Category: Douglas Becker

I know, I know!

The last time in the 1970s we sort of missed the Beast of Revelation!

We were so sure it was Joseph Hayden… no, that’s not right… it was like a name of a composer… was it? was it? Yes! Herr Strauss!

Herr Strauss was a prominent political figure somewhere in Germany and he had all — I mean ALL — of the appearances of the qualifications of being the prime candidate of the Beast Power! He even visited our college campus, although we had to do the hypocritical thing of hiding all our literature that called him the Beast of Revelation. What a public relations nightmare if he ever found out. We figured, though, that with a little PR, we could con him into saving our little insignificant but mostly beautiful campus through The Great Tribulation and would preserve it so that it would be intact when we reversed everything, took over the world and became the Real Beast Power — under Jesus Christ, of course.

How could we have been so very wrong?!?!!!

No.

It isn’t possible!

I don’t believe it!

Anyway, we have the one and only prime — and when I say prime, I mean truly prime hunk of meat on the hoof, so to speak — candidate to carry out Satan’s Plan of Domination to take over the world, sort of like the Brain in Pinky and the Brain!

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the Beast of Revelation!

This time for sure.

We know this because he described himself as “something of a political animal”.

You see!

A Beast for sure. He’s selected himself by his own words!

We now know for sure! We are absolute on our confidence we have found the Beast Power of Revelation, ready to ride the Scarlet Woman bareback!!! He is here! He is prepared! He’s our man!

Just don’t go and die on us, like the last one we were sure of did.

The noisy brain is well known concept among mental health professionals. Dr. John Ratey expanded on that concept in his book, Shadow Syndromes. Autism can lead to a condition where most of the brain generates an electrical storm when someone touches those who have it. Schizophrenia causes overload from too much mental noise. Teens with ADHD notice when they are on Ritalin that the noise level drops. One son told her mother when he got back from school after taking Ritalin, “Mom, it’s so quiet!”. Mentally ill people generally have noisy brains from a genetic predisposition. Often stress can set in motion a psychotic break when a person can no longer tolerate the noise aggravated by stress.

At the second Hope and Recovery Conference I attended, my wife and I were sitting at a table during lunch with a young woman working in the mental health profession. I had realized from my experience with those who were mentally ill that the standard mental illnesses, such as Bipolar Disease, Schizophrenia and Psychosis involve distorted perception. The young woman said she always knew it: It made sense. She was very unhappy when she couldn’t demonstrate that she had ever thought it about it before.

That’s the trick, you know: People say things others immediately recognize as an aphorism, and they believe that they have always believed it. This is, of course, distorted perception.

Distorted perception certainly seems to be implicated in a noisy brain. Moreover, as the “noise level” in the brain increases, the person usually becomes dysfunctional.

Organizations often seem to be victimized by distorted perception resulting in a high noise level which leads to a completely dysfunctional environment. Communications break down from the noise, there is a lack of standards, there is no auditing of results or ongoing processes; in fact, there can be no measurement of any kind of metrics, since nobody seems to know what the immediate and long term goals are.

Armstrongists have a firm belief that they know where they are going: The Kingdom of God! Armstrongists know how to get there: Keep the Ten Commandments — along with a whole lot of other stuff they can’t prove that’s required. Armstrongists know the future because they have the only roadmap on the face of the earth — the one created for them by Herbert Armstrong. To tell an Armstrongist that he or she does not have a clue will only end up their telling you that you have “A root of bitterness” — a self fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

What the Armstrongists don’t seem to understand is how utterly pathetic and directionless they are. They got that way because of the very common structure found universally among those with noisy brains:

1. Lack of planning
2. Lack of commitment
3. Lack of communications
4. Autocratic control
5. Arbitrary change in direction
6. Noisy brains [a tautology here!]
7. Unrestricted flow of ideas
8. Lack of discipline
9. No documentation

Armstrongist community leaders are infamous for these traits.

It can’t be healthy.

Anyone going back through the history of postings in The Painful Truth should begin to get a pattern of the scenario that results from the noisy brain. For example, one man working at Ambassador College noted to his superiors that there were patterns to income. What a concept — that there were reasons for the ebb and flow of money, and, if they noted, analyzed and graphed the waning and waxing of the dollars, associated with various events during the year — such as feast offerings — the administration should be able to plan. He was rebuffed, of course. No planning required. Just have faith in God: He will provide. Of course, Proverbs does advise us to be diligent to know the state of our flocks and herds, but Armstrongists don’t actually use Scripture for a practical guide in their lives. They are fools: They only listen to what they want to hear.

That is why, when you point out that British Israelism is a lie and Herbert Armstrong was a false prophet — 1975 never happened — they bluster about how we should respect Herbert Armstrong because he brought us the truth. The truth?! Wait! What?! Hey, hey now. Let’s face it: He just made stuff up. Mostly. Or robbed other people’s ideas and pretended they were his. Two weeks ago I talked with a minister of the Church of God Seven Day. He brought up the fact that Herbert Armstrong plagiarized material from their booklets and then the Worldwide Church of God sued the Church of God Seventh Day. It didn’t get far when the CoG7 produced the booklet they wrote in the 1930s from some file in a basement somewhere. But that’s the danger from all that noise, you see: They make big mistakes because of the delusions from their distorted perceptions. This isn’t to say that the Armstrongist community leaders are mentally ill. It’s more complicated than that. They are also often criminals.

All of the noise leads to chaos.

So many things in the Armstrongist community make no sense at all: UCG wanting to relocate near a Superfund Toxic Waste Site [now there’s a real failure to plan]. How about the front page of The Good News with that picture of the latest, greatest tool of God’s Work, the IBM Data Cell. It was back to the hard disk drives within the year because the product was a failure and not such Good News after all. The Armstrongists are terribly inconsistent. Sure, they keep the Sabbath. Then they go out and make their manservant and maidservant work for wages on it. That is not consistent with Nehemiah and Ezra. If you’re going to keep the Law of Scripture, then you need to use all the Old Testament Scriptures, if you expect to be an effective Old Testament Christian.

The folks who worked in the Data Processing Center at Ambassador College told me of the internal chaos in the Data Center there. They had to roll with the punches. One described how they had to stack chairs on top of tables and work there while a channel was cut in the cement in the floor. And you have to know, not all of those runs on the Sabbath were totally unattended, though most were.

People would be accepted for a job at Ambassador College, sell their homes, pack up, move clear across the United States, only to discover that their job with the church had disappeared on the way. This didn’t just happen once.

I remember well in the local church, a girl who had appendicitis. She could not get treatment from a doctor. She survived, but her health was never what it should have been. Just 10 years later, the church changed the doctrine so people could see doctors and “be healed” by them. The ministers were advised to hide the faith healing to prevent the church from being sued: Lie for the sake of the church.

The real indication of how chaotic the church really was, though, lies in the fact that Garner Ted Armstrong committed date rape against, by his own estimate by 1972, 200 coeds. In spite of the fact that his father knew about this [and even though he claimed he didn’t, he was still culpable — but, then, he really did know] and was an accessory after the fact. These were criminal acts. Herbert Armstrong covering it up was a criminal act. They should have all gone to prison. Roderick Meredith — that paragon of virtue [in the utterly ironic sense] — also knew about it, did some mental wringing of his hands, gritted his teeth, and preached sermons about keeping God’s Law. The men who attended AC and became ministers knowingly married the women who had been raped. Then they went on to allow themselves to be directed by the very man who had raped the women who had become their wives. This, in turn, resulted in a great deal of bitterness and years of anger for those ministers who compromised themselves by keeping quiet, saying and doing nothing, tolerating the intolerable, pretending to be good friends with GTA and Herbert Armstrong, all the while driving themselves to distraction with the noise of the dysfunctional environment leading to the utter chaos. Now some of them, at least, have a psychiatrist treating them for clinical depression. That is something of an irony, given the teaching of the original Radio Church of God.

The Armstrongist community makes no sense. Furthermore, they can’t prove that they can get you to the Kingdom of God. The leaders are of no worth, and, today, are struggling themselves to come up with a reason for their own being. There doesn’t seem to be much more than keeping their salary, trying to keep a cushy but dysfunctional job and getting retirement. That — and for some of those in the upper echelon of the so-called leadership, which is nothing of the sort — basking in the glow of people who worship them in their idolatrous admiration. Furthermore, even though they know all this, they won’t change a thing. They don’t to risk anything left of the Armstrongist Empire of which they may still have a piece.

It’s like the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges trying to maintain the Winchester Mansion.

You really should ask yourself the question, just how can these people make my life better? They don’t seem to be doing a very good job of running their own lives. Why should we expect anything at all from them except noisy dysfunctional chaos?

The best peace you can have is moving as far away from the Armstrongist community as possible, for, if you keep drinking from the poisoned well, you will take on their chaos.

My book, Assertive Incompetence — An Introduction to Management Malpractice, has been a worthless failure, because… we’ll get to that at the end.

Armstrongists don’t realize that there is an entire Seventh Day Church of God out there, publishing literature world wide and keeping the Feasts annually, including the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles with the Seventh Day Church of God is a totally different experience than the one in the Armstrongist churches of God. It is more like a Bible Camp. Actually, it is a Bible Camp. There may be some tents that people put up, but there are campers these days with a bed and a simple sink and toilet with running water and enough electricity for a light and a few small appliances. There is generally a communal kitchen where the ministers and members together cooperatively prepare the meals. There are a few motel style cabins available. You see where the Feast was kept in Washington State in 2008 here:

http://www.fruitlandbiblecamp.com/fbc_2008_002.htm

The “services” are quite a bit different too. It isn’t all hymns, opening prayer, sermonette, hymn, announcements, hymn, sermon, hymn and closing prayer, although there is often a flavor of that. Services are bit more informal and there may be, occasionally, some gospel singing group come in and perform. There is Bible Study at 7:00 AM, breakfast, activities, services, lunch and… well, it varies. At night, around 7:30 PM, there’s another service with a sermon. It is as quaint and rustic as you might expect, and about 25 miles from the nearest town of any size.

The Seventh Day Church of God has been keeping the Feasts since 1919 when Gilbert G. Rupert championed them.

The Seventh Day Church of God has noted the problems with the official Jewish calendar in general use: The Spring Equinox is not April 6 / 7. That’s not scientific. Therefore, they prepare their own holy day calendar which is published and sent world wide each year. Paul Woods is the minister who currently maintains the calendar. I did talk to Mr. Woods [who is the current editor of The Herald of Truth] about the calendar in 2008, briefly, but there were a couple of other things we discussed. One of them was about the Lord’s Supper and the Passover. Those are separate events as one can see from the Scriptures — 24 hours apart. The Days of Unleavened Bread begin on the evening of the Passover — which the Armstrongists keep instead as the Night to Be Much Observed.

One of the things we discussed was the topic of Herbert Armstrong’s baptism. It turns out that Herbert Armstrong was baptized by A.H. Stith, of the Seventh Day Church of God and the baptism was witnessed by Mr. Stith’s daughter. My response was, “Herbert Armstrong lied? I’m shocked!”. I wasn’t really, but fortunately, Paul Woods has a fine sense of irony as well as being a very nice minister.

That the Seventh Day Church of God keeping the Feasts falls well beneath the radar of the Armstrongists, should not be a surprise. Who would tell you? Herbert Armstrong? What incentive would he have?

Nevertheless, there are some customs and practices which are universal. One of those involves the power and privilege of special classes of people in the Churches of God. Remember that the Sabbath keeping Churches of God have been around a lot longer than the Armstrongist ones. People grow up in families in the Churches of God and they know each other with a long history of association. Word gets around and they are a tight knit group.

A family was going to attend the Feast of Tabernacles with the Seventh Day Church of God. The rule was, first come, first served. If you got there late and didn’t get the better accommodations, that was just too bad. Like or lump it. Except, except. Some of the ministers were going to come in late, so, against the official rules, certain accommodations were set aside to make provisions for them. Sound familiar? So the family came to the Feast in plenty of time, but were told that they would have to take other accommodations — the not, shall we say, very good ones. So the teenager, Nicholas, had to stay in a very small cramped space in one of these campers. Night passes. He sleeps. He wakes up and 18 inches from his face is this big RAT! He shrieks! They’re outta there. That’s just what power and special privilege can do for you.

And where there’s one rat, you can be sure that there are plenty more.

You can be sure the ministry had better digs. After all, aren’t they worthy of a double portion? Maybe so, back in the days of the First Century AD, when ministers could be and were martyred. These days, the real risk for the ministry is dropping dead of a heart attack or stroke from excessive consumption of meat and drink.

If you were looking for the finer things of life at the Feast, count your blessings.

Rats!

How disappointing.

The story is reminiscent of the one where a poor married man with an unbelieving spouse came to the Feast alone and ended up in a motel room. First night off, he hears noises. He turns on the light. The cockroaches scramble for cover. He’s got an infestation. He goes to the motel manager, tells him the story. The motel manager says, “There you go, just keep the lights on!”. The poor man left.

Rats and cockroaches aren’t the only infestations in this world. There are many more, for example, termites.

My first experience with termites was as a lad. My dad had a pile of wood and pointed out some termites in it. Fortunately, that was pretty much my last experience with them. They are so insidious: They come into a building and set up shop. They start doing what comes naturally and begin eating up the support timbers. They are good at hiding. If they happen to break through the wall, they cover it up immediately to prevent discovery. No one hears or sees them until the day the whole place collapses.

If you are not convinced, then you should see articles about the Formosan Termite imported in the wood of the crates made to ship property of GIs home from the Pacific after World War II. They have made a meal of much of the New Orlean’s French Quarter. They have spread far and wide throughout much of United States warm and wet South. They are aggressive and love all things cellulose, including, but not restricted to, wood, paper, fruits, nuts, cork and live plants, and they’ll gnaw or squeeze their petite little bodies through virtually anything to get to their food, including electrical wires, plaster, plastic, and the tiniest cracks in concrete. They get into everything.

Several tell of the story of the water skier on Lake Loma that came down in on an island on the lake into a nest of poisonous snakes and, according to the account, died instantly. I have my doubts: There was probably a lot of pain and agony for a few minutes.

Most of the time, an infestation begins with only one. That was certainly the case with the Radio Church of God — which then became the Worldwide Church of God. And not to put too fine a point on it, after the nest is established, some break off to establish a new nest, and then, later, they break off, and so on and so on. The Tkatches were interesting because they were an internal infestation, infesting the infestation!

Now, Herbert Armstrong was bad enough, but Roderick Meredith has managed to spin off toxic infestations — a lot more than you may think. And, yes, United has managed to spin off dozens of infestations, while Gerald Flurry’s and John Rittenbaugh’s nests have been mostly contained, but Meredith has really done a lot of collateral damage in ways you can barely begin to imagine. Global: Now there’s a nest that managed to implode in on itself. The pests, sometimes called “ministers”, scurried off to invade communities far and wide. But you know, it isn’t like we shouldn’t have been able to see it coming: You should take a look again at his “Manpower Papers”. If that didn’t give us all a clue to the future, nothing would. These infestations always do what they are programmed by the Universe to do — what comes naturally to all psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. Without them, there would probably never be any infestations.

Today we will concentrate on a small infestation in Oregon which you may have never heard of: The Church of God in Peace and Truth — terms which are manifestly self contradictory. The progenitors of the nest are the Haneys, which, again, you are probably blessed never to have heard of.

Every year, it is always a challenge, for my wife wants to go somewhere really good for vacation. To me the Feast of Tabernacles is not a vacation. It is a lot of inconvenient effort which generally ends up to be “interesting” as in the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”. Last year, I chose a spot which looked benign, Bend, Oregon. Safely nestled between the Independent’s Feast Site and United’s, I figured, what the hey, what could go wrong, right? We knew people who were relatively civilized who were attending, so it seemed like a good idea — sort of like the movie, “The Magnificent Seven” where the guy explained why he jumped into a cactus patch without any clothes on: “It seemed like a good idea at the time”.

It was a promising start. Nestled in the high desert country of Oregon, the Shiloh Inn in Bend had a one bedroom apartment with a full kitchen, a leather couch and big leather chairs in front of the fireplace. It was the nicest accommodations there — and most expensive. The entire Church of God in Peace and Truth had come to the Shiloh Inn complex to keep the Feast of Tabernacles and my wife and I had the best accommodations, right across from the conference room where the services were held. The deacon and the deaconess who had been a part of the defense with United against the UCG stalker at the court that issued the restraining order were there as well, since their son was married to the daughter of the presiding minister. The people attending were really nice people. The main congregation was based out of Gold Hill, where there were about 50 people. The minister, Don Haney, was first in Worldwide, then in Global. The main congregation was from Living and they ended up the way they were because their Living minister was very terrible to them in ways that are hard to imagine, but have become standard fare. We were well set up and things looked promising (for a change).

I knew from the first that trouble was ahead. Don Haney said in the first third of his sermon, “I am going overtime” — in a church that proclaimed they lived by the Ten Commandments, one of which is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”!?! Stealing our time?! That’s just rude! He saw me cross my arms and we were off and running in an adversarial relationship. I got to see how bad things were by reading the first few chapters of his booklet [I couldn’t stomach reading the whole thing], “Satan’s Seat of Tyranny,” where he took his misgivings concerning the Living Church of God and Roderick Meredith to a whole new plateau. From the front cover: “Its damaging rule over the Church of God” and “The bonds of restraint broken by the freedom of God’s Truth!”. From the back middle paragraph:

“However, Much of God’s Church Has Been Subjected to a Pyramid of Power and Intimidation, Which Has Hurt and Unnecessarily Divided God’s People, Thereby Impeding the Spreading of the Good News. Those in “POWER” Have interpreted Scripture for and Exercised Authority Over Those They Have Subjected to Themselves for So Long That They Seem to Have Cultivated an Even Greater Influence Over Some in God’s Church Than the Direct Authority of God’s Written Word!”.

I have to admit that I understand the sentiment: Roderick Meredith  is like a community organizer whose sole purpose is to create havoc, divide people, for the sole purpose of self aggrandizement. His swelling ego was a result of his winning the Golden Glove regional boxing championship and then finding his way to Herbert Armstrong who was impressed that Meredith was “a man of quality”. It’s all heady stuff to be set on a pedestal by a highly successful cult leader. The admiration and its results differ little from the current U.S. government political landscape. Roderick Meredith ended up having a lot of power and influence: He was over the students at Ambassador College and he directed the ministers from headquarters. After Herbert Armstrong, he was a god in his own right. His opinions were law and he could oppress people, insult and abuse them, just about any way he chose as a harsh, hard slave merciless slave driver who assumed that he was a Man’s Man because of his being a winner. He didn’t see the real truth: He was a testosterone poisoned, brain shunken despot whose cruelty was legendary. He ended up spawning rebellious leaders who couldn’t wait to get out from under his control, only to set up their own fiefdoms of despotism. After all, he bankrupted his own church, Global, just out of spite.

It was as if Roderick Meredith said, “You haven’t treated me as the GOD I know I am, so I’m going to sink you and do a number on you!”. The sermon in Kansas City was one to remember when he told his congregation that he “would abide by the decision of the council” of elders in Global. He lied. You have to remember that Roderick Meredith has said, “I have never committed a MAJOR sin”. You know, like Adultery. At least not in the carnal sense. I suspect he has missed something in Revelation 22. You know the part where it says that liars will not enter into the Kingdom of God? He doesn’t seem very well positioned for repentance. I occasionally wonder in an off moment whether he has committed the unpardonable sin. It is this rebellion that has, in itself, spawned even more rebellion among those chaffing under his harsh relentless despotism, promulgating even more despots rebelling against his egocentric malignancy. I do often wish he would repent to reduce the massive harm he has done, but I doubt that he can really face himself in the spiritual mirror.

Trust me when I say that Satan’s Seat of Tyranny is the worst written booklet I have ever seen, but is filled with totally rank hypocrisy. [And yes, the author DID capitalize all those words!] He took his hatred and anger of the administration of Roderick Meredith to a whole new level. His basic theory: We will all come to live under the Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies of Scripture, and, from the Return of Jesus Christ on, it will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as the judges determine — and to hell with what Jesus said in Matthew 5:38-39. He was the very picture of the Pharisee as an Old Testament Christian. Here’s how it works: You are just fine as long as you do everything he tells you to do and wants you to do, without any hesitation. He is perfect. And under his administration, there’s no room for mercy, just blood letting. His congregation was fine with that. I suspect they were Stockholmed. If Haney really wanted to see Satan’s Seat of Tyranny, all he had to do is look at his backside in a mirror.

I met a young man at the Feast. His father was an Elder. His mother was with United. He had set up shop, so to speak, with his girlfriend in Eugene, and while things had started out fine with their live in arrangements, he was out of a job and not doing well. He got enough money to leave the Feast in the middle, to go back to his live-in girlfriend and get into the State’s job program. Since Don Haney made so much of how we were all going to [be forced to] keep all the Old Testament Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies, that I told him my expectation: That he, as the minister of the church, would obey the judgments in the New Testament and obey the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 5 and put the fornicator out of the church. His response, “He’s left the Feast”. No can do. Not my problem. It took care of itself. And the whole congregation felt good about themselves for having such “love”.

No wait! What!?! Hey, hey now!

You see, I didn’t really care about the man committing the fornication. This was a matter for the congregation and the minister. After all, if you proclaim that the Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies are going to be kept — all the way for beatings and replacing sheep and oxen, to death for those who commit kidnapping — surely, SURELY, the minister is going to keep what the New Testament says to do in his own congregation today. The truth is, he won’t. That also explains why Garner Ted Armstrong was able to get away with committing date rape with 200+ [by his own estimate] Ambassador College Coeds, in full view of Herbert Armstrong, who was responsible for the whole mess. Instead of prison, he got lots of money, fame and position — until he didn’t, only because the whole matter became too public and SOMEBODY HAD TO DO SOMETHING, even though the damage was done: Leaving a legacy of hopelessness for the ministers who later married the coeds and have had to deal with clinical depression from their anger ever since. It’s too bad so many get locked into the infestation in their warm little nests.

In the end, we lived well — even in the ankle deep snow that fell in early October, snarling up traffic and making it impossible for some to get to services in Sun River and Redmond. We sat in the big comfortable leather chairs in front of the fireplace in our own little fiefdom. We ate well [I fancy myself to be a good cook]. We slept soundly. We had peace, though not the peace of the Church of God. If living well is the best revenge, then we had our revenge. It is also best to observe a drama without getting drawn into it. We also really yucked it up by taking Haney’s preposperous propositions to their logical extreme: We supposed that we should all carry paddles at the Feast for when we needed to relieve ourselves! No one could figure out why my wife and I were breaking out in laughter! Hey, it’s the Law… or maybe Statute: We have to do it! That’s what everyone will do in the Millennium, so we’d better get used to it now! Forget toilets and water closets: God wants us to carry paddles!

The people in the Church of God in Peace and Truth are still nice people, except for the minister. I assume that afterwards, the minister took his posse and went hunting in the wilds of Oregon as he said he would. He lives a comfortable life and he is master of all he surveys. Things would be perfect for him, except for ALL THAT ANGER. It just can’t be good for you to hold it like that. It’s all a comfortable little nest of infestation which will continue for some time to come.

Near the end, I encountered someone I had first met in the Radio Church of God in 1963. I told him United was a cult. He told me that I had the root of bitterness. It is interesting that when an infestation is exposed, the nest bands together immediately to cover up their incursion. That’s how they manage to stay the cults they are, and “the root of bitterness” is yet another tool of the tools who make up the infestation. It’s what narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths always do: Seek first the destruction of credibility of truth seekers and ye shall inherit the nest of infestation. Next time you hear that you have a root of bitterness, just point out that they are attempting a coverup — they don’t want the truth at all because they like their lies too much — and they’ve just proved the points you just made [“Truth! You can’t handle the truth!”]

This year, the Church of God in Peace and Truth moves their venue for the Feast of Tabernacles from the desert mountain high country [God’s country?] to the beach [and there will be no more oceans] at the Embassy Suites in Mandalay Beach, California. For us? Never again. High concept about how things should work out is often disappointing in unanticipated ways — and we do not fear a tidle wave — it’s just that the hypocrisies of these infestations are not something I want during the only really good time to get away — even if it isn’t my idea of a fun time. I’ve had one too many laps in the cesspools of the Churches of God to appreciate the kind of hypocrisy home grown in the toxic infestations of hypocrisy. Better it is to be with someone who’s made a terrible mistake and learned from it than to join with those who are self righteous ungodly godly people who ARE IN CHARGE! I can get all I want of that from work at taxpayer expense.

I don’t know, but I suppose that if I were God, I would wonder if the leaders of the Churches of God would ever do what I said to do of their own volition.

The infestation of the Armstrongists is the worst kind of infestation: The leaders are parasites, living off the host. They take the resources of the host and live from it, providing nothing in return and making the host progressively more sick. When the host can provide no more, it is cast off. The infestation of the Armstrongist parasites then moves on and finds another host to live on.

Yellowstone Park has signs, DON’T FEED THE BEARS! Each year there are a few who do not heed the warning. But the bears have such appeal. So some roll down their windows and give the poor bears a sandwich. Have you ever heard the expression, Hungry as a bear? It’s a reality. The people who run out of food soon find the bear goes from fun to frightening. They will tear the car apart looking for more food. So the Armstrongists seemed to have such appeal. We fed them our “tithes”. That wasn’t enough. They wanted offerings. Then they wanted long term loans. Then, heck, send everything. Then they tore us apart. To add insult to injury, they grabbed the wheel and drove off, leaving us stranded along the side of the road. DON’T FEED THE BEARS! Let them survive or die in their natural habitat. Otherwise, you will have an infestation of parasites you will have a difficult time exterminating.

Moreover, all the sacrifices you have made for the parasite infestation — that made you feel so good about yourself — are completely useless, since you helped support something which was harmful, not just to yourself and your family, but to the rest of the Armstrongist community. Now the toxins left behind by the infestation are even harder to rid oneself from than the parasites themselves, because the toxins not only have weakened you, but left guilt and the feeling of stupidity besides. What you have to remember is that this is what they do and they are not really a part of you and never were. They just fed off of you. It will make it easier to walk away by putting the blame on the real culprits: They had a good spiel, we paid for it, now we have an opportunity to get better. Learn from the con and move on to live your own life, not theirs.

Like so many other kinds of infestations, those involving scoundrels often start in the same place and end the same way.

As for my book,  Assertive Incompetence — An Introduction to Management Malpractice, being a worthless failure, it’s all because the information is all there about narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths: Their methods, approaches and processes — but no one actually uses the information but me. Properly used, it could have prevented the current administration, but people love their little nests of infestations, living off of hope, which is merely an unfulfilled illusion, relying on useless saviors, which leads to disappointment.

That’s all I have to say. For now.