Rod Meredith has an editorial entitled Are We Ready for God's Intervention?
Dear readers, when we read the constant reports in the news about how corrupt governments all over the earth are oppressing and impoverishing their peoples, it is obvious that Almighty God will soon intervene!As if corrupt governments, oppression and poverty were uniquely characteristic of our times... does this guy know nothing of history?
...you will see that this issue’s circulation number has gone down a bit. As many of you know, we ask those who have not been in touch with us for quite a while to “renew” their subscriptions. We are also finding ways to spread this message as cost-effectively as possible, and in ways to reach new audiences. Many of our readers, especially the younger ones, are “digital natives” who do most of their reading on the Internet - on their computers, or even on their smartphones. So, we are reaching out to those readers with a wonderful new “digital flipbook” version of this magazine.Harrumpff. Circulation is down, but it's okay, there's this cool flipping book version. Even Douglas will probably be less than impressed.
The lead article, Are You Willing to Change? is also by Meredith. Strange really, in that Meredith is the last person who has shown any willingness to change over long decades. His version of Armstrongism is firmly mired in the past.
Jonathan Riley writes the Canadian column, and he has the CN Tower in Toronto in his sights. The election of Justin Trudeau's government has rattled the LCG, it's a sure sign that all goodness and light is rapidly gurgling down the plughole. The tower has been lit in "rainbow colours in celebration of homosexual pride", hence Riley is doing a very credible Chicken Little impression ("the sky is falling!") Next thing he'll be comparing it to the Tower of Babel.
Oh, wait, he is.
In Genesis 11 we read about the construction of another tower in the Middle East... A people of one mind or purpose, whose desire was contrary to God and whose language was confused, bears striking similarities to the corruption, pride, vanity and nonsensical sociopolitical dialogue we see permeating Canada and Western society as a whole."Nonsensical sociopolitical dialogue"? Deeply fascist sects don't like the idea that people with different views can sit down and have a respectful conversion. It's God's way (which is, naturally, their way) or nothing. Kind of like the Taliban.
Global utopia is coming according to Richard Ames in an article that reads a lot like a precis of Herb Armstrong's Wonderful World Tomorrow booklet.
Who will supervise the twelve apostles in God’s coming Kingdom? Remember God called ancient King David “a man after My own heart” in Acts 13:22. Bible prophecy reveals that King David will rule over the united houses of Israel and Judah: “David My servant shall be king over them..."Everything is obviously sorted; roll on 1972.
John Meakin has the inside word on industrial relations. Employee and employer groups might as well disband now.
But, if an employer is harsh, that is still no excuse to rebel. We read: “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh” (1 Peter 2:18). We are also told to “count [our] own masters worthy of all honor” (1 Timothy 6:1).John apparently feels that the relationship between employers and employees is a master/servant one. I guess that's how they run things in the LCG.
But wait, we've still got the cover article to come: Rod McNair, no less, has written The Great Unraveling. If you thought this might be a prophetic piece about what will happen in the LCG when Meredith goes to Sheol shortly, you'd be wrong. Read this and weep, fellow scoffers...
Scoffers—even some professing Christians—contend that the book of Genesis is myth and fable. But Genesis is Scripture, and all Scripture is given “by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16). Genesis includes the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden — and Jesus quoted from Genesis 1 and 2 (Matthew 19:4–6). Adam and Eve were real, and the choices they made produced consequences for the whole human family. They set in motion the social ills and societal decay we face today.So the way of salvation is through stupidity and ignorance of literary genres?
Jonathan McNair dishes up some gratuitous advice on boundaries for the younger readers - if there are any. Douglas Winnail gives a history lesson concerning "the post-Flood years of the Bronze Age". Post-Flood? You get the impression that LCG is staggering even further back into the mirror-arcade of Genesis mythology. How many other impossible things can LCG put on the early breakfast buffet? As if to confirm that TW has gone down the rabbit-hole, J. Davy Crockett, III (no, really, that's his chosen byline) has an article following called Chasing Two Rabbits?
To lend a veneer of scientific competence, Wally Smith has contributed an article called Einstein, God and Gravitational Waves. General relativity meets Armstrongism. Kids, a word to the wise, try not to quote Wally in your science assignments.
The PDF is available to download.
(Next time, The Bible Advocate)
6 comments:
Where to begin...?
Concerning flip books, I see them as a necessary evil... I mean necessary EVIL. They can be much easier to read than PDF and much more convenient. People are used to book form. That is changing, but for now, the flip book is sort of in the middle. epub is making strides and will probably be the new de facto standard in a few short years, but for those of us who depend upon books for technological information, Kindle is a terrible idea and has nothing but problems.
As for problems, after actively using no fewer than 4 different purchased software packages to produce flip books, I can honestly tell you that the technology is just terrible. All of them have huge problems (as in software 'bugs'), many of them are fatal. What I've had to do for ambassador.report is to employ three different software packages because one or the other goes into a loop on pdf loading, or stalls when you 'turn' the page or puts the logo just exactly the wrong place from where you specified. In fact, often, bookmarks are confused with table of contents. Navigating the mess is a nightmare, but I do it because it does provide a useful interface for those who would, say, want to read Herbert Armstrong's Autobiography Volume 1 (with the occasional double page spread with pictures where .pdf just won't cut it. Two different software packages were used for the full color flip books of Ambassador Review, Ambassador Report 2 (AR2) and Ambassador Report 3 (AR3), because of the problems outlined above.
For those of you who are interest, apparently LCG has chosen to have a service upload, format and display the flip book format. They are using issuu.com as the service. The good news for those of us hoping that the Armstrongists will go broke, is that Living has to be paying at least $35 a month for this service. Maybe even $279 a month. Let's hope it's the more expensive plan. The format is horrible. The 'flip' is more like moving through a slide show and you can't use the mouse wheel to flip the pages. I haven't tried it on my mobile phone so I don't know how that works, but it is likely subpar.
Now as for the content...
"Are We Ready for God's Intervention?" -- mixed bag. Jesus isn't coming for the third time and if he were to, he's supposed to make war and leave everything in ruins... BUT, the good news is that he'd throw Roderick Meredith into the Lake of Fire along with everybody else at the LCG Headquarters, for having a University course on British Israelism, if for nothing else.
Gavin has covered most of the rest satisfactorily. As for "The Great Unravelling" it's inevitable. 10 million years with neutron star radiation and all life is toast. Can't be stopped. As for "our universe is a comprehensible--a lawful and orderly creation!" it's clear that Smith knows nothing at all. Has he not heard of entropy? The publication itself is a black hole.
Rejoice brethren at the TV Log! With any luck at all it will bankrupt LCG and gain nary a new follower! "Watch us WGN America!"? Not unless they have more attractive people without double chins and seriously gray hair. It's the LCG Fuddy-Duddy Network or Networst according to your tastes.
The magazine itself needs a new masthead. How about, "The Magazine of Empty Promises"?
I recommend that for this 'zine, you just flip it off.
One more thing:
Anyone who has an online publication (flipbook or not) who separates articles on to different pages and has "continued on" to take you to the rest of the article, where often or not, the end of other articles are dumped, or even worse, to have a chain of "continued on" skipping from page, let's say, 13 to 72 and from 72 to 128 and from 128 to 131, should be taken out and shot.
People who are online, don't want to have to skip through a bunch of different pages to read an article continuously. It's a great way to lose your audience, particularly if they are under the age of 55.
At least with AR1, AR2 and AR3, an effort was made to enable the reader to click on "continued on" and to take them immediately to the page with the rest of the article.
In the current issue of Tomorrow's World flip book version on page 7, there's a "CONTINUES ON PAGE 26". Click on it. I dare you. If you do, it takes you exactly NOWHERE! And heaven help you if you want to pursue the "continued from". And unlike other flip book formats, you can't enter the page number in a box to take you right there.
These days, this sort of advertisement for a cult is completely ineffective. About the only thing that would work is a blog or Youtube videos, but better make them young, energetic, lively and appealing (just the opposite of what LCG presents) or you will lose any audience you might have had.
Dear Tomorrow's World,
The first 11 Chapters of Genesis are Sumerian Creation and Flood myths with a Hebrew spin.
The Exodus and the characters who star in it are not real history or as Israel Finkelstein of "The Bible Unearthed" told me..."We exaggerate a lot."
Good science done well and not from the comfort of your home tells us the earth is 4 billion years old and that all life evolved over that time. There are human beings who devote their lives to the hard work of showing this to be true and when the facts overwhelm the ideas, they change the ideas to fit the facts and not the facts to agree with the preconceived ideas as religion is wont to do.
All humans are hairless (mostly) Apes who, through writing and language, became more conscious than our Chimp, Orang and Gorilla cousins who still exist because we share a common ancestor 5 million years ago. We did not come from them. They are less conscious than ourselves though we share 94-98% in common and even a child can look at a chimp as see we are cousins. All of us came from something else before us.
The World Tomorrow under a "jealous God" and the Christ of Revelation with just one way of being for all would be a nightmare.
There is really no "Lake of fire" for those who don't go along to get along. That's made up for power and control of the little people. Read your history of such things.
There are many things you do not know or refuse to entertain in your world about history, good science done well and Biblical origins and politic, but I know you cannot bare them at this time. Nor do I blame you. Now that I am free of the mind virus of organized (oxymoron?) religion, the one acceptable way of thinking and the few telling the many how it all is, I understand the journey from myth to reality. It's not easy. It can be a real "Dark Night of the Soul" experience. But it is worth the journey I am more inspired by being the current results of evolution than I was over being made from a handful of mud and the female counterpart from a rib, which by the way was selected because no man was going to miss a rib. He had lots of them and women, because of their sin and causing men nothing but trouble were merely to have babies painfully now and say "yes Lord" to their men. It's in the Bible :)
And so LCG continues their work of deceptively recruiting more sources of income.
My word! Rod McNair named his article "The Great Unraveling" after an article by Chris Hedges. Hedges is a left wing journalist. It is quite unusual for LCG to quote a person of that political persuasion. Back in January 2007 he published a book critiquing the religious right entitled American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America. Do LCG's leaders realize who they are quoting from?
Hedges did not bother talking about Armstrongism in that book. Shows how (un)important Armstrongism actually is. Admittedly he did quote an article from PCG once about mass layoffs but he said absolutely nothing about any of the Armstrongite organizations.
Douglas Winnail tries to say the Vikings are descended from Israelites by saying they had horned helmets. It is my understanding that the Vikings did not wear horned helmets. That was just a illustrated exaggeration introduced in Victorian times that has since become ubiquitous.
This recruitment magazine contains letters from Jamaica, Pakistan, Canada and Australia. As if those countries didn't have enough problems already without dealing with LCG's attempts to get more recruits.
The editors are listed as Roderick C. Meredith, Richard Ames, William Bowmer, John Robinson, Bruce Tyler, Stuart Wachowitz, Gerald Weston and William Williams.
RCM:
..corrupt governments all over the earth are oppressing and impoverishing their peoples, it is obvious that Almighty God will soon intervene!
This is a Non Sequitur!!
Is this the standard of Logic at Living University?
Post a Comment