Author: Douglas Becker

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Monsters, Inc.

Recovery Innovations is a service which seeks to create opportunities and environments that empower people to recover, to succeed in accomplishing their goals and to reconnect with themselves, others and meaning and purpose in life. My son is in the program and they have set him up in his own apartment, provided him with all he needs for day to day living, while being independent and having more flexibility and freedom than he has had in a long time.

My wife and I went to a seminar last week they held in their local office and met the staff and some of those who are served by their programs. They are based in Phoenix, Arizona and serve mentally ill and disabled people around the world in places like New Zealand. Their recent history begins in 2006 when Meta Services became Recovery Innovations. We learned from the Director that they have been a presence in Pierce County for several years serving within the Regional Support network. I talked with the staff member who used to work in the County Mental Hospital when it was first privatized and then closed down. Pierce County has had special problems with the mentally ill, since mentally ill patients come from all over the State to be treated in the State Facility in Steilacoom only to be put out on the street near the hospital when their treatment ends for one reason or another.

The program that Recovery Innovation offers is for disabled people who want to live and work toward being independent. I talked with one of the young women who is something of a “success story”: Recovery Innovations provided her with the training and set her up in her own apartment (which all is done at a significantly lower price than government programs can offer); she then went to work as a volunteer at not one, but two food banks. For one of the food banks in Kent, she has to take three busses to get there and it takes several hours for her to get to and from the facility where she does quality control inspection of food that is contributed. Her job is important: As she said, some of the food is yukky. The other food bank is just blocks from where she lives. She is justifiably proud of the important and necessary work she wanted to do — but before Recovery Innovations she could not “connect the dots” to do it — and now she can.

I talked with her for awhile after the presentation to learn more about what she was doing and she told me all about her cat. She is responsible and takes care of her little kitty. We shared our experiences with cats. The director was listening in when I explained that cats have about the same attention span and short term memory as corporate managers — ten minutes. The director laughed and laughed. I explained to her that I was a corporate manager at Weyerhaeuser at one point in my career. She laughed even harder and told me that she had also been a corporate manager at one point in her career.

Recovery Innovations does more than just give people hope: They have practical programs and practical experience in helping people shape their lives. They work with people on a daily basis and manage to help people through the rough spots even when the going gets a little tough and challenging: They help find solutions to problems and they know their stuff as compassionate and competent people.

Contrast all of that with this posting at Banned by HWA — Philadelphia Church of God: Take Your Disabled Child To The Mall And Abandon Him – Let Someone Else Take Care Of Him:

Just when I think the depth of depravity of Armstrongism cant sink any lower, along comes more horror stories from Gerald Flurry’s cult.

PCG Told Me to Get Rid of My Mentally Handicapped Son With Cerebral Palsy:

June 17, 2013

I was told by a minister in PCG to “get rid of” my mentally  handicapped son (who also had cerebral palsy) or don’t return. He told  me to put him in some facility, or if I couldn’t afford that, then take  him somewhere that he would not know and abandon him in the mall or  somewhere  that people were. He said someone would find him and put him  away, and that I was to turn and not look back, and just leave him  there! I guess you can imagine just about what I told them!!

What helped me the most were people having the same objections and questions that I was having, wondering if these ministers in PCG really have the authority they say they did over us. The ministers try to make you feel you’re isolated in your thinking, that you’re the only one  questioning anything. So you better get back under their submission,  their rule–or suffer the consequences. (I decided to take the  consequences). I am free and I am staying that way.

 The ESN has been a Godsend. You have saved many people, including me  and my family. We saw how others were questioning things, as we were,  and realized things were just not right in there! Our feelings were  right; we weren’t as crazy as others trying to pull us back in would  have us think. They practice mind control there. All it takes is a few  mentioning of buzz-words from them (i. e., “the Work,” “the Church,”  “Mr. Flurry,” etc.) and you start to question your own common sense and  your sanity. Well, not anymore.

 None are so blind as those who will not see. Well, now I see! Thanks for everything. God bless you. –Former PCG member

A comment from a reader here adds to this story:

Reading this story that is exactly what happened to William B. Hinsom.  He became a WCG minister in the 1960s. However he had a mentally  disabled son. He was advised by people within WCG to leave him in a  facility for such people in Franklin, Tennessee. He strongly suspected  that his son would die, but he trusted them, he thought the Great  Tribulation would soon start in 1972, so reluctantly he agreed. His son  died as feared.
Later he left WCG and wrote a book about WCG, Broadway to Armageddon (1977). You can request it from Exit and Support Network.
Naturally Hinsom focuses a lot on the terrible consequences of people following  HWA’s anti-medicine superstition that he plagiarized from the Jehovah’s  Witnesses.
Congratulations to that brave commenter. No doubt you did the right thing.
This useless PCG minister’s advice reminds me of this terrible incident I  heard about. There was this man who murdered his wife and then took  their eight year old young daughter on a plane and he then abandoned her at an airport. Did not do him much good. The authorities learned what  happened and arrested him. He is now deservedly rotting away in jail. I  think the PCG minister could have been charged with something serious if his horrific advise was followed.

 I did relate this story to the folks at Recovery Innovations. They weren’t particularly surprised: Their reaction was that this is the sort of thing that people in cults do.

The Church of God Seventh Day minister I related this story to was amazed and appalled: He shook his head and simply could not understand how a supposedly Christian minister could have such hubris. He doesn’t understand how anyone could follow advice like this. It certainly looks as if that all the leadership of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong have become so jaded, so filled with hubris, so set in a mindset of entitlement, that they believe that they are above the law and God will protect their interests no matter how wrong-headed or illegal they might be. It is embedded in the core of the lives of those who have lived with it; it’s like wearing old leather — after awhile, no don’t even notice it any more. They are totally comfortable with this sort of abuse and have been for a very long time, to such an extent that they have lost their conscience — what little of it they may have had — and given themselves over to doing evil wickedness of the sort that is extremely objectionable to the average person.

We have had similar advice from the Worldwide Church of God and United ministry concerning our son. We also ignored it.

What people in the CoHA don’t realize that the minister and leader have absolutely no skin in the game: If they give you terrible advice to perform illegal acts of child abuse, they have absolutely positively no consequences: You alone are going to bear this. If the gambit turns out, all the better, because you can spend more time on church activities and give more money to the cult leader.

This is so preposterous, it is beyond words and there are some questions if we pause to take this out to its logical extremes:

  • If you are supposed to do this with your disabled child (ask how Robert Thiel would feel about leaving his child in the shopping mall for someone else to take care of), why can’t you do this with all your children?
  • If this is successful, can you continue to use your child as a deduction on your Income Tax?
  • When and where are the best circumstances to do this?
  • If you leave your child in the airport between flights on the way to the Feast, can you spend second tithe for the one way flight to the terminal?
  • Should you sell your daughter as specified in the Old Testament (typically Eastern Europeans will give you the best prices) and give part of the money as an offering to your own CoHA (times are tough and you need to be innovative)?
  • How does this work in the light of the judgment in the Old Testament concerning kidnapping (the penalty of which is death)?

One would suppose that under such a dispensation, as long as you continue in your cult church to support it, the ends justify the means to achieve a happy, care-free, prosperous, life of egotistical narcissism for the cult leader, you are good to go. Be warned though, if you get into trouble, you must bear the consequences and your cult is not involved in any way.

Some of us will be sending letters and emails to Child Protective Services of State Governments and perhaps even engage with such media outlets as the New York Times and Fox News. We’re pretty sure, those of you who are inclined to follow this terrible advice from your cult leaders don’t have a clue and believe that nothing bad will happen to you and it all things will work together for your good. You will be free of the blessing of children and will be able to more fully engage in the selfish pursuits of your cult leader without any fear of any sort of retribution. You may even think you will completely avoid the Lake of Fire while engaging in this living lie. More power to you. And even more power to the governmental agency convicting you.

If everything works out, it may well be that your minister will be able to give you Sabbath services in prison where you are both serving out your terms. It certainly works if you go to the Federal Prison where Ronald Weinland is locked up, but that is highly unlikely, since you probably won’t be going there and you probably won’t live very long after the other inmates learn what you have done as they serve up their own brand of vigilante justice which will certainly not bode well for you.

Herbert Armstrong was a monster. Not the sort of cuddly monster like Barney or those cutesy monsters of Disney’s Pixar. No, he was the sort of monster one finds in Jurassic Park — all filled with rows of teeth as exemplified by our own version of the Jurassic Park theme song:

It’s Jurassic Park,

Don’t go after Dark,

Even if they seem to greet you,

For all the while,

They seem to smile,

They’re planning how to eat you….

Jesus said that false prophets were ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing. It’s more like it’s a Wolf (Herbert Wolf Armstrong) guarding the chicken house with the able assistance of some foxes he has on his payroll as hirelings of the worst sort: Maybe some of the chickens will survive, but we don’t much have hope for the eggs and the little chicks.

So Armstrongism is little more than Monster’s Inc.

It should be apparent that the children are at risk and that you have no reason for paying Monster’s Inc. for the privilege of putting them at risk.

Stalkers, fondlers, pedophiles, false prophet felons in prison for income tax evasion and now this: The average member seems to have all the mental power of a tranquilized gnat.

This is no Recovery Innovations: It’s Monster’s Inc.

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Ninth

Do you believe that if someone tells a lie, but does not know they are telling a lie, they are not liars?

If a man tells more lies to be consistent with the initial lie, is he a liar?

What if a leader tells lies all the time to support his position, bolster his ego and make money, is he a liar?

The Progress of Popular Opinion

In the 1950s, it was the standard, at least in the United States, that, all things being equal, a man was as good as his word: Credibility was built on telling the truth and keeping promises. Oh, sure, there were exaggerations, but most of the time, companies and leaders had a reputation for honesty: AT&T (The Bell System), IBM, General Electric, Old National Bank, Kraft Foods, Sears, Montgomery Wards, Ford, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Chevron, RCA, Motorola and a whole collection of others we trusted for excellent products and service. Leaders like President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with his Vice President Richard Nixon, were widely admired. Even religious leaders were widely admired: Who can forget the first Televangelist, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen? He even won many Emmy Awards over the years. These were the years of Billy Graham Crusades.

Somewhere between then and now, there’s been a refashioning of public thought: Times have changed. Once well respected branded names have become sullied. Montgomery Wards has gone out of business, Sears isn’t looking so good these days, Richard Nixon will be forever known as Tricky Dick, who’s heard much about RCA? A couple of auto makers mentioned above had to have a Federal Government bailout to survive. And religious leaders? Well, for cringe worthy names we could easily include Harold Camping, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jim Baker, A. A. Allen and for one of the worst public reputations EVER, Garner Ted Armstrong.

Through the years the attitude of people toward lying has changed. It has gone from enraged shock (how dare they lie to us) to major irritation to grumbling acceptance to white noise to “well, we know he lies, but we like him, so what?”; “What’s the big deal?”; “Everybody lies” (a proposition which can never have a great enough sample to have statistically significant basis). In fact, most people, especially the younger generations, have come to accept lies as part of our culture and have adjusted accordingly. One might reflect in passing that, like birds nesting at the airport which are alarmed at first, but adapt to the noise, it can’t be particularly good for us.

Herbert Armstrong was a man who lied. He flat out lied. He flat out lied repeatedly. He said that he refused to take salary from the Church of God Seventh Day when he disagreed with their doctrines and took off, but he continued to collect a salary for years afterward. He lied about originating the booklet “Has Time Been Lost” — and here’s the thing about that: When you lie, you had better remember doing it, because in this case, the Worldwide Church of God went to sue the Church of God Seventh Day for copyright violation and the CoG7 pulled out the original from their file cabinets that they wrote in the 1930s and Herbert Armstrong plagiarized. Herbert Armstrong lied in 1975 in Prophecy. Read the booklet. It’s downright embarrassing. He lied when he said he never set dates — the coworker letters, Plain Truth Magazines and The Good News proves it.

Nevertheless, the churches of God have come to accept the lies of Herbert Armstrong and even excuse the lies and false prophecies. The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God by Dr. David V. Barrett quotes Richard Nichols, Herbert Armstrong and Richard T. Rittenbaugh to show how this works:

The offshoots deal with the problem of Armstrong’s failed prophecies in different ways. Richard C. Nickles, of Giving and Sharing Ministry, quotes Armstrong himself from an early World Tomorrow radio broadcast:

A terrible famine is coming on the United States, that is going to ruin us as a nation inside of less than twenty more years. Alright, I stuck my neck out right there. You just wait twenty years and see whether I told you the truth. God says, if a man tells you what’s going to happen, wait and see. If it doesn’t happen, he was not speaking the word of God, he’s speaking out of his own mind. If it happens, you know God sent him.

Nickels comments, “The twenty years is long past! Herbert Armstrong labeled himself a false prophet.”

But Richard T. Ritenbaugh, of the Church of the Great God, comes to a different conclusion. Although he accepts that Armstrong “made many predictions during his ministry, and many of them have not come to pass. Some were plain wrong. Some were vague. Some were specific,” he then argues:

So what are all those predictions Herbert Armstrong made? Rather than call them prophecies (which they were not) and him a false prophet (which he was not), his predictions were more correctly speculations, theories based on true but insufficient and unclear evidence. Speculation is not sin.

People just blandly accept the lies as docile domesticated slaves.

Today’s Liars

Roderick Meredith, Davy Pack, Gerald Flurry, John Rittenbaugh, Ronald Weinland, Jim Franks, David Hulme are all liars (extracted from the Silenced Rogues Gallery). They all lie.

Now some may say, “But they are sincere and they don’t know they are lying”.

Baloney.

But suppose that it really were true (which it isn’t — witness all they lies they get caught in at Banned!)?

The problem with that is that they all tell the biggest lies of all: The lies they tell to themselves.

Once someone has been dishonest about his true state of integrity, the lies pour forth not just flowing fully and easily, but with dynamic force of apparent belief: Credibility is shored up by the apparent confidence and sincerity. This is why it is called a “confidence game”. They are all cons. They all have to escalate to generate more and bigger lies to support the lies they’ve already told.

The Big Lies of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong

These are the main central lies which support the Cult of Herbert Armstrong in the various splinters:

  1. British Israelism
  2. Church History
  3. Prophecy
  4. Law keeping to gain salvation
  5. Respecting and declining to Authority is the greatest virtue

Without these, the Cult of Herbert Armstrong could not exist.

Making it all work

There is only way to make this all work: The Ninth Commandment, Thou Shalt not Bear False Witness, must be excised from the Ten Commandments. The leaders, ministers and administrators must gloss over and completely ignore this precept to make their cult work. If they could not lie, they could not do business. While they blast forth their evangelism, replete with Law Keeping, spreading the gospel of the Commandments and championing the Old Covenant, they must conveniently ignore being the watchmen to Corporations to tell them that lying is resoundingly condemned in the New Testament by Jesus himself and that Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning. Include that in the meeting with world leaders telling them about the two trees and see how far you get.

Now the amazing thing is that it really all does work. The ministers lie and the people lap it up. One only need look at the double talk of Ronald Weinland over at False Prophet Ronald Weinland to see the abject nonsense of it all. The problem is that he is just an example of a liar who got caught and went to prison. The same sort of lies lay in the weeds at the other 300 to 700+ sects of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong. All you have to do is do a little research and find the lies and lies and lies and lies — they never stop. Roderick Meredith said, “I have never committed a major sin since being baptized”. Maybe he doesn’t know what major sin is, but whatever it is (like lying and being a false prophet — which reward is death), he’s committed it — not only committed it, but has for a very long time and it appears he will not repent but he will keep it up until he dies.

Reaction to enforced lies

There is an observable cycle consistent with those who are living under an oppressive regime where they are lied to but must act as if the lies are the truth and perfectly rational.

First, the people probably don’t know they are being lied to.

Second, the people learn about the lies but they cannot do anything about it. In this phase, there is usually much grumbling behind the scenes, but the people continue to submit to the lies in misery.

Third, there is a glimmer of hope that there may be a way of escape from the oppressive lies. The expectation of the people is lifted and they have hope.

Fourth, they find their way and they rebel. Mostly they will leave.

Fifth, often the people will seek retribution.

The end result is that if there is a steady progression to this end, there will be freedom. Lies are slavery. They are also often costly.

Despite the popular opinion

The majority is wrong. We know it feels right to think that if a person who lies is sincere, he is not a liar. This is wrong.

People who lie are liars.

Lies have consequences.

Honesty is still the best policy and it always will be.

Can we have the Ninth Commandment back now?

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Arrogance

While the actor Johnny Depp was still a bachelor, a single man asked him if he could give advice on dating and Johnny Depp’s response was something like:

Don’t ask me, I don’t know, I’m as screwed up as everybody else.

It’s a good honest answer of the sort we wish we could get from the leaders and ministers of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong: Herbert Armstrong never gave such answers himself — being a “know it all” kind of End Time Apostle — and his followers since have followed in the same rut he established decades ago in the last century, being full of instant answers backed by booklets, literature, magazines and websites of every stripe answering every kind of question and even answering quite a few that were never asked, projecting full confidence that their answers are all true, useful, scientific and unassailable.

The Cult of Herbert Armstrong is full of itself, puffed up in full arrogance, confident in its overweening ego, that the only truth is here with them and you dare not go anywhere else because, if you do, disasters will surely follow, you will be in deep trouble, you will have terrible problems, living in want and fear with no one to rescue you: You will be sorry, because you should have listened! The entire venue is designed to put you in fear so you will submit to the superiority of those who dominate and manipulate you. These self-made Gurus are experts in every subject — at least every subject of any importance. They are the only ones with wisdom and knowledge of any use.

These arrogant Gurus suck you in with something you’ve never thought of, attracting you with curiosity, snaring you initially with something you agree and believe in, gaining your trust with something familiar and then leading you down the primrose path of kook insanity.

Here is an analogy which may help you understand the process:

The world is NOT Flat!!!! We can prove that the earth is absolutely NOT Flat!!!! Brethren (gaining your trust by sucking you into the conspiracy of the brotherhood), you KNOW what I am saying is true!!!! You KNOW I have the truth!!!! You all know (making you part of a collective) the Earth is not flat!!!! People who tell you the earth is flat are WRONG!!!! They know it is wrong, yet they continue to spread this terrible lie!!! I can prove the world is not flat!! You know what I say is true!!! Haven’t you wondered about this truth???!!!? Have you proved it for yourself???!!!?? Write for our free booklets, The Earth is NOT Flat and Seven Proofs the Earth is not Flat! You need this information, never brought to you before!! For 1900 years, this truth has been hidden — a few have known — but now you can know!!! There is no obligation, no one will call on you — it is all free of charge.

Now you know the world is not flat, but did you know that the sun revolves around the earth???!!!??? You may not have thought about it, but you see it every day: The sun comes up over the horizon of the round earth and runs its course in the heavens and sets in the West!!! You’ve never heard this truth before! Scientists are trying to cover this up! But don’t believe me, believe your Bible! The Earth is round and it is in the center of the Universe because God has chosen us to make us gods! I am the only one with this truth! You can become God as God is God, but only if you believe in the truth of key to Godhood, which is that the sun revolves around the earth!!!! Be sure to write for our free booklet, You can become God because the Sun Revolves Around the Earth!

This is all delivered with confidence to the point of arrogance so you will believe that he believes and in believing he believes, you will believe.

Johnny Depp said:

I think everybody’s nuts.

There may be some truth to that.

Consider the absolute arrogance of a man who belongs to an organization and then begins to think that he, and he alone, has been touched by God with an understanding that no one else has, and his mission is now to go forth to preach this new truth to everyone, no matter how silly and stupid it is. Often, this “revelation” is accompanied by a psychotic break, leading to the manic phase of the bipolar disease cycle. This self-styled Guru will insist that he was humbled — a recounting of his initial depression — where he was nothing but “burned out junk”, but when the manic phase kicks in, he will be able to recount the “joy” that his God has renewed him and given him a spirit of understanding that others do not have. And then we are off and running.

Even as unqualified as our new Guru may be, steeped in arrogant incompetence, he manages to dig himself deeper into his pit of arrogance studying without any real understanding of subjects he’s undertaken in his pursuit of his new “truth”. He’s already lost his business / job. He is mentally incapacitated. Yet he is self-deluded that he’s been given brilliance given to him by the endorphins stimulated by sleep deprivation in his manic mode. He has “up” times and he has “down” times. Sometimes the “down” times leave him in such a state of depression he can’t even get out of bed, or, if he does, he won’t be up until mid afternoon. He can disappear and be unavailable for weeks at a time, shunning human contact or at least severely limiting it. After months of this, he finally emerges fully engaged in arrogant narcissism to take on the world as some new savior just emerging from his cocoon. He then thunders his message to the world. Or if he’s like Robert Thiel, he does significant squeaking.

The problem is that arrogance is infectious, like a virus that mutates as it is transmitted from person to person. Once caught, the arrogance does its damage and often becomes chronic. Now when it is transmitted from Guru to simple follower it is transmogrified to be an arrogance that the follower now knows special secret knowledge — but much less than the Guru. This sort of infection makes the follower proud, but it also propels him or her to infect others, but in the process, the followers do not gain infected followers for themselves, but direct the newly diseased to the Guru.

Moreover, the Guru, finding a modest success in infecting others through his arrogance and making them arrogant themselves, but still subservient to him as “Patient Zero”, he trains some of a small cadre of followers in his special laboratory of infectious virtual mental disease to be special carriers of the virus of arrogance. These manifest the disease with different symptoms: They are special and seize arrogant power over the followers of the Guru while remaining in his domain of disease. They lord it over the followers as being superior by virtue of the fact that they know more crap than the follower simpletons do and the followers are impressed with the advanced qualities of the leaders as being superior to them.

It should be noted that this sort of arrogance of ignorance is widely spread. According to the Watchers of Deniers, scientific literacy has reached ever plunging lows showing that United States Adults and Students believe:

  1. Sound travels faster than light (14%);
  2. Disagree that the center of the earth is very hot (20%);
  3. Disagree that the Earth goes around the Sun once a year (33%);
  4. Disagree that astrology is not at all scientific (41%);
  5. Think antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria (45%);
  6. Think that ordinary tomatoes do not have genes but genetically  modified tomatoes do (49%).

According to the article — to be much more clear — one-third of of American Adults / Students believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Really.

They believe.

33%

We’re stunned.

Very disturbing.

Imagine if you must, how much damage an arrogant Guru can do?

Imagine if you must, how much damage an arrogant Guru can do by inducing his followers to believe in British Israelism as the Key to Prophecy — managing to get all of the prophecies wrong — but having the followers believe that he is the End Time Elijah, which we must point out, that Elijah was a prophet, so no matter how you slice it, Herbert Armstrong actually was a false prophet.

There is, however, a built in mechanism to defend the arrogance of the leader, authorities and followers against being inoculated with the truth: Bald face arrogant lies. The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God by Dr. David V. Barrett quotes Richard Nichols, Herbert Armstrong and Richard T. Rittenbaugh to show how this works:

The offshoots deal with the problem of Armstrong’s failed prophecies in different ways. Richard C. Nickles, of Giving and Sharing Ministry, quotes Armstrong himself from an early World Tomorrow radio broadcast:

A terrible famine is coming on the United States, that is going to ruin us as a nation inside of less than twenty more years. Alright, I stuck my neck out right there. You just wait twenty years and see whether I told you the truth. God says, if a man tells you what’s going to happen, wait and see. If it doesn’t happen, he was not speaking the word of God, he’s speaking out of his own mind. If it happens, you know God sent him.

Nickels comments, “The twenty years is long past! Herbert Armstrong labeled himself a false prophet.”

But Richard T. Ritenbaugh, of the Church of the Great God, comes to a different conclusion. Although he accepts that Armstrong “made many predictions during his ministry, and many of them have not come to pass. Some were plain wrong. Some were vague. Some were specific,” he then argues:

So what are all those predictions Herbert Armstrong made? Rather than call them prophecies (which they were not) and him a false prophet (which he was not), his predictions were more correctly speculations, theories based on true but insufficient and unclear evidence. Speculation is not sin.

It is if you sign it “In Jesus’ Name”.

Richard T. Rittenbaugh.

Liar.

What a Dick.

At minimum, a religious leader that makes wild prognostications [make that read: Prophecies] which do not come to pass, simply cannot be trusted to get anything right [make that read: Is a false prophet]. Read 1975 in Prophecy again [published in 1956] and if you aren’t embarrassed to have believed it at some point, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

It is arrogance that moves the leaders to declare that white is black, black is white, lies are truth, truth is lies, love is hate, hate is love, poverty is prosperity, prosperity is poverty, speculation isn’t prophecies and that failed prophecies don’t make a man a false prophet, but it gets worse, because if it were just the arrogance of the leaders, the membership would bolt like scared rabbits.

It is arrogance that keeps the members in place, even after their leader is proved to be wrong, a false prophet, crazy and even a convicted felon. Members of Ronald Weinland’s Church of God – Preaching the Kingdom of God (PKG) continue to not just follow him but continue to give him their money so his wife can go travelling, buy underwear from Victoria Secret and have all those diamonds she sports, even as he sits in prison for Income Tax Evasion as a convicted felon. He isn’t going anywhere for the next three years and neither are his followers. They believe in him. They lap up all the crap he spews at them. They won’t leave. They continue to defend him, even though his absolute set dates (multiple and progressive) for the return of Jesus Christ come and go, come and go and still, no Jesus. The next date is coming up less than 50 days from now. It too, will come and go, but the PKG membership will stay because of their infernal arrogance. They will not admit they are wrong. They will not change. They don’t stop following their false prophet proved wrong again and again. That takes a LOT of arrogance.

1956

History has repeated itself: You just wait twenty years and see whether I told you the truth. God says, if a man tells you what’s going to happen, wait and see. If it doesn’t happen, he was not speaking the word of God, he’s speaking out of his own mind. If it happens, you know God sent him. The only thing that is different is the time period. Ronald Weinland said essentially the same thing. He’s proved himself a false prophet. Since the other Cult of Herbert Armstrong sects have been making the same prophecies (but most don’t set specific dates — it’s always 5 to 7 years away), they too are false prophets. Ronald Weinland is just one who’s the worst one caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Roderick Meredith has been able to be a false prophet for 60 years — a record hardly anyone in the CoHA sects can rival, but he keeps going on and on and on (he may die shortly, so if he does before this article is published, I apologize, but, after all, I didn’t prophesy it, one way or another).

The arrogance of the leaders and the membership is asinine, but one man, Dixon Cartwright, has put together The Journal which manages to keep the arrogance alive and prosper in one place. He knows that most of the stuff in the rag is pure drivel, but he publishes it anyway. He gives nearly everyone to have a dialog, even though it should be obvious they are spewing. The Journal actively supports and promotes arrogance in its own way, to keep the arrogance alive, thereby giving the arrogant advertisers opportunity to promote their emphatic empathy entropy and the writers an opportunity to have arguments which are totally meaningless given that the assumptions upon which they are based are quite daft. There is month after month, page after page publications of stupidity disguised as arrogant confidence.

No one is about to give up the arrogance. It holds everything and everybody in place. It is the glue that holds the cultists together, except they aren’t glued together, they are screwed together — but they are too bull headed to admit there’s anything wrong with their wrong headed religion. It can’t work and it doesn’t, but they aren’t about to admit it because of their arrogance, so the dysfunctional disease continues unabated. A few escape, but often it takes quite a lot at the personal level to prompt them to leave when they get to the point they just can’t stand it any more.

And after they do leave, they look back at the arrogant “friends” and “family” they left behind, with their glorious erstwhile leaders, and see, even if not perceive, the great arrogance of the cult which held them prisoners for so long.

There are over 7 billion people on planet earth. Each one of us is just a small part of a giant crowd. Very few rise to the level of being noticed — but what if, what if, you had something that distinguished you as special? Suppose you had secret knowledge? Suppose that you were one of just a small few that was selected of God to have truth that no one else has? Suppose that you could feel different, special, superior? Suppose that you are so very special that you have the entitlement to be arrogant? Suppose you will become a king, priest, god, to lord over all your former critics, enemies and those who don’t even notice you, let alone pay any attention to you? You can now ignore science. You can now ignore the experts. You can now ignore anyone who disagrees with you. You can remain confident that you are better than anyone else (except your Guru and his appointees) and no one can tell you anything. You are right and everyone else is wrong. You are better. You are superior. Soon, the whole world will see how special you are. You will be validated. You are a winner!

This is really heady stuff. It is the stuff of arrogance. It is for losers.

If you need to know, the earth is not flat and the earth revolves around the sun.

The rest you should be able to figure out for yourself if you’re not too arrogant.