The following is a discussion that can be found at “Banned by HWA”.
James said…
If you look back further, Miller broke away from those pagan Baptists as I recall. But what the hell. All these groups use a book put together by the Catholics. The bible is a Catholic book. Why don’t we discuss this ACOG’ers?
June 13, 2014 at 2:21 PM
Anonymous said…
James said…
“All these groups use a book put together by the Catholics. The bible is a Catholic book. Why don’t we discuss this ACOG’ers?”
Alright, let us discuss it.
What is commonly called the Old Testament of the Bible was put together and preserved by the Jews. The Catholics had nothing to do with it besides trying to add some Apocryphal books to it, which the Jews still do not accept, and trying to oppose and do away with virtually everything that it quotes God as saying. The Catholics replace God`s biblical Sabbath with Sunday, and God`s biblical Annual Holy Days with Christmas, Easter, Halloween and many other such things. The Catholics replace God`s laws about clean and unclean creatures with eating the uncleanest creatures around such as swine. The Catholics replace the biblical Aaronic priesthood that was handed down from father to son with a bunch of supposedly celibate but actually sexually active homosexual pedophile priests.
Even what is commonly called the New Testament of the Bible gets messed up by the Catholics. They replace praying to God with praying to Mary, make Jesus out to be a hippie like some umpteenth century Italian artist’s painting of his long-haired, swish-type, homosexual lover, and basically teach that Jesus was some smart-alec young man who came to do away with his father’s laws. The Catholics try to add their Apocryphal books to the New Testament too, but the Protestants still do not accept them. In rebellion against what Jesus said, the Catholics call some man on earth their holy father, or pope. Once again, the Catholics replace the idea of the married New Testament apostles with some doctrine of demons forbidding priests to marry, but allowing them to be secretly sexually immoral in the worst ways.
The Catholic church trying to hijack God`s Bible and oppose and pervert its teachings is no different than a satanic cult like Gerald Flurry`s PCG trying to hijack the writings of Herbert W. Armstrong and oppose and pervert them—and delete them, while adding other nonsense.
June 13, 2014 at 10:25 PM
rsk said…
Except that the Catholics were the ones to assemble the canon of the New Testament. Its because of the Catholics that we have the collected works today. I believe that is the question the poster was posing.
June 14, 2014 at 5:23 AM
James said…
Anon June 13, 2014 at 10:25 PM
“They replace praying to God with praying to Mary, make Jesus out to be a hippie like some umpteenth century Italian artist’s painting of his long-haired, swish-type, homosexual lover, and basically teach that Jesus was some smart-alec young man who came to do away with his father’s laws.”
Yes, the Catholics did just that. But it gets worse. They turned themselves into a bank!
“What is commonly called the Old Testament of the Bible was put together and preserved by the Jews.”
Until the Council of Trent:
“It was not until the fourth session of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) that the bishops and high ranking officials of the Catholic Church “officially” cataloged the books they thought should be included in the Bible and bound them upon the consciences of all Catholics.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent#Canons_and_decrees
You wrote: “…Jesus was some smart-alec young man who came to do away with his father’s laws”
Yes, the COG members were taught this phrase by HWA himself. You a member?
“The Catholic church trying to hijack God`s Bible and oppose and pervert its teachings is no different than a satanic cult like Gerald Flurry`s PCG trying to hijack the writings of Herbert W. Armstrong and oppose and pervert them—and delete them, while adding other nonsense.”
If you read about the events at the Council of Trent you will see that the bible is not Gods book. Never was. The Catholics put it together. Now as to Gerald, yes he is changing all sorts of things. He will eventually distort Armstrongism into something else. Something as unholy and corrupt as Armstrongism itself.
June 14, 2014 at 7:52 AM
This is an excellent reply that follows:
Anonymous said…
“Alright, let us discuss it…”
The OT is not history. It is Hebrew mythology, most likely composed during and post-captivity based on earlier myth, legend, and mysticism. Archeology refutes the Exodus, the wandering in the wilderness and the battle of Jericho. If the Jewish people ever were distinct from the Canaanites, they entered the land not as a conquering army, but as waves of immigrants. Yahweh and El are Canaanite deities, suggesting that the Jews may simply be Canaanites after all. And the OT isn’t the story of a monotheistic people anyway, it’s the story of a polytheistic people who gradually evolved a theology in which the remainder of the pantheon of gods were demoted into archangels, angels, and demons. And let us not imagine that “the Jews” are in any way united about what “they” do and do not accept. Mainstream Judaism today is hardly about Tanakh anyway, it’s about Talmud and Kabbalah.
The NT began to be written, possibly as early as c. 50AD, and includes books possibly written as late as c. 300AD. By my count, there are at least 36 apocryphal gospels, 23 apocryphal books of acts, 14 apocryphal epistles, and 30 apocryphal apocalypses. That doesn’t include the books in the canon that scholars are all but certain do not belong in it. There are surely some others that I have missed and many more that do not survive. The early church fathers voted on which books to include in Constantine’s canon, but by 331 no one in the world had any idea which were the “legitimate” books, and which ones were not, and in the end, all they could do was just guess anyway. And thus our NT was formulated, no doubt, part of the formulation included calculations designed to give Constantine the sort of “holy book” he wanted.
But the NT was written in Greek, which means it was written for people who could read Greek, and most people in Judea/Palestina could not, as Aramaic was the most common language. This is but one indicator of Hellenistic nature of the NT. Moreover, it was written for Jews, but for Hellenized Jews, not Jews who were hewing to a pure form of an older religion. In addition, it was written about a Jewish Messiah who was supposed to soon rescue the Jewish people from the Romans. However, when Constantine turned Christianity into the official Roman religion, that fundamentally upended the original meaning of the entire religion. Finally, since Christianity became a religion filled with Jewish polemics, tarring Jews as Christ-killers, it’s original context and meaning has been thoroughly stripped out and replaced in every place around the world and in every time, with local values and culturally palatable local meanings. Therefore, even if the NT were inspired by a deity, which is incredibly unlikely, for the last ~1650 years, misunderstanding the original intent of the NT has rather been the point, hasn’t it?
In short, the bible itself is an originally Catholic anthology of Jewish and Hellenized-Jewish mysticism. While it does bear a relationship to the Tanakh, that relationship is tangential. It isn’t a latter-day continuation of an earlier revelation. There is no reason to think that a harmonization of the many disparate elements contained in the Protestant bible is a valid way to interpret any of it.
June 14, 2014 at 9:07 PM
Anonymous said…Anonymous said…
Well done, Anonymous 9:07. Well done! All true.
I might add that it would probably surprise Anonymous 10:25 to know that the jews of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, also used and relied upon what are now called “apocryphal” scrolls. There was never an “apocryphal” writing in the sense s/he is using the term at all until there was an “orthodoxy” building around the canon against which to define a book as being apocryphal. If we want to be technical, there are a significant number of the books currently in the canon that are, in fact apocryphal, on grounds of authenticity.
The COGs are, without a doubt, all children of the catholic power and to think otherwise is pure delusion. But this is well-worn practice among them, so this revelation of truth about history will make little difference. Let’s hope it gets through to a few more who can still consider sound evidence.
June 15, 2014 at 5:14 AM
Origins of the Ancient Israelite Festivals can be found HERE UPDATED.[whohit]http://hwarmstrong.com/wordpress/[/whohit]
You do know, don’t you, that even though the Catholics assembled traditions, fables and myths to make them into something which was the basis of their beliefs from sources derived from the illiterate and daft, their final product, the Bible, was banned from Catholic membership under pain of Mortal Sin up until the 20th Century? Sure, it was myth and fable, but the good news is that no one was allowed to read it anyway! Win-win! ‘course that was all ruined by lifting the ban. Life could have been so much more simple without all those inconvenient Scriptures seeping out, but with the modern age the Catholics had to do something because the Protestants were just killing them. Especially those pesky Adventists spawned from William Miller in the mid 1800s.
Today, the Pope goes through the world helping people and making the world a better place to live. All is forgiven. If it weren’t for the Bible, where would the Pope be? And where would all that wonderful charity be?
No, it’s all good.
Except for the Armstrongists.
Seriously, the Catholics set the pattern.
1. Make definitions.
2. Set yourself as an authority because of the definitions.
3. Authorize the definitions by the authority you have assumed.
5. Use the authority to establish your doctrines.
6. Use your doctrines to control people who follow you.
7. When you gain enough power, enslave the people, declare unscientific nonsense based on your own crazy belief system and persecute anyone who does not agree with you.
Death, doom, destruction to follow.
This is what the Armstrongists have done after the example of the Catholic Church. The history of all this should give us pause because the people always seem to suffer when religion gains control of government. There ends up to be no justice, judgment, equity or even a modicum of mercy.
Based on that scenario, it is terrifying to think what would happen if the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia ever made it to Petra as a Place of Safety. It seems pretty certain that there would be inquisitions. With limited resources in high demand, those in power would get the lion’s share and live in comfort as being the top of the food chain as predators. People would live in fear of being denunciated and the idea that if they were ejected from Petra they would face a long excruciating death would be promulgated to extend even greater control. Beatings and abuse would be common.
This has not happened yet and let’s hope it doesn’t, because if it did, in the microcosm of mental midget morons in ascendancy, there would be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time.
Don’t expect a kinder, gentler CoHAM. Some of them may appear benign at the moment, but that’s because they know they don’t have enough power yet and have to play ‘nice’. We’ve seen the corruption and oppression before and we’ll see it again.
And thanks to the Catholic Church, we have a foundation for the Armstrongists to build their platform.
It should be noted that because of the Catholic Church, science and technology were set back centuries.
Where could we have been today if the Catholic Church weren’t in control of the government?
The good news is that they finally apologized to Galileo and admitted they were wrong 400 years after his death.
“apologized to Galileo”
In a program on the Catholic Church’s contribution to European Civilization, a claim was made that Reformation Protestants opposed new scientific thought, not the Catholics. Galileo’s trial, so they claimed, was not a matter of astronomical models, but “other matters.”
Science history researchers speculated that Galileo was a closet Atomist. The atomic theory of matter apparently challenged the Church’s doctrine of Transubstantiation, and that is what Galileo was “really” guilty of.
Another claim was that Galileo refused to admit that the heliocentric model was “only a theory”. While this model was apparently supported the Nicean method of calculating the date of Easter, it was not “proven” to be a fact.
Many blogs ago there was a regular contributor whose post-WCG life was a Catholic apologist and church historian – a formidable opponent for Bob Thiel. He had yet another excuse for Galileo’s trial…
But the Pope said he was sorry – more than HWA would ever do – so all is forgiven, whatever the reason…
You would never receive an apology from any of these groups. The wcg gave a piss poor apology and a shrug. That was a real eye opener for me at the time. I began to smell a con and that I and my family were the victims of a religious scam.
The hardest thing I ever had to do was apologize and admit I was conned. My family was gracious about the whole thing and forgave me for my ignorance.
Now if the armstrongites were in charge of the government…the making of a good article. Perhaps later this year? Another study on fascistism.
Here is a two hour movie for everyone (not under the age of 17) to explain the Roman Catholic Church!
Watch the Bart Ehrman videos on youtube. e.g. he wrote a book “Fraud” in which he shows much of the new testament was written by imposters.
Correction: the book was called “Forged”.
I put the video on the front page. Third one down.
Thank you.
From the amazon.com blurb for Ehrman’s book “Lost Christianities”
“The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human. In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus’s own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman’s discussion ranges from considerations of various “lost scriptures” -including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus’s closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus’s alleged twin brother-to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various “Gnostic” sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between “proto-orthodox Christians”-those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief-and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.”
In short: history gets rewritten by the winner, and to win you have to be ruthless.
GL: Sounds like Armstrongism.