Please Keep Your Good News Magazines Out Of Sight!

At our house, all Good News Magazines and other sensitive Church literature were kept in a box in my parent's bedroom closet. I made the mistake of leaving one on the kitchen table and got a sound spanking for it.  

Protect that Magazine at all cost but tactfully.

"Should You Welcome Visitors at Church?"

"...First of all, it is better if you do nothing to advertise the fact that you keep God's Sabbath. I do not mean that you should ever deny it. But, for example, if you women make Sunday your wash day and hang out clothes for neighbors to see—or, if you men do work around the house on Sunday, mowing the lawn, or pounding nails or sawing or something that makes noise. Whether this really causes your neighbors any discomfort or not, some of them may claim you are annoying them --creating a NUISANCE on their Sunday. That only shouts loudly at them that you are a hated "Sabbath-keeper." "

"You who meet a visitor at church service, just be friendly, smile, but do not start a conversation about the sermon, about religion, or about the Bible."

"Never do this!!! To the one who does this, let me say candidly, this is one strong reason why YOU are not the minister! It is the minister's place to do any explaining. He has been trained to know how. God has called him, and therefore the Holy Spirit leads and guides him. DON'T TRY TO MAKE YOURSELF THE MINISTER, or the minister may rebuke you very strongly!"

"If the visitor asks about such things, call the minister or assistant or a deacon at once, with a smile, introduce him and mention the question—then let him take over, and excuse yourself to go meet and shake hands with others. And when introduced to—or introducing yourself to—a visitor, NEVER—and I mean NEVER take it on yourself to either say "Don't you ever come again!"—or, the opposite extreme, "I want to invite you to come again.""

"REMEMBER—it is not your place—but the minister's—to invite visitors either to come again, or to forbid them to come. Don't try to be a self-appointed minister when God has never called you! God may deal with you through the minister, if you do!"

"Try to prevent non-members from seeing, or knowing about, The Good News. But NEVER do as one member untactfully did. This woman had read in The Good News that this paper is for Church members ONLY. The paper was left out in plain sight in her living room. A neighbor picked it up, started reading it. She grabbed the copy out of her neighbor's hand, saying—"Oh, we've been told not to let outsiders read this. You're not converted. You're not allowed to read this." Naturally the friend was insulted, offended, and decided she didn't want any of OUR religion!

If a non-member accidentally does see a copy of this paper, DON'T offend by telling them non-members are not allowed to read it. It is then too late for that. Let them go on reading it, but if they want on the list, tell them they can write and ask, but it is just our own Church paper for members, and not generally sent to non-members. But NEVER cause offense. Better just keep it out of sight in the first place...."

Source: Good News Magazine September, 1962

submitted by Mogen David

"If Slavery is not wrong then nothing is wrong" Abraham Lincoln

"However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.  You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land.  You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance.  You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way."

 (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)

"If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years.  Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom.  If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year.  But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him.  If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master.  But the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children.  I would rather not go free.’  If he does this, his master must present him before God.  Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl.  After that, the slave will belong to his master forever. "

(Exodus 21:2-6 NLT)

"When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.  If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.  But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her.  And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.  If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife.  If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. "

(Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

"When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.  If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property."

 (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.  Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ." 

(Ephesians 6:5 NLT)

"Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed.  If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful.  You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts.  Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them."

 (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it.  “But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly.  Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given.”

 (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)

Adam, Genetics and Armstrongism

Adam, Genetics and Armstrongism 

Back in the Seventies, the views of Herman Hoeh and Dean Blackwell were the Worldwide Church of God’s answer to anthropology. From Hoeh and Blackwell I learned that Adam was a Caucasian and non-Caucasian races seemed to be unanticipated mutations and not a part of God’s original intention. The latter idea was eventually dropped. The former has always remained in place. Since those days anthropology has been revolutionized by the rising field of Genetics. In this article, I am going to use the findings of Genetics as an exegetical tool to interpret the account of Adam as it relates to human origins. 

A Word on Haplogroups 

In greatly simplified terms, haplogoups are genetic configurations that may be used as traceable markers. Haplogroups are contained within the DNA of our cells. The rules of the tracing game are that Y-haplogroups are inherited only through the masculine line and mitochondrial haplogroups are inherited only through the female line. These haplogroups are related to one another in a tree structure that encompasses all of mankind. The overwhelmingly prevalent Y-haplogroup in the British Isles is R1b, for instance. My Y-haplogroup is R1b1a2a1a1b4. The additional characters in the string after R1b reflect finer genetic detail. 

The Man Adam 

If Adam was the first man and a Caucasian, where did all the varied races come from? Herman Hoeh explained the racial diversity of mankind by positing the idea that Ham married a Black woman and Japheth married an Asian woman and this was followed by some kind of genetic drift among their offspring that produced all the races. Genetics will lead us to a much different conclusion. 

The Biblical Adam was Y-haplogroup J. As Spencer Wells (geneticist, anthropologist) has pointed out, both the Jews and the Adnanite Arabs claim descent from Abraham. Both groups are Y-haplogroup J. (No population is pure. Intermarriage will always introduce some “foreign” haplogroups into populations.) The Bible, by including genealogies, conveniently gives us the ability to trace genetic descent. Tracing Abraham’s Y-haplogroup backward through the masculine line, we can know that Adam was Y-haplogroup J. If Adam of Genesis lived within the last 6,000 years (or even if he lived much earlier) there has been insufficient time for Adam to be different from Abraham in haplogroup based on mutational rates of change. Haplogroups diversify very slowly – 6,000 years is just a small duration on that timescale. 

Noah, as a descendent of Adam in the masculine line, was also Y-haplogroup J, as were Shem, Ham and Japheth. If the Flood were global and only the riders on the Ark survived, all the human males in the world now would be uniformly Y-haplogroup J. Instead we have a broad range of other Y-haplogroups. And these other Y haplogroups did not originate after the Flood (if we accept the typical dates for the Flood). This is established through both mutational rate studies and the excavation of ancient DNA. Y-haplogroup R, predominant now in Europe, for instance, was found in a skeleton in Siberia dating from 24,000 years ago, millennia before the putative date of the Flood. The earliest haplogroup, A00, originated about 270,000 years ago. 

Conclusions 

Though the material above is briefly presented, a number of conclusions may be drawn. 

1. Adam was not the progenitor of all mankind. Human Y-haplogroups predate Adam significantly. Adam was the progenitor of the Jews and the Bible is about the Jews. Genesis 10 does not reflect the races of man but, as the passage states, the “clans of Noah’s sons.” (It is interesting that the Hebrew term “goyim” used for Gentile nations may mean something like “a bunch of animals.”) 

2. The descendants of Adam were a collection of Middle Eastern peoples, surrounded by other tribes and nations, who all carried Adam’s Y-haplogroup. Some apparently dispersed among other peoples; hence, we may read about their migrations in classical literature. 

3. The Flood was not global. Had the Flood been global, all of the Y-haplogroups we have now would have vanished and been replaced by just Y-haplogroup J carried by Noah and his sons. 

4. The people of Britain, Ireland and Northwest Europe are predominantly Y-haplogroup R1b and are not descended from Jacob of the Bible because Jacob was Y-haplogroup J as we have seen. Their genetic status incontrovertibly places them in the Gentile category. Further, Adam is not the father of these Gentiles “physically” though one could effectively defend the idea that Adam is their father “spiritually”. 

In this article, I did not present a model of human origins that reconciles the Bible with Genetics in any detail. I just sketched out a macro perspective. And any such detailed model developed will always be contestable, but it is clear that, for a model to be credible, it must conform to the science of Genetics. Even though there is much yet to be understood about this, what we can now most certainly conclude is that Herbert W. Armstrong and Herman Hoeh were wrong in their ideas about the origin and races of mankind. 

submitted by Neo