The Painful Truth-Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God

I wanted to draw attention to Al Dexter’s excellent article, “The God Factory“, and if you haven’t read it, it is well worth the read.

I agree with his statements in that essay, and I think it is an excellent foundation of study. My own studies paralleled it when I left the WCG.

As I was trying to figure things out, one of the “rebel” ministers recommended Eric Hoffer’s excellent study of cults and mass movements, called The True Believer. A statement in the front of the book caught my eye and has stuck with me through the years, and it fits in with Dexter’s article:

“There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi, and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing”.

Hoffer was able to describe the process, but he never quite figured out where it came from, except for the fact that it is somehow bound within our genetic system:

“When we speak of the family likeness of mass movements, we use the word ‘family’ in a taxonomical sense. The tomato and the nightshade are of the same family, the Solanaceae. Though the one is nutritious and the other poisonous, they have many morphological, anatomical, and physiological traits in common so that even the non-botanist senses a family likeness.”

The possible cause of this drive for order and sameness may have been discovered by Richard Dawkins, who authored The Selfish Gene in 1976.

Dawkins attributes the needs of religious proselytizing to what he calls “the genetic replicative algoprithm“. Basic the genetic replicative algorithm is the singular process within our genes to replicate themselves. That’s that they do, that’s their job, and in order to do their job, it becomes necessary to control the environment surrounding them in order to minimize change.

At the core of our beings is the need to simply make more like ourselves. At some point in history, however, humans started organizing empires and god-kings, and began building empires dedicated to the eternal” deities described in Dexter’s essay. They developed the social matrix that became the “God Factory”.

But why did they develop as they did? Philip Slater, author of a book called EarthWalk, may provide a key insight:

“A machinelike response in the face of danger had no real value until men began to make war on each other–it was of no use either in hunting or in surviving other predators. The most mechanical peoples won over those less so, so that a profound cultural selection took place. Evolution is full of such mistakes”.

A “Machinelike response” placed stress on standardization, sameness, exact replication, which, strangely enough, is exactly the process that ensures success of the genetic replicative algorithm.
Such reinforcements of culture would easily produce a Spartan culture that sought genetic excellence and fitness, promoted warmaking as the ultimate of masculinity, and eliminated malformed babies at birth.

This would describe the gradual evolution of religions, cults, and nationalist mass movements, supporting the needs of the genetic replicative algorithm. The linear extension of oneself into the environment in this fashion is called Narcissism. But even the narcissistic impulse may come from the genetic replicative algorithm, also producing the mechanical need to proselytize and “convert” more and more to a singular way of life.

This same process was strengthened greatly, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, by the printing press, which was merely the extension of exact replication, standardization, and duplication of a single process of thought.

McLuhan, in Understanding Media, wrote:

“Psychically, the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform, and continuous. The linearity, precision and uniformity of the arrangements of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance experience….the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education. For print presented an image of repeating precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies. Print released great psychic and social energies in the Renaissance, as…in Japan and Russia, by breaking the individual out of the traditional group while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in massive agglomeration of power”.

So we see the genetic replicative algorithm supported by war, the machine-like response developing from it, and the extension of our selves into the environment by means of the printing press, which placed psychic stress on sameness, standardization, repetition of of process.

Given the drive of the genetic replicative algorithm, such developments would seem inevitable.

The “God Factory” gradually evolved toward a concept of integration and elimination of difference into a singular process of general organization.

But as Al Dexter points out, we can now take that same principle and manufacture any concept of God that we wish, or no God at all.

When Gutenberg published the bible on his printing press, however, instead of creating a society of peace and order based on the teachings of Jesus, blood literally ran in the streets, religions became violent in their competition for the right process of “salvation”, and an explosion of diversity within religions occurred.

Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet And The Goddess, points out that it was the development of alphabetic text from ancient times, perhaps even first developed in the caves of Egypt as slaves literally developed an underground movement, reducing the complex hieroglyphs of the Egyptians to a simpler system of sounds that became the alphabet.

This simple system of writing was developed by the Phoenicians, giving rise to what is today known as the phonetic alphabet. It was this development of linearity, the process of writing, said Shlain, that made the “male side” of the brain dominant, the one-thing-at-a-time, sequential process of organization that not only suited the male brain and its war-like capacity, but made the female, with her greater capacity for multi-tasking and organization in the home, less “important” within society. The “goddess” of culture was replaced by a “god”, and the mechanical, warlike response became the dominant feature of social systems.

McLuhan writes that it was this linear, sequential, interchangeable process of organizing our thoughts in alphabetic form that gave rise to geometry among the ancient Greeks, and also gave rise to the axiomatic foundations of Euclidean process of thought.

Eric Hoffer pointed out that in modern times, that same process of interchangeability gradually developed among religions as they organized within the larger context of the Industrial Revolution. The dominant form of social organization within Western Civilization became part of the “God Factory”.

The development of electric technology, wrote McLuhan, made such processes of organization obsolete. Instead of the interchangeable parts of society fitting together like the various part of machines, needing only the proper lubrication of ideas now and then, the world suddenly “imploded” by the process of communications at the speed of light.

McLuhan wrtites:

“…in the electronic age, data classification leads to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data moves instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of ‘information overload’, men resort to the study of configurations….The drop-out situation in our schools(this was published in 1964) at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the ‘mythic’ world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted.”

From specialization and interchangeable parts, to the sudden implosion of electronic communications worldwide at the speed of light. In such a change, the old specialization of interchangeable parts in government and religion become ridiculous. There is no “meaning” in a system that recognizes individuals as disconnected parts.

The “God Factory” has given way to the need for complete integration and ubiquitous involvement worldwide. In such a world, terrorism becomes the new method of warfare, replacing the much older specialization of the organized, machine-like response.

Comments

I don’t think I’m violating anyone’s trust here, since the individual who sent me this email was complaining that he couldn’t respond to the blog for some reason.

Fist statement of the response:

“The PT site doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being on the side of the gods. And yet the readers are to be subjected to preaching for the first month of the new format with your submissions–so far about two a day”.

Preaching? I merely stated a belief. I don;t claim authority for my statements. I don’t even say that any authority can be claimed. If someone wrote something with which I disagreed, would it be “preaching”? If the next editor says something with which i disagree, I will directly challenge him in regards to his statements explicitly.

Notice in the above remarks a decided tendency toward ad hominem. Not actually pointing to the flaw in the logic of mu statements, but obviously disparaging it for my benefit by calling it “preaching”. Does that prove it right or wrong? No, it proves absolutely nothing except that he doesn’t personally like it. So? I don’t personally like a lot of things, but i usually try to discipline myself to specific responses.

Next statement: “Your preaching is about like most sermons, confusing and contradictory”.

Notice again that this is a statement “about” what I’m saying, which falls into the category of ad hominem, but tells me nothing at all except that he doesn’t like it and he finds it confusing and contradictory. Is it confusing and contradictory? How can I possibly know if he doesn’t explain it?

But we are getting into some more specific comments:

“Now let’s see, you cannot prove there is a God so it is likely you don’t know what a god is, and yet man is destined to become a thing you cannot identify. It is rationally confusing.”

First part is true. No one can prove the existence of God. Have I stated a falsehood? Can any of you prove there is a God? Therefore, I do not know what a God is. However, I have never said it is a fact that man is destined to become God. I merely stated that it is my BELIEF that man is to become God. Is this somehow logically contradictory?

Let’s see. Is it permissible to believe in truth? You might say “one doesn’t believe in truth. One PROVES truth. Yes, that must be true. But can anyone prove all truth? No, one cannot. BUT one can conclude that truth must be consistent with all truth. I can’t prove this, but it would seem to be a logical assumption, since if any any statement is not consistent with truth, or contradicts truth, how can it be true? Yet there is no way I can prove this to be consistent with what I happen to believe is true within my own knowledge. The reason being that I cannot prove that all my knowledge is complete and consistent within truth. I may actually believe something that is wrong.

However, with no ability to prove the consistency or completeness of my own thoughts in regard to ‘absolute” truth, I can logically BELIEVE in truth, though I CANNOT prove it. Therefore, I can believe that if there is a God, and that God is consistent with truth, in fact is the embodiment of truth, then it is perfectly logical to accept the idea that I can BELIEVE in a God who is consistent with truth, whether I can prove it or not.

Let’s look at it from another viewpoint. Suppose I could actually define truth in all its completeness. If I could, then there is nothing to prevent me from programming it into a computer. At the point I program all truth into a computer, from every possible definition known to the human mind, that computer would BE truth. It would exist separately from truth, but since it would contain the perfect embodiment of truth, it would be truth in every conceivable fashion. Would there be a difference between the computer that “contained” the truth, and truth itself?

It seems logical there would be a difference. But to actually DEFINE the truth, you would have to “contain” it within some boundaries of human thought. That is, truth would be finite, rational, complete, and consistent. Does truth exist in that fashion? We simply don’t know. We accept that truth is infinite. That was Godel’s conclusion. If it is finite, then we should be able to define the boundaries of truth.

The problem is, we can’t. We cannot list all the true statements of mathematics, but if we could list them, we would discover that there existed some false statements that got “smuggled in” during the process of listing.

If “God” therefore, is synonymous with truth, then “God” would have to be infinite, non-definable, just as truth is.

Next statement, from Ayn Rand:

“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum total of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction s to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality”.

Is God within Ayn Rand’s concepts? Well, if you read The Fountainhead, you will see her making the statement o the effect that “The first frown was the touch of God on man’s forehead”.

Is that a part of her integrated concepts? She was an atheist, and she did not believe God lay within the realm of integrated concepts, yet she stated an obvious contradiction. If there is no place for God within integrated concepts, how could God ‘touch a man’s forehead’ from outside those integrated conceptions?

But let’s just look at her statement above. Lots of people do to Ayn rand what I have accused you folks of doing to me, so I will look at the statement rather than talking “about” it.

“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum total of his knowledge”.

Notice, she didn’t write “all knowledge” or “absolute knowledge”. She merely said “his knowledge”. There is nothing within that statement declaring that every man must possess a complete, consistent understanding of all knowledge. In fact, we know mathematically that he cannot. But it is necessary for him to correctly integrate all HIS knowledge.

Let’s look at another Ayn Rand quote:

“Men have a weapon against you(collectivism). Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props out from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil–though some have gone that far with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What? You don;t have to
be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’–‘Feeling’–‘Revelation’–‘Divine Intuition’–Dialectical materialism’…”

In other words, Ayn Rand is saying that there is no collective power by which men can be controlled in the name of truth. Every man has a weapon against all collective power. Why?
Because truth cannot ever be contained in a complete, consistent sense in one common package. Godel’s theorem merely supports Ayn Rand!

Men are forever free precisely BECAUSE truth cannot be contained in one single package!

How does that differ from what Paul said in Romans 9:16-22? Is there a decision procedure b which we can organize under God? If there is, both Paul and Ayn Rand would be wrong!

If you can define any algorithm or decision process by which truth can be collectivized, then you would prove both the atheist Ayn Rand and the theist Paul wrong!

By the way, Here’s Ayn Rand’s full quote about God, from the above statement:

“Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.”

Whoops!

Another quote from the email:

“So you cannot prove a god exists, but you are quite willing to proceed to preach/teach from a ‘holy book’ allegedly inspired by that unproven god.”

I don’t remember calling it a “holy book”. The only thing I did was to question what the term “holy” means, as in “Holy Spirit”. Did I say there was anything higher than the mind of any individual mind? Have i said you must believe what I say? No, I merely challenge you to prove me wrong, and nobody’s even come close.

“Well, you cannot prove that allegation, either”. What allegation? The only “allegation” I have chosen to demonstrate is that Paul‘s statements in Romans 8 and 9, and Jesus’ statements in Matthew 24:23, are consistent with the facts as we see them, and consistent with what we are learning about the “real” world.
Quit talking “about” my statements and prove me wrong.

I love this one: “Your preaching from it(the bible) treats it as if the god you admittedly cannot prove does indeed exist. There is the blatant contradiction”.

No, I have merely pointed out that the statements I quote from the bible are consistent with the facts of reality. Whether a god exists to support those facts cannot be proven one way or another.

But if the statements ARE consistent with reality, there is no reason to assume that such a god does not exist, any more than we would assume that a complete, consistent truth does not exist, even though we cannot mathematically prove it.

These are tired old arguments the gentleman presents. I’ve heard them many times.

Comments

The well presented argument confronted nowadays is that Paul is the culprit who destroyed the simple truth of Jesus. Paul was the dastardly villain that led to Constantine and the Inquisitions.

In fact, neither Paul nor Jesus could have done so, as I’ve already shown, simply because of the simple logic of their statements regarding truth.

But Paul did seek to organize churches in various areas. He went to great lengths explaining how people should think about things, what should be tolerated, and how it should be dealt with.

That, in fact, is where Paul DID produce the systems of power and confusion we have today.

But was that Paul’s fault? Was it wrong for him to try and establish principles by which people could freely live in service to God?

Of course not. The problem, of course, lay in human nature itself. Given the opportunity to organize, the opportunity to exercise some authority, it becomes so easy to begin representing ourselves as the symbol, the icon of “God’s man”.

Paul himself dealt with this issue. “Some like to say they are of Paul” he wrote, “and some say they are of Apollos”. But notice what Paul actually said. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gives the increase”.

In other words, no matter what men tried to do, it was God who controlled the growth of the church. Many are called but few are chosen.

Did Paul say the church had authority? Within the church, yes. And there was no reason why any community of people established toward certain ideals should not have authority over those who freely choose to join.

Did that mean all who wished to join were somehow “elect”? No, since Paul’s teachings in Romans 8, 9 Ephesians 2:8-10, and other scriptures had clearly cancelled any possibility of anyone ruling in God’s name. The “High Priest” of Christianity, said Paul, was Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t on earth.

If the church had the right to declare authority, what was the limitation of its power?

Jesus had established the broad guidelines of that power when he said that his followers are not to seek “an eye for an eye”, but to love those that hate them, pray for those that use and persecute them, bless those that curse them, etc.

The limits of the church’s authority was quite simple: it had no authority to execute vengeance.

Paul himself confirmed that fact in Romans 12:19, and quoted the Old Testament to demonstrate it. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay”.

Who DID have the power of vengeance? Look at the very next chapter, Romans 13. The “Higher Powers”, the state, had the power of vengeance. They were “God’s instruments of wrath”.

That was a clear limitation of boundaries between church and state, and it demanded that there be a separation of church and state.

But both Paul and Jesus advocated settlement “out of court”. Jesus had stated that where “two or three are gathered”, whatever was “bound on earth would be bound in heaven”.

That is not some special ethereal power given to the church. It is merely a statement that any two people can agree among themselves, and it will be fully recognized by God. That was fully consistent with the “Two Witness” rule of Deuteronomy 17:6 and 19:15.

Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 6 that there was no need for people to sue one another at the law, since that itself, seeking vengeance against another, was actually a violation of the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 5. Paul said that the “least” of the church members could gather together and decide what should be done, but their decision was NOT to permit vengeance as a goal. That was left to the state.

We see in 1 Corinthians 5:5 that Paul wrote of delivering “such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord”.

If we look at Matthew 4 and Luke 4, we see that Satan was in charge of all world governments. To “deliver unto Satan”, therefore, was to deliver to the government for decisions regarding vengeance. The state’ power was NOT primary. It was a secondary power, to be used only as a last resort.

In 1 Corinthians 6:9 we see “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor effiminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind(etc)… shall inherit the kingdom of God”.

Verse 11: “And such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified…by the spirit of our God”.

The church was permitted a kind of “self policing”, but NOT with the power of punishment or vengeance. It was the church’s job, as much as possible to nurture and show principles of love and tolerance.

Jesus had said in Matthew 18:15-18 that if your adversary didn’t want to accept the verdict of the church, given in love and tolerance, to simply treat him as a “Gentile or tax collector”.

Jesus obviously didn’t care for tax collectors. Paul had simply said to “deliver him to Satan” if it was necessary, to “destroy the flesh”.

So the state DID have the power over “flesh”, over death (Hebrews 2:14), but the “spirit” was the domain of the church.

And what was that “spirit’ that guided the church? How about “love, joy, peace, gentleness, meekness, goodness, faith…”. Remember that?

Could this “spirit” be reduced to mechanical, rational, finite definitions by which any man could rule in the name of God? No. There was no one who could claim any such special relationship, and Paul had already established that fact in Romans chapters 8 and 9.

Any group, anywhere, any time, any place, is free to organize by those principles. But NO group can legitimately claim to have any special relationship with God.

And, because no state can demonstrate any finite, rational, logical relationship to truth in any special sense, the state can claim no more power over the people than the church. In fact, the state can ONLY exercise authority by the permission of the people. That is also reflected in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

So, while we can freely organize and profess to serve God, biblically, we CANNOT organize for the purpose of vengeance in any form, we cannot organize for the purpose of controlling others in any form. And the guarantee of Jury trial in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the state (Satan) can only have access to the “flesh” once the people have decided there is no other way. That is proper government “by the people”, and it is fully recognized, in principle, in the New Testament.

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