Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Could COG Crackpot Prophet Be A Modern Day Nimrod?


 

Our favorite self-appointed prophet to the Church of God is back today all bent out of shape over some of the vestments that Catholics wear and titles that they give themselves. Like any good COG prophet, he scrambles like crazy to defend his point by quoting so-called authorities on Catholicism and its supposed links to paganism. Thanks to his ties to the splinterest Church of God movement created by Herbert Armstrong and it is poor standards on exegesis and hermeneutics from whom he claims to get his wisdom and authority, our self-appointed prophet has set himself as the ultimate word in biblical authority and interpretation. Given the track record most of us have with the endless supply of self-appointed prophets, apostles, pastor generals, church overseers, and chairman most of us know these guys as arrogant, pompously boastful, and opinionated blowhards who have no authority or spiritual integrity.

That does not stop our dubious doubly-blessed self-appointed prophet and great Bwana to Africa and 299 Caucasians from letting loose another of his anti-catholic diarrhea episodes in order to make his little group seem superior and godly. One of the problems in the apostolic bullshitters' latest episode is his reliance upon Alexander Hislop's Two Babylons, the third authoritative book of the COG after Mystery of the Ages, as a source of fact.

Hislop's Two Babylons has been trotted out for decades by anti-Catholic groups and many Protestants as a way of delegitimizing Catholicism and elevating Protestantism and Sectarianism as the true path. This gives the Great Bwana and other COG leaders the right, they feel, to cast the word paganism against anything they think devalues their idea of what "true" Christianity is. If a tradition or practice of a church is not found in the bible then it is an automatic leap to it coming from paganism.

First, this term does not come from the Bible (I also did a search of the Douay Rheims, and it is not in there either). 
 
Second, it comes from paganism.

The Great Bwana and far too many COG leaders today like to spout off the word pagan if something is not found in the bible that they are harping on. This is a great trigger word to throw out to the sheeple and scare them into believing everything thing the prophet or apostle says is true because he is speaking against the pagans.

Cardinals, and their garb, were adapted from paganism. This is one of the many reasons to consider that the final Antichrist will claim ties to the Church of Rome. I would like to emphasize that this leader will CLAIM ties to Rome, but ultimately will betray the Church on Seven Hills as that seems to be laid out in Revelation 13, 17, and 19. 
 
The office of Cardinal does not come from the Bible. It comes from paganism. Cardinals also dress in ways that pagan leaders did, and not as the early apostles did.

Bwana Bob and so many of the current COG leadership today have so many extrabiblical beliefs and traditions that they no more compare to first-century Christians and apostles than the Catholics that they love to smear as pagans. 

Hislop's Two Babylons have been exposed many times as a book filled with many erroneous teachings and great stretches of the imagination. That has never stopped men from trying to use it as an authority on church history and which led the COG to place it on a pedestal.  Many years ago Ralph Woodrow wrote a book called Babylon Mystery Religion which quickly became the 4th standard work of authority in the COG. The problem with his book, which he later admits was that he got his information from Hilop's book and Worldwide Church of God literature. Talk about a downward slippery slope! Woodrow later wrote a book refuting his first book called The Baylon Connection?.

Woodrow writes:

In my earlier Christian experience, certain literature fell into my hands that claimed a considerable amount of Babylonian paganism had been mixed into Christianity. While the Roman Catholic Church was the primary target of this criticism, it seemed the customs and beliefs with which pagan parallels could be found had also contaminated other churches. Much of what I encountered was based on a book called The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop (1807–1862). 
 
Over the years The Two Babylons has impacted the thinking of many people, ranging all the way from those in radical cults (e.g., the Jehovah’s Witnesses) to very dedicated Christians who hunger for a move by God but are concerned about anything that might quench His Spirit. Its basic premise is that the pagan religion of ancient Babylon has continued to our day disguised as the Roman Catholic Church, prophesied in the Book of Revelation as “Mystery Babylon the Great” (thus, the idea of two Babylons — one ancient and one modern). Because this book is detail­ed and has a multitude of notes and references, I assumed, as did many others, it was factual. We quoted “Hislop” as an authority on paganism just as “Webster” might be quoted on word definitions.

As a young evangelist, I began to preach on the mixture of paganism with Christianity, and eventually I wrote a book based on Hislop, titled Babylon Mystery Religion (Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Assn., 1966). In time, my book became quite popular, went through many printings, and was translated into Korean, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and several other languages. Hundreds quoted from it. Some regarded me as an authority on the subject of “pagan mixture.” Even the noted Roman Catholic writer Karl Keating said, “Its best-known proponent is Ralph Woodrow, author of Babylon Mystery Religion.”1 
 
Many preferred my book over The Two Babylons because it was easier to read and understand. Sometimes the two books were confused with each other, and once I even had the experience of being greeted as “Reverend Hislop”! As time went on, however, I began to hear rumblings that Hislop was not a reliable historian. I heard this from a history teacher and in letters from people who heard this perspective expressed on the Bible Answer Man radio program. Even the Worldwide Church of God began to take a second look at the subject. As a result, I realized I needed to go back through Hislop’s work, my basic source, and prayerfully check it out. 
 
As I did this, it became clear: Hislop’s “history” was often only an arbitrary piecing together of ancient myths. He claimed Nimrod was a big, ugly, deformed black man. His wife, Semiramis, was a beautiful white woman with blond hair and blue eyes. But she was a back­slider known for her immoral lifestyle, the inventor of soprano singing and the originator of priestly celibacy. He said that the Baby­lon­ians baptized in water, believing it had virtue because Nimrod and Semiramis suffered for them in water; that Noah’s son Shem killed Nimrod; that Semiramis was killed when one of her sons cut off her head, and so on. I realized that no recognized history book substantiated these and many other claims. The Two Babyons

COG leaders had a fit when Woodrow refuted his own book and Hislop's book. He was knocking out another of their foundational understanding and they were having none of it. It was important to them that they continue to have a way to scare their members when they casually toss around the word pagan. When everything around them is pagan then everything coming out of the mouth of the chosen leader and his minions would reveal them as the enlightened ones, the un-pagan's, if you will. In COGdom and fundamentalist religious groups, this black and white world has created the biggest mess of unhappy miserable people who see themselves as surrounded by paganism in every direction they turn. It keeps them scared and fearful. Scared and fearful people are easy to manipulate and COG leaders have had a field day ever since.

Anytime your COG group tosses out Hislop's Two Babylons as an authoritative source, you should realize how little your leader really knows.

There are many webs sites and books that debunk Hislop's Two Babylons. Don't take anything your leader says with blind obedience, the chances are extremely high he has no idea what's is talking about.

COG leaders, like Bwana Bob, have literally set themselves up as little Nimrods in the church as they fill the church with extra-biblical beliefs and traditions and mind-boggling batshiterey.

Here is a great video by a man who easily debunks the book and the Nimord myths that Bwana Bob and the COG love to trot out.




The Two Babylons: Ralph Woodrow explains why he refuted his own book.Alexander Hislop's "The Two Babylons" is Not Reliable

So You Think Easter Is Pagan Part 1: Ishtar, Eostre, Eggs, and Bunnies (A COG perspective)So You Think Easter is Pagan Part 3: Modern Easter Tradition

Monday, April 19, 2021

Because The Bible Is 100% Infallible It Gives Me The Right To Quote Scripture Out Of Context!

Tonight in the theology class I lead there was a discussion on Bible scriptures and contradictions.  Many people in the group have come from fundamentalist, evangelical, conservative, and/or Catholic backgrounds, and the common denominator most in the group was how their groups claimed the Bible was 100% infallible and yet would pick and choose what they want to believe or follow. 

The other thing they brought up was how their religious group always quoted scripture out of context.

This pretty much reminded me of the Church of God. We pick and choose what we want to believe and follow out of the bible and then use proof texts to validate that belief, most of the time ignoring the story before and after the single scripture quote.

One of the comments a person made was, "I am always suspicious of people who throw around scripture by memory. It is usually done to impress us on how knowledgeable they are, but, yet actually proves they aren't when they take those quotes out of context.

Another said, "But a lot of times when you see that there's a quote, there's no context. And so, because the Bible is so complex in terms of differences in the same story and by other  contradictions, I just wonder sometimes why there's not more skepticism."

Anyone who has been in the COG for long knows how church leaders and ministers love to throw around bible scriptures dripping like honey off their smooth tongues. COG leadership has always been good about never practicing what they believe. Tossing around bible verses is meant to impress the sheeple in the congregation and give them the air of authority. The vast majority of COG ministers have never had a real theological education where they dissected scriptures without a COG booklet by their side or even been given space to have doubts and questions about verses or teachings. Questioning and doubting are anathemas in the COG.

That's why you see poorly trained leaders like Bob Thiel thrusting his big fat bible in your face in his videos. That big fat bible is meant to impress you that he is a follower of the words inside the book. He has proven he is not. Then there is Dave Pack who admits he no longer needs to open his big thick bible up because it all in his head now. We have witnesses who wrong that belief is now for many years.

If COG ministers actually told you the truth, the vast majority of them do not believe the bible is infallible but they would never publicly admit it.

Some Seventh-day Adventists say this:

Of course the Bible contains errors, big and small, because its writers were human. Sometimes, the errors were "innocent," other times they were contrived, purposeful, and made to fulfill an agenda. Anything that involves humans comes with a taint: and that includes products resulting from God’s use of human agents to reveal himself. Humans often hijack and distort God’s message. That’s how God in the Bible is made to promote genocide, regulate slavery, and ban women from church leadership. But as Jesus’ ethic reveals, genocide, slavery, and a host of other ungodly behaviors are inconsistent with God’s character. A good God does not endorse evil in one era and disavow it in another. And if this God promotes immorality, that is a bridge too far. 
 
The process of biblical composition, compilation, and canonization involved humans, who are incorrigibly prone to error, deceit, and manipulation. Those involved in the writing and vetting of what became our Bible had a full complement of human frailties. And the 66 books they canonized, even granting the Holy Spirit’s involvement, showcase these imperfections. Is God inerrant and infallible? Yes. Inerrancy and Infallibility are baked-in suppositions about God. But we cannot extend these same attributes to anything fallible human intermediaries helped to produce. The only possible way in which the Bible could be error free is if God verbally inspired the writers. But this is a position we have consistently rejected.

Something similar happens in how adherents of scriptural religions relate to their sacred texts. We call it interpretation, or its other fancy name, hermeneutics. In all three Abrahamic religions, we approach our different texts, whether it’s the Hebrew Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Koran, as individuals – and interpret the same materials individually, differently. The writings are the same, the expressions are the same. What is different are the humans who interact with the texts. Their differences are informed by a variety of factors, including culture, education, and gender. If we are exposed to the same source material but end up with dramatically different, sometimes opposite understandings, how then could we argue that the source is infallible? In these “books” slavery is good and bad at different times. And through its pages this blight is countenanced and denounced by different writers. Limited polygamy is endorsed and practiced by virtually all the patriarchs but is circumscribed in the New Testament. Some would be killed by God for improper Sabbath observance and others allowed to violate the same with impunity. All these opposite moral portrayals couldn’t emanate from the same God. 
 
A true God wouldn’t behave so ungodly. But humans could. And it is these human behaviors, often attributed to God by the same humans who serve as God’s prophets, priests, and disciples, that are at issue. Any faults we find in God, when reading the Bible, tell us more about ourselves, about human agency, than about God. Humans are perfectly capable of indulging evil independent of God. But we drag God into the mix and have the effrontery to “defend” him for the indefensible things we “made” him do. GOD IS INERRANT AND INFALLIBLE; THE BIBLE IS NEITHER

COG ministers have a great track record of using scripture to prove their point and enforce their rules. God's name is tossed around and occasionally Jesus may be quoted, but ultimately it is about their authority of you and how they can use scripture to control you, almost always out of context.

The other problem with CO Gministrers and those who claim infallibility is that their own human interpretations come into play.

Fallible people have to decide what the Bible is affirming. Mistaken-prone human beings must do the hard work of interpretation. Imperfect people have to determine the meaning and purpose of Scripture.

Our track record in the COG with this has left us with between 400 - 700 different splinter groups with the vast majority of them claiming infallibly in their teachings. They all can't be right and there isn't one group out there who demonstrated they are the one true church. The Churches of God have turned into the very thing they have been accusing other Christians of for decades.

The obvious danger of taking the Bible out of context is that we end up with the wrong message. And our culture is saturated with the wrong ideas about the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity. But I don’t think that’s the extent of the dangers of taking Scripture out of context.

Often times when we take scripture out of context we remove the “we” and insert “me”. We’ve made verses all about ourselves. We read the Bible as if it’s a personal letter addressed to us. The problem is the Bible isn’t written to you. It’s written for you, but not to you.

When we ignore the context we miss the original meaning. We read the Bible for what we can get out of out, and not what God wants for us. The Bible has something for you, but it’s not written to you.

Our culture has made reading the Bible a very “I” centric thing. But much of the Bible is written with a “we” centric theme. We are going to look at a few verses in the next section that show just that.

The point is we need to read the Bible in context. We need to pay attention to the surrounding verses AND who those verses were written to.


If you only remember one thing from this article remember this. Context is king.

In other words, the verses around the verse you are reading will tell you a lot about the verse you are reading. If you ignore the context you will likely end up with a skewed view of the Bible. Context is king.

The context of a verse is one of the most crucial elements of Biblical exegesis. And it’s also one of the easiest things to do. It only takes a few minutes to look at the context in which something is said. If we spend just a few extra minutes on the above verses we would easily arrive at the intended meaning of the passage.

This isn’t just a principle for Biblical interpretation. Imagine if you actually read that article or listen to what that politician said. Rather than jumping to conclusions based on a one-sentence soundbite. Context is king. It tells us the whole story.

If you take a sentence out of context you can make anyone say anything you want. That’s the danger of taking scripture out of context. You can make the Bible say anything you want if you ignore the context. You HAVE to pay attention to the context of the Bible. Context is king.  
Stop Taking The Bible Out Of Context (and how to avoid it)

Today in the COG its leadership thrives on proof-texting and taking scripture out of context. When one holds them accountable they are proven to be liars and false prophets. No one in the COG should take the words of their leaders as gospel truth. Throw away the booklets they wrote and the other useless material and check it out for yourself and you will quickly see how spiritually depraved they all are.

 

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Dr Blatheronias Thiel (Scientist Falsely So Called) Wanders All Over the Topic of "Race"

 

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard



"Racial variety will result in more love in more ways in the future coming Kingdom of God. That's why there are different races, hair colors, sizes, and shapes."


Mystery of Race


Dr. Thiel Asks...

"Where did the various races come from?"

Response: Aside from your shallow and confused all over the map explanation, they evolved out of Africa over the Past 200,000 years. And melanin production is different from getting a sun burn Dr Thiel.

" Did they evolve?"

Actually, they did.

"If God created them, why?"

He didn't so don't keep yourself up at night wondering why.

"What is a Cushite?" 

Who cares. A small cushion?

"Is one race superior to any other?"

No. And there are no chosen people either unless they choose themselves then made up stories about being chosen by the gods to give the small cultic people they actually were a huge pedigree. This concept gets humans into nothing but trouble

"Why are people different shapes and sizes and with different hair color, etc.?

Evolution in their environmental situations over tens of thousands of years works its magic. Neanderthals evolved as they did due to Ice Age challenges. Modern humans as they did in the walk out of Africa 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.

"Were Adam, Eve, Noah, Noah’s children, and their wives involved?"

Actually no. These folks never existed in reality and are Sumerian mythologies given a Hebrew spin in the very recent past of total human history.

"From whom did coastal people descend according to Genesis 10?"

Small cushions evidently according to you 
 
"Why are some weaker and others not?"

Chips, beer, ice cream and cigarettes. Others go to the gym more often and take better care of themselves. The less bulky types evolved intelligence to outsmart the stronger ones. Environmental factors powered by time, location and evolution of the species did what it does.  

"What is the purpose of multiple races?"
"How could this be part of God’s plan?"

It isn't.

"Does God have a plan for each INDIVIDUAL?"

We'd like to believe that wouldn't we? No. A nice thought but in reality "The Universe has not given us Center Stage"