Tag: lies

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Calendar

The Church of God Seventh Day is right! Herbert Armstrong got it wrong!

Herbert Armstrong declared many times:

The Sabbath stands or falls with the Feasts.

It’s strange, because the Church of God Seventh Day just doesn’t seem to think so. Here is what they say:

The Church of God (Seventh Day) teaches that Christians are not obligated to observe the feast days, the annual Hebrew holy days of Leviticus 23. Here are seven reasons for this position:

  • The annual holy days were part of the Levitical law of the old covenant and were intimately linked to its system of animal sacrifices.
    The annual holy days were neither Creation ordinances nor included among the Ten Commandments, but they belong to a portion of law that may be called ceremonial.
  • The annual holy days were commanded to the nation of Israel when it departed from Egypt and were to be observed where the Lord placed His name: Jerusalem.
  • The annual holy days have an agricultural framework, inextricably tied to the land, crops, and climate of ancient Palestine.
  • The annual holy days were observed according to an ancient (Hebrew) calendar that is impossible to decipher from Scripture.
  • The purpose of the annual holy days was for the Hebrew nation to celebrate its own history and to anticipate the greater salvation that would come through Messiah.
  • Observance of the annual holy days often casts a shadow on the final work of redemption and grace that was accomplished by Christ on the cross.

Apparently, keeping the Feasts is a point of view.

Some of you know Alan Knight, either personally, through his interview in The Journal or from his book, Primitive Christianity in Crisis. The last time we had lunch, we discussed the current controversy surrounding Robert Thiel, since Mr. Knight had several exchanges with him and after lunch, I asked him the question of what he thought of the Feasts, given that he is something of a scholar on early Christianity. His response was that “Scriptural support for keeping the Feasts is weak”.

One’s skepticism is certainly piqued with Chapter 17, “The Most Important Holy Day” in Showdown At Big Sandy: Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional Bible College in East Texas by Greg Doudna, now available at Barnes and Noble on Nook (apparently, Dr. Doudna took my advice to put it in an ebook). While the WCG nattered on about the other Feasts, the Wave Sheaf Offering, picturing the acceptance of Jesus Christ by God the Father, would, one would think, be the most relevant to Christians, if we were to keep the Feasts, but sadly, no, no there is no observance. Just keep the Lord’s Supper on the wrong day, keep the “Passover” as the Night to Be Much Observed and totally miss that the Days of Unleavened Bread start on the evening of the Passover.

Now one would suppose that keeping the Feasts could be a blessing… but certainly not to hear sermons about Doomsday and the lie of British Israelism.

But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that Armstrongists don’t actually know when to keep the Feasts. If you are going to keep them when they don’t need to be kept at all, you should, by all means, get the dates right. But with the nine variants that the Armstrongist churches of God use now are every one of them wrong — objectively, observably, technically wrong. It is time for them to admit that the Church of God Seventh Day is right and the calendar is impossible to decipher from Scripture.

Having failed to understand the Hebrew Calendar at all, Herbert Armstrong did the really stupid thing and went to the Jews as THE “authority” on the topic. This is a totally wrong move. Think about it: The Apostles went to the Pharisees in the First Century to ask them to tell them when the Feasts were? There’s nothing like stupidly making yourself a martyr. Besides, who would they ask after 70 A.D., do pray tell? The Old Covenant (if people believe the Bible) ended at the Death of Jesus: The veil to the Holy of Holies was ripped apart — there was no more authority of the Sanhedrin. The Christians just don’t go to the Jews for spiritual knowledge, because in the view of the New Testament, they don’t have any. Nevertheless, Herbert Armstrong went to the Jews for their calendar because he made the very wrong assumption that they were the keepers of the oracles and were the experts in such things in perpetuity.

Just how wrong this is has been exposed scientifically: The calculated calendar by Hillel II, the last of the Sanhedrin, declared that the solar year is 365 days and 6 hours, based on the stellar advice of an astonomer friend. Unfortunately, the Universe is unforgiving in such things, and he had the year off by a surplus of 11 minutes and 14.4 seconds. That may not sound like much, but given the past 1,650 years+, the Hillel II calendar is 12 days, 21 hours 7 minutes and 12 seconds off, putting the calculated Spring Equinox around March 6th or March 7th (depending upon leap year). If this were to be continued about 21,000 more years or so, the Feast of Tabernacles would coincide with Christmas Vacation Week in December between December 25th and January 1st. This would mean that people would not have to ask for time off for their children to keep the Feast and Boeing Employees could go because they get the week off every year. So, in the scheme of things, it’s very convenient… maybe… some day.

Hillel II was also off on what the moon transit time was by 6 millionths of a day every month being about .5184 seconds. This might not mean much month to month, but over the centuries until now, the Jewish Calendar is about 2.94 hours later in its expectation of the New Moon. This, under some circumstances can amount to one day.

It gets worse, though.

Hillel II set about to make sure that certain things didn’t happen in the Calendar, such as having the Day of Atonement on a Friday. However, documents from Jewish History show very clearly that the Day of Atonement did occasionally fall on a Friday during Christ’s time First Century A.D. and there were instructions on how to deal with it. This is important because no one can arbitrarily set the Passover in the First Century AD by a Calendar issued later in 359 A.D. by Hillel II. It is for this reason that the Armstrongists insist that Christ died in 31 A.D. to make their Festival timeline fit, when, in fact, they have it wrong and according to the self-correcting Hebrew Calendar at the time, would have made 30 A.D. the year that Jesus Christ would have been sacrificed to be put in the tomb in the evening of the Passover.

Things really get dicey from here. For one thing, the prophecy of Daniel 9 is impacted. For another, the Armstrongists don’t keep all the Feasts any year, even though, sometimes they keep a few of them on the day set forth by correct calendar computations, meaning that they can’t claim to be keeping God’s Law of the Old Covenant Correctly, and since, according to Herbert Armstrong, the Sabbath stands or falls on the Holydays, they are technically breaking the 4th Commandment, and hence, cannot have salvation.

Does your head hurt yet?

It’s no wonder that Armstrongist leaders doesn’t want to open this particular bag of snakes and convinces their membership it’s too complicated to understand and we all have to leave it to the “Authority” of the Jews: They couldn’t get the people together to keep the Feasts, which would reduce the effectiveness of the control Armstrongism has over the people and most of all, they would lose out on the money. That is a lot of powerful incentive to keep the people in confusion and delusion.

In actual fact, it isn’t that hard. After all, the ancient Israelites seem to have been able to calculate the Feasts, didn’t they?

I first learned about postponements in 2003, when the beautiful full moon was out on Thursday and the Feast of Tabernacles started on Saturday and a member called the minister and asked why and the minister said he didn’t know. At the Feast in Redmond, Oregon, I asked a minister about postponements and he lied to me and brushed me off saying, “I studied that once but I don’t remember”. He knew. He just didn’t want the answer. It would foul up Armstrongism and threaten his job.

In 2005 and 2006, my wife and I kept the “Passover” with Wayne Bedwell and his wife Carol in his home, along with the Edwards. Shirley Edwards was a delight and quite a woman. In the 1950s, when women weren’t supposed to do such things, she learned to fly, got her pilot’s license and flew to Cuba! My wife still has the picture of Shirley on the wall where she receives the silver prize in the Arizona Senior Olympics 50 yard swim at the age of 83 years old! Wayne Bedwell and I had an opportunity to discuss many things during our stay in the Tucson area, particularly his booklet, The Original Calendar for Our Day. He was an Engineer who once worked for NASA. I guess this calendar thing really is rocket science. He told me that he had travelled to New York to study in the very extensive Jewish section of the New York Public Library to learn how to calculate the calendar. He mentioned the fact that the First Century Jews did not use postponements and that the Day of Atonement could indeed fall on a Friday. He also noted that 30 A.D. was the only year where the Passover occurred on Wednesday night within years on either side: It could not be 31 A.D., 33 A.D., 29 A.D. or any other of the dates picked by others. It is also convenient, he explained, that from 30 A.D. to 70 A.D. there was a 40 year trial period for the Jews.

Plagiarism is a long, well-established practice with Armstrongists and the calendar presented by Wayne Bedwell was no exception. It is true that Ted Phillips of the Church of God Modesto used his calendar for the Feasts with full attribution. However, James Russell over at the Church of God In Truth did not acknowledge the source, particularly when he changed the assessment for the occurrence of the new moon: To wit, to change the beginning of a new moon from the time that the earth,  moon and sun were in conjunction, all nicely lined up, to the very first moment Jerusalem time, when the moon went down before the sun did. Another cult leader set the time differently by insisting that the Sabbath didn’t begin at sunset, but at nautical twilight. The differences could mean a full day’s difference. Nevertheless, this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as when the official Jewish Calendar was one full month off from the non postponed one. One should note that there are those who insist that the new moon really begins with the crescent of the moon, usually two days later than the real true lunar new moon. While it is completely silly in practice, there is a rationale to it because of yet another problem.

In 2008, when I met Paul Woods at the Feast of Tabernacles in Fruitland, Washington, hosted by his church, the Seventh Day Church of God of Caldwell, Idaho, I discussed the calendar also, since he publishes the Hebrew Calendar through The Herald of Truth, of which he is editor and publisher. The Seventh Church of God is quite independent from Herbert Armstrong, and their particular group came from Gilbert G. Rupert and has been keeping the Feasts since 1919. In our discussion, he showed me from Exodus, that the Passover, beginning on the evening of the 14th day of the First Month is also the beginning of the Days of Unleavened Bread and that the Armstrongists have that all wrong as well — so at the very least, the Armstrongists always begin the Days of Unleavened Bread at least one day late. Paul Woods solves the inherent problem with the Feast of Tabernacles with one simple assumption: That, as he puts it, the moon rules the day. What that means that on the day of the new moon, the moon must have arisen either at sunrise or shortly before sunrise before that evening can be declared the beginning of the new moon. This means that there will be a very slight sliver of the moon visible, but not as great as those who, say, follow William Dankenbring’s assessment of the timing. This solves the very great problem that there is a full moon on the 15th of the month each time and every time, meaning that the Israelites would have had a full moon on the Night to Be Much Observed when they left Egypt and also the Feast of Tabernacles always, always, always begins in the light of the glorious full moon in the fall, with either the Harvest Moon or sometimes more rarely, the Hunter’s Moon.

So just exactly how does one find the First Month in all this? Go out and look for sprigs of springing up barley in the hills in Israel like Carl O’Beirn does? In all of this, you have to remember that the ancient Israelites were not carrying iPods, having reflecting telescopes and certainly didn’t have orbiting satellites they could use for JavaScript programs to calculate new moon conjunctions at midnight, when they couldn’t even see the moon. It is a “keep it simple, stupid” scenario which could be understood by those not in tune with calculus and geometry: Remember, observations, pen and papyrus only. They did know when the Spring Equinox was (before it was fouled up by Hillel II in 358 A.D.). Here is a simple formula from Paul Woods for figuring the Holy days:

1) Find the spring equinox;

2) Find the new moon nearest the spring equinox (either before or after);

3) Use Jerusalem time (The moon is new to the whole earth at one time);

4) The first night the moon has completely ruled (had authority) over the is counted as number one (1). This day is the Biblical new Year Day;

5) Count to the fourteenth (14th) day of that moon and you have the Passover Day. The Lord’s Supper Service is to be held the evening of the preceding day.

Say what!!??!!!

Yes, it’s true: If you are going to do it right, you need to read the New Testament (along with the Old) very, very carefully — the Lord’s Supper Service is to be held on the evening of the 13th Day of the First month and the Passover begins the Days of Unleavened Bread on the next evening.

Here’s how it works in 30 A.D.:

Tuesday evening, Jesus has his last supper with his disciples;

Wednesday, during the day, Jesus is crucified, dies and at sunset is in the tomb and sealed in just as the evening of the 14th begins the Passover;

Thursday, Christ is in the tomb;

Friday, Christ in the tomb;

Saturday, Christ is in the tomb, but at sunset, after three days in the tomb, he is resurrected and leaves the tomb; 50 days later he ascends into the heavens on Pentecost;

Sunday morning, Jesus ascends as the Wave Sheaf Offering.

From there, you are on your own.

That’s as close as I think we can get: You may have different ideas, but they probably don’t work. One thing is clear: Herbert Armstrong was wrong about the calendar and most of the 700+ spit-offs are wrong as well. There are all sorts of excuses, the main one being, “We need to keep the brethren together”. It’s a little late for that, don’t you think? Wrong in the first place and wrong ever since. If the Jews didn’t get it right, what chance do you think Armstrongists had, when they went to the Jews for faulty advice?

Perhaps, and likely, this is all wasted effort: The question remains as to whether or not there is a requirement for Christians to keep the Feasts. The best evidence is that support for keeping the Feasts in the Bible is rather weak, if it exists at all. The Feasts, were, after all, a shadow of things to come, about half of which already have. As for keeping the Feast forever, it’s not going to happen, since, according to Revelation 22 there will be no sun or moon. So much for forever.

Get Your Fill of the Spirit
Get Your Fill of the Spirit

Moreover, there is no good Christian way to fund the Feasts given in the Bible, even if there might be a blessing in keeping them. There is no such thing as second tithe to keep the Feast. In Greg Doudna’s book, he points out that in 1975, the WCG very nearly cancelled the Feast to have everyone stay home so the church could get the money. You don’t really believe that the Armstrongist leaders are in sincerity and truth when they claim that the way to salvation is to keep the Feasts, do you, when they can propose cancelling them altogether? Besides, how much of a blessing is it to listen to sermons filled with false prophecies from false prophets about doomsday scenarios based on the ridiculous fully disproven British Israelism scrap? It’s no wonder the Church of God Seventh Day doesn’t keep them, even if we could figure out when they really are.

There is a lot that the Armstrongists don’t volunteer. It isn’t just that Herbert Armstrong had a cup of coffee and a donut on the Day of Atonement “to keep his strength up” before he gave the sermon; there is the matter of special dispensations that many members did not know: For example, those with health problems could skip fasting on the Day of Atonement — at first under doctor’s orders and approved by headquarters, and then later, anyone with diabetes had an automatic dispensation. There are all sorts of different various exceptions to the Sabbath and Feast Days, hidden away from the rank-and-file members, with special exceptions given, especially to those of the ministry (we are not forgetting that the ministers did not have to keep “second tithe” and “third tithe” because they were “spiritual Levites”. There’s nothing like corrupting a corrupt system adapted arbitrarily for whatever purpose someone wants and have it enforced by God and the Bible. It’s no wonder that the Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 1:14-15,

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.
And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.

But then the record of Old Testament Scripture was that the Israelites didn’t keep the Feasts for centuries at a time and God didn’t seem to mind — it was the idolatry that got to Him: The same kind of idolatry the followers of Herbert Armstrong commit today. Some of those Armstrongist church history theorists insist that at least one era of the church had so many problems that they did not need to keep the Feasts — that God just looked the other way as yet another entitlement. The problem is that there is no such thing as church eras and what was that about Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever? Is that forever, as in thou shall keep the Feasts forever in your generations? If so, it never happened. Armstrongists paint God the Father as being so fickle, double minded and inconsistent that it’s hard to take anything they say seriously: There are explanations everywhere as to why they don’t do what is commanded in the Bible in the Old Covenant that after awhile, it becomes little more than confused mental mush. It’s no wonder they don’t understand the Calendar… not that it makes any difference, since they don’t really keep the Feasts anyway: Hey! It’s a church corporation type convention — HP, IBM, LINUX Expo, Promise Keepers. Go for it. If you can afford it. If not, don’t worry, since it apparently isn’t required anyway. And don’t forget to booze it up: Just remember that the word Symposium comes from the Greek word for “drinking party”. Maybe the Armstrongists should rename it to the Symposium of Tabernacles and be done with it.

If you do attend the Feast of Tabernacles, do insure that you go someplace with good reception so you can be connected to the world through the Internet and your cell phone: You wouldn’t want to miss out on anything that is going on — after all, the world could come to an end and you wouldn’t know it.

The Calendar is always an interesting exercise.

Let it not be an exercise in futility.

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Con Job, Part 2

Eric Fromm commented:

It becomes ever increasingly clear to many students of man and of the contemporary scene that the development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century (now the 21st); the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammad–he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by the discrepancy between intellectual-technical over-maturity and emotional backwardness?

— Escape From Freedom

Escape from Freedom probes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule. The analysis concludes that if humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism.

Herbert Armstrong established totalitarian rule, not as a mass movement, the basis of analysis of The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, but as an individual movement promising something for nothing: He appealed to the greed of human nature, but convinced his followers that his motives and theirs were pure. The individual was conned into compartmentalizing truths behind walls in order to accept the distorted perceptions of Herbert Armstrong, the con. It’s like entering the fun house at the circus with all those mirrors which make everything look funny: Things that are smaller, look bigger; things that are bigger, look smaller; things that are taller, look shorter; things that are shorter, look taller; things that are narrow, look wide; things that are wide, look narrow. Perceptions are distorted for fun at the circus in the fun house; perceptions are distorted for profit in Armstrongism. Nothing is as it seems. It must be so, to accomplish the purposes of the man at the top of the one man show — to live as an Oriental Potentate at the top of a Ponzi Scheme.

The first act of a con man is to establish credibility, and coincidentally torpedo the credibility of anyone or anything which will wreck the credibility of the con artist. There are a multitude of ways to do this, but in the end, the con man establishes an anti ad hominem around himself to make himself invincible: That is to say, he establishes himself as the expert so that people will accept anything he says, simply because he said it. Once this is accomplished, he is able to say pretty much anything and those following him will accept it as the one and only truth and make people feel special because they personally believe the crap he’s pedaling.

Herbert Armstrong had several “truths” to establish his credibility: Invented Church History, the utterly stupid idea of British Israelism, the misguided idea that if you obeyed God’s Ten Commandments (including a few of Herbert Armstrong’s own), you would have material prosperity in this life and become God as God is God with power as a ruler to make people bend to your will and all the Wealth of the Universe at your fingertips — forever.

One of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of Herbert Armstrong was the Feast of Tabernacles: Even though he was robbing people of their peace of mind, stability — financial and otherwise — family relationships, sanity, independence, self-respect — taking the very lives of people into a world of dysfunctional chaos and making them proud that they somehow made it all work (even though it didn’t) — the people compartmentalized away the confusion of their lives, looking for the one time in the year they could have all the nice things they did without the whole rest of the year. No one noticed or seemed to care, that they did it all on their own time and Herbert Armstrong really had no skin in the game: We all payed our own money to attend the annual circus and spend time in the Festival fun house of distorted perceptions. Three tithes was a masterstroke of manipulation to create an impressive impression of delusion deformed into a personal truth of prosperity for 8 days, while living a life of dystopian self-sacrifice the rest of the year. Of course, it wasn’t just self-sacrifice: It was sacrificing the children and spouse on the altar of self-serving idolatry to achieve something unattainable for one brief shining moment once a year.

The three tithe tithing system was certainly advanced for its time and predated the financial manipulation of the documentary Inside Job outlining the cause of the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008, which took over four decades of preparation by those of less than stellar morals (and none of whom have been convicted for their actions). Financial wizards devised Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), Credit Default Swap, Derivatives (including futures), Hedging, leverage with high margins, Residential Mortgage Backed Securities, Securitization and deregulation to create their own prosperity, taking trillions of dollars of profit. [The terms are defined here.] Scientists and mathematicians who worked for the United States Government during the Cold War lost their jobs when the Cold War was declared to be over. They sought new vistas to apply their considerable expertise and in the 1970s settled on the Financial Sector to leverage their knowledge of technology to financial markets. It was not long before they created new financial instruments so sophisticated that the average person on the street could not begin to fathom the methodologies behind them, nor the potential impact they would have in the future of the world.

One analogy in the movie was used to describe the financial instruments this way: Suppose you were buying a house. The seller insists that your house be insured. If something happens to the house, both the seller and buyer would be covered. Suppose, though, that not only the buyer had the insurance, but 20 other outsiders took out insurance too. If the house burned down, not only would the buyer / seller get the insurance money, but the 20 outsiders would too — with no interest or stake in the property at all: It would just be free money.

Now it turns out that AIG was the major insurer. When one of the firms against which other companies insured went bankrupt, AIG could not cover the payout of the insurance and had to get a bailout — and so did several other companies. The people behind this Ponzi Scheme who were CEOs, Presidents and Directors of the companies which fell, managed to bail out just before the crisis to go to work for the Federal Government as regulators and financial consultants, insisting that Derivatives did not need to be regulated (oops!). In the process, they sold off hundreds of millions (cumulatively, billions) of dollars, all — due to the vagaries of the system they helped create — of which were tax free. And before Congress in the aftermath of this disaster, as these people were brought into account for their manipulation for their own profit (and for which they were not ultimately penalized), they explained that they didn’t do anything legal and they did what they did because no one stopped them.

Watching the movie (recommended to watch several times), is a disturbing experience.

What is even more disturbing in its own way is that Herbert Armstrong created financial instruments of his own without one whit of remorse to accomplish pretty much the same thing: To make himself rich, without accountability and — like those testifying before Congress — never admitted he did anything wrong. The Worldwide Church of God was one giant Corporate Ponzi Scheme, just as the Financial World was one giant Worldwide Ponzi Scheme.

Some people objected to the revelation in the movie that Cocaine stimulates exactly the same regions of the brain as financial gain activates. The truth is that it is science. Make no mistake: Herbert Armstrong’s brain was highly stimulated by the $2 Billion to $4 Billion dollars he ran through in the era of the Worldwide Church of God. He had an addiction to fine things and had quite an expensive habit we all paid for and that addiction was very likely the same as found in Cocaine addicts, lusting for the rush of the feeling of power.

Now maybe Herbert Armstrong was nowhere near as sophisticated as the Cold War scientists and mathematicians turned to churning out financial instruments, but he certainly was clever enough to distort Scripture to say what it did not say through Proof Texting and carefully compartmentalizing anything which would detract from his high concept ideas of control and manipulation. He was ahead of his time. He created a Sythetic Religious Corporate Disney World in the form of Ambassador College and he created his own corporate conventions for his “employees” (who paid for the privilege and not the other way around) to have fun consistently once a year to hold them captive and to continuously escape from freedom. Many religious people accept the premise that they should give 10% “to God”. But another 10% to be used to attend a church corporate convention once a year — money which cannot be used for any other purpose? And yet another 10% given every third year in a seven year cycle? It’s preposterous and decidedly Unbiblical. Scripture does not support such a thing, no matter how much of Herbert Armstrong’s distorted perception is employed to force fit it to try to make it true.

Herbert Armstrong was only the beginning. Not unlike Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff — and from the Inside Job movie — Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and our fave, Alan Greenspan, the Armstrongist co conspirators have expanded the financial debacle perpetrated upon the dupes in the Armstrongist community. Herbert Armstrong bought gold diamond cuff links on church money, along with renting a yacht for family to sail on the Mediteranian. He spent money on gold and silver flatware for the table, and managed to take $50,000 cash everywhere he went as “mad money”. Ronald Weinland followed in the footsteps of Herbert Armstrong, spending $3.5 million as personal money out of CoG-PKG funds and the IRS caught him at it and the Federal Court convicted him. Nevertheless, Herbert Armstrong did worse and never got caught. We all should note Art Ferdig had a scam going in his Ponzi Scheme which cost his investors $35 million. He too has been convicted and is going to prison. He learned from Armstrong at his side as Herbert’s personal assistant. There are so many others (some of which are not offenders in the financial realm, per se, but are corrupt too, such as Kevin Dean). Herbert Armstrong not only was a scoundrel who made off with the money, he also taught his sycophant lackeys a thing or two about being a con artist. The entire venue of Armstrongism is a realm of ministers and administrators who are greedy for our money and they don’t stop. Those of us who listened to Dennis Luker for those decades know very well his self-concern over his salary and retirement. Everybody there is greedy and wants to live off of us in the social equivalent of the welfare system — only with much higher stakes. And yes, the UCG today is pushing its Million Dollar Faith initiative, promising to spread the gospel to the Arabs. It is another useless grab for money which will end in tears — for those who contribute to the folly.

Herbert Armstrong was certainly a corrupting influence.

No sane person would accept such a thing.

Let us return to Eric Fromm:

It seems useful to differentiate between “static” and “dynamic” adaptation. By static adaptation we mean such an adaptation to patterns as leaves the whole character structure unchanged and implies only the adoption of a new habit. An example of this kind of adaptation is the change from the Chinese habit of eating to the Western habit of using fork and knife. A Chinese coming to America will adapt himself to this new pattern, but this adaptation in itself has little effect on his personality; it does not arouse new drives or character traits.

By dynamic adaptation we refer to the kind of adaptation that occurs, for example, when a boy submits to the commands of his strict and threatening father — being too much afraid of him to do otherwise–and becomes a “good” boy. While he adapts himself to the necessities of the situation, something happens in him. He may develop and intense hostility against his father, which he represses, since it would be too dangerous to express it or even to be aware of it. This repressed hostility, however, though not manifest, is a dynamic factor in the character structure. It may create new anxiety and thus lead to still deeper submission; it may set up a vague defiance, directed against no one in particular but rather toward life in general. While here, too, as in the first case, an individual adapts himself to certain external circumstances, this kind of adaptation creates something new in him, arouses new drives and new anxieties. Every neurosis is an example of this dynamic adaptation; it is essentially an adaptation to such external conditions (particularly those of early childhood) as are in themselves irrational and, generally speaking, unfavorable to the growth and development of the child. Similarly, such socio-psychological phenomena as are comparable to neurotic phenomena, like the presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses in social groups, offer an example of dynamic adaptation to social conditions that are irrational and harmful to the development of man.

— Escape From Freedom

The more we examine each of the irrational premises of Herbert Armstrong in his seriously deluded distorted perception sociopathic follies, the more we see the superstructure of his interlocking logic crumble as we pull the pin from the underlying key supports of the structure. In this case, we can compare Herbert Armstrong to those who are responsible for creating the worldwide financial meltdown, even though the scope was limited to only tens of thousands of personal financial meltdowns.

More disturbing is the aspect that the irrational forces created by Herbert Armstrong have led to the dynamic adaptation of over 100,000 (at a time — with more going through the revolving doors of the WCG in the 1970s), to produce in most of us psychological phenomena comparable to the neurotic, with the presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses. In the mental disorder, Folie à deux, the patient will generally recover from the insanity passed on by the one possessing the madness because of static adaptation — the induced delusional disorder does not become ingrained in the character of the afflicted. It appears that the folly of the daft kook, Herbert Armstrong is not a simple  Folie à deux — the shared psychotic disorder — and thus requires more stringent measures for its removal.

It is incumbent upon us all to guard ourselves against all the various cons. It requires constant vigilance. We must be aware of the methods and practices of the con.

It takes considerable effort to win against totalitarian forces. As Eric Fromm says:

If we want to fight Fascism we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as the ritual of an Indian rain dance.

— Escape From Freedom

We must also embrace freedom and sacrifice our desire to be dominated by others for security, a desire of belonging. We must be willing to accept the responsibility and accountability to stand alone.

Freedom can have a high price.

It is only when we realize that being dominated by authoritarianism has a much higher price — in this case, measured in Trillions of Dollars — that the price of freedom is so much less than the Escape from Freedom.

Go forth and make the life of the con man miserable: From such turn away.

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Giving Your Power Over To Another

 

 

In my article, “Politicians, Priests, and Pornographers” I touched on how people give their hopes and dreams to others, often compromising their personal integrity in the process.

In the next few blogs, I and another blogger, Bob Dixon, will touch on how easy it is for people to forsake their freedom and give their hearts and minds over to promises made by the less scrupulous among us.

To get started, here is a short video by Bill Abram entitled
“THE CRIME OF THE CANADIAN BANKING SYSTEM”

“For nearly 40 years, Canada – the people of Canada – had control of their own currency! Imagine! They founded their own bank and issued their own currency with no debt obligations to banks.”
—Bill Abram

Politicians are putting people, corporations, and nations in debt. Religious pimps are putting people, communities and societies in peril as they exploit the naive masses, building a base of blue ribbon tithe payers who sacrifice all for the lie of a glorious future.

For example, when the COG’lets decide they need a multimillion dollar auditorium they borrow money from a bank, and in the process put the entire congregation into debt. If you signed a support pledge to your church, you are stating that you are personally responsible for some of that debt.

Exploiting the world for profit by any means is something all of us experienced in and out of Armstrongism. We were told the fairy tale that our tithes and offerings honored God and paved the way for a new and glorious world tomorrow. In the end it was all a lie. We were put into unnecessary and unending debt. Many of us never recovered financially.

Why then do some of us who have abandoned religion now embrace and put our faith into another man made disaster? Politics.

 A man who wanted to buy an Ass went to market, and, coming across
a likely-looking beast, arranged with the owner that he should be
allowed to take him home on trial to see what he was like. When he
reached home, he put him into his stable along with the other asses.
The newcomer took a look round, and immediately went and chose a place
next to the laziest and greediest beast in the stable. When the master
saw this he put a halter on him at once, and led him off and handed
him over to his owner again. The latter was a good deal surprised to
see him back so soon, and said, “Why, do you mean to say you have
tested him already?” “I don’t want to put him through any more tests,”
replied the other. “I could see what sort of beast he is from the
companion he chose for himself.”
-Aesop’s Fables.”The Ass and his Purchaser”