I don’t “belong” to a religion. I belong to Jesus Christ.

Former WCGer and now cult recovery expert Bill Hohmann answering a person’s question of what church organization he belonged to.

For those who did READ my post called Raise A Little Hell (April 18th), you will understand. Thank you PasedenaGuy10!

“ … I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

When I say that Ron Weinland is a heretic and a cultist, it is not done out of the sadistic joy picking on him. Thank God he has also been proven a false prophet—he predicted the beginning of end time of events on the Passover season and thank God we’re still here and thank God for His mercy that He does not wish that anyone should perish—but should ALL come to repentence through the Gospel of Jesus Christ who came to save us from sin and death and to give all a precious opportunity to live with God forever. Waaay more positive news than Weinland’s gospel of gloom, doom and destruction and you better clean up your act because these things are going to happen. Gavin Rumney also argues that Weinland is also a con-man who have manipulated members into giving their money to for his livelihood and now his prophecies that have failed to materialize it will be probably a case of “so long suckers!”

The reason I label Ron Weinland a “non-Christian cultist” is that he denies that Jesus Christ is God and I know that religious pluralists are offended that I made such an assertion. I believe if a religious leader is claiming to be Christian, he must agree that Jesus Christ is God. Not a created being. Not just a great teacher. Not just an enlightened man of his day. He was God in the flesh. To believe opposite is simply not an option! Yes, this is not some Oprahized, touchy-feely political correctness that some want to hear but if a leader and his church want be called a “Christian church”, the divinity of Christ cannot be negotiated among other essentials. To worship on the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day—negotiable! Whether Christ died on Friday night or Wednesday night—negotiable! To keep the Lord’s Supper any weekend—or ONLY on the 14th of Nisan—or only on Good Friday/Easter Sunday—negotiable! For anyone to assert that Jesus Christ was not God in the flesh…Houston we have problem. Yes, I am very conservative when it comes to the essentials of historic Christian faith—this firm belief means I am in opposition to liberal theologians who oppose—not out of hate and spite (and I will have to admit there is a lot to learn from them but not on this issue, sorry)—but to preserve the foundations of Christianity. Some are offended (and some extremely angry) at that but in due time, I hope they will understand it is for a decidedly, intellectually thought through for very good reasons. Many of the cults who have rejected basic truths such as Christ’s divinity have become the most deadliest cults in which those who lost their lives. Oh yes people will protest and say, “What about the Catholics—they are trinitarians—and killed millions of people through the ages!!!” Decidedly, I will say, “No comparison.” By the way, they took responsiblity and apologized (unlike some cults or so-called “former” cults refuse to do!). Hold off you arguments. Wait until I get the chance to write the second part to “Why The Churches of God will NOT re-unite REDUX!” I will be getting very deeper on the issue of the Godhead.

Aside from my blather, my real purpose for this post is I thank God Almighty that people can come out of the kingdom of the cults and enter into the kingdom of Christ. There has been one lady by the grace of God that have been delivered from the dark and evil kingdom of Ron Weinland’s cult and is in a journey into the kingdom of Christ by reading the pages of her Bible without the literature of Weindland’s deceptive materials. Here is what she had to say,

I grew up in WCG. Listened to RW for awhile but he was twisting scriptures & he said Jesus had a beginning, among a long list of other false teachings. And he’s trapping people on the flypaper of old covenant. ‘To this day a veil covers their eyes when Moses is read.’ I have family in his church. It baffles me how they can believe RW. Don’t they research? Do they limit themselves to the few scriptures he supplies with his own personal false interpretations?

Any reasonable person can conclude to answer the last two questions is that the first question is a resounding NO and the second is sadly, unarguably YES! This lady who goes by the pseudonym of Seeker of Truth has set up a new blog, “As The Bereans Did” and has a post refuting the heretical nonsense of Ron Weinland when it comes to the deity of Christ. She does an excellent job of proving that through the Old Testament and New Testament Jesus Christ is God in the flesh and is in NO imaginable sense a created being.

As late Walter Martin author of Kindom of the Cultist said in his ending paragraph on the section of the historic Worldwide Church of God and Armstrongism,

Since “God is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33), there is one sure remedy to the problem of the spread of Armstrongism. Turn off the television and radio wherever it is promoted and open your Bible, for within its pages God is always broadcasting the eternal message of the Gospel of grace. A study of the essential doctrines necessary for solid growth in the Christian life can be found within its pages. When this supplemented by attendance in a truly Christian church where that gospel is preached, there is no need to listen the Hebert Armstrongs of our day, for as the psalmist so beautifully described it, “The entrance of they Word giveth light.”

I thank God that Seeker of Truth has just did that! May her blog last for a loong time as tool to bring many out of the dark,gloomy, evil darkness into His wondeful, joyous light!

Her blog and post is here at http://asbereansdid.blogspot.com/2008/04/it-is-my-hope-that-those-who-believe.html

Also this man may have been controversial but he had a good segment on his show about the belief in the deity of Christ. The late Dr. James Kennedy examines proof that belief in Jesus Christ as God was solid in the early centuries of the church and was simply NOT an afterthought from the Council of Nicea in the 4th century AD.

Fundamentalists and cultists are the most petty people on earth. They have a perverse pleasurably delight in seeing wrong in any and everything.  They excel in the figuring out the smallest of details (in which 99.9% of the time have absolutely no relevance nor consequence) in how a believer should behave and restrain oneself (lest their twisted concept of “g”od will get angry and whack you Tony Soprano style if you don’t fall in line. I think Tony would blush but that’s another topic)and at the same time fail miserably when it comes to seeing the big picture and take perverse joy in missing the point. Frankly the less fundamentalists (of all religions) and cultists in the world, the more harmonious and progressive the world would be. What is my point? Back in my teen years in the WCG in the good old mid 1980’s,  my pastor was doing a Bible Study on music. It was of course, a pro-classical, anti-rock bias and the pastor reminised that when he was in a different church area, he clamped down on a song that I guess the local teens were playing (I guess at some church activity) by the title, “Of Raise A Little Hell.” Only if my then pastor did not fall in the same damnable trap of missing the point.

To digress for a moment (and if J of Shadows of WCG is lurking, I am giving you a readers discretion advised. I am fully aware of his ultra-conservative zero tolerance against coarse language amongst other things) American  university professor and evangelist, Tony Campolo made a dramatic statement of something to the effect (probably not exact but this what he roughly said), “Millions are going to hell and some of you don’t give a s–t!” In the binary mentality of a fundamentalist and/or a cultist, they are waaay more obsessed with the later of the statement than they are the former. To be blunt, their minds have simply shut off what the former was said and sadly they have missed the point. Even Dr. Campolo acknowledged this that some Christians were obsessed with the word “s–t” than they were of the statement that “millions are going to hell”. Perfect example of how “fundagelicals” (with apologies to Gavin Rumney) miss the point—to their own detriment.

It seems that my then-pastor was obsessed with a song that had “hell” in it than actually taking the bloody (is that bad in your books J?) time to sit and down and honestly figure out the true meaning of the lyrics—it wasn’t this satanic song as he stupidly imagined it would be. Actually the lyrics are pretty meaningful. Actually it is something that Jesus Christ in his life, leading up to his crucifixion did nearly 2000 years ago. He raised a little hell. He hated the lip service of the Pharisees, hated their double standards, hated the excessive burdens on the masses of people and he did something about it. It costed his life but thank God he revolutionized the world as we know it.  As I write the post, it is 2008 (and believe it or not we’re no more certain who’ll be the next U.S. president), it is my sincere hope that my then pastor has grown up considerably since the mid 1980’s over issues like these.

Enjoy the peformers of the song by a Canadian group (yes!) by the name of Trooper presented by none other than Youtube.com and yes, you can sing a long with the lyrics below!

Raise a little Hell, raise a little Hell, raise a little Hell
Raise a little Hell, raise a little Hell, raise a little Hell
Raise a little Hell, raise a little Hell, raise a little HellIf you don’t like
What you got
Why don’t you change it
If your world is all screwed up
Rearrange it

Here’s FYI’s take on why an Armstrongist American state or Canadian province cannot handle nor understand modern society.

Hey Felix.  Interesting subject.

All in all, it would be a very bad place to live.

Controversy for the sake of sin controversy is sin. Controversy for the sake of truth is a divine command.

—Founder of the Christian Research Institute and the original Bible Answer Man, Walter Martin (1928-1989) , who led a ministry on exposing false doctrines against abberant sects and non-Christian cults and is now under the direction of Hank Hanegraaf today

Jack Poirier is a contributing writer to a website called Jerusalem Perspective which touches on the Hebraic roots of Christianity. He also has his take on the long cherished doctrine of Original Sin (at http://jerusalemperspective.org/default.aspx?&tabid=27&ArticleID=1778). I even printed out the article years back when it was freely available and sadly I accidentally threw it out.  Here is an excerpt of his introduction to the topic:

I sing not, but (in sighes abrupt),
Sob out the State of Man, corrupt
By th’ Old Serpent’s banefull breath:
Whose strong Contagion still extends
To every creature that descends
From the old Little World of Death.

These lines from Henry Smith represent for many, as for their author, what they consider to be a central tenet of biblical Christianity: the idea that humanity’s moral corruption springs from the sin in the Garden. It usually comes as a shock to learn that the Church did not always teach this, and in the wake of such an enlightenment, it is often supposed that Augustine, who formulated the doctrine in his fight against Pelagius (early 5th century), only made explicit what had already been implicit in the Church’s understanding.

This is not to say that everyone within theological academia regards the doctrine of original sin as a foreign body within the Church’s theology. Certainly, scholars who specialize in Paul’s theology often refer to the fact that the doctrine of original sin is not found in Paul’s letters, or, for that matter, anywhere in the Bible. But those who name theology (rather than biblical studies) as their specialty often disagree. (E.g., a recent article in Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniense finds the idea of “a Christianity without original sin” hardly fathomable.) These diverging views on the doctrine of original sin represent a great chasm fixed between scholars and theologians today. To those who approach the history of doctrine from the perspective

Unfortunately, this is far as I can currently go on the splendid article, the rest of heading instructs:

I have mentioned on a blog before that of recent, my theology has embraced some (and the word must be stressed SOME) theological ideas which have it’s origins in Eastern Orthodoxy. Does this mean I will ever become Eastern Orthodox? No, it does not.  To burst a few people’s religious ideological bubbles, I will not be joining Roman Catholicism anytime soon (Sorry Jared and Darren!). My mind and philosphy is very much wired in the Protestant Reformation and proud of it. I don’t need any priest being a middle man or interpreting scripture for me personally.  Well anyway, those SOME doctrines that I have embraced from Eastern Orthodoxy would be the Christus Victor view of Atonement (I hope to have a book review about two books about the subject), it’s view of heaven and hell, it’s universal access to salvation and oh yes, the touchy one for some, the rejection of the western view of original sin. Yes, you heard it the Eastern Orthodox reject the concept of Original Sin—at least the western view. I believe, my friend Dennis Diehl has no use for it and said along the lines that it has done a lot of harm to a lot of people. I agree 100%.  Thanks to Augustine who introduced the concept back in the 4th century AD. The blogsite called TheoGeek explains in their post:

In the history of Christian theology there have been a number of major theological changes made in Western Christian theology over the course of time, often due to the use of inaccurate Latin bible translations.

The earliest of these changes chronologically was the doctrine of Original Sin. The Christian church in the second century AD had nothing remotely resembling the doctrine of original sin as we know it today. The universal view attested is that children are born innocent and that people are guilty only of their own sins. In some writers the concept that Adam’s sin damaged the likeness of God within humanity somewhat, and this is viewed as a kind of corruption of the natural order which is inherited - and this is generally taken to explain why humans die. But this is not taken to imply any inevitability to human sinfulness or any damage to free will. There is a dominating belief that through human effort and the assistance of the Holy Spirit and Christ’s example, humans can live godly lives that are upright and pleasing to God.

In the late second century, in North Africa, the writer Tertullian protested against the introduction of the practice of infant baptism there. He argued that baptism was supposed to be for the forgiveness of sins, but since infants had no sin the introduction of its use for them was wrong. The widespread thought however seemed to be that there might be some mysterious gracious blessing from God conveyed through baptism, and thus infant baptism quickly became a fairly universal custom.

In third and fourth century North African Latin Christianity, there is a clear trend present towards taking a darker view of the human condition. In the course of these centuries the theologians in this area began to take the view that humanity had been very seriously damaged by the fall, that humanity was bad, that the human will is not capable of becoming good, and that all humans are born guilty of Adam’s sin. It appears that a couple of generations after Tertullian, people had started using his same logic backwards: “We baptise infants, baptism is for forgiveness of sin, therefore infants must have sin.” Such doctrinal changes were geographically fairly confined. Greek Christian writings from during and after this period reflect an unchanged stance on the subject - eg John Chrysostom (d. 407), states explicitly that infants have no sin and that forgiveness of sin is not the motive for infant baptism.

Nor, it seems, had these innovations reached too far to the west. When a monk from England named Pelagius journeyed to Rome he was shocked by the theology he encountered there. He felt that the teachings of the North African bishop Augustine effectively denied the possibility of good moral conduct and human moral reform which Pelagius (in line with typical Christianity of earlier centuries) saw as the foundations of Christianity. Augustine had gone further than his North African predecessors and actually advocated Predestination, a doctrine that had always previously been strongly opposed by Christians. This led to an extended controversy between Pelagius and Augustine. Scholars are generally agreed that Pelagius’ viewpoints by and large were typical of previous Christian orthodoxy (especially the Greek-speaking church at the time, who couldn’t read Augustine’s writings) and Augustine’s were radically new. Nonetheless Augustine managed to use his influence to get Pelagius condemned as a heretic: “it was an injustice that made history” writes the renowned Lutheran patristics scholar Jaroslav Pelikan in his The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (pg 313).

One passage that Augustine drew heavily on in his arguments with Pelagius was Romans 5:12, which in the Latin translation (he couldn’t read Greek) said that everyone had sinned “in” Adam. Augustine used this to argue that all humanity was present “in” Adam when he sinned, and thus all are born guilty of sin. His Latin translation was extremely faulty here however, and it actually reads in the Greek that everyone dies “because” they sin or that everyone dies “because of which” they sin.

Thus the doctrine of Original Sin became standard within Latin Christianity. The Greek Christians however (who were at that time a large majority of Christendom), never read Augustine’s writings and continued to hold their traditional doctrines. To this day the Eastern Orthodox Christians continue to totally reject the Latin innovations of the doctrine of Original Sin. Unsurprisingly when we turn from history to the Bible, there isn’t much in the bible that could lend itself in support to the Latin doctrine of Original Sin. Nor did the Jewish Rabbis teach such a doctrine, and Judaism today rejects any such doctrine.

And that’s how the standard Protestant doctrine of Original Sin resulted from the introduction of infant baptism, a bad Latin translation, a conflict where influence beat orthodoxy, and a couple of centuries of doctrinal change.

Another website Sullivan-County.com continues on the topic of how the Eastern Orthodox understood Original Sin:

Augustine wrote in Latin in the fourth century, but his writings were not translated into Greek until the fourteenth century. Consequently, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christianity never held that guilt is inherited, and began repudiating this idea once they learned of it. They teach that we inherit a corrupted or damaged human nature in which the tendency to do bad is greater, but that each person is only guilty of their own sins. By participating in the life of the church, each person’s human nature is healed and it becomes easier to do good; at the same time, the Christian becomes more acutely aware of his or her shortcomings. Eastern Orthodox theologians believe that Adam and Eve began to choose separation from God when they chose independence and took fruit for themselves, rather than allow God to continue to feed them and remain dependent on Him. The expulsion from the Garden was not a legal consequence, but to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life and immortalizing their sin. As Christians partake of the Eucharist and eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ, they return to dependence on God and experience a gradual healing of the relationship between God and humanity. The ultimate goal is theosis or divinization, an even closer union with God and closer likeness to God than existed in the Garden of Eden.

To sum it up: It was a biblical interpretation of scripture by a repressed man called Augustine who was no dummy but in spite of that fact caused a lot problems than solutions and his doctrines paved the way for a mean-spirited misanthrope in the 16th century, John Calvin who came up with the doctrine of total depravity and I don’t need to tell you what other problems that were created after that.  It is time for Protestants to learn something from the Eastern Orthodox in the 21st century but I  guess I am going to have to wait for some decades for that to see that actually materialized in it’s fullness.

Editor’s note: I have originally tried to get a discussion of a topic (imagining an American state or a Canadian province of where the XCG’s resided). The topic didn’t do so well on one message board but it did a little better on another. Many respondents had very good points to be made and I am going to share them in a series of posts here.  What was the basis of  forming this project? The basis was from a book I read called Central Liberal Truth by Lawrence E. Harrison. In it discussed that the prosperous and progressive societies had these religions backing them up: Protestant Christianity, Confucianism, Judaism (and with the possibility of Hinduism) and the more poorer and ultra-traditionalist societies had these religions backing them up would be Catholcism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Islam. Check out reviews at amazon.com at
http://www.amazon.com/Central-Liberal-Truth-Politics-Culture/dp/0195300416 or at Buzzle.com at http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-23-2006-97043.asp.http://www.amazon.com/Central-Liberal-Truth-Politics-Culture/dp/0195300416 or at Buzzle.com at http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-23-2006-97043.asp.

Though there some similiarities between Armstrongism and Protestantism, I never considered the XCG’s fully Protestant because they reject the essentials of historic Christian faith and have long argued that they are a cult.  For a moment to imagine (yes it’s a probably a perverse imagination too): If the XCG’s were to have a seperate state in the U.S. or a province of Canada.  For starters, I do not think it would be the best thing in North America. First of all, I believe that Armstrongism is against technology because of it’s reactionary nature. You would have the highest number of welfare cases loads, high unemployment.  I would even argue that it would be a state or province with high domestic violence rates. Armstrongists would never be cops or even participate in fire prevention because of their fanatical strict Sabbatarianism (Ox in the ditch? Fergedaboutit!). They would be relying from others out of state (or out of province) to fill in. Talk about literally sitting on your butt and not lifting a finger—pure laziness at it’s worst (but that was Armstrongism anyway! Don’t take things in your own hands God will sort it out). I think Lou Dobbs would be willing to give illegal immigrants amnesty before he would tolerate a state (or province) full of XCGers. So would I. This XCG state or province would be pushing the limits to an actual theocracy and trust me I would hope any reasonable U.S. President or Canadian Prime Minister to see that jurisdiction severely crushed. These are my observations about an American state or a Canadian province populated by Armstrongists. Therefore it is my firm belief and assessment that Armstrongism is a completely backward religion that cannot accept nor handle the modern world. Period. All more the reason to condemn it at every turn.

In the next coming days, I will be posting this series as others have given their very apt and insightful assessments on a frightening thought such as this. Stay tuned.

Can’t get enough of satire against the religious stupidity in the cult of Armstrongism? Get your full dose on J’s sister blog COG Humor and get a bellyfull of laughs against the religious stupidity that you once had to reckon with. Go to http://coghumor.blogspot.com/ receive a good dose of medicine for the soul! And yes, J, I am hoping this site will last for decades to come, tormenting the leaders of the XCG who cannot handle satire (and never will)!