We know what you’re thinking! We think so too! Dr. Robert Thiel just could not have written this! After all, Bob Thiel is a spirit led Christian Prophet of Jesus with the Spirit of a sound mind and this just isn’t it!
We think we have an explanation. We believe you will find it compelling.
As some of you may know, Google has an impressive language translation feature called, appropriately enough, Google Translate. Now Google has brought us some of the finest technology available to mankind and has advanced civilization to an unprecedented degree.
Unfortunately, language is highly complex reflecting millenia of evolution. Technology is constantly being honed to bring better and better translations to the table. Google has mostly done that, bridging the gaps of communications throughout the world to connect societies. In some cases, however, the message suffers in the translation. We believe that is the case here.
In this multinational corporational world, publishing is often accomplished using various subcontractors in different countries. Let us suppose that Dr. Robert Thiel created his manuscript and submitted it for publication. You can click on the above cover illustration and it will take you to Amazon.com where you can either buy the paperback edition or read the Kindle edition online for free if you are a Kindle Unlimited user. The question is, how did these products come to be? Suppose the manuscript was sent first to India for initial setup. Now while the people in India have 500 million English speakers, it would be much simpler to translate it using Google Translate to the local Indian dialect. Next in processing, suppose the partially transformed manuscript was sent to the Philippines for further processing where it was translated into one of the Philippino dialects. After that, the Russians get it and transform it into Russian via Google Translate. Finally, the Chinese take it and format the final copies into first Chinese, using Google Translate and then to English using Google Translate again.
This is not as far fetched as you might think. In fact, any number of people have been experimenting with Google Translate doing just that to improve the product (we suppose). We can completely remove all your skepticism with an example of a Miley Cyrus Song, “Wrecking Ball” using this method.
In the following example you will be able to extrapolate what has happened to Robert Thiel’s publication and settle in your own mind that nothing you read there was Bob Thiel’s original intention. It’s unfortunate that it appears that he is accusing Hillary Clinton of being the Antichrist and the one responsible for the coming World War III when she becomes President in 2016. Frankly, we can’t be sure what the book was about. Maybe it’s about Hillary Clinton’s efforts to bring world peace when she was Secretary of State. Who knows? Maybe we will never know.
Anyway, after you view the following, you will be convinced that the whole thing was a ghastly mistake:
Armstrongist Minister Just After Coming Out Of Hibernation
And you know what that means: Armstrongist leaders come out of hibernation after a brief winter respite to grouch about stupid stuff that doesn’t mean a thing to anyone but them — it’s embarrassing as they come loaded for bear to bare their grouchy opinions of what’s wrong with the world. It gets to be unbearable.
They quickly get their bearings and start bearing down on their prey:
Armstrong Ministers Quickly Find Their Bearings
It isn’t long that they are all grumpy about rabbits:
Bunny With Eggs
They can’t bear the thought that people would ever think that bunnies would lay eggs — and not just eggs in some cases, but chocolate eggs — so they come out with The Plain Truth About Easter, baring their souls and insisting that Easter is pagan and that bunnies can’t lay eggs. This is silly of course because no one really thinks that bunnies lay eggs (wink, wink). It’s all part of the fun of spring time and there are fun social customs associated with the spring equinox that have a long tradition of history. There are even Easter Egg Hunts on the White House Lawn. This drives the grumps of Armstrongism to despair. They just can’t bear the thought that something was so, so, so… Pagan, could ever be part of any sort of Christian associated practice.
It’s silly of course. No one really believes that bunnies lay eggs and in the scheme of things it’s pretty harmless. Of much more concern is the fact that until Easter no one can wear white.
This is a big time of year for the Armstrongists as they bang the drum to drum up business based on, well, it’s so wrong! They are so obsessed about this that they have booklets decrying the practices of what they view to be deeply rooted in paganism.
After this, they settle down a bit for awhile and have some pretty barren months until the long hot summer is over (winter south of the Equator) and fall sets in. Then they start in again with their rants about Holydays or Holidays, which is rather ironic because the only real holiday in the United States around that time is Labor Day, which, if you think about it is kind of a misnomer, since people don’t generally work on that day and take it off: You’d think that’s a day they would work, since it’s Labor Day… get it? What they are aiming for is to expound the message of the Feast of Tabernacles to declare that an ancient Bronze Age observance of physical rituals by Israelites (who didn’t actually keep it centuries at a time) some how pictures Christ reigning a thousand years with a rod of iron, which he is just going to hand over to them so they can abuse people, not realizing that no one can really keep the Feasts, since there is no temple, no altars, no Levite priests to offer animal heave offerings and no Sanhedrin to keep the whole thing together, not to mention which, the Jews themselves know their calendar for the schedule of keeping these things is wrong but they can’t fix it because they haven’t had a Sanhedrin for something going on 1,700 hundred years or more. One wonders how physical rituals given to a physical people who didn’t have the Holy Spirit could actually be all that spiritual when practiced in the 21st centuries supposedly by Christians, albeit, Olde Testament Christian Pharisees. Of course, one of the things they don’t mention up front as part of their sales package is the Day of Atonement, which, calling it a feast is sort of stretch, but given that United declared recently that old and infirm people can eat and drink on that Day because of health reasons, there may not be as much a tough sell on the matter.
Things go on after the Feast without too much major maladjustment up until right around Thanksgiving, then they unleash again about all the pagan practices of Christmas and New Years. This is rather ironic, because behind the scenes, these people use the Winter Solstice holidays to have their happy time of their Winter Festival, which is sort of like the Feast, but not really and sort of like Christmas / New Years and more really. Of course, there’s some dissent by some objecting to the obvious cognitive dissonance of keeping worldly holidays in much the same way and in the same convention centers used by the great unwashed pagan Christians who do keep Christmas and Easter. It would be interesting to check for sure, but it is probably the case that the drinking patterns of the two are probably very similar, except the Armstrongists may have an edge.
It is shortly after this point that the Armstrongists go into their dank caves to hibernate until it’s spring again, only to start the cycle all over again.
Of course, these particular creatures may have meetings. They don’t always agree — especially when they are of different social groups competing for the same resources:
Armstrongist Ministers Disagree At Conference
Something about baring their teeth, but I won’t go there.
Of course, we can do a lot to fix this problem. It’s an environmental issue. First of all, there are too many of these creatures for a sustainable ecology. They war over turf. There’s not only not enough to go around, but you’d be surprised how much litter they leave in their wake. The booklets and magazines don’t always get recycled and it’s a real problem for the environment. There’s another problem: They produce toxic waste and much of their material is from recycled garbage. If it looks familiar, you’ve seen it all before.
Now some who are not familiar with this species may wonder about the issues presented here. It’s wild and crazy out there. Sometimes you have to know where to look. Often you need to be vigilant to be careful you don’t broach their feeding grounds. If any need assistance, Google should be able to help. They should be avoided at all costs.
There is only one way to be sure to control their numbers: Don’t feed them. The best thing to do is starve them of tithes and they will move on to greener pastures… so to speak:
Herbert Armstrong wrote The Proof of the Bible in 1958 (no one can be quite sure if he plagiarized the material or who he might have plagiarized it from). Unfortunately, the so-called “proofs” are all based on Old Testament Prophecies — touted by him to be absolute proof because they were fulfilled, thus “proving” the Bible. Now those of us who have our own copy and have studied Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal: A Critical Thinker’s Toolkit by Johathan C. Smith can spot the problems with The Proof of the Bible almost instantly. We won’t bore you with the disproved theory that Tyre was actually not destroyed — it still exists. No, we ask you to skip forward to page 22 and read the section Why Egypt is a Weak Nation. Herbert Armstrong quotes Ezekiel 29:15-16 where he makes a point that Egypt will be the basest of kingdoms! How did he do? How did the Bible do on this one?
It’s hard to get our arms around this because, really, the statement is pretty vague. Nevertheless, let’s use a commonly agreed upon measure of a country’s viability and ranking by selecting the List of Countries by GDP (PPP). Data from the World Bank ranking Gross Domestic Product for the years 2005-2013 rank Egypt #25 out of 179 countries with a GDP of $910 Billion. That’s fairly respectable. Of course, the United States, China, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, France, United Kingdom are ranked at the top above Egypt as you might have suspected. What’s interesting though, is the nations ranked below Egypt: Countries such as Netherlands, South Africa, Columbia, Venezuela, Philippines, United Arab Emirates, Switzerland (who knew?), Iraq (Iraq?), Sweden and Switzerland. The most interesting one, though is… wait for it… Israel! Israel was ranked at #54 with a GDP of $264 Billion.
So if Egypt is the basest of nations, are we to assume that Israel, the specially selected country chosen by God, is even more base? If you use the objective measurement of Gross Domestic Product, the answer is obviously, yes. So much for Herbert Armstrong’s Bible Prophecy (not that he wasn’t a huge failure in this department anyway). The Proof of the Bible is no such thing. And not to put to fine a point on it, The Proof of the Bible doesn’t even begin to address the New Testament, it’s provenance and the questions about such books as II Peter, the gospels and Revelation being forged: The Proof is more than a little thin — it’s only about a small part of the Old Testament and a few prophecies given there — it does not address the Big Picture at all.
Some of the ministers in the Armstrongist churches seem to have realized that no one can actually prove the Bible is true and may believe the information from Theologians, such as David Fitzgerald at Skepticon 3 “Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus”:
Byker Bob wrote, over at Banned!:
Many groups over the millennia have taught the sabbath, the holy days, clean meats, the ten commandments, and either a tithe or voluntary giving of a generally recommended percentage of 10% as God’s basic standard.
People have been happy, they’ve lived exemplary lives, and they have raised fine families in peace and tranquility under those customs. Whether they are New or Old Covenant, whether certain facts are known or unknown that would make it possible or impossible to still observe those tenets, and whether the act of teaching them is the way of identifying “God’s True Church” rather than love, faith, and other Christian fruits, has been the subject of ongoing unresolvable debate for many years. Still, a once a week “special date with God” would certainly not harm self, or others, in and of itself.
What elevated Herbert W. Armstrong’s church and his heirs into cultic status was the addition of an extrabiblical theory (which can actually be disproven using the Bible, let alone archaeology, history, linguistics, and genetics) based on British Israelism and German Assyrianism. This was compounded by Armstrong’s pretentiousness in claiming to know something that Jesus said could not be known, I.e, when the end would come. Now, that is all cultic “gnosticism”, but it doesn’t yet rise to the label “toxic”.
Toxicity entered through Herbert using the apocalypse of Revelation, bolstered by the prophecies of Daniel, asserting that these would occur during our lifetime, applying it all to civilizations initiated by Anglo-Saxon gentiles, and leaving anyone from his primary broadcast audience who wanted to be spared and protected from these with the sole alternatives of joining his church movement, or suffering the brunt of the tribulation. It was a black and white ultimatum. He then introduced another bit of speculation, that the churches enumerated in Revelation were actually eras, thus branding anyone more liberal or conservative than himself who actually taught the same doctrines as “Sardis” or “Laodicean”. Some over the years have considered all of this intimidation to be special, privileged truth, while in the face of continued failure of the root prophecies, and witnessing horrible fruits, others have seen it as blatant, deliberate, false entrapment.
The final and worst toxicity came from Herbert’s doctrine of “government from the top down” (rather than the power of Jesus Christ converting and transforming one Christian heart at a time from the bottom-up), thus opening the door for all of the cruel, arbitrary, “our way or the highway” enforcement practiced in original WCG and the ACOG splinters. Basically, this is the “we OWN you” doctrine, making the leaders of these groups the gatekeepers to the so-called “place of safety” and supposedly to the kingdom itself. Members in good standing do not question their gatekeepers’ authority!
I have no problem with the people who think that the New Covenant is simply the Infusion of Jesus into the Old Covenant. But, I have a huge problem with the people who would contaminate all of that with the various ingredients that Herbert W. Armstrong added as his own modifiers to that. The use of a special set of Armstrong gnosticism, combined with totalitarian enforcement, is what makes the ACOGs toxic. That is in no way spiritual guidance.
BB
Unfortunately, most of the Armstrongist churches have resorted to tactics which make them look more like George Orwell’s 1984 than a church.
Now no one needs to give up the Bible. It can still be used for inspiration. In fact, in some segments of the Armstrongist community, there are those who actually seem to be fine with the fact that the Bible might not be the inspired Word of God, absolute, with Authority. It is a growing community and there are some prominent leaders out there directing the charge. One such group is the Church of God Big Sandy, led by David Havir who is, in turn, supported by Dixon Cartwright and The Journal. Dixon Cartwright has declared that he does not believe in British Israelism: He responded to the PT Article, The Journal is Cursed! by saying:
Yes, the aspects of Armstrongism that I judge to be silly I try to be above it all, as you put it. You can say false prophet all you like, I don’t care. But I don’t think terms like that are appropriate for a journalist to use (except in quoting other people) because those are terms for Bible scholars and farmer theologians and church members. I don’t think Herbert Armstrong was a prophet, therefore I don’t think he could have been a true or false prophet. Just as I tried to remove myself from the Bible fray when I wrote my canon articles (because one cannot prove or disprove the validity of the Bible in the usual conservative-Christian sense by arguing from within the Bible), I think it’s advisable for a newspaper not to report from inside the Bible. Interesting you guys are always talking about British Israelism. I am not a British Israelist, but I don’t think BI is any weirder than certain important doctrines of mainstream Christianity.
It seems likely that David Havir and others at the CoGBS hold the same disbelief. Since the staff of The Journal has ties to the United Church of God an International Association, it is also likely that many of the ministers in the UC Gaia also tacitly realize that British Israelism is a dead issue, although, behind the scenes they still have a United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy, they have backpedaled the issue and don’t promote the booklet actively. Certainly, Dennis Luker was moving United in another direction away from Armstrong during his tenure as President. In addition, “False Prophet” and “Heresy” are irrelevant terms, as Dixon Cartwrite wrote over at Otagosh:
To Black Ops: You do not understand where I’m coming from. I pick up from Gavin and his little comments now and then that he pretty much does. “False prophet”? Interesting that you still are tuned in to the concept of false prophet. That strikes me as a religious and conservative-theological way of thinking that I try not to do anymore. It’s like saying someone’s a heretic. For a person trying to stay above the fray, some of those concepts make little sense. People obviously have strong religious convictions, and I think that can be an objective statement. But lamentations about false prophets and heretics and interpretations of Scripture and doctrine are not. –Dixon C.
This would make absolutely no sense at all in the highly conservative pragmatic Biblical based world of Herbert Armstrong and the Radio Church of God. But if it is rooted in venue of high concept religious abstract fuzzy thinking of modern Christian Theology, it makes perfect sense. The Bible is not absolute — it’s just used for inspiration to pad out sermons and written material. No, what’s really important is the social group. Dixon Cartwright has validated this.
Now if you take a look at the Church of God Big Sandy, you can clearly grasp the concept. Youth Day includes the activities of the Boy Scouts of America chapter at Big Sandy during Sabbath services. The Journal reports on all the personal items of interest (as well as doing the Boomer thing of allowing everyone to have their say and go their way). People can believe whatever they want to and even have discussions about it as long as they don’t get too loud or pushy. As long as it doesn’t threaten the group in any way, it’s allowed — this gives people the Byker Bob standard, acknowledging that as long as the environment isn’t toxic and works for the group, it’s (mostly) OK. In this case, the Bible is just a prop and has no real relevance and neither does doctrine, heresy, false prophets, prophecy. In fact, the ministers could all be humanist atheists (and they may well be) and it would make no difference: The social group is together and everybody’s OK. Of course, some of the more retentive types soaked and locked into the ultra conservative arcane religious beliefs espoused by Herbert Armstrong haven’t got the memo (clueless, deliberately excluded from being able to understand what’s going on) but that’s OK too — there’s a safe place for them to hold their superstitious delusions.
Now it is the case that for the sake of the social group, there are still some unique Armstrongist things. The biggest of these is the so-called Feast of Tabernacles. There is no such thing, of course, because there is no Temple, no Levite priests (no matter how Herbert Armstrong tried to make his hirelings into them), no altar, no animal sacrifices… well, OK, sometimes they do have a barbeque at the “Feast” but you know what we mean. The “Feast of Tabernacles” allows people to get together for social activities, meet friends, make new friends, eat, drink and be merry, have a generally fun time. People can have the best of everything (up to a point) more than they can have any other time of the year. The physical rituals help bind the community together, and that’s all good. There are also all those Christmas / New Year socials for various social activities. With this approach, there’s absolutely no conflict with “Feasts of the Lord” because if it benefits the social group, there’s nothing wrong with it. They do it because they can. [Note: United recently published in The Good News that it is OK for the elderly and those with medical problems to eat and drink on the Day of Atonement, meaning that those “Festivals” aren’t as much an obstacle any more for those who don’t really want to keep them fully and it also means that it was just fine for Herbert Armstrong to have a cup of coffee and a donut on the Day of Atonement to “keep up his strength”. Nothing’s all that sacred any more.]
This is real freedom!
So now, people can whine about false prophets. Irrelevant. People can whine about heresy. Irrelevant. People can get all bent out of shape about doctrine and a million things associated with it, particularly the calendar. Irrelevant. British Israelism. Irrelevant. The Bible can go poof! No problem. Gee, about now, Joe Tkach probably wishes he had the idea back in the day with the Worldwide Church of God: Just allow people to have their local church buildings and build a local social community and people would be happy and it would all be good. None of this mucking about trying to change absolutely everything Herbert Armstrong stood for as a vendetta. Just let the people do what they want to do anyway, and sit back and collect the dough. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier? This is a successful business model that really works! It’s all good as long as the music’s good! After all, it’s just a social club.
Well, live and learn.
Or don’t.
And yet… it’s hard to know what to call these fun folks — Unarmstrongists, perhaps?
We do believe that those who have rejected British Israelism should be praised, it’s just that we would have hoped they would have been more obvious and public about it.
These days there are accounts of atheists yearning for a social group. They’d like to have something like a church, just without the religious nonsense that goes along with it. They’d like to socialize with get togethers, pot lucks, conventions, all without having to argue that the Bible is so much superstition. They need to take a page out of the book of these former Armstrongists. They could learn a thing or two.
Make no mistake: Most of those such as Roderick Meredith, David Pack, Gerald Flurry, Ronald Weinland claim to obey God and believe the Bible but prove by their behavior that they don’t.
