Sunday, February 28, 2016

Herbert Armstrong: TO BE ENFORCED! Ruling On Women's Dress


Herbert Armstrong writes:
And I want to say, before quoting from the former article, that God’s ministers are quite frequently embarrassed, while preaching in the pulpit, by women wearing too short skirts that do not cover their knees, sitting with their knees spread apart at least eight or ten inches. Usually the careless ones are middle-aged or elderly women. Just once, I believe, have I personally noticed this inexcusable carelessness on the part of a college girl. This happens REPEATEDLY. Personally, I have not wanted to publicly embarrass these women. But if, after this article has appeared in print, such carelessness occurs again in my sight, I shall personally reprimand such women regardless of the painful embarrassment it may cause them
Apparently the "men" who masqueraded as ministers were having issues with elderly women spreading the legs in front of them during sermons.   What kind of nonsense is that?

To show these apostate elderly women who is in charge, HWA says that they are to be told ONCE and then punished if they do it again.  Armstrong was like most other patriarchal men when it came to women in the church.  Women were nothing more than "children" in his sight, under contestant need to be controlled and disciplined. Women are too stupid to know right from wrong and need a REAL man to tell them what to do.  Of course only real men could be found within the Church of God.
In our teaching on child rearing, based on God’s Word, we teach parents to speak plainly JUST ONCE-and then punish. The women guilty of this neglect are old enough to know better, but they are our spiritual children, and I am instructing all ministers to PRACTICE WHAT WE PREACH, and ENFORCE this ruling! 
Herbert was especially disgusted by women's knees.  What could be more revolting?
It is embarrassing to me, personally, when I see a woman in constant embarrassment tugging away at her skirt while she sits, to make it cover her knees when it simply is not long enough to cover them. Or, as so often happens, now, because her skirt comes merely to her knees when sitting, but leaves them completely exposed, she continually tries to pull her skirt tightly around her legs just above the knee, fastening the skirt underneath. between her legs and the chair.
So what was a poor woman to do in the church?  Herb has the answer: 
Women who care more for what GOD thinks than what this rotten, filthy, doomed WORLD thinks, will immediately let out any skirts shorter than that. Those who care more about what THE WORLD thinks than God will mark themselves as PART OF THE WORLD and NO LONGER MEMBERS OF GOD’S CHURCH. 
So what else ticked off HWA?  Tight skirts!  Women who wore tight skirts deserved to be SPANKED! Now we know here Spanky Meredith got his deviate passion from.  Meredith frequently bragged about how he spanked his wife and daughter when they were rebellious.
Since the last article on this subject, the Ruling has been so flagrantly ignored or disobeyed that the time has come TO ENFORCE this Ruling. God’s Ministers are instructed to act accordingly. 
And THIS INCLUDES THESE TOO TIGHT SKIRTS. 
By that, I mean these skirts taken up just below the hips, so they FORM-FIT the buttocks, clinging tight behind and under the place where they OUGHT to be SPANKED! I know that nearly all skirts are made that way today. 
It seems that HWA thought most women in the church were walking harlots. 
Candidly, when I see a female with a skirt tight enough to call attention to the shape of her hips, especially when tight below the hips and under the buttocks, I know that she is either care- less and needs sharp admonishing or else she is wearing it deliberately to attract male eyes and arouse lust toward her in men’s minds. 
 It's not the men's fault their tongues hang out in lust, but the women's fault for making the men sin. 

HWA continues with his desire that women be spanked because they are nothing more than common  prostitutes:
Do you want to know my personal reaction when I see such an example? It makes me feel that such a girl or woman needs either a good lecture driven home by a sound SPANKING of what she so brazenly displays, or to be classed as a fallen woman and a common prostitute. 
THAT IS PLAIN LANGUAGE! I mean it to be plain, and I want the women in God’s Church to know it is coming from God’s Minister, who speaks by Christ’s authority!

Recently some of our girls and women have been wearing skirts that are entirely TOO SHORT! Often I have felt I ought to speak personally to some of you. If this article does not quickly correct this EVil-AND IT IS A N EVIL! -God’s ministers will be instructed to begin speaking personally and in a manner that ought to cause a deep sense of shame and produce a very red face on any girl or woman who invited such sharp rebuke from a Minister of God! 
Even Herbert's god is embarrased by those knees:
When many of you women wear skirts as high as (and now above) the knee, and which completely expose the knees when sitting, your skirts are an abomination in GOD’Seyes. I wonder, frankly, if God doesn’t blush when HE sees you! Are you women who do this, deliberately trying to tempt men into breaking the spirit of God’s law against adultery? Are you trying to make yourselves adultresses ? Are you not breaking the very spirit of that law, yourselves? 
Again, its the women's fault, not the poor over-sexed men.

Lest we think Herbert only looked at knees; he also was disgusted by breasts.  It must have been a real struggle for him and other ministers to have to preach every week looking out at all of these spread legs and boobs hanging out of dresses.

More than once I have seen a few of our women, in evening dress, exposing entirely too much female breast-with neckline cut so low as to show a goodly portion of breasts, with a crease in the middle. On one or two occasions, I have instructed Mrs. Armstrong to speak to such women, telling them plainly that their necklines are too low. 
Women’s breasts, in plain language, were designed by God to nurse babies- not to be flaunted immodestly to arouse lust in men. 

Can you imagine the catatonic fit HWA would go into today when he saw a woman nursing her baby!

Herbert has this final thing to say:

In the matter of too-tight skirts around the hips, the excuse often is that the girl has taken on weight-and she protests that she cannot help it. But she can help it, and if she is to remain in God's Church or enter into God's Kingdom, she must-one of two ways: either don't remain over weight (fasting and proper diet will cure that quickly). or let the seam out.
It is the over-emphasis of lust-arousing portions of the female body that MUST BE CORRECTED.


The only over-emphasis that I have ever seen in the church has come from the top down.  Men who can't control their lusts or perversions.

Male cult patriarchy it its finest!

You too can read this absurd article here: TO BE ENFORCED Ruling on women's dress

Reactions to the Pasadena Rubble



The reactions have been swift at the latest photo's of the demolition of the Hall of Administration.  This meme was done by a child of the church (an actress) who's life was screwed up because of it. Others have been moved to tears at seeing the debris because they have been hurt so much by the church, yet still identify with it.

Broken families and marriages, suicides, and mental disorders have been a result of the church and its teachings.  Some have been scared for life by the church and so many want to sweep it all under the rug and act like nothing bad ever happened, and if it did, it was the person's fault for being weak and not the church.


On the Banned Facebook page and the FB pages the following comments have been made: 

Reminds me of the destruction of The Temple signifying the end of the Levitical Priesthood and the daily sacrifice and how many still insisted on living in OT OC times. The splinters are in denial of this being a significant sign, Armstrongism is dead...
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I fight very hard not to be bitter because it is counter productive. That said, after a 50 year exposure to that hot mess, I can't help not be angry. It was bad enough being raised in it, but now, in my early 60's, I have no hope of ever retiring, a still live paycheck to paycheck. After all, we should be in the Millennium, right? Who needs IRA's and Social Security when we are all now in the Wonderful World Tomorrow! 
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Many lives and careers are a pile of rubble just like that. it is not so easy just to sweep away the damage done to children and marriages. I contributed thousands of dollars and there it is in a pile of trash. 

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I'll say it again. That pile of rubble was what was stolen out of our mouths as kids, was stolen of our backs. That building, was built and paid for by people like my parents with the thousands of dollars they didn't have to spare which they sent to Pasadena every paycheck. It seems a waste to see a beautiful building that my parents in part paid for laying there as a pile of rubble. I don't miss the organization but to see the sacrifice decimated is a hard pill to swallow. Just my thoughts and feelings on this.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Glynn Washington weaves his childhood in the WCG into his stories on PBS



Glynn Washington has a highly successful radio program that is known around the country.  He weaves his story of growing up in Armstrongism into many of his broadcasts.


Glynn Washington adding diversity to radio one story at a time New York Amsterdam News

"On this night, Washington opens up about his childhood in Pasadena, Calif., which was spent in the now infamous Worldwide Church of God, headed by the apocalyptic radio evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong. Many, including Washington, called the church a cult.  
I don’t know how this is possible, with the sadness and seriousness that was woven throughout the story, but laughter erupted in the room. Here is this man telling us that when he was a 9-year-old, he was going to school and telling his best friend goodbye, sleeping in shoes and trying to get right with Jesus so that he wouldn’t perish in the rapture. He was surrounded by adults who were doing the same thing. His family was almost convinced to send their lifesavings to Armstrong, then pick up and leave their home to follow this self-proclaimed prophet to a “safe place” before God’s rapture came, and we were all laughing. This is a true story, but we can laugh because it’s a part of his life that he has come to terms with. Now he is sharing it with us, so that we can take from it what we need or want."

NPR’s Great Black Hope The Atlantic


"That was 1997, when This American Life, Glass’s public-radio show, was just two years old, and people were beginning to suspect that his style of curated storytelling might be radio’s next big thing. Now Washington, a proud student of Glass’s, is the next big thing. In its first three years, Snap Judgment, Washington’s fast-paced, music-heavy, ethnically variegated take on the public-radio story hour, has spread like left-end-of-the-dial kudzu. It is on 250 stations, reaching nine of the top 10 public-radio markets, and its podcast is downloaded more than half a million times a month. And while there has long been minority talent on public radio—a realm that includes National Public Radio and other producers of non-commercial radio, like American Public Media and Public Radio International—Washington is the first African American host to swing a big cultural stick, the first who seems likely to become a public-radio superstar on the order of Glass or Garrison Keillor."

"Many NPR hosts come from NPR-ish families. Not Washington. “I grew up in a cult,” he told me. His parents were members of the Worldwide Church of God, a sect founded by Herbert W. Armstrong, an apocalyptic radio evangelist based in Pasadena. Washington got out—a story he tells with an escapee’s pride—and went on to the University of Michigan and its law school. He studied in Japan, then worked for the State Department, then ended up directing a program at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of the best Snap Judgment segments are drawn from his own life, and you get the feeling he could carry several episodes a year by himself."