Live Field Report: A Local Religious Prediction From "CHUCKLES THE GROUNDHOG" here in Arroyo Grande California

 

A Local Religious Prediction From CHUCKLES THE GROUNDHOG" here in Arroyo Grande California 

Live In the Field Reporting by TONTO
Five Cities News Syndicate/Associated Press/COG News Syndicate

Today on Groundhog Day in charming Arroyo Grande California, the locals gathered eagerly at the town square, clutching their thermoses of hot cocoa and donning their coziest winter jackets. This year was special because the famous local groundhog, affectionately named "Chuckles", was rumored to have a unique religious insight that he was ready to share.

The sun had just begun to peek over the local mountains as Chuckles emerged from his burrow. The crowd hushed in anticipation, wondering what weather-related prognostication he might deliver. However, to everyone's surprise, Chuckles cleared his throat and adjusted his tiny spectacles, revealing a small, handwritten sign around his neck that read, "Buckle up, Arroyo Grande – THIEL IS A FALSE PROPHET!"

Gasps echoed through the square. The groundhog, it seemed, had taken a keen interest in the local religious scene, especially the influx of one Bob Thiel in the area. Chuckles, with a twinkle in his eye, began to narrate his predictions with a gravitas that would have made Garner Ted Armstrong envious.

"Dear citizens of Arroyo Grande, prepare yourselves for many more months, nay, years of dark predictions of doom and gloom looming on the horizon from Bobby Thiel," Chuckles declared, his tiny paws gesturing theatrically. "The shadows cast by the Thiel will be longer than my burrow, and his crafty, deceitful, illusions of grandeur will make the ground shake – not just from the winter chill!" 

The crowd exchanged bewildered glances, trying to reconcile the fact that they had come to hear about weather patterns and not local religious issues. Chuckles, undeterred by the audience's confusion, continued his prophecy.

"Thiel will dance in the shadows, pretending to be true prophet , but his moves will be as awkward as a groundhog attempting the moonwalk," Chuckles proclaimed, eliciting a few giggles from the crowd. "Be prepared for a dark Thiel winter that may be colder than any High Sierra snowstorm, with more FALSE claims to fame, crazy imaginations, and goofy prognostications than ever. 

As the groundhog's predictions unfolded, some citizens scratched their heads, wondering if they had accidentally stumbled into a Church satire instead of the traditional Groundhog Day festivities. Others found humor in the unexpected turn of events, appreciating the absurdity, yet truthfulness, of a groundhog doubling as a religious reviewer and auditor. 

Despite the confusion, Chuckles had left an indelible mark on the Arroyo Grande Groundhog Day celebration. From this day forward, the citizens of Arroyo Grande will affectionately refer to their furry friend as "Chuckles the Sage," acknowledging his unexpected talents in religious discernment , and the great danger that a FALSE PROPHET portend for their hometown.

Looking Back: Sodium and Somorrah

Biblical archaeology: Remember Lot’s wife? Here are photos claimed to be her

Dr. Robert Thiel

"Whether or not that location (and a photo of that pillar is shown at the beginning of this post) is it or not, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of some type of salt."

https://www.cogwriter.com/news/old-testament-history/biblical-archaeology-remember-lots-wife-here-is-a-photo-claimed-to-be-her/

Wikipedia, which after discrediting the biblical account, does mention two locations have been pointed to:

Mount Sodom Pillar, made of Halite, a rock salt (photo by Wilson44691)

Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed as an example to show what happens to those that follow their ways. They pushed LGBTQ-type matters and were destroyed. Destruction will be coming to this world–and that will be part of the reasons ( Romans 1:18-32).

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On the other hand...

Getting Sodom Straight

https://armstrongismlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/09/getting-sodom-straight.html

The Biblical story of Sodom is not the story of a town that happened to be 100% gay, men and boys, for this is a ludicrous assumption. This would have to be the conclusion if God, vowing to save it for ten righteous men, did not. It would also mean that "righteous" meant heterosexual, while unrighteous meant homosexual and, well, I doubt that alone qualifies men to be righteous.

The story that unfolds in Genesis 19 is a hospitality story and not a story based on homosexuality. Sodom's problems as remembered by Ezekiel were that the people were prideful, had too much food, too much time, neglected the poor, were haughty and committed abominations (Ez. 16:49-50). Not ANY mention of mass homosexuality. 

Abominations can be just about anything not in tune with the law and in this case was a reference to idol worship. Another common Israelite trait all through their history. Why would papa Lot offer his virgin daughters to a crowd of homosexuals, in place of his guests? What interest would homosexuals have in virgin women? ZERO, unless the girls were being offered as an appeasing virgin sacrifice ("for they have not known a man.") This would qualify as an abomination to be sure, and also idolatry. Human sacrifice was still an option it appears with Abram and Lot.

African American COG Member On What It Was Like Growing Up Black In The Church of God

A former Worldwide Church of God member writes about

how it was growing up Black in the church.

In honor of Black History Month

Jerald Walker grew up believing the world would end when he was twelve. His parents—both blind—had joined the Worldwide Church of God at its height in the 1960s. The Church would later prove to be a fraud, its leader collecting hefty dues from its parishioners and using them to fund a lavish celebrity lifestyle. But before Jerald Walker understood this, he came of age believing that The Great Tribulation would transform him, his family, and all believers into gods, and that his parents’ sight would be restored, and so for years, the stringent rules and deprivations within the Worldwide Church of God seemed worth it. When the Great Tribulation did not come, and the family’s faith began to unravel, Walker was left with a life that had no order. The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult is the story of Walker’s childhood journey through believing, ending in the realization that he will now have to erect an understanding of life from the ground up.

The World in Flames is as hilarious as it is harrowing. Walker’s accounts align so faithfully with his childhood point of view that the reader can see how he managed to believe that a dog bite was a direct punishment from God for wanting to celebrate Christmas, or that “integration”—something the Church forbade—was as bad a sin as “fornication.” And oh, yes, the Church preached slavery as ordained by God, and supported racial separation. How does the black Walker family make sense of that? The dissonance between what young Jerald understands, and what we know he understands later in life, creates instant comic friction.

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Rumpus: Your childhood religion was the Worldwide Church of God. Can you tell readers unfamiliar with the Worldwide Church of God what it was all about? Is it still around?

Walker: The Worldwide Church of God was founded by a man named Herbert W. Armstrong in 1933. At the height of its success in the 1970s, it had a membership of over a hundred thousand and annual revenues of eighty million dollars, more than Billy Graham and Oral Roberts combined. Composed of a hodgepodge of religious beliefs, including Levitical dietary restrictions, the observance of “Holy Days,” literal Sabbath-keeping, and the rejection of medical treatment, the underpinning tenet was British-Israelism: the view that Western and Northern Europeans, as direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, was God’s chosen race. The membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats, such as the assertion that anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life, and eternal suffering in the next. And the next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of The Great Tribulation.

When Armstrong died in 1986, leadership of the church fell to Joseph Tkach Jr., who began to move the church away from Armstrong’s teachings to mainstream Christianity. The name of the church was changed to Grace Communion International, and ultimately Armstrong was declared a “heretic” and “false prophet.” Needless to say, many members rejected these changes, and a dozen or so splinter groups formed, some of which adhere to Armstrong’s original teachings.

Rumpus: One thing that differentiates your experience from the experience of a childhood in some other extreme religious communities is that the reader gets hints throughout the book that this religion is not just restrictive and fear-inspiring, but might also be an enormous monetary scam. You and others who grew up within the church and later left it had to come to grips with reevaluating pretty much everything that had previously ordered your life, including the possibility that you and your entire family had been taken advantage of. What role did writing play, if any, in your process of understanding the world after your youth? When did you realize you would be a writer, and when did you realize you would write about your childhood in the form of memoir?

Walker: Writing helps me to understand most everything; in a very real sense it’s how I process my world. My view prior to writing the memoir was that my parents’ decision to join a church run by a con man was inexcusable, and I harbored a bitterness toward them about it that lasted for decades. And so when I began writing the book, I knew there was a real possibility that this bitterness would taint, if not largely shape, the narrative. But I also knew that something else could happen, because for me the process of writing is the process of thinking and learning, of acquiring knowledge more than dispensing it. I wasn’t entirely surprised, then, that by the time I’d completed the book, my bitterness toward my parents had given way to sympathy, understanding, and a deepened respect.

Though I’d been writing stories since I was a child, I didn’t realize I’d be a writer until I took a creative writing course in college. Fiction was my genre of choice, but my stories were always thinly-veiled works of autobiography. My MFA degree is in fiction writing, and for more than a decade after completing the program I continued to write fiction. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I tried my hand at writing nonfiction, and I fell in love with the form, particularly the essay because it requires the writer to think on the page, which, as I noted, is my wont. I had no intention to write about the cult because I didn’t want to think deeply about it, to reopen those wounds. But the honest truth is that I’m a writer, and my experience in the cult is rich material. Sometimes you have to put the work first, even at a high emotional cost. 

Read the entire interview here:  The Rumpus Interview with Jerald Walker 

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The title of Jerald Walker’s new memoir “The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult” (Beacon) sounds like it was ripped from the front page of a supermarket tabloid. Yet this was his life growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s.

Walker, a writing professor at Emerson College, is one of seven children. Both his parents lost their sight in childhood accidents and Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God gave them hope that their sight might be restored and that they had been chosen for a better afterlife. Struggling to make ends meet, his parents sent tithes to Armstrong even when they needed the money for heat and food.

After “60 Minutes” aired an exposé of Armstrong and his lavish lifestyle, Walker and some of his siblings left the church. His parents did, too — for a while.

Walker will speak about the book at 7 p.m. Friday at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. 

“World in Flames” is Beacon Press’s first title to be simultaneously released as an audiobook. Boston Globe

Amazon Books has this:

When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames.

The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old.

Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height.

When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.  A World In Flames