Saturday, December 3, 2016

The Church of God and Its Dystopian Society



The Painful Truth has a new article up on Armstrongism and the Church of God and its vision of things to come and how none of it has ever come to pass and what happens to people caught up in the deception.

Just what is a dystopian society?
  • A dystopia is considered a fictional society usually portrayed as existing in a future time, when the conditions of life are extremely dismal due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. 
Sound familiar? Remember the Good News magazine that spewed out the WCG’s view of what God’s utopia would look like? It was heaven on earth. But to enter into this wonderful time (the kingdom) would require you to do unending somersaults of law keeping, tithing, and blindly obeying those who really did not care for you or your family.  
Remember the Plain Truth? Have you ever read Meredith’s or Flurry’s rag? They fill your mind with a hopeless air of despair. 
The propagating of these ideas and others into the minds of their audience that future race wars are coming, or economic collapse is just a few short years away, are an ideology the ACOG’s place into print within their magazines in order to form opinions, prejudice and to mirror church doctrine. This conditions the membership not to jump ship and chance that they will be caught up in the fray when the projected SHTF moment materializes. Anyone who has spent a decade or more in one of these groups can attest that a SHTF moment is always just a few years off.
What the ACOG’s fail to foresee is the results of their endless negative prognosticating. When a human has confidence and optimism, the very joys of life itself stolen from them, you take away the zeal for life, you squelch the will to live. You destroy the individual. What you have left is a shell of the former and a slave which needs to be constantly managed in order to maintain his or her direction forward.  
The Dystopian standard-bearer (an advocate or champion of a particular cause or ideology) often feels trapped and is struggling to escape and questions the existing social, political, or in our case, religious systems. 

The article is well worth the read: Herbert Armstrong's Utopian Society


4 comments:

Unknown said...

For me the problem was not keeping the Sabbath, Holy Days, tithing etc. It was the constant harping "we only have a few more years." We don't need to plan for the future we don't need a retirement plan. Why strive to be better educated develop skills. We only have a few short years left. Meredith said take the equity out of your homes, withdraw your 401K money and send it in to headquarters. We only have maybe two or three more years. Now many of us are 60-70 years old. Meredith's words have proven to be hot air. I wish I had been as smart as some of you who left in the 70's. It took me 20 more years to wake up. Now in my 70's I am finally going to retire next month. My house and car is paid for. I now do have a retirement plan. God help those still in a ACOG

The Painful Truth said...

That is just it Floyd. They ruin lives with this world tomorrow bullshit. It took decades to rebuild our fortunes.

Anonymous said...

'We only have a few short years left' comes from Herbies training in advertising. 'Hurry, hurry, 20% off on all stock, this week only.'
My bible does say to not add or subtract from Gods word. This was adding, with disastrous consequences for many.

Retired Prof said...

One of my colleagues introduced a course in the literature of utopias and dystopias. Early in the course he would make the point that one person's utopia is someone else's dystopia.

At Ambassador College we were told in great detail what Armstrong's idea of utopia was: those of us who qualified would be authorized in the Millennium to follow people around, guiding them toward good behavior and sternly reproving them if they strayed toward the bad. We would be charged to head them off in time to prevent them from actually sinning. We were expected to revel in this role.

So I recognized the utopia/dystopia principle as soon as that other teacher mentioned it.