UPDATED: Guess Who Is The Most "Sought After Expert" COG Leader To Ever Exist In The History Of Christendom...

"Find out how world events are aligning with properly understood biblical prophecy."

(Funny quote from the website)

Never had the Church of God movement had a more vain and narcissistic splinter cult leader than it has in the Great Bwana Bob Thiel. He believes he is so important that God doubly blessed him in order to be a channel for dreams and visions from the creature he calls "god".

His Bible News Propehcy Radio site has him describing himself as thus:

Dr. Bob Thiel’s writings have made him a sought-after expert in the fields of philosophy, religion, research, science, and prophecy. Dr. Thiel has received several awards for his research. He is also a regular radio guest on various AM/FM and internet radio channels and is the Pastor and Overseer for the Continuing Church of God. For more information, see COGwriter.com 

 

We in the Continuing Church of God strive to always rely on the Bible: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; where unto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19, KJV).

Expert?            Expert?             What?

Never have we had such a failure in the things he has spoken about than we have in Bwana Bob (well, maybe except for Dave Pack). Is there anything Bwana Bob says about himself that is actually true? From his so-called double blessing to his many nightmares, we are supposed to accept that he is the chosen one sent by God to redeem the Church of God back into righteousness because everyone is Laodicean except for him and his 299 Caucasians and 3,000 some African's. When he uses his lies to justify himself as a legitimate COG leader, what does that say about his prophecies? 

Dr. Bob Thiel is our primary speaker and writer, he brings his sought after expertise to internet radio. His extensive knowledge and research skills, are conveyed in our Bible News Prophecy and CCOG audio along with Prophecy News reports from his popular COGwriter/news page. See COGwriter.com for more info on Dr. Thiel. See below for some of his audio items.

AUDIO ITEMS

Trade Wars: Are COG Warnings Coming to Pass?

Donald 'Trump of God' or Apocalyptic?

Is the USA a 'better, stronger place'?

Donald Trump and Mexico's Future

Twelve Grey Swans to Watch for in 2017

13 Ways President Elect Trump is Apocalyptic

Do these 7 Prophesies point to the end of the USA?

Simon Magus and Christianity

Post Brexit Prophecy

Is There Another View of Evolution?

Where are the Ten Lost Tribes? Why Does it Matter?

Mystery of Civilization and How it Will End

Ten Kings of Revelation and Great Tribulation

CCOG Answers: The Soul, Reincarnation, Creeds and Michael the Archangel

Genesis, 'Prehistoric Man' and the Gap Theory

The Future Kingdom of God

Russia in the Bible and in Prophecy

Was USA debt and destruction predicted 2,600 years ago?

Pope Francis & the Devil's Unity

Is the USA pushing Germany to start WWIII?

As usual, not one single thing about Jesus is mentioned in his sermon list posted or on his website. Not one single thing directing people to Christ, grace, justification, or sanctification. Instead, it is just an endless mind-dump of useless speculative crap that even his African followers could care less about. 

UPDATE:

Right on cue, Butthurt Bob did not appreciate this post and is whining about persecution again. It's all lies! Lies I tell you! Lies!

The Butthurt Bwana has now joined the worldwide celebration of Gay Pride with his new logo:

In the Letter to the Brethren: July 15, 2021, we had the following:

Online Radio

As many of you are aware, we have an online as well as mobile radio presence.

He then goes on to add:

Well, apparently posting something positive about this did not go over well with an anti-Church of God blogger who posted a lie about that radio site yesterday. His post was then followed by lies from others who commented at his site about it.

While endorsing commandment-keepers, which would include all true Christians, the Bible also warns about those who believe and love lies:

14 Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. 15 But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie. (Revelation 22:12-15)

Loving and practicing lies looks to be a feature of many during this time.

Consider also that the Bible warns:

12 There is a generation that is pure in its own eyes,

Yet is not washed from its filthiness.

13 There is a generation — oh, how lofty are their eyes!

And their eyelids are lifted up. (Proverbs 30:12-13)

We are in that generation.

Truly, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “evil men and impostors” have grown “worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).

Amen, brother! Preach it from the mountain tops! Evil men and imposters claiming double blessings and preaching lies have grown worse in the Church of God. Bwana Bob sadly continues the tradition of imposters infiltrating the church and deceiving many! Pure in his own eyes and unwashed in his filthiness!

Dave Pack's Sickening Ability To Destroy Families In His Cult

We have reported many stories here over the years from people who have been abused by Dave Pack and his cult. In spite of literally THOUSANDS of documented lies, Dave, in the eyes of his followers has the "sure word of prophecy" and as a result, they fall for his endless lies as if they were true. Whatever he says is directly inspired by the creature god he follows. Members have been bankrupted, marriages broken and families ripped apart all due to Dave's lies.

Exit & Support Network has a letter up today from a former child survivor of the Restored Church of God cult. Another life has been appallingly ripped apart and family relationships destroyed because of Dave Pack.

On several Facebook pages, there have been hundreds of stories from people who have shared how their lives had been ripped apart by Armstrongism over the decades, with many lamenting childhoods lost. From sexual abuse by pedophiles in the church, physical abuse from daily beatings and spankings, to spiritual abuse, the stories are deep and painful. Exit & Support Network, The Painful Truth, this blog, and hundreds of personal blogs have documented these horror stories over the years and yet people still sit there week after week letting this megalomaniac control their lives.

Life Has Been Full of Turmoil After Being a Child Survivor of RCG:
August 3, 2021 

 

I only found this site Friday evening. I left RCG at 16 and since then life has been full of turmoil, counselling at 18, sleeping issues, moments of deep self condemnation and so on. And now I’m 20 and still have moments where I feel overwhelmed with thoughts of what I witnessed and went through along with my younger sibling. Even to this day I find it almost a mental tug of war to accept a shift on a Saturday (even when funds are running low). Not to mention the flashbacks of abuse and domestic violence that I experienced and witnessed first hand. I really wish to find others who left RCG (or other splinters) because funnily enough I still consider so many as extended family. It saddens me when I think about all those who “died in faith”; all those who turned their back on their blood family for the “spiritual family.” 

 

I remember my [parent’s] word “If you leave this, I want nothing to do with you, you are excommunicated from Christ and His government,” etc., etc (bear in mind this all began when I was approximately 7-9 years old when I was just starting out as a child in RCG). I completed all the children’s Bible studies, fasted from my first Day of Atonement (as other children and some adults ate), gave up all my worldly dreams all for the sake of acceptance by my [parent]. How is that in anyway shape or form the love of Christ or God? 

 

As well as the multiple years of being told to “abase and humble yourself,” “we are dust, nothing,” “we must be spiritually de-leavened,” and then in the next breath be told we are “God’s chosen” and “true spiritual Israel”; “God is a family and He will make us gods too.” 

 

I feel I’ve jumped around from topic to topic quite frantically, but the more poems, child survivor testimonies and even seeing some ex-ministers for example speak out about things over 8 years ago, it’s just back to back making me feel stupid for the childhood lost and desperate for my [parent] to finally see sense. 

 

I just wish I could rekindle some type of faith again in something because in all honesty RCG not only destroyed my idea of religion but God himself. I’m no atheist but the thought of the Christian God or the Islamic God (any form of so called Abrahamic faith) just makes me lose hope.
I managed to have good dialogue with [a relative] and they explained that they came across this site but didn’t tell me because they felt I would react negatively. But, in fact, it’s just made me feel better, that I’m not the only one, and just from the poems I read in the evening have eased my mind and heart. 

 

Thank you ESN for making this site.Thank you very, very much. I feel that finally I have answers that make sense and I accept my role as a child who was in a cult. –Child survivor of RCG in UK [name withheld]

Will Men's Colored Dress Shirts Keep Your Out Of The COG Kingdom?

Satan's choice for mens dress shirts…colors!

 

One of the hallmarks of cults is its extreme desire to control every aspect of its followers lives. Much of the time this includes how people are to dress in the presence of the Dear Leader. Armstrongism has had a convoluted history of doing this over the decades. The pendulum has swung in both directions over the decades, much to the chagrin of fundamentalists in the various groups. When leaders crack down the fundamentalists celebrate and then when it swings the other way there are laments of liberalism creeping in. And then, If you were Rod Merdith, it was always those pesky homosexuals who were leading church men astray.

Who can forget Meredith's tirades about mens shirts and dress socks during  the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. Only homosexual men wore black socks with their suits. Real he-men (like Rod Meredith) wore white socks anytime they wore a suit. God forbid if a man wore a pink shirt! Oy vey! He was ranting one time in the early 1970's about men wearing pink Izod shirts to class. Again, if was those pesky homosexuals who were leading men to wear pink. The class was so disgusted by Meredith's words that everyone wore pink shirts to the next class.

Yet, here we are in 2021 and we still have splinter cult leaders in the Church of God who are telling their men what to wear. Dave Pack has all the men at his HQ in white shirts and power ties. Look at any picture of his staff and followers and there will be no men wearing a shirt of any other color. Recent Feast films of Dave's cult has his men all walking in the hot Ohio outdoor sun, in their long sleeve white dress shirts and manly ties, to look at Dave's trees and gardens.

Dont forget the women either. If COG leaders had their way all women in the church would be in mid calf length dresses with long sleeves and high necklines on their dresses. Some COG leaders would not even allow women to wear jewelry if they could get by with it.  We already have men telling women to not wear make-up or color their hair. Mansplaining has always been the hallmark fo the COG when it comes to women.

Like most things in Armstrongism, it has the ability to major in minors and ignore the important things in life and with God.

From Exit and Support Network:

July 30, 2021
One of the traits of a cult is controlling everything in the person’s life. This is the reason people who leave have a lot of trouble making their own decisions, because they have been treated as children. In the July 23 Friday Philadelphian men were reminded of the ruling about white shirts as it says: “Reminder: Pastor General Gerald Flurry has said that men should wear white shirts to Sabbath and holy day services. A full suit is also preferred.” Preferred means you better do it.

I found an article written by Gareth Fraser (November 16, 2018), “God’s Character in Your Clothing” and in it he says: “The way we present ourselves on the outside reveals much about our character on the inside.” He talks about the “Philadelphian Standard” and reiterates how Herbert Armstrong wrote an article, “The Way We Dress Could Keep Us Out of God’s Kingdom.” 

 

This is why GF is telling the men (and women) how to dress. In a cult everything is regulated and spelled out. This is the opposite of freedom. –[name withheld]

Why Is The COG Always Trying To Provide Easy Answers?

 Why is there no room in the Churches of God for mystery and wonder?

What we all got stuck with was hundreds and hundreds of books, booklets, pamphlets, and letters from the Personal Correspondance Department that sought to answer every single question imaginable. Instead of relying upon church members to engage their brains and develop a personal theology for themselves, the church treated them like toddlers and spoon-fed them bad baby pablum.

Look at Bob Thiel today with the thousands of topics he thinks he has an answer for and of which hardly any of his 3,000 African members and his 299 Caucasians could care less about. Yet, he thinks his followers are too stupid to think for themselves so he provides his own take on things, not God's, but his.

Gerald Flurry and Dave Pack do the exact same thing. They feed their members putrid baby pablum that is so far off base and so far removed from the Gospel message that their members now are just as brain dead as they are.

Followers of The Way were meant to live in the mystery so that they would always be in awe, so much so that they yearned for more.

10 thought patterns that trip up former Christians

 

Mental health expert details 10 thought patterns that trip up former Christians

                                                              By Valerie Tarico

Perhaps it's been years or even decades since you left biblical Christianity behind. You may have noticed long ago that there are human handprints all over the Good Book. It may have dawned on you that popular Christian versions of heaven would actually be hellish. You may have figured out that prayer works, if at all, at the margins of statistical significance—that Believers don't avoid illness or live longer than people who pray to other gods or none at all. You may have clued in that Christian morality isn't so hot and that other people have moral values too. (Shocking!) You may have decided that the God of the Bible is a jerk—or worse.

But some habits of thought are hard to break. It is a lot easier to shed the contents of Christian fundamentalism than its psychological structure.

Here are ten mental patterns that trip up many ex-Christians even when we think we've done the work of moving on. None of these are unique to former Christians, but they are reinforced by Bible-belief and Christian culture, which can make them particularly challenging for recovering believers.

1. All or nothing thinking. In traditional Christian teachings, no sin is too small to send you to hell forever. You're either saved or damned, headed for unthinkable bliss or unthinkable torment, with nothing in between. Jesus saves only because he was perfect. Moderate Christians are "lukewarm."This kind of dichotomous black-and-white thinking seeps into us directly from Bible-believing Christianity and indirectly from cultures that are steeped in Protestantism...
2. Good guys and bad guys. One consequence of black-white thinking is that we put people into two mental boxes—good guys and bad guys. You are either with us or against us, a patriot or a socialist, an anti-racist or a racist, one of us or one of them. Disagreement becomes synonymous with schism and heresy. When we discover the personal failings of a public figure like Bill Gates, we may move them from one box to the other, good guy to bad guy. Christianity offers no mental model in which people are complicated and imperfect but basically decent—we are just fallen ("utterly depraved" in the words of Calvin) and either washed in the blood or tools of Satan.
3. Never feeling good enough. Since we are acutely aware of our own failings, it can be hard internally to stay out of the bad-guy box. Some of us toggle between "I'm awesome" and "I suck." Others have a nagging internal critic that tells us nothing we do is ever quite good enough. After all, it isn't perfect, and that's the biblical standard.
4. Hyperactive guilt detection. Biblical Christianity gives tremendous moral weight to all of this, and the practice of "confessing our sins one to another" turns believers into guilt-muscle body builders. We live in a world of shoulds and should-nots, and in the Protestant ethic, those daily failings are moral failings. A nagging sense of guilt can become baseline normal, with little bursts of extra guilt as we notice one thing or another that we have left undone or goals where we have fallen short.
5. Sexual hangups. For many former Christians, particularly for women or queer people but also straight guys who like sex, it's impossible to talk about guilt without talking about sex, because sexual sins are the worst of the worst. When it comes to the Bible, getting and giving sexual pleasure are more matters of temptation than of intimacy and delight. Idolatry and murder share the top 10 list with coveting your neighbor's wife. Then there's virgin-madonna-whore trifecta. And don't forget God hates fags.
6. Living for the future. Sexual intimacy isn't the only kind of pleasure that biblical Christianity devalues; the consecrated life focuses broadly on the future rather than the moment. The small every-day wonders that comprise the center of joy in mindful living are mere distractions for a person who has their eye on the prize of heaven. As former believers grow convinced that each person gets one precious life, those individual moments can become treasures. But the habit of focusing on the future can make it really hard to center in the moment, breathe in, and bask in the ordinary beauties and delights around us.
7. Bracing for an apocalypse. Even worse than being drawn by the lure of heaven is being braced constantly for some impending apocalypse. We may no longer expect a Rapture or the Mark of the Beast or Jesus riding in on a horse. But the idea of a cataclysmic disruption in history looms large nonetheless. A sense of nuclear doom or pandemic doom or overpopulation doom or underpopulation doom may nudge us to action or be paralyzing. Either way, the experience is very different from being driven by a sense of curiosity and discovery as we face the unknown.
8. Idealizing leaders. Living in a cloud of anxiety makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, people who exude confidence we lack, who convey that they know what's right and true and how to solve problems. They prey on our fears and on our desire to do good and be good. They prey on our sense of ourselves as sinners and tell us how to atone. (Sound familiar?) They prey on dichotomous thinking, reinforcing our sense that people who don't share our worldview must be evil and so must be silenced or defeated.
9. Desperately seeking simplicity. Biblical Christianity tells a story about us as individuals and about human history that is clear and simple. Multi-dimensional causality? Moral ambiguity? Conflicts with no good side and bad side—just sides? Problems with no right answer? Blurry boundaries between human beings and other sentient species? No thanks! Fiction from Western cultures often mirrors and reinforces older Christian templates and tropes and specific types of oversimplification. And it's all to easy to project these in turn onto the hard-to-parse and hard-to-solve challenges of the real world. We know deep down that things aren't so simple, but it's easy to act as if we live in a world of saints and sinners, elves and orcs.
10. Intrusive what-ifs. And so we struggle, with new and old interpretations of reality and thought habits competing in our brains. We tell ourselves it's ok; that we're ok. But often nagging doubts persist. What if I'm wrong? Many years ago I told a therapist that I didn't believe in the Christian god anymore, but I didn't talk to anyone about it because I didn't want to take them to hell with me. He laughed and I laughed at myself, but it also felt very real.The journey out is . . . a journey. Along the way people second guess themselves, especially if Bible-belief got inside when they were young. Years after quitting a former smoker may crave a cigarette. That doesn't mean they were wrong to quit. It just means those synaptic connections got hardwired, soldered in place, and some of them are still there.