Thoughts on yesterday's post
As I started advertising my blog to certain other blogs like XCG and the Painful Truth message board, one particular gentlemen by the pseudonym of BykerBob took a great liking to my article rebuking the religiously fanatical David Ben Ariel and his racist attitudes. He had his own thoughts and welcomed me to share them on here. Usually, it is common policy on the Plain Truth message board to have what is said on there stays on there but there are exceptions to the rule.
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
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
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