I feel a certain debt of gratitude to the Feast of Booze for helping convince me — through the fine alcoholic example being set there — to leave WCG back in 1971, after the Feast that year, at 21 years old. I’ve done some dumb things in my life, but leaving was one of the smartest moves I ever made.
Armstrongism is most certainly an adventure in associating with boozing alcoholics. As we face the New Year, let us consider this MSN health & fitness article, particularly if you are still a victim of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia, chained to your own alcohol addiction:
Dry January
If you say you can do without it, prove it!
And you may decide that you don’t like your ‘friends’ in Armstrongism any more.
Matching the questions to the answers may be problematic!
Within the context of 1971 when it was written, the WCG was living in its last days.
Everything about it is provably false.
Your worries are just beginning!
Only if you spent much of it involved with Herbert Armstrong
That's really rich, coming from the Worldwide Church of God!
Uh... Hello! This coming from Herbert Armstrong?
He had a $5 Million divorce!
Really???!!!
Written in 1971, the answer appears to be no!
Financial conversions are not covered! Sorry!
If you are talking about religious conversion, well, be aware that in the WCG nothing changed for the better!
R.I.P.
WCG
If you are wondering, Herbert Armstrong was against serving in the military.
Unfortunately, if you were a conscientious objector, the last place you wanted to be was serving out your I-W program at Big Sandy, Texas for the WCG! The hypocrisy was horrendous and men were persecuted and abused for their religious beliefs by the religion that taught them!
The WCG never did either.
Is this a choice or are they the same??!!
Which doesn't exist any more!
Yes... no... and NO!
Totally wasted in the WCG!
Lost at last!
Gotten totally wrong!
Still missing: Gone AWOL because of Herbert Armstrong
As opposed to the decline of the WCG
And not one word about teens and cell phones!
The truth is that if it's serious, you should go see a doctor!
Should be titled: The Proof of the Old Testament Using Fulfilled Prophecies (some of which failed). Talk about not living up to its promises!
Garner Ted Armstrong
- Gambler
- Adulterer
- Boozing Alcoholic
- Serial Rapist
Yup! He knew Jesus!
Written by Roderick Meredith in 1955. He should have researched to find out how to prevent his diabetes.
Failed to include planning.
Would have helped for planning his succession....
Written in 1964: The truth really changed in a decade!
Fail! Fail! Fail! Fail! Fail!
We have proof the United States and British Commonwealth are not from Israel!
The WCG predicted by Revelation???!!
The author didn't have a clue!
Not any more: Doesn't exist!
The WCG sure knew how!
It's hard to pick one out of the 40 written!
It's more important to know what science can discover about the human mind poisoned by boozing alcoholics of Armstrongism!
Given the Waring tribes of Armstrongism, it would be interesting to know!
If only you stay away from Armstrongism, you'll have a much more awesome future, unless you define awesome as totally dysfunctional.
Oops!
Herbert Armstrong wrote a lot of booklets which made promises — actual and implied. When we go back through and review the booklets he and his staff wrote in the light of what has actually happened, it is clear that the great swelling promises and prognostications were profoundly empty. Looking back, the booklets now seem crassly hypocritical. The Radio Church of God, Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God never measured up to the very standards they set. The slide show includes only 39 of the booklets:
Answers from Genesis (1973)
Are We Living in the Last Days (1971)
A True History of the True Church (1959: ‘Dr.’ Herman Hoeh)
Ending Your Financial Worries (1959)
Has Time Been Lost? (1952)
Hippies, Hypocrisy and Happiness (1968)
How to Have a Happy Marriage
How to Understand Prophecy (1972)
Is this the End Time (1971)
Just What Do You Mean Conversion? (1972)
Life After Death (1973)
Military Service and War (1967)
Never Before Understood: Why Humanity Cannot Solve Its Evils (1981)
Pagan Holidays or God’s Holy Days? (1976)
Seven Proofs of God’s True Church (1974: Garner Ted Armstrong)
The Bible: Superstition or Authority? …and can you prove it? (1985)
The Incredible Human Potential (1978)
The Key to the Book of Revelation (1952)
The Mark of the Beast (1952)
The Middle East in Prophecy (1948)
The Missing Dimension in Sex (1964)
The Modern Romans (1971)
The Plain Truth about Child Rearing (1963)
The Plain Truth about Healing (1979)
The Proof of the Bible (1958)
The Real Jesus (1971: Garner Ted Armstrong)
The Seven Laws of Radiant Health (1955: Roderick Meredith)
The Seven Laws of Success (1961)
The Truth about Make-Up (1964)
The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy (1964)
The White Horse: False Religion (1976)
The Wonderful World Tomorrow: What Will It Be Like? (1973)
This is the Worldwide Church of God (1971)
To Kill a People (1971)
What Is the True Gospel (1955)
What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind (1978)
Why Were You Born? (1957)
World Peace: How Will It Come? (1978)
Your Awesome Future: How Religion Deceives You (1978)
[jqeasytooltip tiptheme=”tipthemewhite” tipicon=”fa fa-frown-o” tipposition=”tiptop” tipfollowcursor=”true” ][jqeasytooltipcontent]The absolutely most embarrassing prophecy ever![/jqeasytooltipcontent]1975 in Prophecy[/jqeasytooltip] (1956)
Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
by Robert Jackal; Oxford University Press, Copyright 2010
Chapter 7: The Magic Lantern, page 185.
[/jqeasytooltipcontent]Moral Mazes[/jqeasytooltip] aptly describes what is represented by this list of Armstrongist publications:
From the standpoint of public relations, the journalistic ideology closely resembles the social outlook of most college seniors — a vague but pious middle-class liberalism, a mildly critical stance toward their fathers in particular and authorities in general; a maudlin of championship of the poor and the underclass; and especially the doctrine of tolerance, open-mindedness, and balance. In fact, public relations people feel, the news media are also constructing reality. They are always looking for a “fresh” and exciting angle; they have an unerring instinct for the sentimental that expresses itself in a preference for “human interest” rather than substance; and they arrange facts in a way that purports to convey “truth,” but is in fact simply another story. In reality, news is entertainment. And, despite the public’s acceptance of journalistic ideologies, most of the public watch or read news not to be informed or to learn the “truth,” but precisely to be entertained. There is no intrinsic reason, therefore, why the constructions of reality by public relations specialists should be thought of as any different from those of any group in the business of telling stories to the public. Everyone is telling stories and everyone has a story to tell. Public relations men and women are simply storytellers with a purpose in the free market of ideas, advocates of a certain point of view in the court of public opinion. Since any notion of truth is irrelevant or refers to at best what is perceived, persuasion of various sorts becomes everything.
And there it is. Armstrongism isn’t about truth; it is simply about manipulating perceptions to evoke responses to their story telling. Herbert Armstrong was an ad copy writer, after all. As such, he lined up some facts, threw in some colorful descriptions and weaved his fictional stories. The booklets in the slides presentation above is representative of this magical world of the ‘magic lantern’, creating illusions illustrating imaginary constructs of perceived ‘reality’. There is neither truth nor reality in any of it. It is all fake.
Moreover, it isn’t just about Herbert Armstrong and his ‘public relations’ advertising hirelings, it is also about The Journal, which is exposed for what it is in the brief description given by Robert Jackal; to wit: the pursuit of a “fresh” and exciting angle with an unerring instinct for the sentimental that expresses itself in a preference for “human interest” rather than substance; and the facts are arranged in a way that purports to convey “truth,” but is in fact simply another story — in reality, it is merely infotainment. The editor reveals his true self when he speaks of the doctrine of tolerance, open-mindedness, and balance — while secretly harboring contempt for the “farmer theologians” who deign to advertise in its pages.
Moral Mazes has framed it and nailed it in the landscape of the church cult corporate of lies, deceits, conceits, fiction, fantasy — all parading as religious truth — which, if it be told, can be demonstrated as pure rubbish if you but stand back and look at the chaotic mess it represents.
Dr. James Milam, in his book, [jqeasytooltip tiptheme=”tipthemesquareyellow” tipmaxwidth=”100″ tipicon=”fa fa-book” tipminmargin=”15″ tipposition=”tiptop” tipfollowcursor=”true” ][jqeasytooltipcontent]Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.: Houston, Texas; 2013[/jqeasytooltipcontent]Ending the Drug Addiction Pandemic: Discovering the Liberating Truth[/jqeasytooltip], in Chapter 2: Core Evidence (page 17), says:
Within the big lie all of the component falsehoods have been carefully crafted to support each other in concealing the whole truth. To assemble the abundance of decisive scientific and clinical evidence comprising the biogenic paradigm it is necessary to identify, define, and disentangle each piece of the truth from the corresponding part of the shroud of disinformation that has so carefully hidden for so long. Surrounded by the support of the others each falsehood has become an inarguable given truth. It is therefor necessary to confront and discredit them one by one until the whole fabric of disinformation is disposed of.
He adds this sentence in Chapter 3: The Language of Denial (page 34):
The familiar comes to seem normal and every big lie develops its own familiar language of deception that conceals the truth while purporting to represent it.
In the end, Armstrongism promises the truth and fails to deliver. What it delivers instead is empty promises which can never be fulfilled.
A&E Network Television Channel has a program called Intervention. It has 14 seasons so far about people who have serious life threatening addictions. A&E sends help for an Intervention for these people and their families. Seasoned professionals counsel with the family. Both the addict and the family are offered treatment. Often the treatment saves the life of the addict and the family members.
Play and watch the above Intervention about Shane: Shane was a talented cellist and an aspiring music producer, whose musical aspirations were out of reach because he abused prescription drugs and dealt drugs out of his grandmother’s house where he was living. He also used cocaine. Jeff Van Vonderen, the facilitator of the Intervention had this to say to the family in the pre-intervention meeting:
Delusion turns into denial and delusion isn’t just really bad denial, delusion is a whole different thing. Shane doesn’t know he’s lying any more. You guys know when you’re lying, don’t you, OK? Look at it like this: It’s like this thinking grid, you give him this picture of reality and on the way in, it takes a couple of hits and gets twisted up and looks different, so when he gives you his answer, it’s based on his picture, and he is so sincere and convincing that you start thinking you saw it wrong in the first place. That’s why, when he tells you his answer, he’s not lying. He’s telling you the truth. That’s why it seems so crazy.
Learn to ask yourself, this is the quick test, “Do I agree with this?” If you don’t agree with it, don’t let it happen. We call him the dependent, because he’s dependent on the chemical for his high; we call you guys co-dependents because it’s actually possible for you to become dependent upon the dependent for your high. Which means when Shane’s looking good and trying hard, looking great and making promises, your mood alters up; and when he’s being scary and dangerous and doing bad stuff, your mood alters down. But now put yourself in his place, where now he has to do well, so you guys have a good day….
Let’s pause for a moment and look back at Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God with his multiple addictions to narcissism, needing constant praise and adulation, needing to feel important and following his addiction to buy expensive material things to satiate his lust for self-importance, his panic following the manic phase of realization that he’s overspent, requiring him to loudly demand the membership to make sacrifices to resupply the money to support his destructive habits with money and prestige being his drugs of choice. Over the years, we’ve covered this topic in various ways. What we have not covered is our own codependence.
When Herbert Armstrong was all positive, looking good, trying hard, looking great and making promises — we would have our high. When he showed us news of the world which supported his prophetic nonsense, we seized on that because we were dependent upon it for our high. He offered us British Israelism to support our codependence. And, of course, when things went south and he started yelling about how “this WORK could go down!” our attitudes and mood would alter down. This kept us in the nightmare of being subjected to his moods and whims for our highs and lows. We lived on his promises that we would become God as God is God for our codependent high and faced the imaginary reality of the Great Tribulation for our depressive lows, only to be raised to manic levels on the promises of a Place of Safety, to sink back to the lows of the reality of life, only to be lifted again in enthusiasm with the promise of attending yet another “Best Feast Ever!” spending, as it were, 10% of our gross income in 10 days to experience the excessive highs stimulating the endorphin flow from sumptuous eating, drinking, travel and activities that supposedly reflected the addictive highs of being Kings and Priests in the millennium wielding great power over masses of people under us, vulnerable to our own mood swings.
Subjecting ourselves to this addict was not healthy. He was not living a sane healthy balanced life. He lived a life of excess, bracketed by real alcoholism. We allowed him to manipulate our thinking in inappropriate unhealthy ways, and, in many cases, causing many of us to follow him to become addicts ourselves as well as being codependent.
After the death of Herbert Armstrong and the collapse of his empire, the problem became worse: Addicts like Roderick Meredith, David Pack, Gerald Flurry, Ronald Weinland and so many others, made codependents of their followers, draining the followers of their resources to support their habits of addiction. People could sit in services at United each week and hear the Regional Pastor express his desperation about not having enough money for retirement and discuss salary and money problems. It was clear where his priorities were. Those of us listening to him week after week, year after year, wallowed in his self-pity, which was also accompanied with his revelation that his parents were alcoholics and addicts who beat him as a teen. This was a gross transgression against the 5th commandment, but we were all hearing it through his twisted grid of reality, fed back so that he altered our moods to make us codependents. In fact, at every turn, the delusions of the addict leaders of Armstrongism make their followers codependents.
The solution, of course, is to stop providing the addict with an environment in which he can abuse himself with his addiction and refuse to be a codependent where his moods are reflected in our own.
In the case of Shane’s family, two members had to get treatment from the Betty Ford Clinic to wean them from their codependence and live their life, not for Shane, but for themselves. Without altering their behavioral responses to Shane, they would provide the environment to support Shane in going back to his addictions after his own treatment.
Megan
