The Church of God and Its Dystopian Society

The Painful Truth has a new article up on Armstrongism and the Church of God and its vision of things to come and how none of it has ever come to pass and what happens to people caught up in the deception.

Just what is a dystopian society?

• A dystopia is considered a fictional society usually portrayed as existing in a future time, when the conditions of life are extremely dismal due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. 

Sound familiar? Remember the Good News magazine that spewed out the WCG’s view of what God’s utopia would look like? It was heaven on earth. But to enter into this wonderful time (the kingdom) would require you to do unending somersaults of law keeping, tithing, and blindly obeying those who really did not care for you or your family.  

Remember the Plain Truth? Have you ever read Meredith’s or Flurry’s rag? They fill your mind with a hopeless air of despair. 

The propagating of these ideas and others into the minds of their audience that future race wars are coming, or economic collapse is just a few short years away, are an ideology the ACOG’s place into print within their magazines in order to form opinions, prejudice and to mirror church doctrine. This conditions the membership not to jump ship and chance that they will be caught up in the fray when the projected SHTF moment materializes. Anyone who has spent a decade or more in one of these groups can attest that a SHTF moment is always just a few years off.

What the ACOG’s fail to foresee is the results of their endless negative prognosticating. When a human has confidence and optimism, the very joys of life itself stolen from them, you take away the zeal for life, you squelch the will to live. You destroy the individual. What you have left is a shell of the former and a slave which needs to be constantly managed in order to maintain his or her direction forward.  

The Dystopian standard-bearer (an advocate or champion of a particular cause or ideology) often feels trapped and is struggling to escape and questions the existing social, political, or in our case, religious systems. 

The article is well worth the read: Herbert Armstrong's Utopian Society

Dave Pack: 6,000 pages later and Dave Says, "I’m an okay writer who worked hard and you know, kind of got better."

The most magnificent and most educated Church of God leader to ever exist in human history talks about the struggles he goes through to write his booklets.   His brain is such an awesome machine that it constant is coming up with new ideas and concepts.  It is then initially important o him to add those new revelations to his booklets.  It is an awesome task and only he is the one able to do it.

I’ll tell you an interesting story. When I wrote my literature, I found something. It’s just the way my writing is. If I were like Mr. Armstrong, I probably would not need to do this. He was a great writer. I’m an okay writer who worked hard and you know, kind of got better. That’s the way I would describe myself.

I would write a booklet and then I would come back through and make another pass, and I would see certain things I couldn’t see when I wrote it. I would give the pages to my wife and she would install them. Then she would hand me the booklet again, and I would read through it again and see things that time that I couldn’t see because the other things I had installed blinded my ability to see it. I would continue to read it. It was a lot of work, believe me. Those who think the literature…“How did you write it all?…don’t realize I read and reread…and I am not a fast reader…I read and reread, just in editing my literature, anywhere from 10 to 40 times—6,000 pages—so you can do the math; that is just the books and booklets.

I would, eventually, know that the book or booklet was done when I could not read through and find anything else; then I said, “That is it. Print it!” That usually was six or seven times. The longer ones, I would sometimes add more parts. Whenever I did that, I would read all the way through a book. For instance, Anoint Your Eyes started at two hundred (and I think) sixteen pages and ended up 270, because I would always want to add other things to it. That’s a little different situation.

Some of the earlier booklets I went through many more times, because I just wasn’t a very good writer in my opinion, and you know, Why The Restored Church of God? I edited 44 times. That was the first booklet, but I got better, I had to or I would have been dead soon, or my wife would have been……

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