So according to William “The Holy Days According to Bill” Dankenbring, the US is Ephraim, and the British Commonwealth is Manasseh.

For those playing at home, it is British-Israelism to which I am referring, and if you read Gavin’s posts at the search of AW I linked, you will understand why I laugh and mock, in the face of this latest revelation of “New Truth”.

Manasseh, Willie? Seriously? That’s almost as much of a knee-slapper as Weinland’s “50th Truth”.

It makes one almost nostalgic for the more sober days of the tawdry, tabloidal Prophecy Flush!, doesn’t it??

(So-nicknamed, because that’s about the only thing, according to the ministry from the pulpit, Wild Willie’s rag was good for. Especially after he managed to get hold of the Canadian mailing list.)

Holy shit, I didn’t realize Pentecost was so early this year!

Anyway, let’s have a little blast from the past, from the pre-Pentecost lead-up last year shall we?? (Pentecost last year was June 8, 2008.)

Oh, wait…..

Anyway, here’s best wishes for a “fruitful” (Why yes I did just make a dreadful pun — and your problem with that is…?) Pentecostal feast this year.

Ah, yes, the days of double services with a potluck in between. I remember it well. Our excitement and joy, at being the special, chosen elect of god, the Firstfruits who had been called to be the Old Testament overlords.

Well, that and I remember all the screaming about how we had to prove ourselves worthy to actually BE the firstfruits, when Kingdom finally came. “In our lifetimes, brethren!” Three-quarters of a century, and that Kingdom ain’t come yet.

Happy Pentecost to those who are keeping/have kept it.

“Intellectual vigor of the sort I care about is not dry in the least, but fully engaged with the juicy realities of being human in the world. It is up to its elbows in blood, sweat, flesh, bone, gristle, fire, ice. It is ideas, yes, but not ideas detached from reality and floating in the ether.”

From the Non-Theist Friends blog.

Because it’s been a while since I’ve seen this mentioned, and because LCG leaders probably think they’re getting a break, what with all the sturm und drang surrounding UCG’s much-rumoured and ill-fatedly over-publicized GCE, I wish to call back to mind a particularly relevant video from KScribe.

United Church of God may not be as nearly as benign as the smiling face they show towards the public, but the Living Church of God has its own demons to bear (Literally!), which they have never quite managed to exorcise.

Never forget. Never forgive.

Crazy Teddy certainly does. I really have to wonder why they keep harping on the trinitarian thing; are they still trying to get it right, after Senior’s faux pas (plural) in the early ’90s, with trying to explain trinitarianism to the church and failing?

Or is this a symptom of a deeper problem, an entrenched binitarianism the ministry can’t quite shake loose, from those members still in? After all, you don’t see most professing Christian blogs going on ad nauseam, about the trinity; professing Christianity for the most part, just takes it for granted.

Hell, even ex-Christians who were mainstream Christians, still take trinitarianism for granted!

Armstrongism may very well be descended from the ideology of Cerinthus, moreso than even the Gospel of Barnabas (last featured, you will recall, in the short-lived and ill-fated Systematic Theology Project). To wit:

Contrary to proto-orthodox Christianity, Cerinthus’s school followed the Jewish law, denied that the Supreme God had made the physical world, and denied the divinity of Jesus. In Cerinthus’ interpretation, the Christ came to Jesus at baptism, guided him in his ministry, but left him at the crucifixion.

He taught that Jesus would establish a thousand-year reign of sensuous pleasure after the Second Coming but before the General Resurrection, a view that was declared heretical by the Council of Nicaea. Cerinthus used a version of the gospel of Matthew as scripture.

Cerinthus taught at a time when Christianity’s relation to Judaism and to Greek philosophy had not yet been clearly defined. In his association with the Jewish law and his modest assessment of Jesus, he was similar to the Ebionites and to other Jewish Christians. In defining the world’s creator as the demiurge, he matched Greek dualism philosophy and anticipated the Gnostics.

So not only did Armstrong lift his well-tailored tithing machine theology from the Holiness Quakers he grew up with, the Adventists that Loma joined up with in the early 1930s, and even the Gospel of Barnabas, but now, demonstrably, he plagiarized the ideology behind “the true church” from the fragments of the writings of the heresiarch Cerinthus.

It was quite a construct, all in all. Say what you will for Armstrong’s motivations and attainment of wealth through the means of malicious lies, Herbie was one hell of a world-builder.

Russell’s new project, WCG Survivors (completely unaffiliated with the WCG/GCI apologists’ Facebook idiocy), is an excellent concept, that I really do hope gets off the ground.

This site aims to be a gathering place for people around the country and the world, with spinoff sites for different geographical locations. I envision group events, or picnics, and people meeting up and making new friends. If you or a loved one were at one time a member of WCG or any of its spinoffs, if you know the words to “Holy Mighty Majesty” by heart, if you know what happened about two seconds after “amen” was said at the closing prayer, then please join up. Please DO NOT join up if you are currently a member. If you have not left those organizations and still believe the stuff they’re teaching, there is no place for you here.

To that end, I am planning on setting up a Canadian chapter, if Russell would be so willing, although with a bit of a twist: Since we are, by and large (if the public Facebook pages are any indication), spread out so far and wide across the country, the Canadian chapter of WCG-S is going to have to be entirely virtual.

I haven’t yet decided if this is going to be a from-scratch independent site, a page on the WCG-S site, or possibly a separate blog (likely on Blogspot, if it will be, since there’s more control over layout and settings there), or something else entirely.

I envision a discussion board, a social networking site (entirely unrelated to Facebook thanks, that place gives me the creeping horrors), either from scratch, or on one of the lesser-known services, like Ninq, a chatroom, a “wall” where survivors’ stories can be posted, the possibilities are literally endless. Unlike Russ’ SoCal chapter, which I am sure has many, many WCG Survivors in close proximity to each other, the Canadian chapter is most likely going to be mostly online, for reasons discussed above — but I certainly won’t discount any public get-togethers members might have!

Keep your eyes peeled, I will be posting details on the Canadian chapter of WCG Survivors, as it develops!

THEY PUT BACK THE HUGE HONKING BANNER.

Now, I am under absolutely no delusions whatsoever that it is because of this, but I’ve really got to wonder.

Hello out there in Internet-land! Is there someone from Surrey who would like to comment on the on-again, off-again GCI/WCG on the Canadian office’s website??

Heeeeeheeeeheeee. Talk about “speaking truth to power” !!! That made my weekend.

Ida.

If time was always so short, and the Kingdom was coming in our generation, then why was a $3 million dollar chandelier necessary?

For more enlightenment into the church’s joke of “comparative religious instruction” it provided its members see the video, “Behind the Work 1983 – A History of the TRUE CHURCH”

:

Also, a recent quote of the decade, from The Skeptic over on AW:

But in another sense, Tkach did a very unethical and dishonorable thing. He was in a position of having complete, dictatorial power over a church with a certain set of doctrines. When his beliefs changed to mainstrem beliefs, the ethical thing would have been for him to resign from WCG and join a church that reflected his new beliefs. He did not. Instead, he imposed his beliefs on the entire WCG, forcing all the true believers to leave while he stayed. Then he sold off all the assets, which were the fruits of many years’ accumulated efforts of the true believers, and used the proceeds to pay himself and his loyalists large salaries. That was unethical and immoral.

Shame on us. HWA set up the church as a complete dictatorship and we went along. Then when the next guy took over, he used his dictatorial powers to take all we had.

Still, I’m conflicted. I detest Tkach for what he did. But, in one sense, his actions started me on the road to being cult-free. Hallelieujah!