Month: October 2015

Posted on

2014 Global Natural Disasters Down Big Time!

The Geneva-Switzerland based International Federation of the Red Cross recently released its 2014 Natural Disaster Report. The news is very good.

The report can be found HERE.

Down Again: 2014 Catastrophe Losses Below Average
Global natural disasters in 2014 combined to cause economic losses of USD132 billion, 37 percent below the ten-year average of USD211 billion. The losses were attributed to 258 separate events, compared to the ten-year average of 260. The disasters caused insured losses of USD39 billion, 38 percent below the ten-year average of USD63 billion and was the lowest insured loss total since 2009. This was the second consecutive year with below normal catastrophe losses. Notable events during the year included major flooding in India, Pakistan, China, and Southeast Europe; billion-dollar convective thunderstorm events in the United States, France, and Germany; winter storms in Japan and the United States; and widespread drought in the United States and Brazil. The top three perils, flood, tropical cyclone, and severe weather, combined for 72 percent of all economic losses in 2014. Despite 75 percent of catastrophe losses occurring outside of the United States, it still accounted for 53 percent of global insured losses, driven by a higher insurance penetration.

90% less deaths under the 10 year average

A total of 8186 people died in 2014 because of natural disasters. Bild reports: ā€œ2014 the number of deaths from natural disasters was almost 90 percent under the 10-year average of 76500 deaths.ā€ Thatā€™s hugely good news, but youā€™d never know it hearing the Thiel or Meredeath!

Lowest amount of disasters in 10 years

According to the IFRC, in 94 countries there were a total of 317 floods, earthquakes, forest fires, cyclones and a number of other nature events with deaths. Lowest number in 10 years.

Hurricane landfalls

The 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season marked the ninth consecutive year in which the U.S. did not sustain a major Category 3+ landfalling hurricane, which extends the all time record by another year. It was also the quietest season in terms of named storms since 1997.ā€

Tornado activity in the U.S.A.

For the third consecutive year, tornado season in the United States was one of the least active since Doppler radar began being deployed in the early 1990s.

Violent tornadoes on the decrease

Since 1950, the overall trend of higher-end tornadoes rated at F3/EF3 and above has remained nearly flat and shows a slight annual decrease of 0.8 percent. A comparable 1.2 percent annual decrease is also found when looking at dependable data since the advent of Doppler radar in 1990. When breaking down data to just the last 10 years, there has been a similar nearly flat growth at 0.5 percent.

Conclusion
As you know, the ACOG’s leadership preaches destruction by nature as a judgement from God. They are in the same league as the global warmers with all their propaganda bullshit and made up facts. Really, what is the difference between these two groups? They both promote fear to advance an agenda. And to know their agenda is to know that their primary motivation is self-enrichment and control at the expense of gullible people.

It is knowledge that unlocks the shackles of bondage. Don’t let these morons from both groups confuse you into believing that our only chance of saving the planet is to accept unending regulations and straight-jacket ā€œreformsā€. Or that we need to start practicing a bronze age religion in order to please some bronze age god who hasn’t made an appearance in over 2000 years. And may I add, if you think that your cult leader is God’s true representative on Earth, then maybe you should enroll in Introduction to Reality 101 at your local Jr. college. Perhaps someday you will learn to think for yourself.

Posted on

bar rescue

Typical Assortment of Booze in Motel Room at Feast of Tabernacles
Typical Assortment of Booze in Motel Room at Feast of Tabernacles

Several years back, a member at the Feast of Tabernacles posted a picture of his collection of alcoholic beverages in his motel room at the time. Very quickly, someone not associated with Armstrongism posted and asked, “Where can I sign up??!!??”.

That’s an excellent question, particularly these days in the waning days of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia sects suffering from atrophy and entropy. It is also a missed opportunity for the leaders of the aging seniors within Armstrongism. If there’s one thing that surveys tell us, it’s that seniors, particularly religious seniors, love gambling and booze. It’s high time that the ACoGs cash in on the potential market of Alcoholics that represent 6% of the population. In fact, the Armstrongist Churches of God seem to have a much higher percentage of alcoholics: When Dale Hampton came through to visit the Seattle church in the 1970s to help people understand alcoholism, he estimated that 18% of the adults of that church were alcoholics. In Spokane, 240 miles away, the percentage was much much higher, if you can believe the incidences of hypoglycemia which are indicative of the third stage of alcoholism. It was the disease de rigueur for most of the adults in the WCG there. The [jqeasytooltip tipposition=”tiptop” tipfollowcursor=”true” ][jqeasytooltipcontent]Don Weininger: 1975[/jqeasytooltipcontent]minister[/jqeasytooltip] there certainly was an alcoholic, which partly explains his murder of his wife and his suicide outside the office of Carl Maxie, the wife’s divorce attorney. Anyway, the path to success is to go about drawing in that population of people best suited to Armstrongism — the alcoholics will fit right in.

Moreover, the Feasts are always going to be a special treat, particularly the Feast of Booze in the Fall. Every potluck can be overflowing with spirits. In fact, the church can be especially appealing to Native Americans with their belief in the Great Spirit, as long as they are persuaded of the Great Spirit’s Spirits.

Giving new meaning to 'ACoG'
Giving new meaning to ‘ACoG’

Yes, friends, we can swell the membership with the potential pool of 18 million alcoholics in the United States to draw upon. Hey, some of the WCG congregations actually met in a bar on the Sabbath, so it should be natural for long time members — although we’ll want to go upscale on this one.

It's being done now!
It’s being done now!

There’s a good market for this: All that needs to be done is to determine the demographics and set up the Church Bar accordingly.

BarChurchThe beauty of this commercial enterprise is that it is self-sustaining, if done properly. Initially, tithes, offerings and special building fund will be needed to buy property, build the appropriate facilities and stock it with booze. Out of work members can go to work as bartenders, wait persons and maintenance. Once started up, the Church Bar will be able to sustain itself with patrons from the neighborhood during the week and Sundays, with the bar closed on the Sabbath for ‘members only’. It should actually make a profit. Happy high members can truly rejoice in the Sabbath, having at least a mild buzz. Sermons can be adapted for visitors to show from the Bible that Scripture supports use of alcohol and that it ‘cheers the heart of God and man’ as well as not a few women.

“But,” you ask, “what if something should go wrong??!!??”

That’s where Jon Taffer comes in.

JonTafferofBarRescueJon Taffer is the renowned expert driving Bar Rescue. He comes when bar owners are in trouble and ask for help. He has rescued hundreds of bars using science. He tells those in trouble, “I don’t embrace excuses; I embrace solutions”. He is just the man to set the Alcohol Churches of God on the right path when they run into trouble, if they will call for the help and follow his advice.

We can’t expect every Church of God to accept this new paradigm. In the 1970s, it was the Feast of Pentecost somewhere in Western Washington. David Jon Hill was slated to give the morning sermon. He stumbled up the steps and made a comment about how he “flew up the steps” to the lectern. That afternoon, Roderick Meredith gave one of his most fiery sermons ever about drunkards, so it’s unlikely that the Living Church of God will pursue this. Only if he dies and his successors see the light will there be the Living Bar Church of God.

Herbert Armstrong was a boozing alcoholic. That may be one reason he wanted to spring from the Church of God Seventh Day: He wanted to continue to wallow in his alcoholic solution to problems. Garner Ted Armstrong was an alcoholic. David Jon Hill was an alcoholic. Regional pastors in the hinterland were alcoholics. The whole WCG was top heavy with alcoholics and that defined the character of the church (or lack of it). Alcohol permeated the entire structure. So why fight it?

After all that is said and done, we have to admit that Dixon Cartwright, editor of The Journal was right. The Bible may not have any authority. Herbert Armstrong wasn’t a prophet. The ‘farmer theologians’ are at best misguided. What we should do though, is hold the social groups together.

After all, most of the people of the Armstrongist churches of God have one thing in common: They are boozing alcoholics. It bonds them. It makes them comfortable with each other.

And darn it all, after a drink or two, disagreements just don’t matter any more.

Posted on

The Errancy of The Bible

Blast from the past.

by Bruce Renehan

Recently, a couple of people e-mailed me wanting to debate about some things I had written and posted on The Painful Truth website. For instance, I had written that I initially had started a quest to prove whether Herbert Armstrong was right or wrong and ended up discovering that not only were the beliefs of the Worldwide Church of God erroneous, so was the entirety of Christianity and Judaism. Key to all of this, is the discovery that the Bible was actually carefully put together by Constantine’s bishops in Rome. I generally let those statements stand on their own because this is a touchy subject with people. If they want to do their own unbiased research they will certainly come to the same conclusions. But for those who are genuinely curious why a person like myself could have read the Bible day after day, version after version, page by page, verse by verse and finally throw the Bible away, let me show you how it happened to me.

I spent 23 years in the Worldwide Church of God. Every Sabbath, I listened to convoluted explanations of how to understand the meaning of the Bible. After that length of time, I learned that the Bible can be used by skillful ministers to justify anything. Eventually, I decided to do my own independent investigations. Some of my early research dealt with trying to get a broader perspective rather than the narrow one I had bought into in the Worldwide Church of God. So I studied about Judaism and Catholicism. I tried to keep an open mind. I actually went to the local synagogue and studied in their library by permission of the Rabbi. One of my main discoveries there was that Armstrong had perverted the Levitical system of tithing. That took me about twenty minutes to determine. Why had I wasted all those years believing those Worldwide Church of God ministers?

I later found a book on understanding the Jewish Talmud. That too created an interesting crack in my Christian foundation. For the Talmud describes what a Messiah is. A Messiah is a chief Rabbi and is not divine. The Talmud is what the Jews were using to recognize their Messiah before Jesus was born. Why did they reject Jesus?

After leaving the Worldwide Church of God and returning to college I made friends with a charismatic Christian and two transfer students from Palestine (Muslims). One day we were all sitting in a room talking about religion and my Christian friend was wearing one of those bodacious tee shirts with a picture of Jesus on it and a slogan like “He is the Son of God.” My Muslim friend said casually, “You know, in my country that tee shirt would be blasphemous. How can Allah have a son?” This was a moment of serendipity for me. It has always been the case in the Middle East that God is one and could not have a son. Remember the Arian controversy of the fourth century? But, suddenly in the New Testament there appears someone calling himself the son of God and only the Pharisees seem to get upset about it.

Up until this point in my life I had just assumed that God had directly inspired the writing of the Bible. Now, somehow it appeared that New Testament scriptures had been tampered with by a culture other than a Middle Eastern/Jewish one. But, what about the Old Testament? At the time I began to suspect this, I did not know about the tons of scholarly accounts that completely agreed with my intuitive feelings. I read Harvard scholar Elliot Freedman’s book entitled Who wrote the Bible? and discovered that the Old Testament was written by rivaling priests (primarily those who claimed a lineage from either Aaron or Moses). Thus we find two creation stories that contradict each other and so on. Reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, Freedman shows that the Bible can actually be dissected and the separate versions can be clearly seen to be from the different Levitical authors.

So, the questions then became, “Has all scripture been tampered with? Is the Bible the infallible word of God or is it the skillful work of scribes throughout history?” Fundamentalists like Herbert Armstrong, taught that the Bible is inerrant. But, if one is skillful, one can find a scripture to prove any desired belief. Remember, Armstrong emphasized that the Bible was understood “here a little, there a little.” In other words its like a smorgasbord of beliefs that anyone can pick and chose from.

Let me list just a few contradictions in scripture. I have provided a sampling from William Burr’s book, Self-Contradictions of the Bible:

1. God is satisfied with his works (Gen. 1:31). God is dissatisfied with his works (Gen. 6:6)

2. God dwells in chosen temples (2 Chron. 7:12, 16). God dwells not in temples (Acts 7:48)

3. God dwells in light (1 Tim. 6:16). God dwells in darkness (1 Kings 8:12, Ps. 18:11, Ps. 97:2)

4. God is seen and heard (Ex 33:23; Ex. 33:11; Gen. 3:9,10; Gen. 32:30; Is. 6:1; Ex. 24: 9, 10, 11). God is invisible and cannot be heard (John 1:18; John 5:37; Ex. 33:20; 1 Tim. 6:16)

8. God is all-powerful (Jer. 32:27; Matt. 19:26). God is not all-powerful (Judg. 1:19)

41. The Sabbath instituted (Ex. 20:8). The Sabbath repudiated (Is. 1:13; Rom. 14:5; Col. 2: 16).

58. Man was created after the other animals (Gen 1:25, 26 27). Man was created before the animals (Gen. 2:18,19).

69. The infant Christ was taken into Egypt (Matt. 2:14, 15, 19, 21, 23). The infant Christ was not taken into Egypt (Luke 2:22,39).

81. There was but one woman who came to the sepulchre (John 20:1). There were two women who came to the sepulchre (Matt. 28:1).

82. There were three women who came to the sepulchre (Mark 16:1). There were more than three women who came to the sepulchre (Luke 24:10).

Burr’s examples go on and on. The main point being that the Bible is filled with contradictory statements. How could it be infallible (as most fundamentalists believe)?

It was about this time when I began to hear that the Worldwide Church of God was introducing new doctrines to the Church via resident Greek Scholar K. Stavrinides. Stavrinides was preparing the church to believe in the Trinity concept. He did it by producing a word, “hypostasis,” and showing that the word was in the Bible. While in the library, I did a little historical research about that word and serendipity arrived again. The word originated among the Greek philosophers and was used by Plato to describe the earth’s elements. Later at the Council of Nicea, the very concept of hypostasis was used to create the doctrine of the Trinity. This was probably the second hint that I had that the other culture that had tampered with the New Testament was in Rome. Just prior to that, I had viewed a series of videos about Bible archeology. In the last video, the narrator had pointed out very specifically that Constantine had commissioned the writing of the New Testament in Rome in the fourth century and that the scribes had hundreds of separate documents that the followers of Christianity and Judaism had written. The problem with those documents was that, not only were they contradictory, some were outrageous, describing Christian orgies and so on. So what do you do when an emperor pays you to create a fairly consistent anthology of books that recreate Christianity in a politically correct manner? You interpolate, edit, delete, and fabricate.

In Golding’s Biblical Polemics, he writes:

“First the NT was not written by any of the disciples of Jesus nor by persons who even lived in that era….When the church fathers compiled the NT in the year 397, they collected all the writings they could find and managed them as they pleased. They decided by vote which of the books out of the collection they had made should be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all people since calling themselves Christians would have believed otherwise. For the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other (p.23).”

In the Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy, author C. Dennis McKinsey writes:

“As stated earlier, quite a few books did not make it into the Bible or what is commonly known as the canon. It might be of interest to note the names of some of these writings. For instance, we find that mentioned in the Old Testament are many books not in the Bible. The Book of the Wars of the Lord is referred to in Num. 21; the Book of Jasher is referred to in Joshua 10:13; the Book of Nathan and Gad is mentioned in First Chronicles and the Book of the Acts of Solomon is mentioned in Second Chronicles. All of these books, as well as many others, did not make it into Scripture, although they are mentioned in the Old Testament. Where they are, no one knows. Why were these books allowed to perish? No one knows. Another group of books were left out of the New Testament. It is a rather lengthy list in which can be found the following: the Gospel According to the Hebrews, the Gospel Written by Judas Iscariot, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Marcion, the Gospel of Matthias, the Gospel of Eve, and the Gospel of Philip. Besides the Gospels are such writings as the Acts of Peter, the Book of the Judgment by Peter, the Hymn by Christ, the Magical Book by Christ, and the Letter to Peter and Paul by Christ. None of these books survived the cut and all were left on the debating room floor, again, primarily because of politics in the religious realm. All of these books had their advocates and all of them lost (p. 20).”

It had been suspected for the past 150 years by scholars, that the original New Testament Gospels would have appeared much different than the ones handed down through the centuries by the Catholic Church. Further, it was believed that there was at least one original copy that the fourth century bishops used to make the books of Luke and Matthew. Certain German theorists decided to make a proto-gospel by taking out the parts of the New Testament that they suspected had been added by the fourth century church. This new gospel was called the book of Q (Quelle–meaning “source”). In 1945 an archeological find was made. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Nag Hamadi–it is the oldest surviving text written by early Christians. This Gospel of Thomas was interpreted and compared to Q. The two documents were nearly identical. The fifth gospel calls Jesus the son of Joseph, not the son of God, and there is no miraculous virgin birth in it. If we use our imaginations, we can see that it is possible for a virgin to be found with child and not be married. This is exactly what the Talmud says had happened to a virgin by the name of Mary. The Talmud states that this Mary had become pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera and a man named Joseph married her to take away the shame.

In John D. Crossan’s Book, The Historical Jesus, Crossan takes an anthropological view of the first century and shows that many things claimed in the New Testament would have been historically impossible. For instance, common people were illiterate and thus fishermen could not have been the prolific writers of the Gospels; Pontius Pilate would not have done or said the things that are claimed; the story of John the Baptist was a common story about another king other than Herrod and somehow got attached to John the Baptist. The first thing that struck me in Crossan’s book though was a quote about Caesar being the son of god. The Romans and Egyptians deified their kings. It became abundantly clear to me at this point that Jesus too was deified in Rome and not in Jerusalem where the teaching would have been blasphemous. How else would a fourth century Roman scribe emphasize that Jesus was the King of the Jews except to say that he was also a god?

There is much more evidence than what has been presented here to demonstrate that the Bible is a collection of legends and myths carefully woven together in the fourth century which makes it inconsistent with being a book inspired by God. It takes some investigation to discover this and that is where the rub is for the true believer. Among the many contradictory and fantastic statements made in the Bible there is a built in Catch 22. According to Edmund Cohen, The Mind of the Bible Believer, it all boils down to faith for the Christian and the biblical definition of faith is given in Hebrews 11:1 as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I cannot think of a greater double-bind on a person’s mind than to ask them to understand their world in such a fashion. Don’t let real evidence get in your way, just hope that your belief is right and your blind hope will be your salvation. Can you think of any functional organization that asks its constituents to look the other way in the light of contradictory evidence or to never let facts get in the way of your wishful thinking? Can you think of a healthy system where people are asked to believe fairytale like stories of visions from God, talking snakes and donkeys, sticks that turn into snakes, fiery chariots, long hair making you strong, trumpets knocking down stone walls, people walking on water, commanding the Sun to go backwards in the sky, turning water into wine, raising the dead, and so on to prove their honesty and truthfulness? Is it really sound minded to believe a book claiming that God’s people witnessed miracles for thousands of years and then those miracles were written down and no such grand events happened for the next two thousand years?

It seems ironic that people can so readily believe the Bible stories without evidence and yet challenge evolutionists for believing things that have been fossilized in stone for millions of years.

I personally have come to accept the fact that science and education are not going to change the thinking of the majority of religious believers in this world because of the double-bind of biblical faith. I doubt if humans will ever live in a society free from superstition. But, at least for me, the evidence of things seen is more valid than “the evidence of things not seen.”