Holiday Poetry

The holiday season is upon us and it seems that all the best sites are featuring poetic pieces. So, I have put together a little something I'd like to call...

Twas the Week Before a COG Christmas (with apologies to everyone)
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Twas the week before Christmas
From the North to the South
The Prophets were crying,
"A pox on your house"

Gerry and Rod, Dave and yes Ted
He's still on the air
Yet he's definitely quite dead

Elijah has come, Elijah has gone
For twenty long years
He's been under the lawn

Faster than eagles
On wings he once flew
No Christmas for him
Nor Stan Rader, the Jew

Tsunamis still roll
Earthquakes still clatter
Apostles and Prophets know what is the matter

The Lord will descend in five
Maybe ten
The trumpet will sound at Armageddon

We're in the Last Hour
Last Minute, Last Tick
Last year for a parcel
From Jolly Saint Nick

So if you're out on the town
and spy a man in a suit
Briefcase in hand
and shiny new boots

White hair like the snow
His manner quite merry
And yes he does glow,
Nose red from the sherry

It's only a flashback
a dream or a spoof
Just like the man that comes
from the roof.

Happy Holidays.

Trade Your Mule for a Starship

Tis the season once again. For some to be merry, for others to dust off their quill, or website and start the yearly comparisons between Santa and Satan. Most like to point out that Santa is merely Satan spelled wrong, but a lot of us know that Santa really means Saint. The people warning us about Satan believe in a literal Lucifer the fallen archangel. I am not sure Lucifer exists, though my car did act up a few weeks ago. Could have been a demon attack.

Always ready with the answer, traditional coggers teach that Satan deceives us about his existence, making his job of destroying us a lot easier. They are not falling for it though, they know he walks around like a roaring lion waiting to get a toe in the door. And we know what happens if he gets a toe in--boom! Down comes the door and we get booted into the lake.

All religious holidays have their symbolism. It is when we ignore the symbolism and try to read a literal meaning into Biblical references that we get caught in the trap of proof texts, days and times, and the cycle of failing prophecy. For the good of all of us, lighten up a bit and see the underlying meaning of ancient religious practices. Parts of this book have not been updated for thousands of years!

Arguments over "the reason for the season" open up a real rat's nest of perplexing beliefs. Those nasty little details include the date of Jesus' birth, the virgin birth, non-Christian symbols and their appropriateness, wise men, stars and little drummer boys. There are some who even question whether Jesus existed, and can produce a fairly reasonable argument for their case. In the end most people behave in a manner taught to them by their family and society around them.

Two thousand years after the start of the Christian religion there is still no broad agreement on who or what God is and what he or she wants from us. Yet many persist in trying to convince others that they have the true path to righteousness. Labels get thrown around: heathen, pagan, barbarian, cult, Laodicean, Sardis and "the world". It's a mess and sometimes there is a war to set things straight.

For a long time I bought into the party line and withdrew from the world, came out of Babylon and spent many holidays alone while others celebrated and had a good time. I do not believe I resented it, I felt comfortable with that decision, I believed I was doing what God wanted of me. But it was a difficult struggle and I waited eagerly for those days to pass. Having gone through that experience, I do not believe that it contributed positively to my spiritual state, and it brought me closer to depression than to God. Armstrongism blames me for being weak in faith. I blame it for wasting my time.

I have since learned of the many false historical facts and religious beliefs preached by the WCG and can see that group for what is really was. I can also see that buying my grandmother a Christmas present would really not have been a huge deal. Too late now though.

My current view on Christianity is that it plays fast and loose with the facts of history and of science. To buy into it in its current form is asking too much. But I live in a society and a family that has parties and buys presents every year at Christmastime. I really do not want to live in a cave any longer, so my alternative is to share in those celebrations while maintaining my own self-respect. Yes, I do buy the odd present or two. But I don't go to any church services, or get mired in the myth and fable of the holiday season.

So to those that feel troubled at this time of year, and fight the loneliness on God's behalf I share my compassion. But I also believe that if there is an all wise and loving parent out there, his thinking would have to be way beyond the capability of those who wrote the Bible to even comprehend. Most of them rode mules. To that Being, all religious festivals and symbols would be utterly useless. The business of running a universe (or parallel universes) has little to do with ancient Hebrew slaughters, or Roman Saturn worship. Those are the domain of cave-men playing with sticks and stones.

I think God must be laughing at us somewhere, waiting for us to grow up.

Give a gift to the food bank this Christmas, and call your grandmother.

KTHO

A Message from your Future Leader

The following quote is from a person with the truth of God.

"Firstly, you may believe that HWA was a charlatan, but if we push that belief to its logical conclusion, it'd mean that you, I, and the thousands out there in cog-land were never called by God. For God does NOT call people to follow charlatans. This is not to say that HWA did not make mistakes, and lack understanding in doctrine and procedure. But the same is true of you and me. Yet we don't see ourselves as charlatans. Or do we?

Secondly, when it comes to the bible, I don't have any opinions. For an opinion is only the ignorance we express when we don't know the truth. If know the truth, why would we need opinions? Finally, it is said that imitation is the best form of flattery, provided of course we understand what we are saying."

It's this kind of short-circuited reasoning that traps many immature and unsettled people. Take apart the first paragraph, you get the assumption: "God does NOT call people to follow charlatans." The writer is sure that he knows what God does, and how God thinks and acts.

Also, is it possible that you or I were never called by God? Yes, it is at least equally possible one way or the other. Actually, coggish reasoning would have the probability of being called much lower than not being called given that "Satan has deceived the whoooooolllle world." How many times have you heard that one.

Making mistakes and not knowing correct procedures does not define charlatanism. The speaker is trying to dodge the real issue by throwing something else out to confuse the real matter at hand. Someone duped by a person perpetrating a fraud is not guilty of the fraud. This should be obvious. The people duped by HWA are not charlatans. Co-conspirators (ministers, evangelists, other henchmen) would be.

Beware of humans pretending to know the absolute truth. They have killed many millions of people. Claiming to know "the truth" about anything is a flawed human endeavor. We should not be too smug; reality sometimes proves us wrong a few hundred years down the line. In many cases these laws are good enough until something better comes along e.g. Newton's laws vs. Einstein's theories, God the Eternal vs Trinity vs Elohim.

As I have said before, religious zealots often get caught up in being right. They must be absolutely right in order to bolster their church's view of the world. To permit change is to admit failure. Failure in understanding what the church holds as truth. The implosion of the WCG shows us all what happens when a) you remove a tyrant b) you change church doctrine.

Ka-boom. Beware of falling tithes.

KTHO

Lipstick and other Cosmic Questions

Master of Disaster Gerald Flurry has released the latest issue of the Trumpet magazine. I have not been fortunate enough to remove myself from the mailing list so far.

Inside is a littany of articles detailing the ultimate demise of Western, in fact worldwide civilization. The result of living contrary to God's Law.

Here are some of the article headings.

"Wake-Up Call"
"A Jewel in America's Crown-Lost"
"Urban Anarchy"
"Descent into Barbarism"
"Tragedy of Biblical Proportions"
"Israel's Bleeding Wound"

Those happy little eye-catchers are just from the table of contents. The chapter headings within the articles are jammed full of woe and foreboding.

One statement that jumped out at me was, "God controls the weather. The Bible says that earthquakes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis are anything but normal. These intensifying disasters are not God's fault. They are our fault. National tragedies are upon us, and will increase one hundredfold because of our disobedience to God's law and our rebellion against His authority."

[Note: The Bible also says that a donkey talked, and the earth stopped rotating.]

Same old song and dance. PCG logic is that God created a universal law. It is not His fault that you are disobeying this law because He created you a free moral agent. You could simply choose to do the right thing. In "Mystery of the Ages", Armstrong indicates that many have never even heard the name of Jesus. Think of a Chinese peasant living a few thousand years ago. So it seems that at some point along the line, like when Adam fell from grace, God gave up on humanity to follow their own devices.

But wait! God controls things like weather, and national governments. And God is calling out special people like Moses, David, Herbert Armstrong, and Gerald Flurry. So He is still playing with the works. Just like most things in cogdom, and in religion itself, there is always an answer. The answer is never clear, and the answer is never subject to scrutiny.

Religion asks, sometimes demands of us to believe in things that simply cannot be proved. When I say proof, I mean directly without needing any special middle man to show us the way. As our knowledge increases we understand things that people 1000, 2000, 6000 years ago did not. Why do we struggle with that? It seems very difficult, and I cannot explain why. We accept it in engineering and medicine, but we recoil at holding religious leaders to the same standard. At some level we feel comforted. But the facts rise up like a stench in our faces.

Millions upon millions murdered, misery, ignorance, hatred, politics, sexual scandals including multiple thousands of children abused. These are the things that religion claims to stand against. Yet these are the very things perpetrated by religion. Even the coggers that do not directly take part in war long for That Day when the Eternal descends with a shout and kills millions upon millions.

This kind of god seems like a human with bad behaviour given super-power status. Give me a real god for once.

Given that mahem and murder is gone out of fashion in most religious circles today, exception being radical Islam, many have taken to modernizing God's image. Ministers use the Bible to show attributes of God's nature that apply to today's surroundings. Pam Dewey's talk relating to the Matrix is an example of this. This is spin, and like putting lipstick on a 4000 year old pig. Nobody has answered the fundamental (or technical) questions around God's existence and what, if anything God requires of us.

Sure they claim to know, and they enjoy standing at the podium giving modernized presentations using their Dell Pentium 4 laptop or PowerBook G5 using their laser pointer. But the laser beam is still pointing at a black hole. A lot of people are talking, but God's not answering.

My current position on God, post cog, is very simple. God may exist. God may not.

Wishful thinking, circumstantial evidence (e.g. Moses saw His rear-end), rites or feelings will not bring God into existence. Also, we do not have the capability at this time to prove that beings other than ourselves do not exist in some other reality. We are stuck with reality as it presents itself.

Focus on the here-and-now and let eternity take care of itself. It's out of my control. All I can do is lead a peaceful life in harmony with nature and my neighbor.

Isn't that what God really wants anyway?

KTHO

The Apocalypse--Some Practical Considerations for Worldwide Domination

The following is a public service announcement from the Trumpet magazine.

With the Bavarian Benedict able “to win over and rally all the world’s
Catholics” and a rising political twin [Stoiber] who will likely lead Germany
and even Europe, it appears Europe’s future as a resurrection of the Holy Roman
Empire is coming very close to fruition.

The PCG's 2010 deadline for the end of the age places some near-term prophesies on the horizon. Yet, with less than 5 years to go, their articles are still laden with qualifications like "will likely lead". I am not a general, but I am thinking that it takes at least a few years to get an army ready for world domination. It takes things like trained soldiers, munitions, vehicles, planes, boats, nuclear weapsons and a public information campaign to name a few. The PCG's rhetoric must change to reflect confidence in their prophet--no more likes, maybes, or possiblys.

Germany is in fact spending on its military. For example, "The German Navy is seeking parliamentary approval for a contract for four Type F 125 surface combatants in the first half of 2006 and for the new warships to be commissioned at two-year intervals starting from 2012." This quote is taken from www.Janes.com.

Nothing seems to indicate the kind of spending and ramp-up required for an Apocalypse, beginning in a few short years. Another article outlining the stretched German military is located on the following site, www.cdi.org/terrorism/germanreforms.cfm.

Some proponents of prophecy might point to the fact that the Beast power will be a combined force not just a single nation. However, doesn't it seem strange that the leader of such a massive effort is not super-capable in the final hour before battle?

Then there's the captivity part. Ever add up the total number of persons in "Israelite" countries? Try it some day if you are bored. If you are a future universe leader, you should have these numbers ready for the press conference. We're talking hundreds of millions of people here. Taking a round number like 500 million, even if 90% of them are left dead, that's still 50 million that must be carried off to the gulag. All of that requires ships for US (30 million), Canadian (3 million)and Australian (2 million) victims, and those walking from Sweden (800,000) will clog the roadways.

I checked the Carnival Cruises web site, and their largest ships hold around 3000 people. Given that the evil taskmasters will cram their captives in like sardines, let's up the capacity to 6000 people per ship. That's 5000 boatloads of captives from the US that must make a cross-Atlantic voyage. It was hard to determine the speed for an Atlantic crossing but one estimate puts it at 80 hours (http://www.bluebird-electric.net/the_blue_ribband.htm). That's 400,000 hours total travel time, 16,666 2/3 days. Hey there are a lot of 666s in there, maybe I'm on to something after all. That totals over 45 years.

I won't continue this farsical exercise, but you can see from these crude numbers that to get everyone to the gulag before the trumpets start sounding, and to give the Laodiceans some repentance time, it would take about 30 top notch cruise ships going 24/7 for 730 days to transport 41,096 people per day at seven boats per day carrying 6000 people each. That number is probably not realistic given maintanance and other timing issues, and weather.

The raw numbers from this little exercise almost seem plausible, but they do not consider transit time from destoryed cities and rural areas, the manpower required to escort these captives and other resource issues. We saw recently the catastrophic results of Hurricane Katrina and the manpower required to handle a city of about 1 million. Can you imagine transporting 30 million people after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed infrastructure, and made the country radioactive in may areas?

Doesn't seem realistic when you look at the big picture.

This has been a small rainy afternoon exercise. The point behind it all was to think through just one of the many claims made by Prophets and Apostles. Such thinking and questioning is discouraged in many congregations resulting in accusations of disloyalty or demon-possession.

"Just believe", they say, "the Bible tells me so."

KTHO

In Need of a Warm Bath?

Things have been quite hectic around the lakeshore for a few weeks. Several times I tried to collect my thoughts and write something coherent, but the words just didn't fit right. Perhaps I am suffering a little from COG burnout. Or perhaps my system could not handle the increased stress of reading more apostolic or prophetic meanderings. Or maybe I have been fighting a demon.

The difficulty writing about the PCGs, RCGs and LCGs of the world is that they more or less stay on the same old worn out groove. We who have been there, done that, move on to a new way of thinking. We have our say, hopefully saying enough to make others think twice about following in our footsteps. Gerry builds his compound and watches the EU, Dave makes himself more important and becomes nastier, and Rod continues to warn of that near but far off day and slips into his twilight years. Good ol' Joey packs up the suitcases and heads for his retirement years a very wealthy man. One gets tired listening to these hacks who really do not deserve much attention. Their accomplishments in the good works department would only be visible to those owning an electron microscope.

Unfortunately there are innocents involved, those that cannot get out of the clutches of these groups until they are of legal age, or run away. I think running away would be better then being subjected to religious abuse. The longer you stay, the longer you spend on Dr. Phil's couch when you finally come to your senses, if at all. So I reminded myself of that to keep motivated for these rants. Lest I get flamed, I care about the rest of the members too. They all deserve a free mind.

Young members in the teenage years struggle just as much as adult members. They are in the midst of forming their identity, and their personal view of the world. What they experience in the real world is highly contrasted to the opinions they hear on the Sabbath. Added to that, they are singled out at school and at work for being religous freaks who cannot take part in many normal events. Friendships are few and life is very isolated and lonely. There are exceptions, of course. Steven Flurry's high school basketball career may be one of them :)

If the teen identifies with the church and its leaders, then things go more smoothly. Parental relationships are less tense, they feel a connection with a cause and acceptance by others they view as role models. If a teen does not connect with those in the church, intense struggles eventually follow. Parents are chastened to control Junior or risk the big "D" (disfellowship). If all else fails, Junior is left ostracized from the family.

I remember the wife of a PCG deacon I met many years ago. She told me of her sons, four of them, all but one in the PCG. Her eyes welled with tears as she struggled to hold back her feelings. Son number four was an outcast, headed for the Great Tribulation, and it was breaking her heart. A quiet rebuke from her husband in Italian stopped her emotional reaction.

Harsh, to be rejected by your parents and brothers. But people do strange things when they believe their eternal salvation is on the line. Add to that a universe ruling position in God's Government. The universe in black and white. For us, or against us.

I was once in that mindset and perhaps that's what made me so vulnerable to Armstrongism in the first place. As a teen I loved learning how things worked. It was exciting learning "the" answer. Gave me a sense of safety I guess. Knowing how the universe worked. I failed to appreciate how many possible paths there are to a solution. That feeling of security turned out to be a huge paradox. It cost me big time in money, friends and family.

My impact on the lives of teen Coggers has been microscopic, and will continue to be unless my career as a rock star or Hollywood icon blossoms. Not likely in this lifetime. But perhaps a few net surfers will read this and gain some solace knowing someone out there understands them.

So this one's for the forgotten ones. Those young people wondering what it's all about. For those dreading the next Sabbath service, or this year's Christmas season. Wondering if they will ever go to a classmate's birthday party. Or put on a Halloween costume. Wondering if their parents will ever speak to them again if they decide to leave.

Or how hot the Lake of Fire really is. (BTW: It's really rather nice, especially the sulfur bath)

KTHO

Life Is

I have recently read a blog entry by Joseph Tkach III relating his views on belief, faith and Christianity (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jeva/34028.html). He writes clearly and calmly.

Unfortunately, I am much less eloquent, and looking after a 1 year old baby means that I must write very succinctly.

However, I have read and heard people use similar arguments for "god"--pick a flavour--and creation. They say things like, "Well, everything seems to work so well in the universe, so therefore the only reasonable explanation is that some super-being designed it." Or things like, "I have such a strong belief that there must be another existence after death, otherwise what would be the use of living?" They call that belief, without proof, faith. There they remain, happy with their faith, and content that it is impossible to really know. They feel safe and secure.

This is a dangerous example of human-centric thinking. The earth is teeming with life. Is that life useless? Does that life exist solely to benefit humans? Unfortunately, that has been a foundational belief behind many religions and non-religions alike. We are seeing the results of that thinking in pollution, global warming and other trends.

Life is not useless because a human mind thinks it so. Nor is it useful. Life is.

We make many assumptions to reach the above conclusion. For example, we assume that the universe was designed by a super-being. We assume that the creation exists for humans. We assume that as humans we have custodianship over the earth as a responsibility to god. Some assume that if we screw things up badly enough, God will rescue us and give us a second chance.

And as a wise man once told me, to assume makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me". Then we end up sending thousands to religous leaders who fly around in planes and drive in limos...

Don't close your mind to the possibilities. Examine the things that could make your assumptions fail along with those that make them possible. Is there a God? Could be, but I just don't know. What makes me ask that question in the first place? Obviously something in my brain chemistry triggered it. Some people say that it is an outside force--God's calling through his Holy Spirit--could be. Or maybe it's the "human spirit". Neither have been seen nor measured and for either to be acting on our brain, wouldn't they have to be measurable? If Gerald Flurry had an MRI of his brain, what would we see that would differentiate him from the average human?

Could the Bible be speaking symbolicly or metaphorically? Maybe it's a development of evolution that puts that thought there. Maybe some part of human psychology and being raised in a family/tribe over thousands of years.

The point is, the more we learn, the more we know. And the old answers just don't cut it any more. Faith has to change along with knowledge and understanding, so stay flexible or Santa won't be coming to your house this year.

KTHO