Saturday, March 10, 2012

Wadsworth Ohio: "This town is going to be like the movie "Footloose" before we know it."



notice the subliminal seduction by posing in front of Herb and Loma's picture 
as if Dave and wife and carrying on that tradition. 



There was an article this weekend about Dave Pack and his cult headquarters in Wadsworth.    Click on the link above to read it. We now know that his Wadsworth congregation is 140 members and 67 people work at his cult headquarters.  There is more pablum about being the largest Internet minister on the face of the entire earth:

Plans include a four-story, 38,000-square-foot administration building; a 450-seat auditorium; and a three-story, 19,200-square-foot training facility that will house a printing and mailing center, office space and classrooms. The church, which has more than 370 congregations in more than 50 countries and employs 67 people at its headquarters, plans to launch its cable television ministry this fall. (370 congregations translates to 6 people or less on the average)

Average attendance at Saturday afternoon worship services, which are typically reserved for members, is about 140. Visitors are invited by a member or a minister, usually after viewing videos and reading literature at its website (www.rcg.org). Once a minister is satisfied that the individual understands the basic doctrine, he or she is invited to a service. Membership is made official at baptism, usually three to 12 months after a first visit. Baptism is offered only to adults.

Did you know that Packman made a PERSONAL promise to Herbert Armstrong to continue his ministry and doctrines?  Pack is a liar, plain and simple!  HWA never said any such thing to Pack.

After his graduation in 1971, Pack served congregations in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey and Ohio. His role expanded to training and supervising ministers. Pack said he established the Wadsworth ministry because he was determined to keep his promise to Armstrong of continuing his doctrines.

The best part of the article are the comments that follow the article from Wadsworth citizens:

Sounds like a rather large business venture. Time to start paying taxes. We're getting tired of subsidizing religious businesses.

 I still think this space would be better occupied by Costco.  


Why, Wadsworth? Freaking WHY?
How in the world is this going to be a benefit to our community?




Oh joy a cable TV ministry.... Good grief.  


Pretty grand plans for 140 members. Sumthin ain't quite raight heah.





My favorite:  This town is going to be like the movie "Footloose" before we know it.


Perhaps it's time to add your comments to the Akron Beacon Journal article and let the world know the REAL side of Davey.  Add your comment here:  Article comments


  
 

Vidal Has Another Orgasmic Restored Church of God Slobber Fest



Brother Vidal is back over at Dave Pack's ass kissing site for rebellious back stabbing ministers from United Church of God.  Vidal still wants to remind you on what an IMPORTANT man he is.  He is an attorney. ATTORNEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  In case you missed it each time he writes.  An attorney from Nigeria were all the scam artists are from and attorneys pass bribes under the table to get things done.  Nigeria, where ethics and human rights are not major concerns.  Yes, Dave should be very proud to have an Nigerian attorney in his midst, not that Vidal has any of these bad characteristics mind you, it adds more legitimacy to his organization.  But you have to wonder: ethics - Armstrongism - Nigeria - three things that do NOT have good track records.

Greetings, brethren! My name is Vidal N. Wachuku, pastor of congregations in Miami, Florida and the Caribbean. You may recall from my earlier posts that I am a fulltime minister in The Restored Church of God, having been previously employed as an attorney in Nigeria.

Vidal wants you to know that Dave Packs cult headquarters is unparalleled in the universe for it's hospitality, majesty, and warmth.  No other Church of God on the face of the earth has ever been as warm and converted as the folks at RCG.  Of course this is a direct slam at UCG where Vidal and the rest of his slobbering buddies defected from.  UCG apparently was a hostile environment filled with bitter people, ugly buildings and sub quality literature and materials.

But another thing also stood out: We could scarcely believe that the whole world was being reached from this relatively small complex! We had expected to see a massive complex with a huge staff swarming all over the place—but instead we saw a smaller group, totally dedicated to the Work (this was over three years ago—the staff is now much bigger). The atmosphere was charged with the infectious joy produced by God’s Spirit. We could then understand why the magazines and books we had been receiving were of such high quality!
Vidal hasn't even got to the greatest man on earth today, Dave Pack.  I can only imagine what he will say when he walks into the awesome presence of the most perfect, righteous, and tallest Apostle to ever walk the earth.  Oh wait!  Here it comes:

Meeting Mr. David Pack was another defining moment. The man simply defied all we had heard and read about him. We were momentarily taken aback.

His magnificence radiates from his most awesome presence.  You would think Vidal was describing Jesus, but no, he is describing Dave. A mortal, flesh and blood, sinful, and most degenerate man.

Then Brother Vidal takes another direct slam at the UCG brethren he stabbed in the back.  Now he takes the knife and twists it as he shoves it in:

In the following days, we noticed something that is hardly found anywhere else. All staff members, ministry and lay members alike, were willing to help and assist in every possible way. You could see and feel the cooperation and dedication to duty without the competitiveness that pervades the world. Everyone worked as though there were no tomorrow. There was order, precision, courtesy and consideration for one another. Above all, God’s quality was reflected in everything! The picture we saw was that of one big, happy family!

Once again we are told that UCG Headquarters employees are  lazy slackards who could not give a rat's ass about spreading the gospel.  Disorder, chaos, rudeness, are the trademarks of the UCG employees.  UCG is obviously one incredibly small, sniveling and  miserable broken family.

Brother Vidal then goes on to describe how he and his wife felt a little disconcerted by the Stepford Wife atmosphere.  Was it real or just a show.?  Then Vidal talks about how they were invited back a second time (while still on UCG's payroll) and they saw the awesomeness all over again.

As with our first visit, we proved—again, to our shame!—that what we saw was not a fluke or a show, but the reality of how God’s Headquarters operated. The orderliness, precision, love, care, concern, friendliness and emphasis on quality were pervasive. Brethren were helpful, always on hand to transport us to and from the office and to wherever we wanted to go. We never—not even once—noticed any feelings of disenchantment. I mean, what more could anyone ask?

I guess UCG must sure be a hell hole to work at.  RCG is just the most awesome place on the face of the entire earth.  Rainbows, lollipops and cotton candy float through the air in this sweeter than life world.

Vidal wants you to know that the headquarters of Dave Pack is a continuation of Herbert Armstrong's standards of quality and excess.  Only the best will do, at the poor members expense though.  As a minister, Vidal could care less about the poor folk that pay his salary and free plane trips for him and his entire family back and forth to Africa till he signed on the dotted line with Dave.  Now he is in the States where he can freely jump on a short flight to bask in the awesomeness of God's most perfect man and COG Headquarters.


Brethren, we serve a God of quality, and the only place where He is working today reflects this in a host of ways. As mentioned earlier, by merely stepping into RCG Headquarters, you begin to see evidence of this. You have a feeling of being transported to another time and place. The absence of chaos and disorder is electrifying. The sharp professional appearance of employees is captivating. Work ethics are of the highest standards. Staff members beam with smiles at every opportunity. The inner peace and joy that comes with knowing whom you are serving radiates from every face. You do not see the sloppiness common in many of today’s work environments.
Then once again he slams UCG and the other splinter groups as he goes on to describe the substandard literature churned out by these splinter groups:

The Church’s publications, though given away absolutely free of charge, are of the highest standard, particularly when compared to what the various splinter groups publish. Looking at their literature and materials, you should want to know why your leaders churn out substandard publications despite the millions of tithe dollars they appropriate!

 Then he writes what the PR Department at RCG has been trying to promote about the church.  Dave has the LARGEST Bible based set of materials and web sites that the world has ever seen. We bow at your greatness. We are in awe of your magnificence, we tremble at your presence.  We laugh our asses off........

Our websites rcg.org, realtruth.org, and worldtocome.org not only contain the largest arsenal of Bible-based materials the world has ever seen, but also reflect the God of quality whom we serve. I urge you to take a serious look at them!

Then Vidal goes on to end with a final slobbering suck fest that is appallingly sickening.

Contrary to what we see from the largest splinter’s “Bible Center” and from others, RCG’s Ambassador Center and its products represent excellence, dedication and dignity. The comportment and demeanor of AC students are unrivalled, and the instructors are tested men who live by what they teach. Even though I have had the privilege of passing through University, Law School, Leadership and Entrepreneurship training institutions, none of them prepared me for the unique AC experience. This is one place that strives for the highest standards of professionalism, etiquette and decorum. It prepares you not just to earn a living, but to live life to the fullest the way God intended.

Where is the barf bag that we all need after this saccharine induced slobber fest.  Read it all here, if you dare and if you have a barf bag ready.  The Epitome of Quality




Friday, March 9, 2012

Andrew On: Reality Check (at Passover)




Reality Check


The Jewish Passover is now about a month away. Already the Armstrongites are busy ramping up for the most wonderful and labor-intensive time of their year. Everyone must sort through their entire home, automobile, and workspace, searching for crumbs. These crumbs represent the leaven of sin and must be painstakingly picked out, vacuumed up, or somehow thrown away. (As though that actually accomplished something besides spring cleaning). Meanwhile, as everyone is busy focusing on that, their internal spiritual bakeries keep pumping out thousands of fluffy loaves every day. Yet no one seems to notice that, let alone do anything about it, all the way through the Days of Unleavened Bread. Oh, the humanity.

Let’s be honest for a moment. Really, what’s the point of this cleaning exercise? Shouldn’t the Armstrongite focus on shutting down their internal spiritual bakeries, rather than focusing on each and every piddly physical crumb? But that’s how the bible got interpreted. It’s too late to change it now. Everyone already knows that’s what you have to do to please god for Passover. Still, Passovers come and Passovers go, and even though I am sure their homes are a little cleaner for it, Armstrongites never seem to benefit from the ritual in any other way.

The truth is, the only way that a person could know that their interpretation of the bible and the way they lived their life were pleasing to an omnipotent creator, in reality, not just in their imagination, is if He came down and spoke to them, the way the bible says he did to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. Jesus Christ and all the writers of the bible were all dead and gone before the year 100AD. That means that for at least 1,912 years, the Christian God has been officially silent. Where did he go?

Whether or not God has come and spoken to anyone during the last 1,912 years (or at all, for that matter) is anyone’s guess. After all, today the quickest way to wind up with a new jacket and a padded apartment is to tell someone that God has been speaking to you.

It’s pretty easy to make a biblical case that the "true religion" of the Hebrews was momentarily restored by Ezra and Nehemiah following their return from captivity to rebuild Jerusalem approximately 2,450 years ago. After that, the Jews took the Tanakh (Old Testament), and embellished it with arcane, bizarre, and even contradictory traditions.

Judaism has little to do with scripture anymore and everything to do with the Talmud, which had already become its central text by the time Jesus walked the earth (even though it was still oral, and not yet written down). Rabbis have traditionally taught that the core of the Talmud is supposedly God’s own interpretation of scripture (a likely story). However, much of rabbinical law, not just that of rabbinical origin, such as the wearing of yarmulkes, but also that of biblical origin, such as the injunction not to mix meat and dairy, have both drifted so far from anything scriptural, or even anything sensible, that they could rightly said to be crazy.

When Jesus Christ came along, the establishment of Jewish religion had already gone off the deep end, and according to the gospel accounts he told them as much in rather direct terms. It is easy for the Christian to conclude that one of the purposes of Jesus Christ’s appearance in the first century AD was to get the "true religion" of the Hebrews "back on track" with a "reality check."

Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was the Jews killed Jesus and continued on without interruption. Meanwhile, the followers of Jesus would form a radical new sect based upon the same scriptures, minus the Talmud, plus some new writings now called the New Testament. Judaism and Christianity are really just two sects of the same religion, albeit with many huge disagreements. In the last 2,000 years, Christianity has gone a different direction than Judaism, but has still drifted into a similar type of territory.

The trouble is, none of these sects know where they’re going. Without any navigational aids, milemarkers, or guideposts, every sect will eventually descend into one sort of insanity and corruption or another. Over time they will fragment into innumerable different sects that each need to believe their trajectory is the one and only path that is pleasing to God. However, without a "reality check" to bring people back into line with something that at least makes sense, they just keep going further and further and further afield.

What’s more, as history has shown, organized religion does not even want any "reality checks." Religious leaders don’t really care if the course of their religion is true or not. They are satisfied so long as they are able to "lord it over" other people, command unquestioned respect, and extort an income. Accepting "reality checks" compromises religious leader’s abilities to do those other three things. It was true 2,000 years ago, and it’s just as true today.

With so much confusion, where is a sincere person to turn? If a human being really wants to live an "unleavened" life, to whom can he go for a "reality check"? Alas, there is no human being you can go to for that.

With this in mind, the bottom line for any religious person should be finding God for a personal "reality check." That should not mean finding him in some man’s church, no matter how historic. It should not mean finding him in some superstitious desire to believe, regardless of how many (or how few) people may share those beliefs. It means finding him in the reality in which you live, instead of just in the wishful thinking of either your own imagination, or else in the imaginations you’ve borrowed from others.

The biggest reason why there is so much religious difference and confusion is that for at least 1,912 years it seems that God hasn’t even permitted any "reality checks." Acts 17:27 states that God is not far from "each of us." Whether that was true then or not, I cannot now say. All the religious confusion is the evidence that suggests no one has heard from God for a long time. Today, individuals and ancient monolithic churches are all adrift in the same boat together. Neither individuals nor religious institutions seem to have any access to feedback from God.

What does this mean? What it means to me is that I cannot be so dogmatic about anything spiritual or religious. No one agrees on who the real God is or what will make him happy with you because - wait for it - nobody knows! Those who pretend they do and tell you so are just conning you.

I think many people don’t want to be honest about the true level of uncertainty we all face, so they just pretend the world is more certain than it is. As the Jewish spring holy days approach, both Jews and Armstrongites will hypocritically obsess over minutia of their living spaces in vain. Until we can get that "reality check," shouldn’t a good person just focus on what he doesn’t need to verify? Things such as the golden rule and helping the needy? Spending weeks looking for read crumbs? Seriously? Get real.

Andrew