The noisy brain is well known concept among mental health professionals. Dr. John Ratey expanded on that concept in his book, Shadow Syndromes. Autism can lead to a condition where most of the brain generates an electrical storm when someone touches those who have it. Schizophrenia causes overload from too much mental noise. Teens with ADHD notice when they are on Ritalin that the noise level drops. One son told her mother when he got back from school after taking Ritalin, “Mom, it’s so quiet!”. Mentally ill people generally have noisy brains from a genetic predisposition. Often stress can set in motion a psychotic break when a person can no longer tolerate the noise aggravated by stress.
At the second Hope and Recovery Conference I attended, my wife and I were sitting at a table during lunch with a young woman working in the mental health profession. I had realized from my experience with those who were mentally ill that the standard mental illnesses, such as Bipolar Disease, Schizophrenia and Psychosis involve distorted perception. The young woman said she always knew it: It made sense. She was very unhappy when she couldn’t demonstrate that she had ever thought it about it before.
That’s the trick, you know: People say things others immediately recognize as an aphorism, and they believe that they have always believed it. This is, of course, distorted perception.
Distorted perception certainly seems to be implicated in a noisy brain. Moreover, as the “noise level” in the brain increases, the person usually becomes dysfunctional.
Organizations often seem to be victimized by distorted perception resulting in a high noise level which leads to a completely dysfunctional environment. Communications break down from the noise, there is a lack of standards, there is no auditing of results or ongoing processes; in fact, there can be no measurement of any kind of metrics, since nobody seems to know what the immediate and long term goals are.
Armstrongists have a firm belief that they know where they are going: The Kingdom of God! Armstrongists know how to get there: Keep the Ten Commandments — along with a whole lot of other stuff they can’t prove that’s required. Armstrongists know the future because they have the only roadmap on the face of the earth — the one created for them by Herbert Armstrong. To tell an Armstrongist that he or she does not have a clue will only end up their telling you that you have “A root of bitterness” — a self fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.
What the Armstrongists don’t seem to understand is how utterly pathetic and directionless they are. They got that way because of the very common structure found universally among those with noisy brains:
- Lack of planning
- Lack of commitment
- Lack of communications
- Autocratic control
- Arbitrary change in direction
- Noisy brains [a tautology here!]
- Unrestricted flow of ideas
- Lack of discipline
- No documentation
Armstrongist community leaders are infamous for these traits.
It can’t be healthy.
Anyone going back through the history of postings in The Painful Truth should begin to get a pattern of the scenario that results from the noisy brain. For example, one man working at Ambassador College noted to his superiors that there were patterns to income. What a concept — that there were reasons for the ebb and flow of money, and, if they noted, analyzed and graphed the waning and waxing of the dollars, associated with various events during the year — such as feast offerings — the administration should be able to plan. He was rebuffed, of course. No planning required. Just have faith in God: He will provide. Of course, Proverbs does advise us to be diligent to know the state of our flocks and herds, but Armstrongists don’t actually use Scripture for a practical guide in their lives. They are fools: They only listen to what they want to hear.
That is why, when you point out that British Israelism is a lie and Herbert Armstrong was a false prophet — 1975 never happened — they bluster about how we should respect Herbert Armstrong because he brought us the truth. The truth?! Wait! What?! Hey, hey now. Let’s face it: He just made stuff up. Mostly. Or robbed other people’s ideas and pretended they were his. Two weeks ago I talked with a minister of the Church of God Seven Day. He brought up the fact that Herbert Armstrong plagiarized material from their booklets and then the Worldwide Church of God sued the Church of God Seventh Day. It didn’t get far when the CoG7 produced the booklet they wrote in the 1930s from some file in a basement somewhere. But that’s the danger from all that noise, you see: They make big mistakes because of the delusions from their distorted perceptions. This isn’t to say that the Armstrongist community leaders are mentally ill. It’s more complicated than that. They are also often criminals.
All of the noise leads to chaos.
So many things in the Armstrongist community make no sense at all: UCG wanting to relocate near a Superfund Toxic Waste Site [now there's a real failure to plan]. How about the front page of The Good News with that picture of the latest, greatest tool of God’s Work, the IBM Data Cell. It was back to the hard disk drives within the year because the product was a failure and not such Good News after all. The Armstrongists are terribly inconsistent. Sure, they keep the Sabbath. Then they go out and make their manservant and maidservant work for wages on it. That is not consistent with Nehemiah and Ezra. If you’re going to keep the Law of Scripture, then you need to use all the Old Testament Scriptures, if you expect to be an effective Old Testament Christian.
The folks who worked in the Data Processing Center at Ambassador College told me of the internal chaos in the Data Center there. They had to roll with the punches. One described how they had to stack chairs on top of tables and work there while a channel was cut in the cement in the floor. And you have to know, not all of those runs on the Sabbath were totally unattended, though most were.
People would be accepted for a job at Ambassador College, sell their homes, pack up, move clear across the United States, only to discover that their job with the church had disappeared on the way. This didn’t just happen once.
I remember well in the local church, a girl who had appendicitis. She could not get treatment from a doctor. She survived, but her health was never what it should have been. Just 10 years later, the church changed the doctrine so people could see doctors and “be healed” by them. The ministers were advised to hide the faith healing to prevent the church from being sued: Lie for the sake of the church.
The real indication of how chaotic the church really was, though, lies in the fact that Garner Ted Armstrong committed date rape against, by his own estimate by 1972, 200 coeds. In spite of the fact that his father knew about this [and even though he claimed he didn't, he was still culpable -- but, then, he really did know] and was an accessory after the fact. These were criminal acts. Herbert Armstrong covering it up was a criminal act. They should have all gone to prison. Roderick Meredith — that paragon of virtue [in the utterly ironic sense] — also knew about it, did some mental wringing of his hands, gritted his teeth, and preached sermons about keeping God’s Law. The men who attended AC and became ministers knowingly married the women who had been raped. Then they went on to allow themselves to be directed by the very man who had raped the women who had become their wives. This, in turn, resulted in a great deal of bitterness and years of anger for those ministers who compromised themselves by keeping quiet, saying and doing nothing, tolerating the intolerable, pretending to be good friends with GTA and Herbert Armstrong, all the while driving themselves to distraction with the noise of the dysfunctional environment leading to the utter chaos. Now some of them, at least, have a psychiatrist treating them for clinical depression. That is something of an irony, given the teaching of the original Radio Church of God.
The Armstrongist community makes no sense. Furthermore, they can’t prove that they can get you to the Kingdom of God. The leaders are of no worth, and, today, are struggling themselves to come up with a reason for their own being. There doesn’t seem to be much more than keeping their salary, trying to keep a cushy but dysfunctional job and getting retirement. That — and for some of those in the upper echelon of the so-called leadership, which is nothing of the sort — basking in the glow of people who worship them in their idolatrous admiration. Furthermore, even though they know all this, they won’t change a thing. They don’t to risk anything left of the Armstrongist Empire of which they may still have a piece.
It’s like the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges trying to maintain the Winchester Mansion.
You really should ask yourself the question, just how can these people make my life better? They don’t seem to be doing a very good job of running their own lives. Why should we expect anything at all from them except noisy dysfunctional chaos?
The best peace you can have is moving as far away from the Armstrongist community as possible, for, if you keep drinking from the poisoned well, you will take on their chaos.
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