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