Looking Back: Sodium and Somorrah

Biblical archaeology: Remember Lot’s wife? Here are photos claimed to be her

Dr. Robert Thiel

"Whether or not that location (and a photo of that pillar is shown at the beginning of this post) is it or not, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of some type of salt."

https://www.cogwriter.com/news/old-testament-history/biblical-archaeology-remember-lots-wife-here-is-a-photo-claimed-to-be-her/

Wikipedia, which after discrediting the biblical account, does mention two locations have been pointed to:

Mount Sodom Pillar, made of Halite, a rock salt (photo by Wilson44691)

Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed as an example to show what happens to those that follow their ways. They pushed LGBTQ-type matters and were destroyed. Destruction will be coming to this world–and that will be part of the reasons ( Romans 1:18-32).

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On the other hand...

Getting Sodom Straight

https://armstrongismlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/09/getting-sodom-straight.html

The Biblical story of Sodom is not the story of a town that happened to be 100% gay, men and boys, for this is a ludicrous assumption. This would have to be the conclusion if God, vowing to save it for ten righteous men, did not. It would also mean that "righteous" meant heterosexual, while unrighteous meant homosexual and, well, I doubt that alone qualifies men to be righteous.

The story that unfolds in Genesis 19 is a hospitality story and not a story based on homosexuality. Sodom's problems as remembered by Ezekiel were that the people were prideful, had too much food, too much time, neglected the poor, were haughty and committed abominations (Ez. 16:49-50). Not ANY mention of mass homosexuality. 

Abominations can be just about anything not in tune with the law and in this case was a reference to idol worship. Another common Israelite trait all through their history. Why would papa Lot offer his virgin daughters to a crowd of homosexuals, in place of his guests? What interest would homosexuals have in virgin women? ZERO, unless the girls were being offered as an appeasing virgin sacrifice ("for they have not known a man.") This would qualify as an abomination to be sure, and also idolatry. Human sacrifice was still an option it appears with Abram and Lot.

African American COG Member On What It Was Like Growing Up Black In The Church of God

A former Worldwide Church of God member writes about

how it was growing up Black in the church.

In honor of Black History Month

Jerald Walker grew up believing the world would end when he was twelve. His parents—both blind—had joined the Worldwide Church of God at its height in the 1960s. The Church would later prove to be a fraud, its leader collecting hefty dues from its parishioners and using them to fund a lavish celebrity lifestyle. But before Jerald Walker understood this, he came of age believing that The Great Tribulation would transform him, his family, and all believers into gods, and that his parents’ sight would be restored, and so for years, the stringent rules and deprivations within the Worldwide Church of God seemed worth it. When the Great Tribulation did not come, and the family’s faith began to unravel, Walker was left with a life that had no order. The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult is the story of Walker’s childhood journey through believing, ending in the realization that he will now have to erect an understanding of life from the ground up.

The World in Flames is as hilarious as it is harrowing. Walker’s accounts align so faithfully with his childhood point of view that the reader can see how he managed to believe that a dog bite was a direct punishment from God for wanting to celebrate Christmas, or that “integration”—something the Church forbade—was as bad a sin as “fornication.” And oh, yes, the Church preached slavery as ordained by God, and supported racial separation. How does the black Walker family make sense of that? The dissonance between what young Jerald understands, and what we know he understands later in life, creates instant comic friction.

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Rumpus: Your childhood religion was the Worldwide Church of God. Can you tell readers unfamiliar with the Worldwide Church of God what it was all about? Is it still around?

Walker: The Worldwide Church of God was founded by a man named Herbert W. Armstrong in 1933. At the height of its success in the 1970s, it had a membership of over a hundred thousand and annual revenues of eighty million dollars, more than Billy Graham and Oral Roberts combined. Composed of a hodgepodge of religious beliefs, including Levitical dietary restrictions, the observance of “Holy Days,” literal Sabbath-keeping, and the rejection of medical treatment, the underpinning tenet was British-Israelism: the view that Western and Northern Europeans, as direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, was God’s chosen race. The membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats, such as the assertion that anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life, and eternal suffering in the next. And the next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of The Great Tribulation.

When Armstrong died in 1986, leadership of the church fell to Joseph Tkach Jr., who began to move the church away from Armstrong’s teachings to mainstream Christianity. The name of the church was changed to Grace Communion International, and ultimately Armstrong was declared a “heretic” and “false prophet.” Needless to say, many members rejected these changes, and a dozen or so splinter groups formed, some of which adhere to Armstrong’s original teachings.

Rumpus: One thing that differentiates your experience from the experience of a childhood in some other extreme religious communities is that the reader gets hints throughout the book that this religion is not just restrictive and fear-inspiring, but might also be an enormous monetary scam. You and others who grew up within the church and later left it had to come to grips with reevaluating pretty much everything that had previously ordered your life, including the possibility that you and your entire family had been taken advantage of. What role did writing play, if any, in your process of understanding the world after your youth? When did you realize you would be a writer, and when did you realize you would write about your childhood in the form of memoir?

Walker: Writing helps me to understand most everything; in a very real sense it’s how I process my world. My view prior to writing the memoir was that my parents’ decision to join a church run by a con man was inexcusable, and I harbored a bitterness toward them about it that lasted for decades. And so when I began writing the book, I knew there was a real possibility that this bitterness would taint, if not largely shape, the narrative. But I also knew that something else could happen, because for me the process of writing is the process of thinking and learning, of acquiring knowledge more than dispensing it. I wasn’t entirely surprised, then, that by the time I’d completed the book, my bitterness toward my parents had given way to sympathy, understanding, and a deepened respect.

Though I’d been writing stories since I was a child, I didn’t realize I’d be a writer until I took a creative writing course in college. Fiction was my genre of choice, but my stories were always thinly-veiled works of autobiography. My MFA degree is in fiction writing, and for more than a decade after completing the program I continued to write fiction. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I tried my hand at writing nonfiction, and I fell in love with the form, particularly the essay because it requires the writer to think on the page, which, as I noted, is my wont. I had no intention to write about the cult because I didn’t want to think deeply about it, to reopen those wounds. But the honest truth is that I’m a writer, and my experience in the cult is rich material. Sometimes you have to put the work first, even at a high emotional cost. 

Read the entire interview here:  The Rumpus Interview with Jerald Walker 

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The title of Jerald Walker’s new memoir “The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult” (Beacon) sounds like it was ripped from the front page of a supermarket tabloid. Yet this was his life growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s.

Walker, a writing professor at Emerson College, is one of seven children. Both his parents lost their sight in childhood accidents and Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God gave them hope that their sight might be restored and that they had been chosen for a better afterlife. Struggling to make ends meet, his parents sent tithes to Armstrong even when they needed the money for heat and food.

After “60 Minutes” aired an exposé of Armstrong and his lavish lifestyle, Walker and some of his siblings left the church. His parents did, too — for a while.

Walker will speak about the book at 7 p.m. Friday at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. 

“World in Flames” is Beacon Press’s first title to be simultaneously released as an audiobook. Boston Globe

Amazon Books has this:

When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames.

The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old.

Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height.

When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.  A World In Flames

Crackpot Prophet Weighs In On Groundhog Day

Why is it that in Church of God land, with its many self-appointed blithering idiots, so many have to constantly get upset over innocuous things? Everything makes these little guys upset. Life apparently is meant to be a miserable existence. Joy, fun, and humor tend to be lacking in the personalities of these bumbling idiots and they need to make sure everyone around them is just as miserable as they are.

Every year around this time the Great Bwana to Africa and the 100 Occasional Caucasians reposts his idiocy about Groundhog Day. Every tribe and culture since the dawn of humanity has identifying legends and myths that are central to its identity. Those things are what describe them as a nation or people group.

Every religious system in this wonderful world also has its own myths and legends that are specific to their identity, including Christianity. Not everything in its sacred scriptures actually happened. Filled with countless stories employing metaphor and myths the Bible tells the story of the God of Israel in a constant battle with mythic beasts (leviathan), gods (Baal), and the forces of evil (Satan and his demons) to make the people of Israel set apart from all other nations.

For some reason in COG land it is perfectly ok for the people of its scripture to believe in and be rescued from mythic beasts and gods, but people today cannot have their own stories. This is all pretty hypocritical of Armstrongism considering how its movement is filled with so many incredulous myths and legends that set it apart from all other Christian and non-Christian groups in the world. 

The myths of Leviathan are no worse than the playfully fun people have with Groundhog Day, yet our ever-present self-righteous know-it-alls in COG land can’t stand people having fun with legends. If these adult-sized childhood bullies had been around Jesus in his time they would still be a bunch of whiny little bitches complaining about everything he said.

Even those specially chosen by God to reveal themselves in the end times of the world would end up being consumed by Debbie-downer syndrome. This includes of illustrious Great Bwana to Africa and the 100 occasional Caucasians. Always on the lookout for something to get his miserable little life upset over, he has gotten his holistic little knickers in a twist over the legend of Groundhog Day and the 1993 movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Oh, the humanity!

There is an odd observance on February 2 each year in North America that is called Groundhog Day:

Groundhog Day … is a popular American tradition observed in the United States and Canada on February 2nd. It derives from the Pennsylvania Dutch superstition that if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks; but if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early. 

 

While the tradition remains popular in modern times, studies have found no consistent correlation between a groundhog seeing its shadow and the subsequent arrival time of spring-like weather. … The Groundhog Day ceremony held at Punxsutawney in western Pennsylvania, centering around a semi-mythical groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil, has become the most attended. (Groundhog Day, Wikipedia, accessed 04/25/20) 

 

So, no this is not a biblical holiday, so why mention it? 

 

Well, in 1993, there was a movie starring Bill Murray titled Groundhog Day. Since coming out, it has become a cultural icon, in a sense, in the USA and elsewhere.

Groundhogs everywhere are starting to laugh in derision right now.  You know things are pretty bad when even the animals mock our Great Bwana Bob Mzungu Thiel:

The asshattery of Bob continues:

Here are parts of a synopsis of the Groundhog Day movie from IMDb(Internet Movie Database):

On February 1, self-centered and sour TV meteorologist Phil Connors (Bill Murray), news producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) from fictional Pittsburgh television station WPBH-TV9 travel to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities with Punxsutawney Phil, the Groundhog. Having grown tired of this assignment, Phil begrudgingly gives his Groundhog Day report the next day (February 2) during the festival and parade. 

 

After the celebration concludes, a blizzard develops that Connors had predicted would miss them, closing the roads and shutting down long-distance phone services, forcing the team to return to Punxsutawney. Connors awakens the next morning, however, to find it is February 2 again, and his day unfolds in almost exactly the same way. Connors can change his behavior, but other people do and say the same things they did and said the previous day, unless Connors changes something. He is aware of the repetition, but everyone else seems to be living February 2 for the first time. This recursion repeats the following morning and the one after that, and over and over again. … 

 

After briefly trying to rationalize his situation, and then thinking he is insane, Connors takes advantage of learning the day’s events and the information he is able to gather about the town’s inhabitants, and finds that his actions have no long-term consequences for himself. He revels in this situation for a time: seducing beautiful women, stealing money, even driving drunk and experiencing a police chase. However, his attempts to seduce his producer, Rita, are met with repeated failures. He begins to tire of, and then dread, his existence, starting the day by smashing the alarm clock and professing the inanity of Groundhog Day as a holiday in his newscast. (Groundhog Day, 1993. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/plotsummary)

Our illustrious Bob Mzungu has to immediately find fault with a fictional character and find some biblical passage that he imagines describes Bill Murray's character: 

Yes, Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors displayed what was warned about in the last days by the Apostle Paul:

1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, (2 Timothy 3:1-2, NKJV throughout) 

 

19 Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, (Galatians 5:19)

He continues with this:

Phil Connors loved the world and wanted to pursue the works of the flesh. He did not care much about the following that the Apostle John wrote when his time loop began:

16 For all that is in the world — the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — is not of the Father but is of the world. 17 And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:16-17)

The Great Bwana Mzungu does go on to admit the following:

Yes, in a sense, life can be like Groundhog Day in the sense we have to go through a lot of the same or similar tests and trials to learn how to better live and serve. 

 

It takes a while to build godly character, even for Christians:

1 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; 4 and perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)

Then like any good Church of God leader he lectures members on what miserable followers they are of their God. Never good enough to do anything right and if they don't shape up they will never be crowned kings and priests in some mythical kingdom that's part of Bwana Bob's imagination.

The Apostle Paul also wrote:

25 And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. 26 Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. 27 But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:25-27) 

 

Yes, unlike Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, we are striving for an unperishable crown. 

 

Just because you may have been a Christian for a long time, do not think that if you give up you also cannot become disqualified.

Why is it that everyone in COGland is always on the verge of being disqualified over something? Christians down through the centuries have found rest and assurance in Christ, but not so much in COGland. That Christ is unknown to so many in the Millerite groups today. The law and its prescriptive of death are always hung around the necks of church members instead of having the shackles of the law broken and living free.