I have spent the last two years, decompressing my exit from the church, an exit that occurred over a decade ago. Prior to that, I lived a largely oblivious life. Keep your head down, try and stay off everyone’s radar so you won’t send or receive trouble, and just get on with it, day by day.

I still live day by day, and my life is far from perfect yet. (Yeah yeah. Define “perfect” I know I know.) Recent events on the ex-member blogosphere have got me thinking, and I realize that I may be doing the same thing with the previous 10+ years of my life, that I had done with the 20+ years prior to it. Blanking it out and dropping it out in a black hole. Always moving forward, never looking behind, and dismissing everything that happened, good, bad, or indifferent, just because I have a different perspective now.

My fugue years were far from exciting, and were mostly run-of-the-mill ordinary. But I still learned a lot, and gained the emotional maturity (or maybe it’s just encroaching old age) that afflicts everyone, once you get off the twentysomething roller-coaster. (Being in your twenties sucks. Regardless of circumstances. That’s just the way it is. Brain chemistry, hormones, whatever.) It was an interesting time in its own way, though. There are things I probably would have changed, but I couldn’t have done things any differently than I did them at the time, so that’s it.

I think I have re-examined the bulk of what I need to re-examine, WRT being born and raised in the church (although there will always be shit that will always trip me up, now and forever), and having re-examined what got me to the place of examining my past, I don’t want to spend the next ten years in a fugue state, either.

Am I going to make some radical change to my lifestyle? Oh hell, no. It’s not about circumstances or environment or the bottom line of your bank account, anyway. Those things are good or bad, depending only on how you interpret them. There will probably be things that I could do differently, or better, but I hope I will be able to reach equanimity about them, the way I have with my past now.

Whatever the next ten years brings, I don’t want to move through them in another fugue state. I don’t think I will, but it’s easy to slip back into that mindlessness, if I’m not careful. I’m still anti-social. No getting around that, anymore, although I like to think that I am getting marginally better. (Not likely.) Just one of those character traits that have to be worked around. Like being too tall or too short.

I hope that I will continue to lead an interesting life, although not interesting in the sense of “Look at the freak!” interesting. Just slightly-off-the-beaten-path interesting. Maybe I need to beat the path a little further afield than I have been. We shall see, and time will tell.

May we all have interesting lives.

For Dennis

For those who have been wondering what I am babbling on about with regards to “the banner/no banner” thing on Canadian HQ’s website, I have secured screen-captured evidence to demonstrate the Magical Appearing and Disappearing Name of the Little Church That Couldn’t (hide from its past, that is).

So allow me to present the changing face of the WCG/GCI Canada website. It’s not a major change, but it certainly is striking, if you know what to look for.

banner

no banner

I repeat: Would Someone From Surrey care to comment on this constantly-appearing-then-disappearing name of the church?

If it is only a stylesheet glitch, that’s fine, I won’t make anything more of it. But I note, the appearance and disappearance of the large banner proclaiming the name of the church, with no satisfactory explanation as to why, does lead me to wonder, just what the hell, exactly, is going on over there……….

So Bob Thiel reads Worldnet Daily? Good for him. (Hey, at least he’s not reading World News and Profitcy, am I right??)

But yeah, the story intrigues me, in a look-at-the-trainwreck kind of way.

Several questions plague me. (Pun intended.)

Is the story a hoax? Based on the very few articles, all in sources of dubious repute, I’m leaning towards this theory.

Is the church in question really everything it claims to be? A brief Googling suggests it might be, but all of the information I find is apologetic in nature, and NOT unbiased.

How can it be “revealed Friday” that they have the one true Indiana Jones artifact when this book revealed “the secret” in 1992? And The “History” Channel (there’s a reason that word is in quotes) made a documentary about it in 2005? (The “documentary” according to this Wiki page, had this to say: “Agreeing with ancient sources about a magnificent light emitted from the Ark, the History Channel in a 2008 special claimed that many of the guardian monks have died in short time, mostly with cataracts having formed in their eyes.[2]“

Oh, that’s right, instead of cataracts being caused by poor health and malnutrition. What was I thinking?!

What the ever-living FUCK, “History” Channel? Non-historical “history” is FAIL FAIL FAIL.

And the icing on the cake? There are these people.

The Ark of the Covenant

The Ark of the Covenant was crucial to the success of the Exodus of Moses. It was not just a ceremonial figurehead, it was used as a weapon and possibly a source of food (It is thought by some to have been involved in the production of the manna.).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant

At the moment it is located at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in the town of Axum — 623 km. north of Addis Ababa. (Bible code here)[sic]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Our_Lady_Mary_of_Zion
(See the pictures of Axum - Pics 1 - Pics 2 - Pics 3 - Pics 4 - Pics 5 - view from space.

There are some other theories about the current location so I have provided some links to other online sources on my Ark links page.

Axum is deep within a large area of mountains, I believe these are the mountains that we should flee to, and the Ark is our beacon. The Book of Enoch says we shall be given a sword at the time of the second end - I suspect this means the Ark.
There is also: Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them, and be their God.’ Essene version of Revelation

The emphasis is mine, naturally, but it points out the fact that the Ethiopians are about to have a shitload of pissed-off Left-Behinders land on them, any day now…..

For those still insisting that the Nicene Creed flavour of Trinity is “the One True Truth” (Hmmm, now where have I heard rhetoric of that nature before? It sounds vaguely familiar, but I just can’t put my finger on it……), may I present The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Yes, it discusses the Johannine Comma, but it also discusses the rest of the verses the literalists (and most especially the evangelical fundies) like to hang their absolutist Nicene Creed on.

(Note: If the quote at the top puts you off from reading the rest of the page, then you know what? We’ve got nothing further to discuss.)

I have a question for both Trinitarians AND Binitarians, if either group would like to step up to the plate, and answer me this.

I utilize, in my contemplative practice(s), images of the Nous - Logos - Gnosis (Mind - Word - Wisdom). Sometimes I even utilize images of Nous - Christos - Sophia (same concept, different images). Depends on the day, what insights I am trying to gain, which images “work” at any given moment, etcetera.

However, I do not “accept” the Johannine Comma, simply because of the way it was added in, and how it so conveniently solidified a Roman institution that had everything to do with mass crowd control, and nothing whatsoever to do with spirituality.

There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.

My version of “trinity” is also reflective of, for me, the three cortexes of the brain, to wit, the cerebral(neo) cortex, the limbic system, and the paleocortex (”reptilian” brain).

Studies have shown that meditation thickens the cerebral cortex of the brain (that’s what neuroscientists call “the god part of the brain”, that lights up like a bullseye on MRIs when patients are engaged in meditative contemplation).

So in my worldview, in the non-commentated version of the Johannine scripture above, “spirit” is the cerebral cortex, “water” the limbic system, and “blood” is the primitive brainstem that we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. You can also transpose the Nous - Logos - Sophia imagery/mythologies onto this “map” as well.

So. My question.

Am I a trinitarian?

Please, no comments on how I’m not a Christian, that’s already a given (and definitely not something I have a problem with).

The news has hit most of the ex-Church of God-blogosphere that Rotten Ronnie was pwnz0red by Tom Harpur, so I thought a few words about Harpur’s latest book, from a review in a Sault Ste. Marie paper, were particularly apropos. Especially in light of the trinitarianism arguments that have been making the rounds of the ex-church blogs lately. (Emphasis is mine.)

“Harpur clearly hopes that the ideas in Water Into Wine will offer a remedy for the intellectual bankruptcy and ethical travesties that Biblical literalism has been responsible for ever since the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. That conversion facilitated the faith’s degradation into what Harpur calls “Christianism.” By forcibly suppressing every form of Christianity that didn’t conform to the literalist consensus, and by transforming myths of incarnation into a fairy-tale about a supposedly historical superman, Christianism has created an illusory gulf between the human and the divine, debasing its followers as well as the object of their worship. As an imperial religion, Christianism deploys fear and shame to encourage blind obedience to imperial power. It uses literalism to submerge ethical consciousness beneath the cesspool of authoritarian prejudice, until its worshippers are unable to distinguish religious hatred from divine love, or infantilization from spiritual maturity. This is the religion of Inquisitions and holy wars, of missionaries and residential schools, but if Harpur’s right, it isn’t Christianity.”

Sounds right to me.

Just found this, and thought it gave an excellent “big picture” view to those of us exposing the truth of cults in the 21st century: They were doing the same thing, 300 years ago.

“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:

Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books.
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, & himself the single (Plate 22) one on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:

Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.

And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.

Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial, opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.

Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.

But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.”

It’s not on Blake’s Wikipedia page (Since when is reliable information ever on the Wiki page?), but take the above with the huge grain of salt that Blake was a Freemason, and a Deist on top of that (scroll down to the section titled “The French Revolution”), but in spite of it, the entire text of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven & Hell is one hell (pun intended) of an excellent piece of writing. Three hundred years later, and it’s not past its best-before date. (Well, other than the bits about Swedenborg.)

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled argument of “The trinity is evil!” “If you don’t believe in the trinity, YOU’RE evil!” “IT’S ONLY A FUCKING MYTH PEOPLE!” here on I Survived Armstrongism. I just thought we needed a bit of breather, as it’s been getting a little contentious of late.

Which brings me to my point: Redfox712, when you posted the comment I redacted here, to your own blog, I notice you left out the bit about how I’M “deceived by Satan”, just because I don’t believe in YOUR version of the trinity.

Nice.

Biblical inerrancy, you say? Rejection of “the trinity” is a deal-breaker for being considered a “true Christian”?

Really?

Would the authors of As Bereans Did like to tackle the following?

“Misquoting Jesus”, by Bart Ehrman, TEXTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, pp.78-79 (all emphasis is mine):

Erasmus had studied the New Testament, along with other great works of antiquity, on and off for many years, and had considered at some point putting together an edition for printing. But it was only when he visited Basel in August 1514 that he was persuaded by a publisher named Johann Froben to move forward.

—-

It appears that Erasmus relied heavily on just one twelfth century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for the book of Acts and the Epistles—although he was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings. For the book of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately, this manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost its last page, which contained the final six verses of the book. In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the Latin Vulgate and translated its text back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript. And this, as we will see, is the edition of the Greek New Testament that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King James Bible nearly a century later.

—-

This is the account of I John 5:78, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the Vulgate, the passage reads:

There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.

It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional teachings of the church on the “triune God who is one.” Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly. But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead simply read:

There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.

Where did the “Father, the Word, and the Spirit” go? They were not in Erasmus’s primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text.

More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. In particular, Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in future editions he return the verse to its rightful place.

As the story goes, Erasmus—possibly in an unguarded moment—agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greeks manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth century production, made to order.

Just found this tasty little treat on the Worldwide Church of God, Canada homepage. Which, notably, no longer has a huge honking banner proclaiming that name. BUT, no reference to GCI, either, it’s simply billed as “International HQ”. Trouble in paradise Pasadena Glendora, perhaps? Sedition in Surrey? Say it ain’t so!!

But!

As the Worldwide Church of God is episcopal in its governance, the National Director also serves as national ministry leader, and reports to the denominational president for ecclesiastical matters. For example, the doctrinal positions of the denomination are established and maintained at our world headquarters, and the National Director is accountable directly to the President of the Worldwide Church of God for assuring that those doctrinal positions are upheld by the denomination in Canada. [Found here.]

Jesus fucking Christ on a goddamned popsicle stick, micro-manage much, Junior?!? (Read Stan’s article linked here. This has been ongoing for quite some time now.)

“In Soviet Canada, Church Presides Over YOU!”

Mark your calendars, people! It’s not every day you can (or likely ever will again) read a post to an ex-Church of God member’s blog that says:

I agree with Bob Thiel.

Now that you’ve all picked your jaws up off the floor, kudos goes to whoever tipped their hand and passed along the internal church’s email to Spanky’s right-hand man.

“The MAIN reason that GCI made the change is that it does not want the world’s churches to consider it a cult, and the name change clearly does distance GCI from “Church of God” in the minds of almost everyone.”

You got that goddamned right, Bob.

NEVER FORGET. NEVER FORGIVE.