Wrecked Family. Part II

May 21, 2011
– Elderly Mother Missing After Former World Wide Church of God Member Brother Uproots Her From Nursing Home and Philadelphia Church of God Sister Influences Her.


Yet another serious blow to my family — My former WWCOG member & brother, who wrecked our family by joining WWCOG in the earlier 70s, (He claims to have left the cult several years ago), took advantage of growing tensions between me and my 85-year-old mother over my PCOG sister, and I believe uprooted my mother from a nursing home in PA near us, and transplanted her to TX, where he lives. I also suspect my PCOG sister, referenced in the tragic story posted on this website regarding how she ruined my niece’s future, influenced and encouraged my mother to leave us. If so, he has done this without my knowledge. I found out my mother was missing from a former neighbor who tried to get in contact with my mother. Her phone line in the nursing home has been disconnected.

Instead of supporting me in stopping my PCOG sister from hoodwinking my mother for all these years, my former WWCOG member brother made every effort to exploit a crack opening between me and my mother, he being well-versed in deceiving, as a former HWA devotee, and a family-wrecker (His son has two illegitimate daughters, one of which has a Muslim first name). He learned HWA’s techniques well. It wasn’t enough that he took advantage of the rift, and moved my mother to TX. Before leaving, he and/or my mother somehow made my wife and I out to be the bad daughter-in-law and son for trying to help my niece (who wanted to split from PCOG) and for refusing to be pacifists regarding PCOG, WWCOG and HWA. Several neighbors, co-workers, all relatives, and former friends snub us. The relatives who no longer speak to us include my homosexual cousin whose former partner ran for some city government position and was caught soliciting an undercover vice squad officer. Made the newspapers of course. The other relative had an abortion. They are passing judgment on us. Typical.

Before my mother went missing, over the last few months, I had cut down on the number of calls, visits, and emails to her because she would never address the issues I raised regarding my sister taking advantage of herself and the alleged abuse of my niece via PCOG and her PCOG parents. Indirectly, my mother supported PCOG by sending my PCOG sister money for birthdays and letting her use her credit card when she visited. My mother refused to pressure my sister to compensate my wife the $2000 she spent on protecting our niece after her parents abandoned her to the streets for refusing to participate in PCOG. When we took my niece to visit my mother at the nursing home to tell her what had happened to her while in PCOG, my mother just sat there, stony-faced, and insisted she (my niece) belonged back with her PCOG parents despite all troubles they and PCOG had caused her.

My mother yelled at me the last time I saw her, upset as she was, that we had given my niece shelter over the summer when she had no where else to go. My mother ended by saying that it was wrong of me to have blocked her (my mother) from going to TX a year ago (which wasn’t true), and that as soon as she got better (she had a colostomy) she was going to TX. This, I took, as a veiled threat for me to keep quiet about PCOG, WWCOG, and how their vile influence was destroying us as a family.

Backtracking a bit, it was a little over a year ago when my cousin and her husband left us a nasty voice message containing outright slander and defamation of character statements alluding to us mistreating my mother (It is my understand their son is in a cult, the Seventh Day Adventists?). I played the tape for my former WWCOG brother. He never called this relative to straighten out the slander. His WWCOG wife wouldn’t even listen to the tape. I played the tape for my mother. She called my cousin to tell her she had gotten it awrong, but my mother remained in contact with this relative. Someone influenced my cousin to leave such a nasty message, thus I backed off from visiting my mother, while I tried to figure out who was defaming us. Around this time, my mother started thinking about moving to TX, either on her own, or I suspected with my former WWCOG brother and PCOG sister’s prodding. At the very least, they certainly didn’t’ discourage her. A few months later, I spoke with my former WWCOG brother asking him if everything was OK with my mother. He said “yes.” Less than a week later, he calls to announce his son had another illegitimate child (my wife and I don’t have children, so I believe this was a dig), and that our mother was moving to TX, and “whether I had any questions.” I was upset because I feared for my mother’s safety, her having anything to do with my deceiver and former WWCOG member brother who split apart the family. My wife spoke with my mother, and said I was upset. My mother changed her plans, and stayed. I got back in contact with my mother, overlooking this incident, and my wife visited her almost everyday at the nursing home. I called and visited her too, as before. My wife helped her with figuring out how to manage her colostomy bag. My mother gave the nurses credit for this, not my wife.

It all really fell apart when my niece came last summer, fleeing from PCOG and er PCOG parents. That’s when the family imploded. My mother yelled at me for no justifiable reason. I backed off visiting her, as my visits were obviously upsetting her, and she continued to support my PCOG sister. My wife, being unable to understand why my mother defends a dangerous cult, and is hostile toward us, when it was us who have helped her, not taking advantage of her. My wife and I don’t understand why, after my niece told her what had happened to her via PCOG, my mother insists on burying her head in the sand. My mother places her age and health condition front and center as a reason to avoid confronting my sister and former WWCOG brother and their membership in a dangerous cult, choosing instead to tell relatives, and whoever, that it is my wife and I who are wrong.

I ask to be removed as “executor” of my mother’s will. I said I wanted no part of being involved as her agent in transferring any money to PCOG through any money my sister might inherit. Cult experts advise never give money to any family member who is in a cult such as PCOG or WWCOG. My mother disregards this advice to the detriment of her grand-children’s future and to the integrity of our family.

I told my brother the correct way to handle the executor was to have a third party be executor of the will, not a family member. My brother refused to support me on this idea, and now is the executor of her will. My former WWCOG brother recently said he’d met a lot of “nice people” in WWCOG. We can only imagine his motivations of refusing to back the idea of assigning a third party, non-family member her estate executor.

My former WWCOG brother has smeared my efforts to support my mother and father all my life, when it was he and my sister who destroyed the family after he joined WWCOG. He never devoted his life in protecting his parents as I had, and therefore doesn’t believe I would. People accuse others of the crimes they themselves are guilty of. He took advantage of my mother’s growing confusion. Instead of clarifying reality, he and his WWCOG wife remain silent all throughout my struggles with my mother and PCOG sister duping my mother (She uses various health scares to gain my mother’s empathy).

My former WWCOG brother and PCOG sister make subtle, derogatory remarks about my deceased father, who objected to their membership in the WWCOG cult. My sister even posted derogatory poems on the internet about both her father (after he died) and mother. My father was a good man of character, wanting only the best for his children, and this is the way he was treated in life and after death?

My brother, after having never visited the family for but about 5 days a year since he joined WWCOG in the early 70s, (he called his parents less than a dozen times a year), exhibited greed when it came to emptying the contents of their house, in typical Armstrong fashion. He asked for half a train collection, ridiculing me for wanting to hold onto the collection, since it was me, not him, who as a youth, spent a lot of time with these trains building layouts, instead of holing myself up in my room listening to the likes of Gardner Ted Armstrong (Teddy the Fornicator), and incest committing Herbert Armstrong. He never once touched the train collection. It was with great effort that I had to convince my mother that giving him half the train collection was a mistake. She also wanted to give him half a book collection of classic books he’d never read, instead choosing to poke his nose in incest committing Herbert Armstrong’s “The Plain Truth,” “Mystery of the Ages,” and “End Times.”

When my mother had a colon resection about nine months ago, I rushed to the emergency room. I was just about to round the curtained-off area where she was when I heard her tell the emergency room people that she has family living nearby, but they (meaning my wife and I) don’t contact her. This is after my wife spent most of her lunch hours visiting my mother in the nursing home, helping her. My mother would rather throw us under the bus than have her former WWCOG son and PCOG member daughter exposed for destroying our family, among other transgressions.

So you can see by the example of our family’s history that the suffering, thanks to WWCOG and incest committing HWA, continues to escalate. These creeps and dangerous cults continue to destroy every shred that is left of our once hopeful and promising family.

Today, I’m not even sure where my mother is. My wife is very sick. She has to go to work every day in a lot of pain from a nerve problem that has caused frozen shoulder syndrome. I am told by a PCOG cult expert to be very careful, as some of its members could be “killers, ” as one “former member” has contacted us, claiming to offer help, but is elusive about who he is, and asked for our phone number twice. My wife and I live in fear of our lives while my relatives, former friends and some neighbors embark on a campaign of defamation of character, thanks to the misinformation or incomplete information my WWCOG brother, PCOG sister are probably spreading to throw smoke and mirrors over what they’ve done to destroy us. We want to know where my elderly mother is and whether she’s being abused, financially or otherwise. We want to know where my niece is and whether we can still help her pursue her dream of going to medical school.

The World Tomorrow

It must have been sometime around 1970 when I first heard The World Tomorrow broadcast with Garner Ted Armstrong. I would subsequently listen to it on the drive home after teaching my night school class. I had never heard about the “divided kingdom” or the 10 Lost Tribes and I was greatly intrigued by the idea that the people of Israel might actually have migrated to Europe, Britain, and America, and that Bible prophecy might pertain to present-day geo-politics.

My longstanding interest in history was further stimulated by these assertions but my energies at that time were preoccupied with my young family and academic career. It was a few years later, after a personal crisis and divorce that I began to look more deeply into all aspects of my life, including the spiritual. I had already a few years earlier put aside my belief in Catholic teachings but had not made the effort to supplant that faith with anything else.

It was with some trepidation that I began to read the Bible, something that the Church did not encourage. I quickly discovered why. There was much in the Bible that contradicted Catholic doctrine and practice, and it became obvious that the institutional objective was to keep “the faithful” in line and dependent upon the clergy. One case in point: Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven (Matt. 23:9 KJV). And, of course, Catholic priests insist on being called, “father.”

I also, about that time, took a subscription to the Plain Truth magazine, which I looked forward to reading each month. I found most of the articles on geopolitics and current affairs to be well researched and quite insightful, which helped me to gain a more realistic worldview. I also made it a point to listen more regularly to the World Tomorrow broadcasts, which, following Garner Ted’s banishment had been taken over by Herbert Armstrong. I was rather dismayed to see the chaos and disintegration that followed Herbert Armstrong’s death, but there was a lot going on in my life at the time, and I had never involved myself with the Worldwide Church of God organization, so it simply passed out of my life.

A little less than two years ago, while waiting in my doctor’s office, I happened to notice a magazine that bore a peculiar resemblance to the old Plain Truth. I discovered that the Philadelphia Trumpet, under Gerald Flurry, is now being published by an organization that calls itself the “Philadelphia Church of God,” which looks to be a reincarnation of the Herbert Armstrong enterprise. I’ve been subscribing to the new PT for a little more than a year now and I must credit it with being similarly informative and insightful, despite some obvious political biases and blind spots.

It is clear that humanity is currently confronted with a multi-dimensional crisis—it is at once economic, financial, environmental, political, and social. A recent issue of Philadelphia Trumpet highlighted this in a lead article titled, The Upside-Down World (by Joel Hilliker). I can surely agree that the World is “upside-down” but that author’s assessment of underlying causes has the ring of  typical “Christian conservatism.” Like so many of that ilk, it rails against liberal social norms but overlooks the gross inequities inherent in our political economy. I cannot recall ever seeing, either in the old PT or the new PT, any mention of usury or the debt-trap, and very little about social injustice, gross economic inequities, or state-sanctioned corporate privilege that enables the few to dominate the many.

Over the past several years, I’ve made a careful study of the structures of the money and banking system and discovered that there are serious flaws inherent in the way money is created and allocated. This has profound implications for all of us. As Thomas H. Greco puts it:

Money is a topic that few people understand. Sure, we use it every day and it seems familiar; but like water to the fish, we take it for granted and seldom give its role any notice. Yet the quality of the water that the fish inhabit is crucial in determining the quality of their existence. If the water happens to be polluted, the fish sicken and die. Likewise, money is a primary element of the modern economy that we inhabit. The quality of the money we use determines, to a great extent, the quality of our lives. (Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Chelsea Green, 2001)

Did you ever wonder why both the Bible (Old Testament and New) and the Koran make such a big issue about the practice of usury, or why it was so severely punished under Canon law for hundreds of years? Well, it turns out that the compounding of interest (usury) demands exponential growth, in this case the exponential growth of debt. All questions of equity aside, it is clear that in a finite world nothing can grow exponentially forever. Growth must at some point either level off, or there will be a catastrophic collapse. This is often seen with insect and animal populations. When they grow at an accelerating rate they inevitably overrun their habitats and exhaust their food supplies. So too, the amount of debt in the world must soon exceed the ability of the real economy to bear it.

This is not just theoretical; we can see it playing out right now. As the chart shows, even TotalUSDebt-300x256as late as 1965, total debt for all sectors in the United States was a relatively small one trillion dollars, or 1.5 time total economic output (GDP). By 2007 that had grown to more than $50 trillion or 3.5 times GDP, and George Soros, the billionaire financier and speculator is predicting that debt will soon reach 5 times GDP.

If you want to understand how the money system operates and the root causes of economic depressions, inflation, and so much of the violent conflict in the world, you should study Greco’s websites, http://beyondmoney.net/ and http://reinventingmoney.com/. You should also view Paul Grignon’s animated video Money as Debt (http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/index2.htm) which is available on DVD or on YouTube , (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8).

More about this in the next installment–Santos