he even make particles with more freedom that he himself has?  Do you think he could make something that could do something that he himself could not do and yet be omnipotent?  The rational conclusion is that God is not constrained by distance and the physics of large material objects moving in space, a characteristic of bodily existence, does not apply to him.   So, the entire creation is present with him at once – something called omnipresence in orthodox Christianity.   

Summation – God is Transcendental

While what I have written I believe is a better explanation than believing that anthropomorphisms are literal, I understand that God cannot be known; my views for me are just a placeholder until the real understanding comes. 

A few months back, a contributor to this blog said God is comprehensible.  I had just made statements about God being transcendental.  His feeling was that if you could not understand God, what’s the point.  I think he thought that God was a kind of Superman and maybe we are all Clark Kent and one day we would take off our human suit and put on Superman clothes – Superman who was really quite human except for a few super powers.   This is the natural outcome of the idea that God has a body – and is like us.  That God is not really transcendent – just a more powerful version of us.  It makes the bumptious idea that one day we will be “God as God is God” seem like something within reach.   But God says in Isaiah 65:18, “But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create…”  If we will be equal to God, wouldn’t we be doing our own creating and rejoicing at our creations instead?  It is clear that God expects this to be the eternal condition of our relationship with him – he creates and we rejoice.  Yet, being a Creator is the principal part of what God is.  If you are going to be God as God is God and you do not create, you are missing the principal part of being God.  I am glad that God created quantum reality and scientists can barely understand it even though they can experiment with it.  It informs my personal theology that God happily transcends all that we children of God know.

Forever. 

God is Great!

 

 

The Plan of Salvation Involves Google And Our Favorite Crackpot Prophet

 

Our favorite crackpot self-appointed prophet is back again with a little blurb in his weekly letter to his 100 Caucasians and some in Africa. In it, he talks about how Google has been vital to his so-called gospel and to the plan of salvation. 

Apparently, when God was creating the foundations of the world he made a place in it for Bwana Bob to rise up in the perilous end times and for Google to be created, both at the same time. Seriously people, how else could God get this message across than by using Bwana Bob and Google! Jesus be damned, it is about Bwana Bob and Google, the two greatest gospel messengers in several millennia! this reminds me of the malarkey that the church used to say about the printing press and air flight technology. The printing press was invented so Herbert Armstrong could write books and articles and airplanes were created so Armstrong could fly to world leaders and talk about "a strong hand from someplace".Isn't the church sooooo special!

The Great Bwana writes:

We have promoted information on church history, the true Church of God, and God’s plan of salvation around the world through our Google campaign as part of the work we are doing to assist in fulfilling Matthew 24:14, Matthew 28:19-20, and Romans 11:25.

Imagine talking about a plan of salvation that does not focus on Jesus. Well, that's the message from Bwana Bob. 

Of course, like any conspiracy-laden COG leader, there are conspiracies floating around meant to discredit Bwana Bob's amazing work and Google is part of the demonic process! 

The Great Bwana to Africa and 100 Caucasins is also twitterpated over the number of "impressions" he has for his site.

As far as our Google campaigns go, we are doing very well. We have now reached over 523,894,002 impressions. That means computers (including ‘smart phones’) around the world have been reached over one-half billion times with parts of the good news for those who put in various search terms. 

 

In the past twelve months, we have made 154,423,552 computer/cellphone impressions through our Google campaign, which is over 12 million per month! And, we were able to do this without increasing our spending for this, but by basically working with Google representatives to improve the reach of our campaigns. 

 

It seems like never before in Church of God history have so few reached so many with so little resources. God has blessed the tithes and offerings we have received to give a witness to multiple millions around the world.

Like everything else from Bwana Bob, you need to take this information with a grain of salt. It sure looks impressive to see over 150 million "impressions" and to Bwana Bob, each and every one as a person who saw the gospel message he thinks he promotes. It doesn't mean they looked at it, it means it just popped up in an ad on what every device they're using. That's some gospel outreach there, Bobby! Truly astounding! Impressions usually never engage viewers, and that's what is happening to Bwana Bbo. People ignore him and rarely click through to actually read an ENTIRE article.

Here is what an impression looks like: 

Impressions are the most basic, utterly mundane interaction you can have with a page. In fact, it’s hardly even an interaction. An impression is a view. When your ad loads and displays in front of a user, that is one impression.

What’s the point of impressions? Well, you can’t have clicks without impressions. Users need to see your ads before they can decide whether or not to click them.

This is typically referred to as CPM, or Cost Per Mille, where Mille means thousand. So if you’re paying for $1.50 CPM, $1.50 will earn you 1,000 impressions on your ads. One thousand people will see your ads, and all you had to do was pay under two dollars.

Fun fact: mille is Latin for “thousand” and is the root of the word millennium.

Some advertisers will pay you for a certain number of impressions. This works the opposite way; you pull in views, and the advertiser will pay you per thousand, typically in the sub-$1 range. This is because it’s incredibly easy to get views, but it’s hard to get anything out of them. The Difference Between Website Impressions and Clicks

And more:

Page Impressions (also: impressions or page views, abbreviated as PI) is a term used in web analytics. It refers to the display or page view of an entire HTML document in a browser. Therefore PIs are also frequently called contacts. If page impressions are registered, it is generally not assigned to a specific user. A user can view multiple pages and create multiple page impressions. 

 

Since it is not possible to make a clear statement about specific user behavior with the help of page impressions, (as it constitutes a quantitative analysis), metrics such as unique visits or visitors are preferred as the basis for traffic analyses for quality web analytics. Page Impressions

Things are not rosy with Bwana Bob and Google though. He imagines they are trying to thwart his ministry:

That said, our Google campaign has been facing difficulties as Google keeps changing its rules on ads. Google is now more and more restricting religious advertising as well as the content of such advertisements. Today, we got more emails from Google showing their biases against “Religious beliefs” in advertising. 

 

Google also seems to think that asking a question is an “unreliable” claim and has suspended at least one of our campaigns because of this. While we have worked with Google on this before, the time may come when this door to reach people may be fully shut–before the coming prophesied famine of word in Amos 8:11-12. However, until such time, we still hope to reach multiple millions more through our Google and other campaigns. 

Poor Bwana! Everyone is always picking on him! It is getting bad when even Google sees that he is spreading false teachings! 

Repent Bob Thiel! Set your people free!