The Painful Truth-Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God
Understanding the psychology of religious seduction and spiritual abuse.
I was drawn in by the WCG back in 1968, and, being a teen-ager, I didn’t truly suffer that much. My parents, however, were broken apart by the damn divorce-remarriage doctrine. They stayed separated for about a year and a half, but finally saw the light and and reunited. They enjoyed another twenty years together before my mother died.
The founders understood quite well that no person, especially themselves, had the knowledge or authority to speak for God, but they also intended that the government could, in no fashion, interfere with the free exercise of religion, not because they wished the government to be subject to God, but because they knew that no man could ever prove himself to be a representative of God.
To be free, in the sense I had discovered freedom, I could no longer “renounce” myself. Every decision had to be mine, along with the responsibility and outcome of that decision, and I had to accept that responsibility for myself….
Blast from the past…