(For the record, AW regards British Israelism in any form as irredeemably fallacious, totally discredited, and intellectually indefensible.)

Disposable Income

Our good friend Rick in the UCG told me he was feeling depressed during that long and almost interminable year of issue after issue of the Columbine School Shootings in that flagship magazine, The Good News. He didn't know why he was feeling so down. Then I gave him a suggestion that transformed his life.

Stop reading The Good News!

I knew how he felt. I felt a low level of something in my life. Something disturbing. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I came in and saw a stack of Good News Magazines sitting on the coffee table and then I knew. It was a whole year of hyperbole in prophecy, the bad news in The Good News--replete with a section of 'why is there so much bad news in The Good News' by the editors to explain their asinine position of spreading death, destruction and disease. The awful magazine was stuffed with nonsensical paranoia about the world going to hell in a handbasket. Negative, negative, negative!

So says Howard Davis, producer of the Tomorrow telecast, coming to a free cable access channel near you soon. "The Good News is all negative!", he said, adding, "There's absolutely nothing positive in it: I feel like I am lying when I say that it is the world's greatest magazine on The Tomorrow Program", or so he related directly to me after church services. He went on to try to recruit me for a new stealth web site he and 60 others were trying to set up in order to seduce people to watch the Tomorrow telecast so they could get The Good News, so they could finally become members of the church so they could, I presume, be fondled and stalked. Since that time, my wife and I bailed for this and other obvious reasons. It's interesting to note that $3 million out the some $15 million budget for the ucg goes to publications. It is also interesting to note that the publications don't seem to be doing the job of getting more members to join. After a year of the free magazine, no one renews it, or so I've been told by Howard Davis and Rex Sexton, who have both called it 'an embarrassment'. Not one person came to the 'Bible Lecture Series' in Tacoma from The Good News subscription list--they came from the misleading radio ads. Maybe money doesn't answer all things.

We felt much better to be gone from ucg after we learned they absolutely refuse to obey Scripture but are quick to engage in "let's make a deal" in lieu of not being willing to keep God's Law, but we still had issues we carried about with us like old moldy baggage. It was then that we realized that the real solution was to bail on Armstrongism entirely. We began the detrashing project with vigor and rid ourselves of the accursed things including, but not restricted to, The Autobiography of Herbert Armstrong, The Bible Gory for Children, The Envoy for all the years we had it, The Worldwide News, The United News, booklets, articles, member letters, coworker letters, Feast brochures, The Young Ambassador audio Feast tapes, The Incredible Human Potential, The Missing Dimension in Sects--oops, Sex--even issues of The Ambassador Report. It was the only sensible, rational thing to do. It seemed a lot like deleavening for the Days of Unleavened Bread, but with much more meaning.

We have been working our way through this particular toxic addiction by following the principles of Rational Recovery. Rational Recovery is the only way to successfully walk away from addictions. Support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have only a 12% success rate according to Dr. James Milam in his book, Under the Influence, and the reason is that the problem is not a lack of support, the problem is a commitment to turn and walk away from your addiction forever without turning back. It is also all about listening to that Siren inner voice calling to you to fulfill your lusts and rejecting it. The only people in AA who are successful are those who have accidentally applied the principles of Rational Recovery. You quit and you say no and you don't take 'yes' for an answer, ever. You never let yourself an 'out' to go back. My dad stopped smoking one day because it was making me sick and he never smoked another cigarette for twenty+ years after he stopped. It was instantaneous and permanent. I stopped drinking in 1981 and have never had alcohol again except for the Passover. Some people have even used Rational Recovery to turn away from homosexuality, go on to get married and have children and never looked back. Rational Recovery is effective and powerful and if you do some research, you might just find that it is Biblical. Look in Romans 7 & 8 and compare with 'repentance'.

And so it was that we knew that we had to rid ourselves of the vestiges of Armstrongism if we were ever to recover our lives. But what were we to do with all those copies of The Good News? At first we thought we could ditch them in the recycling bins but thought better of it because they might blow away, and even if they were soggy, some other fool might get a hold of one and get hooked. Shredding them was just too labor intensive and we'd wear out the shredder and have to get a new one--maybe several. We settled on hiding the recycled toxic waste in double-bagged trash and dumped in the dumpster.

In retrospect, there is another possibility. It turns out that cattle are fed newspaper as supplements in feed lots. Is it possible that we could have sold the copies of The Good News to feed lots to provide fodder for cows? What an udderly radical idea! Unfortunately, we'll never know, because they are all GONE. But it might be a possibility beyond the most excellent suggesting of mulching the stuff. [It was also tempting to send them all back to the ucg collect, but that would be an ethical dilemma if refused by putting the burden on the shipping company.]

So there you have it. The world abounds with possibilities. There's often more than one way to solve a problem, it seems. We might have the possibility in the future that one in seven cows chews The Good News as a part of parting with our disposable income. How mooving.

Talk about the milk of the word.

Also visit http://www.cultabuse.com

Ambassador Watch: www.ambassadorwatch.co.nz

Last Updated: Monday, January 17, 2005