Post-WCG Life and Theology ARCHIVES

I have always considered Worldwide Church of God's National Director in Canada, Gary Moore, one of the good guys. My mom told me the story that as a young mother when she had my brother Rob, Gary at church was kind enough to lift my brother and help my mom with her belongings that entailed young motherhood. Meeting Gary Moore in person shows he is a pleasant and very charming personality. He is a people person in every sense of the word. A tragic turn of events happened to him when his wife Tamara battled breast cancer and eventually succumbed to her disease in July 2004. Now I have heard that one of the "good guys" has finally caught a lucky break. A friend told me that it has been announced in his congregation that Gary Moore will re-marry a woman from South Africa (my buddy forgot the name but if I find out I will post it) and on top that will be involved in a ministerial training program in the same country. Best wishes Gary, may you go (and will) very, very far!

Good job, Felix. David "bent" Arial is a stellar example of everything which was wrong about the old school WCG.
To understand the whole phenomenon, you have to take a look at another failed philosophy, namely communism. How many times has this been tried and resulted in abyssimal failure? And, the reason it has failed is not because the attempts had flawed leaders. It failed because communism works against the basic drives of human beings! Therefore, dictatorial level power had to be used to enforce it.
HWA made no bones about the fact that the tenets of WCG were polar opposites to the normal motivations of humans. But, supposedly, the Holy Spirit was the ingredient which was going to make practicing such tenets both possible and palatable. We never did see the types of evidence described in the Bible as accompanying the presence of the Holy Spirit, so, as with communism, we are left with the need for totalitarian enforcement by those governing (the ministers, deacons, and such.)
When practiced en masse, the tenets of Armstrongism naturally produce the so-called cultic behavior which all seem to have found objectionable in the WCG. It seems that one can practice this system in ones home safely, and possibly even feel love for others, but the minute you make an organized religion out of it, very toxic by-products are automatically produced, just as with communism.
In the specific case of racism, any time you have a group of people who are favored, and referred to as "the chosen ones", the natural by-product is that people begin to look at those who are supposedly not chosen as being "less than". Further, they establish a Gerald Waterhouse-like pecking order, based on pulling generalized scriptures out of context. If an ignorant person reads about the curse of Canaan, or the mark of Cain, he will probably use it as an excuse for mistreating the people whom he considers to be descenced from these two biblical characters. This is why DbA feels no qualms about idolizing the Jews to the point where he actually takes a Jewish name, yet begrudges the smallest recognition for Martin Luther King! It's all part of the natural sickness which occurs when one practices the religion to the extreme point of fanaticism encouraged by HWA and falsely labeled Philadelphian (brotherly love?)...
[Y]ou might consider a higher level of award for some of the more egregious figures of COGdom, in fact, a gesture which I refer to as "the double bird" (two fisted flippoff)!
BB

As African American conservative columnist Bob Parks says, "thank God for middle fingers" and I am just going to give a middle finger to David Ben Ariel, a man who off-shooted from Gerald Flurry's Jonestown wannabe cult the Philedelphia Church of God. What did this man did to put excrement on my beloved Raisin Bran? Well on the XCG blog by Gary Scott, Gary gave link to this man's website discussing his opposition to Martin Luther King Day in the United States. I was disgusted and was flamed. I had to agree with Gary Scott's assertion that Armstrongism and racism go hand and hand like ham and eggs. If Kanye West wanted to shout out that somebody doesn't care about black people, it is David Ben-Ariel ---not U.S. President George W. Bush! Kanye and other people who want to spit out and even vomit it out the excrement that DBA put in our lovely Raisin Bran cereal, look at the madness that this man has written:

I had a letter published in The Blade (Toledo, Ohio) and sent to President Reagan, pleading with him not to commit the folly of creating any foolish "Martin Luther King Day." Our fellow black Americans, generally speaking, still hated President Reagan after the fact and still don't practice the good things (there were some good things) King preached.

First Dave, you plead with Reagan not to proceed with the King holiday and then you rail blacks for not following the "good" things Dr. King preached. Which is it, either King was bad and not worth remembering or he had some "good" things taught worth remembering. You cannot demand it both ways. Wait! You are an Armstrongite, you must have it both ways!