Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Buffet Churches of God



Check out Douglas Becker's latest article on the UCG Crisis:

Read the entire article here:  The Buffet Churches of God

As we head into 2011, things just don’t look that good for United. At current count, it appears that 30% of their ministry are fired or left. The UCG lost about 10% of their membership in Latin America due to a controversy over a couple owning a day care center who let their employees work into sunset on Friday nights in the winter and on Holy days. United said no and that the couple couldn’t be members in good standing. This is ironic, since the UCG is adamant that their own members not only can conduct commerce on the Sabbath by eating out in restaurants, but are encouraged to do so. One would think that this would be a glaring inconsistency and invalidate their entire eschatology, but somehow the cognitive dissonance is not just dismissed, but embraced. If you give it some thought, maybe this isn’t so weird, if you consider in what high esteem they hold Herbert Armstrong, the false prophet, who based his prophecies on the abundantly disproved heresy of British Israelism. Anyway, since United took such an intransigent stance with the couple, the ministers south of the border thought it so unfair and not just left, but formed their own CoG.
Amidst this turmoil, those left in the UCG are becoming restless. Some are saying that Dennis Luker is trying to destroy United. This is patently silly. He’s not trying. A number are beginning to have some difficulty with the doctrine of the UCG. What do you think it may be? Eating out on the Sabbath? Church Governance? No and no. You may be as startled as I was to learn that the newest issue causing division is… wait for it… Postponements. Say what?!? Postponements? That’s totally weird. There are other things you would think would come to the fore first, even though this issue has been fomenting for the last 8 years under the radar. It’s like Lutherans objecting to their religion because of Martin Luther not proposing to keep the Sabbath.

Even More UCG Resignations Today 1/2/2011

More UCG Resignations 1/2/2011

UCG Resignations January 2, 2011

Garner Ted's Woodpecker

 Awe, come on!  Stop thinking like GTA!  Get your mind out of the gutter!

This is the woodpecker I was talking about!


What spurred this on?  There was a column on Andrew Sullivan where a reader talked about GTA's woodpecker....

Question Of The Week: An Article About A Woodpecker

02 Jan 2011 11:24 am
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
I have a fairly unusual answer to your question of the week, I think. A magazine article that had probably the biggest impact on my life and the way I view the world was an article on evolution in an issue of The Plain Truth, an evangelical magazine put out by Garner Ted Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God in the '60s and '70s.  My mother subscribed to the magazine and I discovered it lying around one day when I was eight or nine years old.  I was a precocious and voracious reader, so I devoured it along with any other piece of reading material I could get my hands on.
The article in question was about the "so-called" evolution of the woodpecker.
It had the usual mocking tone of creationist arguments (which I kind of liked) and put forth the idea that the woodpecker was so perfectly suited to drilling holes in trees, it would be inconceivable to imagine any intermediate forms.  There was an accompanying illustration of the woodpecker as a machine, with great metallic legs gripping the tree, a piston neck and a drill-like beak. I loved that illustration and stared at it for hours.  More than anything, it convinced me that a partly-evolved woodpecker, flying around the forest, bashing his head against trees was ridiculous.  I become, before I even understood what evolution was, a creationist.

My conversion lasted about six months.  I went camping with my family in British Columbia and, one day, while wandering the woods near our campsite, I spotted a bird (not a woodpecker) pecking away at a tree. I saw it pluck something from the tree and fly away.  I moved to the tree to take a closer look.  I couldn't see anything of interest to a bird in the rough bark, so I dug a little at it with my pocket knife. There were bugs, not just in the cracks of the bark, but deeper inside the bark as well.  "There's stuff to eat all the way inside," I thought.  And, suddenly, I understood how a partly-evolved woodpecker could develop.  By eating the stuff available all the way inside and gradually developing stronger beaks, stronger necks and so on.  I had my first true inkling of how evolution worked.
For a moment, I was elated.  Then, suddenly, I was furious.  I had been lied to.  A magazine with the word "Truth" in its title had lied to me.  Grownups, trying to teach me about the world, had lied to me. It was a disturbing and frightening realization for someone my age, and it created in me a deep skepticism that remains to this day.  On the whole, this has been a good thing, and, I have to say, if I ever ran into the author of that article, I'd thank him, although he might not appreciate the sentiment.

And that picture of the mechanical woodpecker really was totally cool.


For other excellent article dealing with the same subject check out::

The Amazing Animals: The Whales and the Dolphins