Friday, August 8, 2014

UCG: When Is A "Christian" Pastor Not A Christian Pastor?


Double click to enlarge
Screen shot of current speaker of the Why Were You Born campaign

UCG has started another round of public campaigns designed to bring in the uneducated masses of "so-called" Christians who are disillusioned with their own churches or beliefs.  Typical of all the other Church of God's UCG is using another recycled catch phrase that the Mother Church (WCG) used decades ago.  Apparently in the 21st century new ideas cannot be dreamed up.

What I found interesting about the advertising for this event is that the UCG has to DOUBLY stress that Gary Petty is a "Christian."    The description of Petty starts out with, "A long-time pastor and Christian speaker...ordained into the ministry of Jesus Christ..."  Ok, if I was a non COGite then this means the guy is a Christian and think nothing more about it.  Then UCG has to reenforce again that Petty served "...Christian congregations..."  If you are a Christian minister then who else would you be serving for?  Is he the minister of The First Universal Fellowship of Atheists or what? Apparently UCG still cannot get over the fact that they are considered a cult in the Cincinnati area and around the world.  A cult that still follows Herbert Armstrong to the point of deifying him and his teachings.It's soon to be 2015.  Come up with an ORIGINAL thought and make it your own.  Stop falling back on Hebert's legacy.

Oh, and Petty is a world famous author now of a book selling on Amazon, In Plato’s Shadow – The Hellenizing of ChristianityReading the reviews is nothing but a slobberfest of UCG members praising the book as the most enlightening thing they have ever read.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

UCG Advertising Campaign Leads To Online Hilarity As UCG Censors Comments


UPDATE:  In a typical knee jerk fashion UCG put a stop to anyone criticizing their expensive advertising campaign and deleted any comment daring to criticize them.  Now they will pull the other COG stunt and fill the hall up in September with loads of UCG members to make it look like the public has swarmed in because they are soooooooooooooooooo interested in finding out why they were born.  I cant wait to see the glowing reports on the untold hundreds who came to hear the truth once delivered and somehow lost by an incredibly incompetent god who did not have the power to defend believers through the centuries till HWA hit the scene.


Victor Kubik has a screenshot on his Facebook page today with a billboard of UCG's new advertising strategy.  As usual the faithful are on slobbering all over the campaign as totally AWESOME!

However.....they have some great zingers on there from nonUCG folk that show how silly this campaign is.  Some of the comments are:

Your existence was the outcome of some very unlikely events if we considered all the the sperms of your ancestors that did not succeed but could have. That should not lead you to think that your existence was so important that God must have guided each sperm!
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Why was I born? Because my parents did not believe in abortion. Yep, that's what they told me...lol
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My Parents had sex, just like all of your parents had sex.

now that you've thought of it a moment...lets ask the big question. Why are we alive?


I have a theory, at least for me. I was destined to grow up in a religion founded by a failed advertiser who's theology caused the death of a parent, allowed me to contract all sorts of fun diseases and spend the first half of my life in sheer misery, and fear, all because my parents followed a pedophilic charlatan , that I was too terrified of God to question when I grew up so lived another 23 years in poverty and abuse. It still astounds me that people esteem this person, may his corpse always be slug bait.

i lived in hell, so I can appreciate freedom, and joy, and peace. Freedom from religious oppression, joy of a life where I don't have to worry about God always being ticked off at me, and peace by living a faith without the trappings of dogma and fear.

I feel my purpose in life is to share joy, to exude empathy and to share what my life was like in hopes others never have to experience what I did.
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A great question, but be careful with your conclusions. The simple answer is my mother and father created me by the incredible act of creation 9 months before I was born when the egg and the sperm united inside my mothers body. All other "spiritual" answers which is intended with this question are a "guess" and a "hope". We all love to "guess" but some of the guesses have to be wrong. If you ask a militant Muslim why he was born, he will beclare he was born to become a suicide bomber, and he believes that so intensely that he over rides the survival mechanism within humans to kill himself and others to receive 72 virgins in the next life. We all know that idea is "crazy", so why should we believe the Catholics who claim we shall go to heaven and look upon god forever in a "beatific vision"? That sounds very boring to me. An eternity of just looking upon god? Or, why guess we shall go to Valhalla if we were a Viking? Everyone has a guess about why they were born, and no one knows the answer, except to say they were born 9 months after their parents had reproductive sex. The reason you were born is simple, it is procreation of the species. The "spiritual purpose" for your life is a "guess" on your part. And you like the militant Muslim are entitled to your guess. But if you don't get the 72 virgins when you die, something about the teaching in this life time was wrong. I really "hope" there is something after death, but like everyone else on this planet, I have no idea if that is true or not. I can accept "on faith" that there is a grand design. But it is an act of faith to believe that, just as it is an "act of faith" to destroy yourself for 72 virgins. Or it is an act of faith to believe I shall be reincarnated as a human being again. There are a thousand answers to the question, and some of the answers are clearly crazy. Other answers I hope are true. I am amused by reincarnation belief's because everyone believes their parents will be waiting for them when we die. Why would my parents be waiting for me? Would they not be looking for their parents to reunite with? The idea that everyone I loved will be on the other side waiting for me sounds rather self centered. But what do I know? I know the same as you. The other side is a guess. And a hope. But everything about death is unknowable, as uncomfortable as that is to accept. Death is simply the separation of the body that dies and the consciousness within our bodies. No one knows what happens to "consciousness" or "spirit" or "soul" when we die. We have faith, hope and guesses, but no one knows for certain. Except the militant Muslims, they know or they would not destroy themselves. Be careful of "absolute knowing". The only person I knew when in the WCG who knew about the other side was Gerald Waterhouse, and he took 4 to 8 hours at a time to explain in detail what was coming next. It seems to me he had a very active imagination. And his explanations bored me to death.
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And my FAVORITE:


Lying For God: What Adventists Knew About the Sabbath and Lied About




Here is a document concerning the Seventh Day Adventist chruch, of which Armstrongism is a branch of, deliberately LIED about the sabbath being kept in Genesis


LYING FOR GOD: What Adventists Knew And When They Knew It!  
8th Edition – August 1, 2014   
By 
KERRY B. WYNNE 
B.A., English & history (1970 & 1972), Pacific Union College M.A., educational administration, Andrews University (1978) 
WILLIAM H. HOHMANN B.A., theology, Ambassador College (1976) 
ROBERT K. SANDERS Founder Of Truth Or Fables.Com 
DUANE JOHNSON Independent Biblical Researcher and Author   
Part I – Verdict: No Sabbath In Genesis 
Part II – Ellen White And Her Enablers 
Copyright 2014


THAT SABBATH ABANDONMENT WAS VIRTUALLY IMMEDIATE  

A variety of Early Christian writers documented that Christians chose to worship on Sunday, beginning in 70 AD and continuing until the Roman Catholic Church came into existence hundreds of years after “Sabbath abandonment” was universal (140 AD). Using their excerpts to support either point of view is filled with risks and challenges.  Great caution must be observed.  Cox (The Literature of the Sabbath Question, 1865) provides evidence that the writings of the early fathers have been heavily edited and even “tampered with.” There are translation problems with documents believed to be legitimate, and some of the documents are believed to be fraudulent. Our research suggests that the biggest mistake Sabbatarians make in using these excerpts is their failure to understand that many of these writers discuss the term “Sabbath” in the context of the Sabbath festival (such as whether or not to fast) and not in the Jewish sense of a day that is intrinsically holy and requires resting upon it by Divine law. At the same time, taken as a whole, these excerpts demonstrate that the Christian Church during its first 500 years or more worshiped on Sundays and celebrated the Sabbath festival at selected times of the liturgical year. If they rested on these Sabbath festivals, it was because of the festive nature of the tradition, and if they worshiped on them it was because it was a festival established as a tradition to keep alive the memory of the Creation Week. The Lord's Supper was often celebrated on this festival. From the Jewish perspective, the early Christians, then, “broke” the Sabbath on all the Saturdays of the year that were not set aside as a Sabbath festival, and they “broke” it on the Sabbath festival days because the festive activities were not what the Law of Moses would have allowed on the weekly Sabbath of the Decalogue. While these writers had the advantage of perspective that living very close in time to the days of the apostles, they did not have access to the large body of the  research that has been done on this subject over the last nearly 2,000 years.  While a study of the opinions of the early fathers is useful, it is important to keep in mind that a number of biblical concepts and themes
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are opposed to Sabbatarian thinking. Just one example is the principle that observing the ordinance of circumcision was a prerequisite to keeping the Sabbath. Do not suppose for a moment that SDA leaders, historians, and theologians are not keenly aware that the Christian writers of the second and third centuries were not virtually unanimous in their disdain for the Jewish concept of Sabbath-keeping. Michael Morrision of Grace Community International comments that SDA Theologian Mervyn Maxwell, in his book, Early Sabbath-Sunday History, concedes that second and early third-century writers had basically the same negative attitudes toward the Sabbath (see part 3, note 27) and summarizes this concept as follows: These writers taught that the new covenant had put an end to the old law — and that now the new spiritual Israel, with its new covenant and its new spiritual law, no longer needed the literal circumcision, literal sacrifices, and literal Sabbath. Barnabas observed that God "has circumcised our hearts." Justin referred triumphantly to the new spiritual circumcision in Christ. Irenaeus taught that circumcision, sacrifices, and Sabbaths were given of old as signs of better things to come; the new sacrifice, for example, is now a contrite heart. Tertullian, too, had a new spiritual sacrifice and a new spiritual circumcision. Each of these writers also taught that a new spiritual concept of the Sabbath had replaced the old literal one.... This supplanting of the old law by the new; of the literal Sabbath by the spiritual, was a very Christ-centered concept for these four writers. God's people have inherited the covenant only because Christ through His sufferings inherited it first for us, Barnabas said. For Justin the new, final, and eternal law that has been given to us was "namely Christ" Himself.  It was only because Christ gave the law that He could now also be "the end of it," said Irenaeus.  And it is Christ who invalidated "the old" and confirmed "the new," according to Tertullian. Indeed Christ did this, both Irenaeus and Tertullian said, not so much by annulling the law as by so wonderfully fulfilling it that He extended it far beyond the mere letter. To sum up: The early rejection of the literal Sabbath appears to be traceable to a common hermeneutic of Old and New Testament scriptures. -  C. Mervyn Maxwell in Maxwell and Damsteegt, Early Sabbath-Sunday History," (pp. 154-156)