God strikes down Second Witness...But NOT in Jerusalem!

The Church of God has always been blessed by having so many prophets, scholars, and end times witnesses in its midst.  While a few have been women though the overwhelming majority are self-appointed men who feel they have a higher calling than the dumb sheeple and therefore need to be heard.

Well over ten years ago one of the biggest liars in the Church of God proclaimed himself one of the end time Two Witnesses.  Ron Weinland went on to make many SURE predictions and prophecies that we all now know to be complete utter bullshit.  2008 came and went as Weinland was publicly humiliated in San Francisco at an Idea City conference:

He was so sure that his creature "jesus" was going to come back with righteous fury in 2008 that he made the rounds publicly proclaiming his message and writing a "book" on it all.  Then, like any good Church of God prophet, his rantings failed.  His god had changed the return time, it then turned into a "spiritual return", the brethren were not ready, the same old tired shtick.

Then his god turned its back on him once again and let the United States Government swoop in and convict him in court sending him to prison for a prophetic 3 1/2 years.  2013 was a humiliating year for him as he turned the reigns over to his money-laundering daughter and his wife Laura, the diamond  wearing Second Witless Witness.

In 2015 he had a heart attack that his god apparently let happen in order to humble him.   Not one to learn from his mistakes and failed prophecies, he developed even wackier predictions as he wrote another book.

Once the convicted felon was let out of prison, he started making more and more idiotic prophecies to the point he now has his "jesus" returning in 2019.

His god must not be pleased that felon Ron has not learned his lesson.  At the beginning of July 2018, the all-powerful god of Ron struck him down with another heart attack.

One person on a Weinland newsgroup wrote:

"I don't recall anywhere in Rev 11, where God makes His #1 prophet/servant sick and disabled. How are the TWs going to do there job, if the lead man is sick and disabled? Did God drop the ball? Did God forget to give Ron the health he needs to do his job? Or MAYBE Ron is a false prophet?"

How is Ron and his dingy wife Laura going to be the Two Witnesses as we approach Pentecost 2019 when he is laid up? What a cruel joke Ron's god played on him.  Dingy Laura now has to step up to the plate. Ron has never really had much faith in his dingy wife as he used to force her to leave the room when he spoke.  Was she giving off bad vibes?

Weinerdude's heart attack presents a huge problem for his god and the church.  As one of the Two Witless Witnesses, he is supposed to be preaching for 1,260 days getting the message of his god across to the world as a final witness.  His wife Laura is supposed to be by his side doing the same thing. Now that he cannot speak publicly and his dingy wife is incapable of it forming a logical sentence, how is the message of his god going to get out there?  Millions upon millions of people will not be able to hear the word of his god and will lose any chance of escaping the tribulation soon to come!  

Another person has noted on a Weinland forum:

"(Rev 11:3)  And I will give [power] to My two witnesses, and they will prophesy a thousand, two hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth.

How hard can it be? If you just believe what is written, it's easy....

THEY BOTH TESTIFY. The verse is plain, the English is clear, BOTH witnesses testify. They both do it EVERY DAY for 1260 days. They don't testify/preach/prophecy on Monday, and then take the rest of the week off. They don't go on cruises and get deep tissue massages, while browsing through the Fredrik's of Hollywood catalog for expensive panties. They both work and they both preach for 1260 days.

Another person made this checklist up:

1) BOTH the Two Witnesses are MEN  (YLT Zec 4:14  And he said, These are the two sons of fresh oil who stand by Jehovah of the whole earth. )

Instead of making excuses by trying to force the verse to mean "children" instead of "sons", why not just believe what is plainly stated? IT'S SO EASY. Believing the truth is easy, believing lies is hard work.

2) They both prophesy

3) They both defend themselves if necessary, by killing their enemies by breathing fire on them (they are COMMANDED by God to kill their enemies, it is not an "option") 

4) They both stand toe to toe facing the Beast Leader and his army. 

5) They turn rivers to blood 

6) They cause droughts for as long as they wish 

7) They have discretion to call down as many plagues as they please  

8) They both get martyred  

9) They both get resurrected 

10) As "payment", 7000 give their lives for killing these two prophets...

Weinland has been placing curses on people for over a decade now and not one single person has died, so how can he call fire down from heaven to destroy his enemies? Even better, how can his dingy wife Laura call down fire while wearing her fur-lined panties that she bragged about years ago?  Imagine her craggy fingers bedecked with numerous diamond rings pointed at you as fire proceeds from her fingertips.

Can you imagine God allowing one of his powerful witnesses having to undergo a quadruple heart bypass surgery before he begins witnessing?  What happened to the all-powerful god who could have secretly healed Ron's heart so that he could carry on unencumbered? 

Can Armstrongism get any stupider than this? Oh, sorry...there is Bob Thiel.  Three peas in a pod.

 

Self-Appointed COG Prophet Claims To Know Everything About Atheists

Why is it that certified liars who have self-appointed themselves as COG leaders, prophets, teachers and self-appointed scholars think they know everything about everything? Why do they feel the need to lambast others outside their groups when the Church of God community is one of the biggest messes that can ever be imagined? Arrogant and despotic leaders are wrecking peoples lives.  Hundreds and hundreds of splinter groups all doing what they want with nothing truly unifying them.  On and on they go casting stones from their fragile glass houses.

Anyway, back to the antics of the self-appointed and improperly doubly blessed Elijah Bob Thiel. He claims to know WHY there are atheists.  The problems with Thiel's exposes starts in the very first sentence.  For many years now he has mocked the magazine Christianity Today as "improperly named" because he thinks they are not real Christians.  Like any good Armstrongite, he believes there are no Christians outside the Armstrongite circle of Church of God's. But anytime he finds an article that supports his erroneous beliefs he latches on to its proof he is correct.  Hypocrisy is never something he thinks about when he opens his mouth.

False teacher Thiel writes in Why are there atheists? 

At the Christianity Today website, an author (Shawn Graves) asked and provided some answers to the question, Why are there still atheists?

A lot of ink has been spilled over whether God exists. Within this context, some theists like to point out that “God has made it plain” that he exists, that “God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20). They urge us to remember that the “heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1). In a recent Christianity Today article, Jim Spiegel cites these passages and writes: “This naturally prompts the question: If the evidence for God is so abundant, then why are there atheists?” 

Spiegel asserts that for many atheists, it’s not “cool, rational inquiry” that led to their atheism. Rather, in many cases it’s complex moral and psychological factors that produce atheism. For example, Spiegel points to research suggesting that some prominent atheists had broken, defective relationships with their fathers. Others live in perpetual disobedience and rebellion—resisting lifestyle changes required upon adopting theism. And still others confess that they just don’t want there to be a God. Spiegel contends that immorality has cognitive consequences—it impedes one’s ability to recognize that theism is true. 

No doubt he’s right. Surely some people accept atheism due in part to such powerful motivational factors. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/marchweb-only/whytherearestillatheists.html

Then the craziness begins. He believes that the reason evolution came into being was that there were a bunch of fornicating sex-obsessed men who could not keep their pants zipped up.  Nevermind the fact that many COG leaders had the same problem, but that is another story to contemplate.

Now, actually one of the reasons that there are evolutionary atheists is, believe it or not, in the 19th century various male “intellectual” were looking for excuses to not have to abide by biblical standards of sexual morality. And back then, some of them even admitted that is why they embraced the concept that life randomly evolved without a creator God.

Next, he blames evangelical Christians as being people with no morals:

I would also add hypocrisy to the list. The fact that evangelicals, for one example, are more likely to be involved with fornication than the general public, despite biblical admonitions against it, turns people off.

Fornication in the Church of God has been going on for 80 some years now and very actively as many know.  Then look at the immoral lives of many of the COG leaders and higher up ministers. Don't look at or blame evangelicals till your own house is in order!

War apparently also creates atheists, at least in the improperly self-appointed scholar Thiel's eyes.

 War is another factor. Many non-believers point to religions such as Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism as major causes of war, which turns many people off to the idea that there is a truly loving God. But of course, all scholars realize that early Christians would not participate in carnal warfare. And in my opinion, this is still true of faithful Christians today .

Next, he takes a dig at Bart Ehrman:

There are also scholars, for example, like Bart Ehrman, who started out as Protestant but when they learned more about church history, realized that Protestantism simply did not fit with much of the Bible. And while he may be more of an agnostic than an atheist, the fact that most of what is considered by the world to be Christianity, is not Christianity, and this turns many off of religion (though it does not necessarily make them atheists). 

Thus, the improperly named scholar Thiel proclaims that it is "...illogical to be an atheist."

But I would like to add that it is illogical to be an atheist. While there may be many reasons that people may doubt the existence of a personal God, such as the one that the Bible teaches about, the reality is that any that conclude that there cannot be a creator/god are being foolish:

1 The fool has said in his heart,”There is no God.” (Psalms 14:1, NKJV)

I can honestly say that I would rather sit at the table and have a conversation with Bart Ehrman than I would at a table with a COG leader running off their self-righteous mouths. They seem to forget that Jesus would do the exact same thing. Eating dinner with prostitutes, tax collectors, and unbelievers was his thing to do.  Can you imagine any  COG leader doing that today?

The Church of God should be on its knees begging forgiveness for destroying the lives of its members and ripping out any bit of spirituality that they may have originally had when they joined the church. The families that had marriages ripped apart because immoral divorce and remarriage doctrines, the thousands of lives lost due to faith "healing" thanks to the church deciding doctors were agents of Satan, to the hundreds, if not thousands that have died from suicide over the decades due to the way the church treated them, to the  people gunned down in church thanks to filth from Rod Meredith's sermons, and to its continued path of making church members feel like unworthy worms in God's sight.

Here is what the improper scholar says that makes atheists fools:

One of the reasons that it is foolish to conclude that there is no God is because humans should realize that we are finite beings. No human has been to ever place in the universe, no human has lived forever, no human has been to every possible dimension that may exist in the universe. Since no human has done that, for any human to conclude that there cannot be a god or any type is illogical. Why? Because no human has enough possible proof that God cannot exist. Doing so with limited “evidence” is foolish. 

Furthermore, if the laws of bioscience are accepted as valid, one can easily prove that something outside of those laws (God) was necessary for life to begin and to continue. Amino acids simply did not randomly line up, become alive, realize that they had to eat, realize that they had to have a means to eat, immediately have a way to utilize food (like a properly developed digestive system), realize they had to reproduce for survival of life, and have the means to do so. It is illogical to conclude otherwise. 

He concludes with this:

But, despite the fact that some claim to be atheists, God’s existence is logical.

Faithful people throughout the centuries of the church have struggled with faith due to doubt and questions.  It is not something that is wrong.  The entire belief system of Judaism allows people to question and dialogue over belief and unbelief. Even in scripture people have been allowed to question and wrestle with God.  Armstrongism taught its followers to never question and be blindly obedient.  Wrestling with sculpture has never been an aspect of the Armstrongite version of the church.

Armstrongism and a lot of Christianity come up with lots of non-spiritual reasons why it exists: fear, guilt, shame, and the need or desire for authority in one's life.  Many, if not most are unwilling to think critically.

One question that might be asked is:  If it is so absolutely vital to get church right, why does God have to speak through contradictory and competing middlemen who have muddied the waters for 3,000 years? 

Better yet, the question we should all be asking is why would God be speaking through the rebellious  "Problem Child" Bob Thiel?

PCG: Kieren Underwood Refutes David Vejil's Article About Germany

The Remarkable Identity of the German People

In 2014, David Vejil wrote the above-named article for the Philadelphia Church of God.  It is an attempt to prove where the people who call themselves Germans came from and what they are destined to do.  Anyone with a history in the Church of God will know where the article is headed.

Germany’s recent history is marred by the two most destructive wars in human history and the most systematic genocide. Were these two world wars flukes? History shows that Germany’s ancient history is also filled with blood and violence. Just who were the ancient Germans, and where did they come from? The answers will not only surprise you, but they will also help you understand Germany’s immediate future!

Several months ago, a writer for the Philadelphia Trumpet and for the Phildalephia Chruch of God left the PCG. On June 17th, I posted the resignation letter of Kieren Underwood here:

PCG Kieren Underwood - "I hereby renounce every article I have ever written for The Philadelphia Trumpet...one thing it does not do well is tell the truth."

The article mentioned in Underwood's resignation letter about Germany is below:

 Double click to enlarge to read quote about the Germanic peoples

Hello Mr. Vejil. You wrote the article “The Remarkable Identity of the German People.” I have a number of comments on it. Most of it, I assume, was taken directly from research Herman Hoeh and the WCG did. Nevertheless, if you write an article like this, you have a responsibility to make sure you check all the sources. Please read the rest of this very carefully and think about whether you can stand behind your article’s claims.

-    You mention the Bayerische Chronik. You say it “reveal[s] that some of Asshur’s descendants settled in Europe from Mesopotamia soon after the Flood…”

As you even mention, the Chronik is “now relegated to pure myth.” That’s because it is: 

“In his Chronik, Aventinus fabricated a succession of Teutonic kings stretching back to the Great Flood, ruling over vast swathes of Germany and surrounding regions until the 1st century BC, and involving themselves in numerous events from Biblical and Classical history. 

These rulers and their exploits are mostly fictitious, though some are derived from mythological, legendary or historical figures. Examples of the latter are Boiger, Kels II and Teutenbuecher, whose joint reign is given as 127–100 BC, and who are based on King Boiorix of the Cimbri, the unnamed king of the Ambrones, and King Teutobod of the Teutons.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Aventinus)

-    You then move on to say that the “Assyrians were forced to settle the southern shores of the Black sea by a group of invading warriors from Central Asia.” (Who were Scythians.) You also quote Herodotus, who mentions that there are Assyrians in Cappadocia.

This only proves that some Assyrians were moved to Cappadocia (by the Black Sea). Actually, the vast majority were not taken captive to this area. You can find this information in literally any history book on Assyria. After the Scythians weakened the Assyrians, the Medes, Persians and Parthians (and others) joined in on the fighting. The Assyrians were eventually conquered around 605 BC. Yet they were not taken captive and deported! 

“Certainly by 599 BC at the very latest, Assyria had been destroyed as an independent political entity, although it was to launch major rebellions against the Achaemenid Empire in 546 BC and 520 BC, and remained a geo-political region, ethnic entity and colonised province until the late 7th century AD, with small Assyrian states emerging in the region between the 2nd century BC and 4th century AD.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyria)

Even if you could prove some of those Assyrians in Cappadocia moved into Germany, the vast majority are still in Mesopotamia!  

You then quote Mike Edwards from National Geographic, who is talking about the Scythians (supposedly the Scythians who are actually Assyrians): “Nomads and fierce warriors, they lived in Central Asia … and their culture spread westward to southern Russia and Ukraine, and even into Germany.”

Hmm, why is the full quote not given here? What is between the ellipsis? Here’s the full quote: “Nomads and fierce warriors, they lived in Central Asia as early as the ninth century B.C., and their culture spread westward to southern Russia and Ukraine, and even into Germany.” (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0306/feature7/index.html) 

Clearly, the full quote is not given here because it reveals that this is talking of the real Scythians—who were in Central Asia (rather than Mesopotamia) in the 9^thcentury—and not the Assyrian-Scythians you claim they are.  

Even if this were talking of the Assyrians, Edwards says they moved into southern Russia, Ukraine and Germany. So, is southern Russia and Ukraine also descended from Assyria then? By your logic, all three of these regions are now modern-day Assyria.  

-     You then quote Pliny the Elder, who says: “The name ‘Scythian’ has extended, in every direction, even to the Sarmatae and the Germans…” 

So, by your own admission, the Scythians were clearly a conglomerate of a number of different peoples—all lumped together by historians. But somehow, out of all this, when some historian says Scythian and they happen to move into Europe, they must be the Assyrian-Scythians! Of course! There’s no other explanation. 

-    Then, under the subtitle “More Proof,” you quote Smith’s Dictionary of Biography, Mythology and Geography, “Germania”: “[T]here can be no doubt that they … migrated into Europe from the Caucasus and the countries around the Black and Caspian seas.”

Ah, here is the ellipsis again. What is being hidden here? Here is the full quote: “The Germans regarded themselves as indigenous in the country: but there can be no doubt that they were a branch of  the great Indo-Germanic race, who, along with the Celts,migrated into Europe from the Caucasus and the countries around the Black and Caspian seas…” (https://archive.org/details/b2178050x) 

Now, that is just ridiculous. What is removed from the quote is the most important part, because it shows that whoever the Indo-Germans were who moved (you clearly are saying it is Assyrians, but that is your assumption), they moved along with the Celts!  

There are only two explanations here. (1) You failed to check the original quote in Smith’s Dictionary, or (2) you checked the original and took out the information which would incriminate the quote. This is either ignorance or outright fraud.  

-     You then quote Jerome who talks about numerous tribes overrunning parts of Gaul. “Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemanni and … even Pannonians.” 

By this point, you’ve pretty much given up on trying to convince the reader that these are Assyrian. You just say that historians says these are Germanic tribes, and expect the reader to realize that in your mind, Germanic already means Assyrian. So there—proven!  

-    You then go on to write that “the Germans and Assyrians share the same physical features, the same warlike tendencies and even certain characteristics in art.”

This is almost laughable. I mean, really? The same physical characteristics? As in … light skinned? So, by that reasoning, all of Europe is also Assyria, and also Britain and America, oh, and Russia as well. As for their warlike characteristics, here is a real historian’s analysis:  

While the reputation for decisive, ruthless, military tactics is understandable, the comparison with the Nazi regime is less so. Unlike the Nazis, the Assyrians treated the conquered people they relocated well (as already addressed above) and considered them Assyrians once they had submitted to central authority. There was no concept of a 'master race' in Assyrian policies; everyone was considered an asset to the empire whether they were born Assyrian or were assimilated into the culture. Kriwaczek notes, “In truth, Assyrian warfare was no more savage than that of other contemporary states. Nor, indeed, were the Assyrians notably crueler than the Romans, who made a point of lining their roads with thousands of victims of crucifixion dying in agony.” (https://www.ancient.eu/assyria/) 

And then you go on to give approximately … no proof about them having “certain characteristics in art.” 

-     Finally, “the clincher,” as you say, is that no other country “could fulfill the prophecies of the Bible that pertain to Germany.”  

Do you give any reasoning for this? No. Just read our booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, which also assumes Assyria is Germany! You could prove literally anything with this circular reasoning.  

I wonder what the Assyrian Church of the East thinks about the fact that you believe they are so deceived that they do not even realize they are not in fact Assyrian! If they are not Assyrian, then what are they? This is never, ever addressed by anyone who claims that Germany is modern-day Assyria.  

You have two options. (1) Research this article again and provide proper reasoning and proof that Germany is modern-day Assyria. (2) Admit that this whole effort is a complete fabrication, and denounce the article you have written.  

I am confident that if you put any serious time and thought into this, you will choose option (2).