Bob Thiel, Charlie Kirk, Dave Pack And Jesus

I caught a few moments of the Charlie Kirk memorial today as I was waiting for church to start. What I did see looked like a huge church service, revival, or whatever you want to call it. More was said about Jesus, the gospel message, grace, and forgiveness in the 10 minutes I watched than I have ever heard come out of the mouth of Bob Thiel in the last 12 years. You never hear this kind of message from the likes of such angry Church of God leaders as Dave Pack, Gerald Flurry, or most of the Church of God ministry.

What particularly struck me was later in the day, reading comments by people about the service. I collected a few of them below. 

Have you ever heard a person talk about Jesus, Christianity or faith after hearing the likes of Bob Thiel, Herbert Armstrong, or a Church of God minister as these people do? Have people ever reacted like this to the message of Armstrongism?

Regarding the amount of international press present:

I don’t know if there has ever been this much press from all over the World gathered in a place of Worship. Charlie has turned State Farm Stadium into a House of God and the message of Jesus Christ will reach people all across the Globe. I have chills.

From a Muslim woman:

I listened to Erika Kirk’s full speech at the memorial, and I want to share a few thoughts that came to me while live streaming the event. This is not political. 

First, I should say that I grew up as a Muslim in a Muslim country. I don’t know enough about Christianity to say if what I witnessed is rooted in faith or culture. But what struck me most was how, even though death is heavy and this was by nature a sad occasion, the entire event carried a celebratory spirit that honored life. 

That contrast hit me deeply. In Islam, even though we believe that good people go to heaven, the relationship with God is taught through fear. Funerals are overwhelmingly sad, often filled with warnings of the terrifying first night in the grave. Growing up hearing that, and then witnessing people celebrate life, speak of God’s love, and remember someone through the impact he had on others; it felt so refreshing, so positive. 

Second, I was profoundly moved by

@MrsErikaKirk

’s words. I cannot fathom the strength it takes to stand and deliver such a meaningful speech after losing the love of your life. But even more than that, the grace it takes to forgive the very person who destroyed your world. I cannot imagine myself standing on a stage, sending love to those who cheered your husband’s murder, or inviting others to spread God’s love in response because, as she said, “we do not respond to hate with hate.” That is powerful beyond words.

Again, I am ignorant when it comes to Christianity, but if this is what it truly embodies, then I am envious of those who get to experience that feeling. 

From a person inspired to go to church: 

I went to a church service for the first time last weekend, along with two vigils for Charlie Kirk. 

 

I was raised secular and I’m an atheist, but when he was killed, I felt a strong desire to be
around people like I never had before. 

At the service, the appeal became clear. What must it feel like to go through life never truly alone — to feel connected to someone who loves you and to believe you serve a higher purpose? 

It hit me then just how alone I have been my entire life. From an early age, I was disconnected from everyone. I became depressed as a child, and that turned into severe depression in adolescence. I went into self-destruct mode and my life went off the rails. But even after I got my life on a better track in my twenties, and developed a relationship with my parents, I still kept people at a distance. 

In church, seeing people so happy being connected to each other and to their God, it became apparent that this is likely a big reason conservatives tend to have better mental health than liberals. I can’t know how my life would have gone had I been raised differently, but I do wonder about it.  

I’m skeptical that I’ll suddenly start believing in something I’ve never believed in. But people who grow up with values like family, faith, and community — and keep them — seem to be much better off. That’s something worth advocating for, and something I will support going forward. 

From a Jewish man:

Let me say this as a Jew: 

America would be a MUCH better country if more Christians went to Church. 

Charlie Kirk's vigil acting as a rally for Jesus is a net positive for society.

This crowd is God-fearing, neighbor-loving, and patriotic Americans. 

Another woman said this:

Just got out of church for the first time in 20 years. Prior to that I had been to church maybe 2 or 3 times. Here are my initial thoughts: 

-Church music makes me cry 

-Lessons taught in church are applicable to everyone and everything 

-I need to read an easier bible than KJV before I understand any of this well 

-Christians are kind, gracious, polite, and sane 

-America needs this now more than ever

I will share more once I’ve had time to digest this experience 

Another woman said this:

I remain Jesus-Curious, but I want to be real for a minute and say some things: 

- I was shocked by the music before it began, it was so beautiful. I didn't know that people looked like that when they sang along; like so connected to something. I cried a lot during the music and don't know why.  

- I knew that Charlie was a Christian, but I didn't know that he did all of this for Jesus. I knew he loved Jesus, but I thought more about his drive for social change and real leaders. I didn't know he like literally did it all for Jesus. 

- If

@bennyjohnson

was a pastor, I would go to that church every week.  

- I realize a big thing I am afraid of with it is having to change. I would have to change. What Erika said about the answer is love and always love... I'd have to change.

I don't know. But I do know that I came to social media to complain about the USDA and now I'm writing my feelings about Jesus on the internet. I have met so many amazing people here who believe in Jesus and I never expected that. 

From a British/Canadian man:

My dear American friends, 

We British Christians would get excited when, once a year, Queen Elizabeth would make a mild but sincere reference to the love of Jesus Christ in her Christmas address.  

In Charlie Kirks' Memorial service, watched by tens of millions, I just heard: 

 

- Multiple clear presentations of the gospel from men like

@robmccoyus and @DrFrankTurek with clear calls to repentance and faith

- Worship songs full of Scripture sung by tens of thousands live and millions at home

- Personal testimonies of lives transformed by the work of Christ and the witness of believers

- Demonstration and explanation of the value of marriage, child-rearing and family

- Calls to Romans 13 for the government to bear the sword for the protection of good and punishment of the wicked

- Declarations of spiritual warfare on the forces of evil and promises to endure no matter the cost

- Calls to be prophets and call the nation to repent

- More Scripture references and Bible readings than I can count

- And a widow publicly forgiving her husband's killer because Christ forgave his killers on the cross. 

 

All of it done before, and by, the most powerful people in your nation and the world. You guys should be on your knees thanking God for your country. It is a light to the world.

Never stop fighting for it. 

 

By far one of the best videos on social media right now.

Just wow. pic.twitter.com/XEdv8teofq

— Mr. Star Spangled MAGA (@4thOfJuly365) September 15, 2025

A new video site yearning for the "cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic" of old

World Tomorrow Videos

I get notices as they happen from Google anytime certain keywords are mentioned on the internet, and this popped in my feed this evening, within hours of it appearing online. It is a new site that features the old lectures/sermons by Herbert Armstrong, now in 4 K and with enhanced audio. It is another HIGHLY original named site that obviously took many months to come up with an attention-getting name.

This site is seeking to:

Rediscover the message that inspired millions in restored clarify for a new generation — World Tomorrow with Herbert W. Armstrong — in restored 4K video with enhanced audio. 

Herbert W. Armstrong, pioneering religious broadcaster and founder of The World Tomorrow, Plain Truth magazine, Ambassador College and the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation dedicated over 50 years to proclaiming to millions worldwide the good news message of biblical prophecy and world peace, culminating in his final major work, Mystery of the Ages, before his death at age 93.  

Visit the World Tomorrow website for more high quality genuine Herbert W. Armstrong media — original content to view, listen and read.

Oh, how they long for the glory days gone by. It will never be recovered. No one today, especially younger people, care about listening to bombastic preachers on the internet, regardless of being in 4K with enhanced audio. 

If they refuse to listen to living modern-day "preachers" like Bob Thiel, Dave Pack and Gerald Flurry, why in the world does anyone think people will listen to stale old recordings of HWA? Those days are gone. Men like Flurry, Pack, and Thiel, have used and abused his name so much that no one cares anymore.

Crackpot Prophet Lets His African Ministers Con COG7 Members Into Joining His Cult

 

Not content with poaching members from different Armstrong-related Church of God groups, 

his so-called ministers in Africa have long poached 

Seventh-day Adventists 

and now are focusing on

The Church of God 7th Day.

Crackpot Prophet On "What God Expects"

 

Leave it to our favorite crackpot prophet and his so-called ministers to lecture the church on "what God expects" when they themselves do not do what He expects. They have added so many extraneous rules, beliefs, and other nonsensical things that no one in their right mind could ever do and believe everything they demand.

Of course, as usual, the sermon was really all about supporting the only "work" that is doing a "work" on earth today. Support the Great Bwana, or you are NOT doing what God expects of you! Your salvation depends upon!

Did You Bake Your Cake Yet?

 

Imagine worshipping a book so much that you bake cakes to celebrate it! 

Forget the Bible, Mystery of the Ages rocks!

Hubristic Pride: The Exaggerated Sense of the Self

 

No one in the left-over debris of the WCG holds himself in higher esteem, in his own eyes, than David C Pack. 

How a man can publicly and consistently brag about his amazing self is beyond me. One would think he'd catch on, sooner or later, at just how delusional, self-serving and stupid he sounds and comes across to those oblivious to it all. 

Why do people brag about themselves in such a way? And how can they do it with a straight face? What's going on? 

========================================

Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass. —Shakespeare

Sickening Samples of David C Pack's hubris

 “I’ve been studying God’s word for almost 50 years. And I’ve studied prophecy, I know this, like no man who’s ever lived. And I’m gonna tell you things over the next several weeks that are so awesome, so mind-bending, even before today.”

“These are mysteries. Nobody understood any of this. I didn’t and took me a while to put it together. I mean, I feel like I could write a new King James Bible better, with the Greek and Hebrew. They were fine, I’m not I’m not trying to brag, but I’ve   had to. That’s where I got up to and I do estimate it’s about 9000 hours of study on this.”

I’ve come to the point whereas I’ve explained, I’m encyclopedic on the Bible, I can just study it in my mind, I can call up these verses and I just then I just said, ‘I’m not gonna stop.’ Then I took a pause and by nightfall I was over a hundred and eventually over a hundred and ten.” 

It just never happened. I’ve studied Church history like no one I’ve ever known,

maybe there’re some who know it better than I do, but I wrote a lot about it, I’ve talked about it, and I’ve harkened to this point.”

===============================

For pages of David C Pack's hubristic bragging and delusional self-worth and hyperbolic achievements see:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14o-MoBeyhpWmNNhE0bHaHPArnA7sUefF/view

Many thanks to Marc Cebrian for his compilation of Dave's quotes about himself over the past years. 

========================

Why Do We Brag?

If you're so great, why do you have to continually remind yourself?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/202203/why-do-we-brag?msockid=1eb54dd6f85a6af4098e5bbaf9536b71

No one likes a braggart. Indeed, the term’s definition and connotation entail a negative evaluation. Despite its social harmfulness, however, bragging has not died out. How can this be?


Bragging is a form of self-promotion and self-promotion is not bad by definition. It has its uses. Students of persuasive speech learn that they must establish their credentials, that is, their expertise on the subject matter they are about to discuss. Audiences of goodwill want to learn, and they will appreciate credible claims of expertise.

 

Sometimes, you see, we have to toot our own horn because no one else will do it for us—and when we do, we do gain advantages.


Bragging, however, is different from the communication of expert credentials. Bragging is gratuitous. It seeks applause from the audience without offering anything in return. When braggarts only gratify themselves without creating value for the audience, they should realize that it is time to step on the brakes.


Still, audiences may be forgiving or ignorant, and braggarts may know this. Research shows that simply claiming to be above average on some talent or skill induces observers to perceive the claimant as competent—at least until the claim is proven to be false (Heck & Krueger, 2016). In other words, bragging may work because the audience does not have enough information (yet) to evaluate the braggart objectively.

Personal Note: The RCG members have, by now, more than enough evidence and information to evaluate the braggart objectively 

Braggarts may try to anticipate—and manage—the audience’s reaction to their exuberant self-presentation, and here desire encroaches on reality. Scopelliti et al. (2015) showed that braggarts have empathy gaps they are unaware of. They project the positive feelings stirred up within themselves by their own bragging onto others without realizing that these others do not care as much about them as they themselves do. Braggarts pay a reputational cost because they fail at perspective-taking.


Self-praise, i.e., bragging, amounts to an expression of pride. During the era of the Enlightenment, David Hume was skeptical of a view shared by many philosophers at the time that expressions of pride are necessarily signs of vanity, or, as he would put it, vainglory. Hume (1776/2015) argued that vanity or pleasure-seeking is not the cause of virtuous acts, that is, virtuous acts are not byproducts of vanity, but that instead the pleasure of self-satisfaction is caused by virtuous actions. When we act virtuously, Hume argued, feelings of pride or self-satisfaction are morally justified. Why not feel good after having done good?


Recent research suggests that both Hume and the philosophers he criticized had a point. In a series of studies, Jessica Tracy and her collaborators have brought the distinction between authentic and hubristic pride to light (see Mercadante et al., 2021, for an overview). Whereas authentic pride is grounded in effortful achievement (what Hume called virtuous action), hubristic pride is grounded in the idea of one’s own intrinsic superiority.

Observers are attuned to the difference. They can, for example, tell hubristic from authentic pride from differences in body posture and gaze behavior (e.g., a braggart is more likely to stare at you as if demanding validation).

Intriguing as this research is, it returns us to the question of why bragging is not self-eliminating. Are some braggarts perhaps self-sufficient as their own adoring audience? Such individuals only need others to witness their self-congratulation; these others do not need to endorse it. Other braggarts, of a more insecure stripe, need the audience to agree with them; they seek to extract approval with tactics such as fishing for compliments.


Sophisticated braggarts use nuance to lavish praise on themselves (Krueger, 2017). They will not, like Muhammad Ali, baldly declare that they are the greatest; they will only let you in on the fact that third parties, especially parties of high prestige, have already done the lavishing. On the websites of some academics, for example, one may find a list of awards, emphasis on the prestige of these awards (if you did not know), and even added emphasis on the fact that the self-describer was the very first person to win this very prestigious award, without ever being told what that person actually did to win these awards.

This strategy of showing off one’s existing fame is, alas, self-limiting. Eventually, discerning audiences will ask, "And what is it that you actually do?" Being famous for being famous lacks substance. The braggart is, as Shakespeare put it, shown up as an ass (i.e., a donkey). Still, the possibility remains that less discerning audiences settle for appearances, at least as long as they don’t have to pay. Perhaps this is enough for the braggart.


All told, psychology gives little comfort to the braggart. Stephen Hawking put The Bard’s verdict more colloquially: “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.” Then again, who would ever make such a boast in the presence of Stephen? Such a person would definitely have to be a loser.

God’s Work Needs God’s Representation

 

Timothy Kirchen has a post about. "God’s Work Needs God’s Representation". It has a lot of the normal Armstrongist beliefs till this paragraph:

Because the Church is to become the Kingdom of God, it must already reflect both life and government now — before Christ’s return and the resurrection. Christ, as Head, leads His Church both spiritually and organizationally so that when the resurrection occurs, the Church can immediately transition into ruling the Kingdom of God without needing to redesign its structure or reestablish spiritual life.

 Can you imagine Christ coming back and immediately unleashing the Churches of God upon the world as the perfect embodiment of church government and spirituality? Seriously? 

Looking at these blasphemous church leaders masquerading as men of God today in COGland and how they have set themselves up as God's personal mouthpiece—and watching the pure hell their current churches are experiencing—how could anyone in their right mind see a bunch of COGers elevated by Christ into gods and goddesses to rule the world and expect true church governance and true spirituality?

The Churches of God are filled with spiritual rot thanks to men like Thiel, Pack, Flurry, and Weinland. God is no more going to use these guys than he will Gerald Weston. Where is there any COG doing a "work"? No one even knows who any of them are anymore!