Friday, October 30, 2020

Dave Pack: What is he hiding from the world?

 

From a reader:

A special thanks to the courageous ones who have been providing this information. Standing up to the Wadsworth bully has provided enough information these last few years to severely weaken Mr. Pack's grandiose ambitions for years in the future.

One of the most asked questions from the early concerned membership sent to headquarters addressing Mr. Pack's departure from Herbert Armstrong's teachings and the great additions to Herbert Armstrong's teachings was: "if this is all all true, how come HWA didn't see it or understand it"?

Mr. Pack's answer to that was: "GOD COULDN'T HAVE LET MR. ARMSTRONG SEE OR UNDERSTAND ALL THIS BECAUSE HE KNEW IF HE DID UNDERSTAND IT, MR. ARMSTRONG WOULD HAVE THUNDERED IT TO THE WORLD".

So what is Mr. Pack hiding from the world? If his truth and understanding is so special that Herbert Armstrong would have thundered it to the whole world had he known it, what is holding him back from doing the same?

We just heard in one of the released sermons where Mr. Pack said his church is doing very well financially and is in very good shape and poised to do a great work. So presumably money is not an issue.

Now we have the RCG chasing ghosts real and imagined who my be pirating out of Wadsworth the supposed thunderous truth that the whole world needs to hear. 

That's alright Dave, keep your special message locked in a vault and plaster it into the walls of headquarters. For there is Dee Bunker, Ex RCG, NO2HWA, your son-in-law, Jeff, the three evil shepherds (sorry Kaidanneks), strong women and men whose marriages you have tried to destroy, many anonymouses, people that care and many others who have in their possession or in their minds the complete truth about you and all of them are glad to freely share it.


Restored Church of God: Lil'Dave's Dirty Tricks He Will Use To Catch His Moles


 


From a reader:


For anyone in RCG who leak materials out, understand that the leadership will lay traps to catch you. They will determine a short list of people who they determine are the most likely candidates who are leaking materials, then they will send you copies of messages that are slightly different from the rest of the membership. This will look something like a couple of added words in a member letter or perhaps a few additional seconds at the end of a sermon. When the material is leaked online, then they will know if it is from the larger membership, or in the smaller group they distributed the different copies to. I would recommend avoiding posting materials in their entirety. Instead excerpt segments of the full message to be posted. It is harder to compare if its the copy or the "approved" version. Another idea is to use a cell phone to make a recording of the video or audio file if you can no longer download them. I am sure there are other tricks they may try, so just be smart about it!

Restored Church of God: Suspicious Lil'Dave Pack Struggles To Find His Moles

 


Poor Davey Pack. The little guy is not happy these days. With his Jesus failing to appear, his ministers reading this blog and other exCOG sites, videos of his sermons leaking to the world, and members so tired of his lies that they are spilling the beans on his carefully crafted empire, Lil'Dave is lashing out again.

For many years Davey has been posting his superfantabulous sermons to the Member Area of the Restored Church of God website. Well, those days have come to a crashing end. Just like the non-existent Jesus that still can't be found on the RCG website or property, Davey's sermons will no longer be found on his site.  

Lil'Dave is on a campaign to find the moles in his organization.

This just in from an RCG source:

Something all cult leaders have in common is suspicion. They are suspicious to everything and everybody and David Pack is no exception. 

The RCG members were told this week, that all messages are no longer posted in the 'Member services' part of the RCG website, but will be sent by email to all the members instead. The RCG is trying to locate the mole in the organization. 

Good luck with that Dave! Because too many of the RCG members see you for what you really are: a liar and a fraude. And too many of your ministers are regular visitors of 'Banned' and the ESN. You are the captain on a sinking ship. 

The current state of the Restored Church of God


Thursday, October 29, 2020

Leaving one cult and joining another. From Armstrongism into NXIVM

 

A reader posted a link to the following article in one of the comments on another thread. It is a story from Rolling Stone Magazine about why people leave one cult and how they can be easily be attracted to another cult.

Teah Banks was born into an evangelical Christian sect called the Radio Church of God. Founded in the 1930s by an advertising sales representative turned minister, the insular group promoted an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament, eschewing divorce, premarital sex and even wearing makeup. “It was a super closed religion,” Banks, now 42, remembers. “We had pictures of the leader in our home. We worshipped him like he was a god.”

Although Banks started having questions about the group, she attended services until her 20s, when she was expelled from the organization. In 2004, she and her then-boyfriend, a filmmaker named Mark Vicente (best known for the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?), were approached by two women who wanted Vicente to make films for their organization, NXIVM, which taught a curriculum called the Executive Success Program, or ESP. The two women (one of whom was NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman) raved about their leader, a mathematician, scientist, judo champion and concert-level pianist who had patented a unique method of hacking the human brain. The man’s name, the women said, was Keith Raniere.

Banks and Vicente’s interest was piqued, and they agreed to join the women for lunch; when Salzman successfully used ESP methods to “cure” Banks of her lifelong lactose intolerance, she was even more intrigued. “I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. This woman is amazing,” she says. “And I said, ‘Nancy, I want to be one of your people.'” Blown away by the women and by ESP in general, Banks encouraged Vicente to take a NXIVM intensive; eventually, he bought an apartment in New York to be closer to group headquarters in Albany. She was involved with the group until 2005, when the two broke up, though she continued taking courses remotely for years afterward. Vicente, who eventually became a member of the NXIVM executive board, was involved with the group until 2017.

At the time she joined NXIVM, Banks had just left one large organization with an enigmatic leader at the helm. Vicente, too, had also just extricated himself from a similarly insular fringe spiritual organization: the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a group led by a New Age figure named JZ Knight, who claimed to be channeling a 35,000-year-old warrior deity named Ramtha. But even though they were both disillusioned with spiritual organizations, NXIVM struck them as different. “The first day you’re there, they’re like, ‘We’re not a cult. Cult is a bad word. It is used loosely,'” Banks said. “‘[We’re] a success school. We’re helping you raise your ethics.'”

At this point, everyone knows the rest of the story: in March 2018, Raniere and five of his NXIVM cohorts, including Salzman, were arrested on such charges as sex trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forced labor. Raniere is currently standing trial in Brooklyn, where his former supporters (including Vicente) have testified that he, among other things, imprisoned a woman for nearly two years, convinced his followers that he controlled technology and the weather, and ran DOS, a secret all-female organization of “slaves” who were branded with his initials and told to have sex with him.

The general view in the media — and among former followers like Banks and Vicente, who declined to comment, presumably due to his involvement in the case against Raniere — is that NXIVM operated not as a self-improvement “school,” but as a cult run by Raniere, who used threats and coercion to keep his followers in line. The revelations came as a shock to Banks, now a makeup artist and YouTuber based in Oregon, who had fallen out with the community after her 2006 breakup with Vicente but had kept in touch with many members and taken classes for years afterwards. She even recorded an ASMR video about her time in NXIVM, speaking at length about her feelings of guilt over her involvement. “I truly thought that this group had answers, and isn’t that why we join any group? [Because] they have answers there that we don’t have inside ourselves,” she says in the video. How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another: As the NXIVM case shows, “cult-hopping” is more common than you think

Here is the video mentioned above. She apparently is a practitioner of ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) which I find creepy as hell and also irritating to listen to due to the "'s's" and "sh's" that hit her microphone when she speaks. That alone destroyed the "calming" effect" she is supposedly getting across. I could only listen to a few minutes but others find her story to be fascinating.



Wednesday, October 28, 2020

COGWA: Christians Should Be Considered Unbelievers If Looking To Marry Outside COGWA


 


One of the great myths of Armstrongism is that COG "believers" are special and set apart from the rest of Christianity. The rest of Christianity apparently is too stupid to understand God, Christ, and scriptures unlike COG sects located here and there in the United States. In spite of the fact that millions have died over the centuries standing up for their faith (which no COG leader or minister ever has ever done) American COG leaders and ministers claim to be able to determine just who is a good Christian and who is not. Given the track record of rebellious COG leaders that continue to cause denominational divisions and whose ranks are filled with abusive, adulterous, and alcoholic ministers, none of these groups are in a position to tell members who they can or cannot marry.

In an article on whether a COGWA member should marry outside the COGWA belief system there was this:

What, then, is an unbeliever? In brief, an unbeliever is the opposite of the person above. Regardless of his academic knowledge of Bible instruction, he does not believe the truth and does not follow Christ with commitment and action. Again, the Scriptures must be our guide.

John 3:36: He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”

Acts 14:2: “But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brethren” (emphasis added throughout).

Romans 4:20: “He [Abraham] did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God,”

1 Timothy 1:13: “Although I [Paul] was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man; but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

Hebrews 3:12: Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.

Unbelief is thus described as a lack of belief or faith in God and His Son Jesus Christ. An unbeliever will not always worship idols or be hostile to God, but may simply not know or believe God and His truth. What about the millions today who “believe” in Christ? There is more to being a believer than just claiming the name of Jesusone has to understand and follow Jesus, as preached by the apostles. Notice Paul’s words:

2 Corinthians 11:4: “For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not acceptedyou may well put up with it!”

Today many preach “another Jesus”—for example, one who came to abolish God’s law by “nailing it to the cross.” Those in God’s Church are begotten through faith in the gospel of Christ, while others are attracted to a gospel about Christ. The point is that a person who does not share that same belief in (understanding and desire to obey) Jesus is not spirituallycompatible with one who is a believer. So a professing “Christian” is not necessarily a believer in biblical terms. Only those who are called by God can become believers (John 6:44). Marrying Within The Faith