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

Okay, you know this one, right? Second commandment, Exodus 20:4-5. No need to quote it.

That would include any icon, any image created by man, any conceptual framework of knowledge created by man that claims to represent God.

Can we actually choose such a system by any method of human reason? No, not only from the viewpoint of the second commandment, but it is now a mathematical theorem that there exists no process of axiomatic formal reasoning by which we may predictable develop ANY SYSTEM at all that can represent God?

We can know, therefore, as a matter of mathematical proofs, that we not only should not or “shall not”, but in fact we CAN NOT create any human made system that represents God in truth!

Which brings us to the question which the Pharisees asked Jesus: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?”

Who was Caesar? A self proclaimed god-king, the “Son of God” as recognized by Roman tradition.

How did Jesus respond? he asked for a coin and then asked “Whose image is on this coin?”
Is there a law regarding images? We just referred to it, above. Is it therefore lawful to pay taxes to any system that claims authority over men in the name of God?

Obviously, the answer is “NO!”.

Let’s look at it another way: First commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”.

All, right, just for argument, which is the one true god? Give me a definition, one that stands up to all logical examination. You will find it impossible to give such a definition. We are left with one logical conclusion, therefore., which is summed up in the second commandment! Nothing created in the “image of God”, nothing created by the hands of man, by the iconic concepts of man, by any structure created by man. If you can’t define it, there is no reason whatever for me to bow down to it.

And now, thanks to Godel’s theorem, we have mathematical proof that no such system can ever be developed! Godel’s theorem is merely the mathematical recognition of the second commandment. If you can prove there IS such a system that demands our obedience, you’ve got me, but you can’t. You have no way of proving it. Therefore, to “have no other gods before me” is to be free of all human systems of power and authority, and that would include churches that claim to represent the “true God”.

We are left, therefore, with the logic of Jesus’ statement in Matthew 24:23. Don’t follow any man who says “here is Christ, or there”.

Ayn Rand, in the person of the fictional character, Howard Roark, had this marvelous statement which Roark presented at his trial:

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. he was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded.”

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning….Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received–hatred. The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors–stood alone against the men of their time”.

Ayn Rand said there is no God, even though she did refer favorably to the idea of God a few times in “The Fountainhead”.

If you claim to follow God, you must follow truth, and if you follow truth, you cannot bow to the whims and false gods of men. If you follow anything less than truth, you follow idols. If you even follow the collective concepts of men for ANY reason other than proven truth, you practice idolatry. No “borrowed vision”, no “second-handers“.

And what was HWA, other than a flim flam, con man, scam artist, liar and worse? He was an idol, created by men as a “bridge” to God. Of course, he encouraged the bridge, but he, like all men who claim to represent something higher than themselves, are idols.

So what is the truth? If you look for it within ANY collective concept of men, whether of government, religion, or even the bible itself, you will be wrong.

John 14:17; “Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive”. Truth is not a “given”. It is not any process of rational thought which we can organize and structure and place other men under our control. It is not subject to the power of men, as Godel’ theorem now tells us. The “world” cannot receive it.

Matthew 7:14: “because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”. Not “choose it”. FIND IT.

There is only one possible truth you can derive from that. You are free from men! Even more, if you “bow down” to any concept, any icon chosen among men, you commit idolatry.

If ANY “church of God” or “church of Christ”, or whatever title, claims it represents the truth, we now know it is a mathematical impossibility to make such a claim! There never was such a system. Even assuming that Israel was actually chosen to fulfill such a requirement, we know even from biblical statements that the people could not live up to it.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Simple stuff. The truth is, no power of man has the right to control you unless you harm another. The only power of the state is “vengeance”, and that vengeance is only enforced AFTER the people themselves seek other alternatives.

Simple, simple, simple.

From Ayn Rand:

“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it–and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip–he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse–and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it’s done?….Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity..The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal…Since the Supreme Ideal is beyond his grasp,
he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of personal value….To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already?…Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men….Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

“And if any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not”.

0 Comments

Right off the bat, I don’t think anyone can really define freedom. Questeruk posed an interesting dilemma, when I stated that “freedom is the absence of absolute knowledge”. Questeruk then stated that God is both absolute and free.

I found this response interesting because that is what Ernest Martin said when I discussed the matter with him.

Ernest Martin was a brilliant man, but there were three basic flaws in his conclusion:
1.We can’t prove there is a God
2.We have great difficulty in defining “absolute”
3.We have the same problem with “freedom”.

This leads to yet another problem: how can anything be both “absolute” and “free”?

If it is absolute, the very absolute itself would provide a limit to what could be done beyond that absolute. If it were free to select otherwise, the limitation of choice itself would not be absolute.

Dr. Martin responded to me then that freedom is like a length of rope or “tether” to which we are bound. To the extent we can move within the length of that tether, we are free, but we are NOT free to move beyond the length of that tether.

I said, “That’s all well and good, but now tell me how long the tether is. Can you define the limits?”

There was a man named Georg Cantor who once believed that God would reveal himself to Cantor if he, Cantor, studied into the nature of infinity and was able to offer definitions.

The problem was, Cantor began to realize not only infinity, but an infinity of infinities! Even worse, in trying to list all “real numbers” by the use of a diagonal method, he showed that it was impossible to do so. The list would always remain incomplete.

A “real” number corresponds to what is also called “irrational numbers”, like “pi” the square root of 2, 3, etc.

The Euclidean line is said to contain an infinity of points, each corresponding to a number within the infinite continuum. One problem: where is the point corresponding to “pi”, and the square root of 2, etc? Not only did there appear to be gaps in the Euclidean line, but the number of gaps seemed to be infinite.

Pythagoras was rather disturbed by this fact when one of his students showed there was a problem with his theorem, A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

Pythagoras’s student said, “Sir, what if ‘C squared’ is ‘2’? What is the square root of 2?” Legend has it that Pythagoras had the student drowned to keep his mouth shut.

So, in the most formal system of proofs we have, there doesn’t seem to exist a process that contains all the other facts within that process which is non-contradictory, or which can be summed up in a “rational” statement(the ratio between two numbers).

So, it seems impossible to define “absolute” as a point beyond which human knowledge cannot go, which would appear to show that we are “free’ to choose among an infinite set of alternatives which we can define. But then, if we can’t define those alternatives, we cannot choose among them.

Among all the infinity of alternatives, therefore, we can’t define “God”, because “God” would therefore be the sum of those alternatives. We can’t even list all real numbers, much less define God! Any attempt to define God would naturally result in the infinity of alternatives we see around us today.

You can’t define a procedure to get from “here” to “God”, because you would first have to define limits as to what God is, and that would place God within the measurements of calculus, since calculus seeks to define the number of steps or “decisions” approaching a limit.

Of course, algorithms follow this process by which we define decisions or decision procedures to “terminate” at a certain limit or goal. Regarding truth as one complete, consistent system of thought, might be a useful idea of either “God” or “absolute”, but Alan Turing demonstrated there is simply no way by which a computation can prove all such truth(s), as did Godel’s theorem.

If you seek to define ‘freedom’ therefore, you must define it strictly within the context of human definitions. It cannot in any sense be applied to God, since there is no evidence of the existence of God.

That, basically is what Paul told us. If there exists a God, any decisions procedures by which we may hope to get “there” would be completely subject to that God and with “God’s” knowledge.

If there is such a decision procedure, that procedure is programmable, which means it can be reduced to human concepts and ideas, which means that “God” is therefore either created by, or creatable by, human ideas. It would necessarily mean that “God” is less than man.

On the other hand, to believe in God is to believe that there does exist knowledge and truth that transcends the knowledge of men. That, in essence, is what Godel’s theorem tells us: truth transcends theoremhood. Truth exists as a context of completeness and consistency beyond the power of humans to regulate or measure in one system.

Does truth exist in such a complete and consistent form? If it does, we can’t get there from here.
Does God exist as the sum of truth? If “He” does, we can’t get there from here.

Paul’s statements in Romans 8 and 9 are fully consistent with that fact.

Comments