30 years in the Worldwide Church of God Part 2

the painful truth about the worldwide church of god

30 years in the
Worldwide Church of God
Part Two
Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four Part five

More anecdotes, observations, musings, and opinions from my 30 years in the Worldwide Church of God and 57 years of life.

(1) In 1974 I was working at the church's headquarters in the Data Processing Center. I had a good friend there who got me interested in Gordon Lightfoot's music. I could play the guitar fairly well, too, so he and I had many good times together doing Lightfoot music.

I must have gotten a reputation around the HQ area as a Lightfoot aficionado, because one time in 1974 another fellow HQ employee whom I did not know very well named Andy (last name intentionally omitted as he was a real human being instead of a HARMstrongian), invited me and my then wife over for dinner. He told me to be sure to bring my guitar and all my Gordon Lightfoot music.

During dinner I observed that we were eating with goldware. Not silverware, mind you, but rather with forks, knives, and spoons made out of gold. He informed us that he had bought the goldware from the college. It has been so long ago now that the accuracy of my memory is starting to fade a little, but I think he said there had been an auction. At any rate, HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG had bought the goldware to use in his "home" there in Pasadena. It may be that he had given this goldware to a relative who then auctioned it off.

I thought that it was a remarkable stroke of luck that this musically talented young man was in the right place at the right time to obtain such fine eating utensils at what must have been an unusually good bargain price. I did not stop to think about the widows out in the field churches scrimping by on next to nothing in order to give some of their welfare money to Herbert so he could buy more goldware. I don't hold anything against Andy for buying the goldware, just against HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG for buying it with our sacred tithes.

Andy also told us a little bit about his job situation. He said he had a two-year employment contract with the college. I believe he was on the faculty in the music department at the time. I couldn't help wondering again about how shrewd this fellow was to have demanded an employment contract rather than blindly to step out on faith and trust the upper management where he was employed not to have a budget cutback which would cost him his job. He also said that evening that he was thoroughly disgusted with the organization, and he would be damned if he would ever give HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG another nickel. I took this all in stride.

Eventually I got out my guitar, and we started singing Gordon Lightfoot songs. The rest of the evening was passed with great pleasantry, my wife and I went home, and I promptly forgot all he had said. Too bad I didn't think about it a lot more and follow his wise example of shrewdness and self-protection. Andy was definitely a real human being.

(2) In 1967, one year after I had become a fledgling church member, I was working at Duke University in Durham, NC and attending services in Greensboro, NC. One day I met another church member who was doing some research work at Duke that summer. His name was Clifford Anderson, and he was a history professor at the University of Mississippi. He was one of the very few church members I ever met who had a real PhD from a real university. He suggested I should read an autobiographical book titled "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome." This would help me understand God's real, plain truth about the evil, pagan, Roman Catholic church and thus all other churches except the one I was now in. I found this book in the Duke library and read it. It was written by Charles Chiniquy, a French Canadian man who had been a Roman Catholic priest for 25 years. He told of the fifty years of his life that he had been a member in the Roman Catholic Church and all the abuses he saw. The one thing I remember most vividly from this book was the way the Catholic priesthood in Canada were enforcing tithing and what they did with the tithes. Suffice it to say that many fine meals were dined upon by the church's upper management while the poor members just barely scraped by. Too bad they didn't know about second and third tithe, for then they could really have lived in the lap of luxury.

Now I am reading story after story on various web sites about what tithing did to us deceived members of Herbie's evil church business. It's all the same, no matter who does it. Spiritual abuse, enforced tithing, and meddling in everyone's personal life always lead to the same sick results.

That's why I named my memoir "Thirty Years in the Worldwide Church of God." I was hoping someone who reads it might also have read or be tempted to read the similar but much longer story written by Chiniquy one hundred fifty years ago.

(3) I was never completely mindless in the cult. I was always on the rebellious, independent side. In fact my mother, who taught the third grade in public schools for 20 years, has told me that I was the most independent child she ever saw. Here are some examples that show more about the mindset afflicting most of us in Herbie's great scam.

(a) I was in the Greensboro, NC church from early 1967 to late 1969, when I moved to Pasadena to work at "God's Headquarters". After being in Pasadena for four and one half years, I visited the Greensboro congregation again during the time of the great ministerial rebellion in 1974. One of the members who had known me fairly well in the late 1960s thought I might have more knowledge as to what was really going on because I had been working at HQ. He told me he was in a state of confusion over the rebellion and all the allegations against HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG and GTA. He then asked me what he should do with his tithes. I didn't want to go against "God's government" as I understood it at that time, but I also thought that there was a lot wrong in Pasadena which having less money flowing in might help to straighten out. So I told him to keep saving up his tithes and then when he felt more comfortable with the leadership in Pasadena to send it all in. After all, there was a scripture that said we were to tithe the increase that our field brings forth year by year. So I reasoned he could accumulate his tithe for at least a year without disobeying God. Of course, Pasadena had already thought of this and told us we should send in our tithe as soon as we got any money on which to tithe. But I thought this answer would be the most reasonable for someone who seemed to be thinking about leaving the church anyway.

(b) In the early 1970s there was a fairly sudden and major increase in the price of gold and silver. I got involved in "investing" in gold coin futures. It turned out later that the company I was investing in was really a scam and my investment was much more like gambling, but I didn't know that at the time. One day I got the bright idea to take all my second tithe which I was saving up to spend at the annual Fall Festival and buy more gold coins with it. Since I thought this might be a little risky, I decided I needed to check it out with a minister. So I found a minister who I thought was most likely to give me the answer I really wanted to hear, and thus one Sabbath I asked Gary Arvidson to comment on my idea. He thought it sounded great. So I then started buying up even more bags of gold coins than I had been able to before and greedily counted all my paper profits as the price of gold kept going up. It wasn't long before I started noticing a fishy smell with this company, so I bailed out and got all my money back. Shortly after this the company was seized by the authorities and all the organizers charged with operating a Ponzi scheme. But this was typical of how we were taught to ask ministers for advice on every decision we needed to make.

(c) While working in Pasadena I had been exempted from having to pay third tithe. This was another one of the wonderful little teachings that came from HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's detailed study of the fine print in the Old Testament. Actually, it was probably based more on the need to give HQ employees a financial break since they were so grossly underpaid to begin with. Anyway, because of this little loophole I gained a much more liberal attitude towards third tithe than most.

A few years later I found myself back in a field church again, but now I was making much more money than I had been at HQ. I also had to pay third tithe again. And by this time my then wife's mother had been widowed and needed financial help. So I decided all on my own that I would send my third tithe directly to my mother-in-law one year rather than sending it into HQ. She was a really hard-core conservative church member, and it took a while to convince her that it was OK for her to accept this money. But she finally came around. It really helped, her, too. A lot more good came from that third tithe year of mine than would have if I had sent it in to help buy Herbie some more Dom Perignon to drink at 37,000 feet while flying off to have sex therapy in Romania or to give Steuben crystal to Dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in return for being given an honorary degree at some Philippine university.

(4) I became the leader of the Plain Truth News Stand Distribution Program in the Washington, DC church area in 1978. I continued doing this, I think, until the program was discontinued in the early 1990s. (I have been assiduously trying to forget everything I ever knew about that sick cult, and thus it is sometimes a little hard for me to remember the details of these anecdotes.) Around January, 1987 a big, new emphasis was placed on this news stand program. A minister from Pasadena, Rob Elliott, was sent around the country to give motivational sermons in certain key, major city church congregations, of which Washington, DC was definitely one. I was chosen to give the sermonette as a way of introducing this sermon. I walked out onto the stage carrying a heavy box that was filled with Plain Truths. I then spoke about how a certain tiny percentage of people who read the magazine would ultimately become church members and thus be spared from the soon-coming world holocaust. Then I gave some statistics about how many tons of magazines had already been distributed in the D.C. area, how I had picked up and moved each and every boxful of magazines for 9 years in unloading them from the giant delivery truck that came to my home once a month, and how I kept thinking that somewhere inside each box was a potential church member. My very last few sentences were: Did I ever get tired picking up these boxes? No, because I thought about that potential church member inside the box, and then I ended with "the box ain't heavy, he's my brother."

We really believed our leaders back then. Especially when HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG told us in 1974 to believe our President Nixon and disbelieve all those evil investigative journalists hounding him mercilessly. We really believed all our leaders' shit. I sincerely believed we were helping to save people's lives. So did many in that congregation. We had a record number of people volunteering that day to get involved in the distribution program after both my sermonette and the far more motivating sermon from the professional speaker-motivator from HQ. We all really believed in the so-called commission of the church, at least down at the grassroots level. We were sincere and not hypocritical, and we put thousands of hours of hard toil into all the volunteer work we did like distributing Plain Truths. Now I read on the Internet about one who went around to those news stands and threw as many magazines away as he possibly could, and I have to say "Thank God for all those people throwing our foul magazine away so fewer people would get stuck in the spider's web of Armstrongism."

(5) George Orwell's prescient novel "1984" describes mind control on a huge scale in an extremely effective way. The following quotes are very applicable to what happens in cults.

Speaking of one of many important mind control techniques used to subdue each person in the super-state of Oceania, Orwell says if any normal person "... were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate."

We were told to "come out from among them, and be ye separate", "Come out of her, my people", and to "be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers" for our own good. No close associations with the filthy, deceived pagans all around us was to be permitted. Whether or not the intent was to keep us from learning what Orwell warned against, the result was the same. We inexorably allowed our minds to be molded into where we turned almost totally inward as a group. I like to believe that we also did it reluctantly, because if we had known in advance where it would lead us I believe we would not have gone along with it. How can you possibly "love the sinner but not the sin" if you constantly view all other people as sinners, deceived, and having their lives filled with pagan practices? An over-all negative outlook on life and other people sooner or later swallows one up in negativism.

HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG often drew parallels between spiritual and physical growth. He said that God was reproducing Himself by His process of adding His Holy Spirit into our minds as a sperm fertilizes an egg at the instant of conception, then the newly converted Christian grows and grows until finally he is born into the Kingdom of God. If we look at what actually happened and try to hold to HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's analogy, we can see that we became spiritually inbred. The predictable result of physical as well as spiritual inbreeding is that the population becomes more and more unhealthy with more frequent mutations and birth defects. It is obvious now that we produced many spiritual mutations, birth defects, and some seriously mentally sick people through our process of teaching people "God's plain truth."

Orwell wrote further: "The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies [of the other two enemy superstates in his novel], but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense." We were trained that all other religions were so stupid, filthy, and pagan that there was no need for us to learn about them. In fact it was spiritually dangerous to try to learn about other religions. Any superficial knowledge of them that we ever needed was supplied during sermons given by our Herbie minions.

More Orwell: "All rulers of all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,...". This was certainly true of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD. This is another aspect of group mind control. We were also kept in a constant state of war, just as the citizens of Oceania are in "1984". The cult was at war with the world and with its evil, invisible, demonic rulers. In "1984" being in a constant state of war is another effective means of national mind control, as Orwell explains: "While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible [i.e., if there was a danger that they might lose a war]. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous [to the ruling class]. ... Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. ... Since each of the three superstates is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced." Our little cult was protected by God, and thus unconquerable, so we were our own little universe, and all kinds of perversions of thought were safely practiced by the top leaders. Orwell again: "Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past [because of the lies we were told about history, and because HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG kept changing what he said he had said previously, especially regarding his failed predictions], the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. ... But though it is unreal [the continuous war] it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs." All of this is given by Orwell as an explanation for Oceania's slogan "War Is Peace". We certainly had all our surplus consumable goods eaten up by the "war" we were in. We thought our tithes and offerings were going to help spread the good news of God's Kingdom to the deceived masses, when in fact much of our money was spent on Dom Perignon, lavish meals at Perino's Restaurant in Los Angeles, personal gifts from top leaders to themselves, gambling junkets in Las Vegas, prostitutes all around the world, and fat retirement accounts.

Orwell also had this to say about the top leader, who was called Big Brother in his novel: "At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration." We were told that God had personally chosen HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG and revealed to him all the "new truths" and wisdom we would ever need. What happens when the top guy makes a mistake is also explained by Orwell: "... no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness." Read the whole novel "1984" and see how many other analogies you can find. There are plenty. HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG admitted error only when absolutely forced to, and even then he tried to blame others for having deceived him and thus caused the wrong teaching in the first place. The sorry way he flip-flopped over the issue of women's make-up is a profound lesson in duplicity, chicanery, and stupidity.

You shall know them by their fruits. Every tree that does not bring forth good fruit is chopped down and tossed into the fire. Surely this verse is now being applied to the evil tree known as Armstrongism and the Worldwide Church of God. The WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD has "grown" to where it is now about 30% as large as it ever was. I hope it keeps on "growing" even faster. Every other cult will also be chopped down and burned up some day.

(6) When I was in the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD my then wife and I got into the habit of taking our children on outrageous trips to the Feast of Tabernacles. I made enough money that we had so much second tithe that traveling anywhere on earth with our children for two to three weeks was no problem. Some time in the early 1990s it was announced that one of the Festival sites to choose from was going to be on board an Alaskan cruise ship. My wife and I decided to try for that. My elderly non-member mother was also looking forward to going with us. She was not hostile to our cult's teachings, as she had been watching the World Tomorrow TV program for some time. The Festival Office told us to fill out a certain form and send it in not earlier than a certain date "in order to give everyone a fair chance", and due to the egalitarian and righteous policies of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD it would be first come first served for the very limited number of people who could fit on a floating festival site.

I decided to be selfish and less than perfectly egalitarian about this, so I got myself a form, filled it out, and sent it by Federal Express with early morning delivery to arrive the very first day such forms were to be allowed. Of course I paid for this expensive way to send the form in with second tithe, since it was a festival-related expense of mine. I was notified by a form letter a week or two later that my request for the Alaskan festival cruise had been turned down due to a lack of space. In other words, all the ship's berths had already been filled up before they opened my request. HELLO??? How was this possible? I did a little angry investigation and discovered that families with children were not going to be allowed on board the boat, and I wanted to take three children. It didn't take me very long to notice also that according to the published rates for berth occupancy that if the boat were completely full of adults the cruise ship line would make substantially more money than if many of the berths had children in them. This was because they were charging somewhat less per person for children than for adults. This little piece of the fine print was not explained in the Festival Office's planning brochure. All they had said was "first come first served". I was pretty angry at this. My conclusion was that either: (1) the decision had already been made to fill the boat up with only adults if enough adults applied, to make families with children wait until all the adults-only families' forms had been processed (first come last served), and thus a deception was being foisted upon us; (2) the decision was made after the filled out forms started coming in to change the rules in the middle of the game, which demonstrates cowardice rather than deception; or, most charitably, (3) the Festival Office simply forgot to add this needed piece of information when they were writing up the announcement. This last possibility shows their incompetence. At the very least the Festival Office was highly incompetent.

(7) When I was ordained a local church elder, I had no clue as to how to do what I was now expected to do. I had never had any training in marital counseling, psychological counseling, suicide counseling, etc. I have still never had any. Thank God I wasn't asked those kind of questions very often. Giving sermons was easy, though. As a deacon I had already given scores of sermonettes, and I really loved delivering those powerful dogmatic messages that all of us men aspired to being able to do some day.

Over the ten years that I was an elder, I was called upon twice to officiate at a wedding and once at a funeral. The weddings were pretty easy, as we were supposed to read from a book during the ceremony. The funeral was more difficult, as the person being buried was a non-member father of a member, and most of the people expected to attend the funeral were non-members. I put together about a 10-minute overview of what we taught about life and death, and tried as hard as I could to make it sound palatable to non-members.

The dead person was an 80-year-old former military man, and he was being buried at Arlington National Cemetery. This was the only time I have ever seen a military funeral, and it was quite impressive, except for one MAJOR mistake. During the ceremony we watched riflemen fire several volleys of shots. Then the military guards picked up an American flag, extended it over the table on which the dead man's cremated remains had been placed, and they were supposed to snap the flag tight in a typical militarily precise manner while holding the flag over the urn with the ashes inside. Unfortunately when they snapped the flag they somehow managed to strike the urn with part of the flag. The urn tipped over, rolled to the edge of the table, and fell off the table. I was standing so far away that I couldn't rush over and stop the accident from happening. All the military men, of course, had to remain absolutely motionless in order for the ceremony to remain precise. So no one standing next to the table acted to prevent the accident, either. I watched in horror as the urn fell off the table, seemingly in slow motion, fell to the ground below, and spilled about half of the poor dead man's ashes onto the grass.

At this point I decided there was nothing to be gained by intervening, as the ashes had already been spilled. The military guards folded up the flag in their normally precise way and acted as if nothing unusual had happened, then someone handed the triangularly folded flag to a family member. Pretty soon one of the family members came up to the urn and tried to put most of the ashes back inside. The whole thing was simultaneously hilarious and yet horrible. I felt like laughing because of the ridiculousness of the situation, but yet I knew the non-WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD family members must have felt sickened at heart. I had been taught by HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG and his minions that once we are dead that's it. Our ashes are nothing, the urn is nothing, blah blah blah. But yet I knew these close relatives must have been devastated.

(8) One of the MINOR IRRITATIONS that beset me in trying to read all of Herbert's VOLUMINOUS LITERARY OUTPUT was his habit of continuing to write EVERYTHING as if he were still writing ADVERTISING COPY back in the 1920s! Surely I am NOT THE ONLY PERSON ALIVE who remembers this DEMEANING WAY OF WRITING that we were FORCED TO PUT UP WITH! For example, as you read this SUPREMELY IMPORTANT INFORMATION of mine right now, are you getting a little ANNOYED with my writing style OR WHAT??!!! Assuming he had ever really been an ADVERTISING GENIUS as he wanted us to believe, then I guess that's where he learned to WRITE WITH ALL CAPITALS AND PUT EXCLAMATION MARKS AT THE END OF ALMOST EVERY STINKING SENTENCE!!!!!!!! After you read eight or ten sentences like this, the writing style starts to become BORING, ANNOYING, AND OVER-EXCLAMATORY! And a loving God surely would not want us to bore those precious souls whom CHRIST DIED TO SAVE!

Maybe he WROTE LIKE THIS was because he thought we were all IGNORANT, UNEDUCATED, HIGH SCHOOL DROP-OUTS like himself! Or maybe it was because he thought we had all come from SMALL FARM TOWNS in Iowa like himself and were too stupid to KNOW ANY BETTER! Since he assumed we were all IGNORANT and had never read much REAL LITERATURE since it was all TOTALLY PAGAN, we would not recognize a SHITTY WRITING STYLE when we saw it!!!

I was taught in basic English that the purpose of an exclamation mark was to CALL ATTENTION to something! But if you put one of these marks of punctuation at the end of EVERY STINKING SENTENCE, then you are forcing your poor dumb sheep reader to believe that EVERY STINKING SENTENCE you write IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!!! This is importance over-kill, IN MY SUPREMELY HUMBLE OPINION! If everything is SUPREMELY IMPORTANT, then that must be further proof that what you are reading has been written by GOD'S ONLY TRUE PROPHET FOR OUR HORRIFIC END TIMES!!!!!

Unfortunately, writing like this is an APPEAL TO PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS rather than to their EVIL SATANIC INTELLECT!!! So maybe that's why we were KEPT IN A MIND-NUMBING TRANCE by all of Herbert's shit that we had to read in order to remain A FAITHFUL DUMB SHEEP! And maybe that's why NOT MANY WISE MEN now were being called, and certainly not very many EVIL INTELLECTUALS with decent logical and reasoning skills would ever put up with reading more than one or two sentences of HERBERT'S INANE, SHITTY, AND EMOTIONAL RAMBLINGS spewed out on paper! Maybe another reason why he thought we were all dumb sheep is because he treated us that way BY THE STUPID WAY HE WROTE, then we acted like dumb sheep by believing it and bleating for MORE OF HIS INSIPID PABLUM, and thus we reinforced in HIS INCESTUOUS, GREEDY MIND the idea that he could successfully manipulate us like GOD'S TRUE END-TIME DUMB SHEEP! A sheep that is not dumb would spiritually VOMIT if forced to read such ridiculous SWILL! And anyone with any spiritual courage would GO TO HIS BROTHER PRIVATELY and complain about being treated LIKE A MORON! Unfortunately, all of us SHEEP who tried to complain to Herbvert were forced to watch his hideous jowls shake, and then we were yelled at, beaten down, chewed up, spit upon, reviled, defamed, marked, cast out, and DISFELLOWSHIPPED for being IN A BAD ATTITUDE by the person with MORE OF GOD'S HOLY SPIRIT than anyone else on earth!

Herbvert was SO SUCCESSFUL at writing THIS STUPID WAY that he INFECTED many other people who were writing GOD'S PERFECT END-TIME TRUTH for us all to read! Especially his son GARNER STUD!!! I have just read on the Internet something that GARNER STUD wrote, and it looks JUST AS RIDICULOUS as if it had been written by GOD'S ORIGINAL END-TIME PROPHET HERBERT THE PERVERT himself! Garner Stud also now is COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of writing even the simplest sentence without adding TOTALLY USELESS CAPITAL LETTERS and putting a VITALLY IMPORTANT EXCLAMATION MARK at the end of virtually every single SUPREMELY IMPORTANT SENTENCE he writes! Surely this is even more proof that Garner Stud is now a SUPREMELY IMPORTANT SERVANT OF GOD!

Thank God for the exclamation mark, brethren! For how else would we be able to recognize HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG for the sick FALSE PROPHET moron that he was unless we were able to count up the exclamation marks and compare that with the total number of sentences and see what a TRULY INSPIRED WRITER could do! HELLO????!!!! Whatever happened to the concept of "proofreader"?!! Didn't anybody ever tell him HOW STUPID EVERYTHING HE EVER WROTE LOOKED?!!!!! Apparently anyone who dared think such EVIL PAGAN THOUGHTS was afraid to mention it to Herbie, lest Herbie SHAKE HIS JOWLS AND YELL at him for being IN A WRONG ATTITUDE!

I wonder why the Bible is not written in such an OBVIOUSLY EFFECTIVE STYLE! If the material in the Bible is so AWESOMELY AND SUPREMELY IMPORTANT, surely it should have been written with LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS and at least one exclamation mark at the end of every single SUPREMELY IMPORTANT SENTENCE!!

Another problem is that by constantly CALLING ATTENTION to virtually EVERY STINKING SENTENCE you write is that you weaken the reader's ability to know WHAT IS TRULY IMPORTANT! It is like the little boy who cried "Wolf!"!! Sooner or later the townspeople learn that THERE IS REALLY NO WOLF!!! And then should a wolf actually appear the people WILL NOT BELIEVE YOU! They will come to think of you as a MORON, or maybe a tired old SENILE FOOL, or maybe as someone who is trying to SUCK OUT ALL THEIR HARD-EARNED MONEY THROUGH SUBLETY in order to spend it on his own OUTRAGEOUSLY LAVISH AND LURID LIFE STYLE! Or maybe they begin to suspect that YOU ARE WRITING THIS WAY MERELY TO IMPRESS YOURSELF WITH YOUR OWN IMPORTANCE!!!!!!!

May THE LIVING GOD WAKE YOU UP, SHAKE YOU UP, and MOVE YOU from the SPIRITUAL LETHARGY, SPIRITUAL CONSTIPATION, and SPIRITUAL INCEST you are involved in now so that you may finally see how SUPREMELY STUPID it is to write this way!!! I am writing this SUPREMELY IMPORTANT LETTER while sitting in my chair at zero feet altitude! I have to sit as I write because I have had so much high QUALITY Dom Perignon refreshment that I am truly unable to stand! Making one's followers wade through trash written like this is truly a STENCH in the nostrils of THE LIVING GOD and HIS RISEN CHRIST!!! God Himself has just led me to know that we are now in the final, ultimate, last, for real, better believe me this time, no joke, really truly serious, cross my heart and hope to die, GUN LAP!! Unless we have to have another GUN LAP next week!

Oh, my brethren! My heart's prayer is that you would achieve the SIMPLICITY that is in Christ and then you would be able to discern the PLAIN TRUTH as to how this writing style REALLY SUCKS! God has revealed to me just now an AMAZING NEW TRUTH! I have discussed this breakthrough understanding with all my top servile lackeys and they stand UNITED behind me in making this BREATH-TAKING announcement! And it's not that I made a mistake on this before, but rather I now have been shown NEW TRUTH by our LOVING GOD! We are moving from one position of absolute certainty to an exact opposite position of ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY of this NEW TRUTH! God be PRAISED! This NEW TRUTH has to do with the identity of the END-TIME BEAST! This is the number of the BEAST: count the number of the letters in all the words that are ALL IN CAPITALS and the total number of EXCLAMATION MARKS! Surely there can be NO OTHER PERSON in all human history who ever wrote this STUPIDLY! Brethren, this CANNOT be a COINCIDENCE!!!

In order for all you DUMB SHEEP to see this NEW REVEALED TRUTH, I am hereby calling a church-wide FAST this next Sabbath! We must all fast and pray until we come to see this NEW TRUTH that GOD WANTS US TO KNOW! (Of course, while you dumb sheep are fasting I will be quaffing down my normal DAILY LITER of Dom Perignon and sherry! I might even let a few of my most trusted running dog evangelists share some of this very high QUALITY refreshment! And we all know how the LIVING GOD believes in QUALITY!!)

How disgusting! How stupid! How uninspiring! How unliterary! How insipid! Yeccchhhh! And to think I used to read all that shit and think it was SUPREMELY IMPORTANT!!!!!!

(9) Why do we who have exited the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD cult spend so much time reading these web pages and writing some of our own? Because we are normal human beings, that's why. People who glibly tell us to get over it are not normal human beings. We are the normal ones and they are the mentally sick wackos, or at least seriously misled.

I work for a large company that has gotten involved with helping Steven Spielberg in a major humanitarian project of his called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The Hebrew word "shoah" means a devastation or calamity, but specifically now means the mass murder of European Jews during World War 2 by Nazi Germany. This foundation is an attempt to find as many survivors, eyewitnesses, liberators, and rescuers of this holocaust as possible and record on video tape their memories of what the holocaust was like, how it affected them or their loved ones, and any other related anecdotes they can remember before they all die. The people who are having their stories recorded all universally say the same thing as those who were involved in the filming of the Spielberg movie "Schindler's List", and that is that they needed to talk about their experiences in order to deal with their unresolved emotional issues. I believe the psychology terms for this are "post-traumatic stress", or more popularly "unfinished business", but it is nevertheless real. Already over 100,000 hours of testimony has been recorded. These people really have a lot to get over, and they have been waiting a very long time to do it. They need a lot more than to be told "Be warmed and filled!" or that someone else will pray for them. A friend of mine who lived in Israel for seven years beginning in the late 1960s told me that one of the most frequent causes of death was pedestrians' being struck by cars. Many people living in Israel then had been survivors of Hitler's death factories, they were so traumatized by their war-time experiences that they often wandered around busy downtown streets in a mental daze, and they would step off a curb to cross an intersection without bothering to check if any vehicles were about to run into them. They needed a lot more than to be stupidly told to get over it and trust God.

I saw a TV documentary recently (written in March, 2001) on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War 2 and how the survivors had suffered until they finally were able to get together with each other after many decades and talk about the horrible experience they all shared while floating in the Pacific Ocean for five days, fighting off sharks, and waiting to be rescued. To a man they all agreed with the Shoah survivors in their need to talk about their experiences with others who shared the same fate, who felt the same way they did about what had happened, who would believe what they had to say, and who would have compassion on them. They were angry at the fact that the US government had turned their innocent Captain Charles McVay into a scapegoat, had court-martialed him, and found him guilty of failure to avoid the enemy. McVay was so tormented by his guilty feelings that he committed suicide. He would not have felt guilty if his own government had not betrayed him in such a low, duplicitous way. The fact that his men were able to get together and petition the government in a united way was directly responsible for the US Congress's decision to issue a non-binding resolution calling upon the Navy to exonerate him. So far the Navy continues to hold to their original verdict. Read more of this incredible story at http://www.discovery.com/exp/indianapolis/captain.html.

That is why we who have given up on Herbert W. Armstrong's lies feel an inescapable need to write about our experiences, to tell any others out there in cyberspace who might read about what we know, and to read others' stories as well. Since we know we will never get any help from the current leaders of the scam or from the American justice system, this is all we can do to get over it. Every time I write another sentence that will be posted on the Internet I feel better about my decision to leave. I also feel MUCH better now that I am able to think critically again about the empty arguments of misled fanatics who try to manipulate my mind.

(10) I think I may have figured out why Herbvert liked to call himself the Pastor General. That's because he was secretly hoping that he would get in a conversation with some beautiful young college coed and one or the other of them would mispronounce his title as "Pastor's Genitals", and then Herbvert could start talking about his genitals, which he apparently liked to do quite a lot with others (see the Painful Truth's web page on Rasputin). Of course he could mispronounce his title on purpose if the comely young woman didn't do it accidentally soon enough to suit his lust.

And now that his licentious son Garner Stud is the Pastor General of his own shrinking little empire, he can call himself the Pastor's Genitals all the time and see where it leads. Keep it up, Stud boy, you just might get yourself some more sexual favors, especially if you pay prostitutes for it. At your age they're about the only ones whom you would find willing partners any more.

(11) From 1970 to 1974 I worked at the Worldwide Church of God headquarters in Pasadena at the Data Processing Center. I made many good friends there. One was an outspoken lover of truth named Mitch Derick. I was laid off in 1974 and moved to the east coast of the USA.

I was attending church in the Washington, DC area in early 1977 when one Sabbath I suddenly ran into my old friend Mitch. He quickly told me why he was in town. He had left the Data Processing Center, moved away from the smog-filled crush of humanity called the greater Los Angeles area, and had a new job writing microchip software for a firm in Grass Valley, California. Their software was used extensively in the television industry, and he was in the DC area to attend some kind of television broadcasters' conference. I offered to drive him back to his downtown hotel after services so I could get to talk to him at greater length, talk about old times, ask about his family, etc.

During the hour-long drive to his hotel, he told me the most amazing story. One day while in the employees' cafeteria or lunchroom where he worked, he saw an older man at a nearby table all by himself and looking rather sad and lonely. Mitch went over to the old loner and asked if he could sit down and eat his lunch there with him. The old fellow was soon coaxed into telling Mitch what was bothering him.

I don't know the old guy's name, so I'll call him Mr. X. He just happened to be the chief scientist at Mitch's new high-tech company, and he had a background in mathematics. Before working at this high-tech company that built computer software used in digitizing and processing television images, he had been employed by the US government as a theoretical mathematician specializing in probability. He told Mitch of two different projects he had been involved in that allowed him to learn things about how our government operates that left him sick at heart.

The first project he told Mitch about was the early hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean. Mr. X had been involved in doing the mathematical predictions of how much energy would be released by the explosion and what all the explosive effects would be. I have seen the 10 or so seconds of film of this explosion dozens of times on television. The camera filming this famous scene was at a great distance away from the explosion, you can see a hundred or more ships on the water surrounding the atoll, then a great blast, then the mushroom cloud goes up into the sky. Mr. X was on one of those ships to observe the explosion.

Mr. X then told my friend Mitch that the government mathematicians and physicists had made a very great mistake in predicting the energy yield of this explosion, as it was the very first hydrogen bomb explosion ever and they didn't yet know what they were dealing with. The yield was many times more than they had predicted. The US Navy had stationed many ships around the atoll with explosion and radiation monitoring equipment so they could learn exactly what the effects were at various distances. Unfortunately there was a destroyer stationed much too close to the atoll, and it was sucked up into the sky along with the mushroom cloud. This destroyer had hundreds of men on board. After a while, of course, the destroyer stopped going upwards and then fell back down into the ocean, killing everyone on board and sinking instantly. Oops! Back to the drawing board on that one. Mr. X then said the US government did the predictably cynical, diabolical thing, which was to pretend this incident had never happened. Everyone who had been involved in this project who knew anything about what really happened was then reassigned to various other projects everywhere else on earth but they were separated from each other. This was so they would lose contact with each other and not be able to refute the government's official cover-up of what had actually happened.

Since Mitch told me this amazing story I have seen this 10-second piece of film on television another 15 or 20 times. Every time I see it I jump up out of my seat, run over to the TV set, get as close as I can to the screen, and look intently to see the ship going up into the sky. I have never seen it. It may well be that the piece of film shown on TV is the official government sanitized and perhaps even doctored up version. I am sure that many different cameras were recording that event, and maybe the ship's destruction can be seen if the explosion were viewed from a different angle. I heard this story confirmed once by someone else. A couple of years after Mitch told me this story I was watching a panel discussion on a public television channel about nuclear disarmament. One of the panel members was Dr. Helen Caldicott, who is an Australian physician vitally concerned with preventing global thermonuclear warfare. In one of the things she said during that panel discussion she casually mentioned that a large ship can be seen being sucked up into the sky in a hydrogen bomb mushroom cloud. She has also apparently seen this in a film or maybe someone else who has seen it has told her.

That was the first sickening experience Mr. X had with government duplicity. 15 or 20 years later Mr. X was involved in another project for the military that required his expertise in mathematical probability. This other project with a sickening result was to support the War in Vietnam.

Mr. X was assigned to a group working at Fort Ord, a military establishment in northern California. Their task was to build a computer program that would model the war in Vietnam. The variables included things like the total number of US troops, the number of helicopters, the number and types of weapons and bombs, the size of the enemy troops, weather, ground conditions, etc.; in other words, everything you would need to predict the outcome of a battle to see which side would win and how much it would cost to win. The cost to win includes things like the number of casualties as well as the financial cost of all the weapons, ordnance, etc. All this sounds like a reasonable thing to do in order to wage war, except that Mr. X told Mitch that the real goal of this project was to use the computer model to help find a way to maximize the amount of money spent on weapons and bombs without actually winning the war. In other words, to prolong the war as long as possible in order to keep using up war materiel. In other words, to keep funneling huge profits into certain US businesses like Howard Hughes's enterprises, Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, etc., also known as the military-industrial alliance. That is what made Mr. X sick at heart. Once again this group of mathematicians was broken up after their project was finished and all the individuals were reassigned elsewhere in such a way as to scatter them and keep them from being able to contact each other.

I personally don't doubt that our government is capable of doing even the most heinous and diabolical activity imaginable. But that is not the point of my story. The point for this web site is that people who know what is really going on in any evil enterprise must be prevented by the leaders of that evil enterprise from telling their story. Their credibility must be destroyed lest the masses learn what is going on and through public pressure force the evil enterprise to stop operating.

When the "ministers" who were at the highest levels of power in the Worldweird Cult of Greed leave, they are well taken care of. Many of them continue getting paychecks for "consulting services". Such payments were made to many of HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's family members who never had any involvement at all in the cult, and some of these family members are rumored to have been at least two illegitimate children living in South America. Stan Rader continued getting payments after his alleged retirement back in ca. 1982. I knew Steven Andrews personally when he was in the Washington, DC area before he moved to Pasadena to become the Treasurer of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD. He then left and went with one of the many offshoot cults. I knew him well enough to call him on the phone in 1996 and ask him to confirm the payment to Rader. He confirmed that Joseph W. Tkach, Sr. had authorized payments to Stan Rader as a sort of "retirement" payment. How much longer does Stan have to be paid to keep quiet?

What about most of us who leave? What happens to us? We don't represent the same level of threat to the continuation of the mega-scam, so we are never offered any bribes to remain quiet. In fact I dare say that very few of us low-level minions and members who have left would be sleazy enough to accept such bribes. We just want to be left alone to heal, get our minds working properly again, tell the truth, and finally start living life the way it was meant to be.

If it weren't for the Internet and web sites like this Painful Truth, how could the scattered thousands of us possibly be able to reunite with each other to discuss the little piece of the puzzle that each of us was privy to and to put all the pieces together into finally showing that the emperor was indeed totally naked? We must never let the fanatics who are still in the belly of the great mind-kidnapping cult whore or any of its scorpion daughters dissuade us from posting our "bitter" diatribes against their religion. We must keep reading these web pages and contributing any little bit of knowledge we may have to the benefit of all humanity. This is an obvious case of synergy, in which the sum is MUCH greater than all of its parts.

Why else is a centralized point for communication like this web site good? There is strength in numbers, and the more of us who write articles for this and other healing-through-truth websites, the more likely it is that someone still in the clutches of a cult can come out.

We can be much better organized. Some day there might even be a class action law suit. If this happens (and I don't hold out much hope), then those of us who could be plaintiffs or witnesses of the atrocities can learn about it much more quickly and join in the fight.

The more we have people telling the same kinds of stories, the more credible we all become.

We are also acting as a support group for each other. I know one person who no longer believes the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD's teachings but yet continues to attend their services frequently because it is her support group. We all need a support group of one kind or another.

And, finally, writing up these little things I remember from time to time and sharing them with others is cathartic for me. Herbert the Pervert made sure I didn't believe in psycho-doctors, as they were all of the Devil. Now that I am out from under his stinking clutches I still find it hard to contemplate going to a shrink. But telling others of what I know is very helpful to me. We are all here now to heal ourselves, to help heal one another, and to make the most of what time we have left in our human lives. Don't let any fanatic cult member threaten you out of writing anything you can remember.

(12) Let's try a little experiment in logical thinking. Herbert W. Armstrong said he was God's Apostle, the head of God's Church, and God's government requires that we believe the leader of the church regardless of how atrocious his personal habits and private sins may be. If this last teaching it is true, it must be true of not only him but also of anyone else who holds the position of top leader. After he died the new top leader became Joe Tkach Sr. He changed almost every one of HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's teachings before he died in 1995. Then his son took over. And the new infallible teaching from God's infallible top leadership was that HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG had been wrong about most everything he taught us and that the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD had in fact been a cult. HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG said that both JWTs would be infallible when they were to inherit the top leadership position, and they said that HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was wrong. So therefore if HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was indeed infallible then that means that the two JWTs' statements that HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was wrong must be right. So therefore HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was wrong when he said he was infallible, and therefore both JWTs were also not necessarily infallible. That doesn't mean, however, that everything they say is wrong. They said that HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was wrong. The only way this can all logically be true is if HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG was fallible and wrong.

(13) In the course of my adult life, I have worked for ten different employers as a computer professional, not counting the several years when I was self-employed. One of the places I worked was at the Pasadena Headquarters of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD. Sometimes the top management where I worked was decent and rational, sometimes incompetent, and twice even criminal. The top levels of management in the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD from 1970 to 1974 when I worked in Pasadena were both criminal and incompetent.

We were told through sermons and Good News articles to make wise decisions, to count the cost, to seek out wise and multitudinous counsel, etc. The Church claimed it also followed its own advice every time a major decision was made.

There was no master plan in place in 1970 when I arrived at Pasadena. Each department manager had his own budget and could instantly implement almost any idea he had regardless of its impact on other areas of "God's Work". One frequent egregious example of this was Garner Stud's habit of announcing during his daily radio broadcast the availability of some booklet that had been out of print for years due to its low popularity. Then thousands of people would write in for that booklet in the next few weeks, and the printing department would suddenly and unexpectedly find they had to work lots more overtime to make up for Garner Stud's moment of inspiration. The Stud Boy would step out on faith in making his radio utterance about booklet X, and the printing press employees would get to lose sleep and miss out on normal family life in order to fulfill Garner Ted Armstrong's promises to the radio audience.

Another hideous example of the lack of planning was the annual budget cutback. Typically the church would lurch from Holy Day to Holy Day in the hope that extra donations would come in to help pay the day to day expenses that kept increasing. The greatest amount of extra income was always in the autumn with the fall festivals. Then new employees would be hired as God had just given another "shot in the arm" to His work. Then predictably donations would slacken off as the winter holidays caused people to spend more money on their own evil little selves, and so early each year there would be employee lay-offs. This annual boom and bust cycle went on for years. The year I was finally laid off there were at least two such budget cutbacks. The top man has been described on a Painful Truth web page as being manic depressive, and the whole organization functioned as if it were one gigantic manic depressive organization. I guess the corporation took on the personality of its founder.

I remember hearing Garner Stud give a sermon once in which he was deploring this lack of planning. He told us employees of the notorious case of some new employee who had just been hired, he was being relocated across the country, during the several-week period that it took for him to move all his family and belongings across the country the "inspired" ministers in charge of the management of the day-to-day business operations of the church had decided to "step out on faith" and eliminate this person's job, and thus when this poor man arrived at his new job he found he had already been pre-sacked and had to move right back across the country. What colossal stupidity! What sickening arrogance!

HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG stated very often that God had never let him "make a mistake that would hurt the Work". If he was indeed infallible, or even if infallible but that one statement were true, let's see what it took to hurt the Work. Since we are now in the post-Clinton era, we know that the only real truth is if you believe you are speaking the truth at the instant you make a statement. In other words, HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's veracity depended on what he meant by "mistake", "hurt", and "the Work".

Making almost 200 separate and totally false prophecies over a 50-year period were not enough to hurt the Work. The toxic spiritual amoeba kept on growing and adversely affecting more and more families. After all, continued growth was defined as one of the many proofs that we were God's Church and doing God's Work. (Or course, many other religious organizations, like the Roman Catholic Church, could also use that same proof. In fact, they have been growing for at least 1,650 years now since Constantine made Christianity his state religion.) Being dragged through a shameful receivership did not hurt the Work. Having large fractions of the ministers and members leave in disgust did not hurt the Work. Even HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's death apparently did not hurt the Work. The Work only seriously began to go backwards and obviously to fall apart quickly when Joe Tkach Sr. made his infallible decision (he was the leader so he must have been right) to reverse practically every one of HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's teachings, to stop the radio and TV broadcasts, and to shut down almost all the magazines. But since HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG claimed the top leader was infallible, surely what Tkach did must also not have hurt the Work.

The only way I can logically allow all this to be true in my mind is for there never to have been any work in the first place that God wanted us to do. The real work that was not being hurt, apparently (in other words, what the greedy, short, fat Herbert the Pervert had in his mind when he spoke of "God's Work"), was his own plan to live a life of luxury, make others do his bidding, amass a personal fortune, and squirrel it away in untraceable offshore bank accounts. This is what the top managers were really trying to manage. So they were actually successful managers. But all the while the 99% of us chumps on the bottom rung of the ladder thought we were helping people, serving God, and doing good works on a dying planet. I can forgive many sins, offences, and mistakes, but it is next to impossible for me to forgive the utterly and massively incompetent top management of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD as far as striving to achieve the organization's stated purposes for which we were all toiling and sacrificing.

Speaking of stated purposes, it became fashionable in the early 1990s for large enterprises to publish their official "mission". This is supposed to be a succinct statement of the goals of the organization and how the goals will be achieved. Such "mission" statements are thought of as a complete farce by most of us low-level professional white collar workers in every industry. Even among people who allegedly know the value of mission statements, such credos are actually supposed to be succinct. That means very short and to the point. The shorter, the better. I was not surprised at all when I saw the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD's new mission statement under the insipid inspired leadership of Joe Tkach Jr., the boy wonder Pastor General. This mission statement was two solid pages of fine print. This is manifestly absurd. It reminds me of one of my favorite Dilbert strips, in which the moron manager first says that ten of the finest executives got together and created a statement of their core values. Then he reads the statement to Wally and Dilbert, and the statement of core values is a meaningless mish-mash of vague double talk. In the last box of this strip, Wally says "I'm glad we didn't skimp and try to do that with only nine executives." And finally Dilbert adds "Yeah. It might have sucked." (quoted from Scott Adams' delightful comic strip "Dilbert").

The WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD's top management today sucks. Their mission statement sucks bigtime. They have no clue what they are doing. They are massively and utterly incompetent at management. They are carrying on the proud tradition of Tkach Sr., who mismanaged the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD into oblivion. They have given each other very lofty ecclesiastical titles, such as Pastor General and Evangelist, and this supposedly means they are capable ministers, discerners of spirits, etc. But that in no way qualifies them to run a business.

Several times in my professional life I have had the immense pleasure and gratification of working at a company at a time in the life of that company when it was managed by competent leaders, it was growing, and I was fortunate enough to be involved in a team of excellent and competent co-workers. Alas, any really good thing can be screwed up, and every time so far I have seen such excellent teams fall apart as management fails. I know this is an unavoidable part of being human, but it still really angers me when it happens.

(14) I ate dinner recently in a Chinese restaurant tonight and studied the paper place mat with the 12-year Chinese zodiac printed on it. Just for fun, I thought I'd see what the stars had in store for old Herbie. He was born in July, 1892, so that means he was born in the year of the ....

No joke. Good old Herbert the Pervert was a dragon baby. In Chinese astrology, the dragon is considered lucky. He was certainly a lucky guy. He ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free scammed money. His birth was certainly lucky for him, but not very lucky for the hundred thousand people whom he scammed.

In Biblical symbolism, of course, the dragon is synonymous with Satan. The Painful Truth website is chock full of info showing the Satanic things he perpetrated on others.

Back to my place mat. Here is what it says for dragon dudes: "Robust and passionate, your life is filled with complexity. Compatible with the monkey. Your opposite is the dog." Was he robust? Yes. He overate, overdrank, overmasturbated, overharangued, and generally overindulged himself in every conceivable way, yet he still managed to live to the ripe old age of 93. You have to be robust to punish your body (the way he told us not to) for so long and stay alive. Was he passionate? Of course. He would yell and scream at people for the slightest of reasons. As it says somewhere on the Painful Truth website, he had a "filthy temper". Was his life filled with complexity? Oh, for sure. No one had any clue he had incested his daughter for ten years until we began to learn about the real Herbert shortly before his long-overdue death. Most church members practically worshipped that selfish hypocrite.

Was he compatible with the monkey? Back to the place mat to see what it says about the year of the monkey: "Persuasive and intelligent, you strive to excel. Compatible with the dragon and the rat; your opposite is the tiger." Was he persuasive? Well, did he persuade us to become true believers, to give our mind, heart, and soul to him as well as empty our wallets for him time and time again, or what? He sure had me hooked. Was he intelligent? Well, even the Chinese astrologers can't win 'em all. But he conned most of us true believers into thinking he was intelligent. He certainly was sharp (slang for clever). In fact, he was a real sharpie (older slang for con man). Did he strive to excel? Yes, and he sure did excel at stealing, lying, drinking, keeping a journal of all the times he masturbated, etc.

Was his opposite the dog? The place mat has this to say about the year of the dog: "Generous and loyal, you have the ability to work well with others. Compatible with the horse and tiger; your opposite is the dragon." Was he generous? Not to people in need. He was generous with his top-level minions. He gave them huge salaries, free shopping sprees paid for by loyal tithers, and bribed them bigtime to keep pumping out the poisonous mind control to make us keep on tithing. When did he give any help to the widows and fatherless? He was not generous where it counts. Was he loyal? He was loyal to himself only. Was he loyal to those under him? Did he set up nice retirement plans for the thousands of employees and fulltime ministers? No. Was he loyal to his top henchmen? Somewhere on the Painful Truth website it says that he named J. W. T-cash his successor because he knew T-cash was an incompetent nobody, and thus HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's reputation as the GREAT LEADER would never be tarnished even after his death. So he wasn't loyal with any other people. How about his own children? Was he loyal to them? He incested one daughter for ten years; he pushed one son until he died as a result of an auto accident because he was out "doing the Work"; he banished his other son. Loyal? Get real. Did he have the ability to work well with others? You mean the ones he would scream at with his filthy temper whenever they would suggest doing something that was not according to the will of Herbie? Did he work well with the religious people with whom he associated in Oregon before they defrocked him and he decided to move to California to start over with the membership list he had stolen from them? Gimme a break. He was a fat, little Stalin wannabe.

So maybe the Chinese astrologers know what they are doing. Or maybe it's all just a big coincidence.

For what it's worth, and maybe all it's worth is having a little laugh at ourselves for being so gullible that we could be taken in by that fat, filthy snake who sold us all his rancid snake oil for so long.

(15) Reliability of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD "experts" in non-theological areas:

In the early 1980s I read an article by Raymond F. "Mr. Loyalty" McNair on the creation of the universe. He talked about the Big Bang theory and then said "Of course, God did not use this method to create the universe" (or words close to that effect). God would never use an explosion in a print shop to try to print a book. I had also just finished reading an excellent article in Scientific American showing the latest thinking by physicists and cosmologists on the subject of the Big Bang. Experts now believe they understand all the forces, energies, and math equations describing everything that happened beginning about one millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang occurred. What happened was that the huge blast of energy began to expand. After a certain period it had expanded so much that the temperature of all the energy had cooled down to the point where certain elementary particle reactions could no longer occur. The result was that matter began to form. As the energy expanded and cooled down even further, more and more matter of more and more complex forms began to appear. Finally localized clumps of matter began to merge together to form atoms, then molecules, and ultimately stars. Interstellar matter gravitated together near stars to form planets. And so on. The whole article sounded pretty logical to me, so I wrote to McNair suggesting he might want to read this article before speaking so dogmatically on a subject of which he so obviously was totally ignorant. I never got any response from him.

Another time I read an article in the Plain Truth by Keith Stump in which he was "proving" that the ancient Japanese people had originally migrated to Japan from somewhere else. As part of his "proof" he stated that the Japanese language has many similarities to the Basque language, or maybe it was to Spanish. It's been a long time and I have forgotten this detail Basque is spoken in a corner of Spain (unless, of course, you ask a Basque and he will say that Basque is spoken in The Basque Country and Spain ought to let them be free of Spanish tyranny). Since reading this authoritative article I have studied Spanish, Japanese, and Basque, and I can assure you that there are virtually no similarities between Japanese and any other known language. Professional linguists classify Japanese as a "language isolate", which means they can not find any other language similar enough to say it is in such and such a language family, as they have done with the Romance language family, e.g. Stump, of course, offered no proof in his article for this absurb claim of his.

Once I saw David Hulme doing a TV program. He mispronounced the name of the country Byelorussia. Since I have also studied Russian, I wrote him a short letter explaining the correct way to pronounce the word. He wrote me back and thanked me for my letter. At least he replied. That was better than what Moron McNair did.

And then there was McNair's totally horrid book about the American Revolution, the name of which escapes me now. I remember eagerly buying this book back in 1976 when he published it to coincide with the USA's bicentennial. After about the tenth page I decided to write him a letter explaining all the mistakes he had made in case the book were ever to have a second printing. After about 50 pages I gave up on my idea and also gave up on reading his trash. On virtually every page there were not only numerous typographical and grammatical errors but also there were historical inaccuracies. The book was so poorly done it was abominable. And this moron had the gall to make us pay for his book. McNair and Waterhouse were the two evangelists who came the closest to having a single-digit IQ. Of course they both constantly praised each other, especially in their loyalty to Pervert W. HARMstrong.

(16) Why people should write articles to post on the Internet and read articles written by others:

HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG taught us (raped our minds, i.e.) that psychology, psychiatry, therapy, and counseling were evil and pagan unless you were counseling with one of God's true "ministers". Now that we are free from his toxic mind filth, we are left with the need for therapy. I for one do not feel comfortable in going to a "shrink" because of the lingering emotional debris left in my subconscious mind and my memory from Herbie's sick ideas. Also real therapists cost a lot of money.

But we can receive therapy from the Internet. Think about the similarities. What happens in the presence of a real professional therapist? He asks you questions, you answer them, you talk about your past experiences, he asks you how such and such an experience made you feel, you explore your past feelings, etc. In other words, you do most of the talking to the therapist, and he guides you into exploring certain areas of thought where he thinks you need more help in confronting your repressed feelings. In group therapy you talk a while and get things off your chest, then you take your turn listening to others do the talking and getting things off of their chests.

All of these same things happen to us when we check in for another session with our cyber-therapist. If we read others' experiences, we are in a group therapy. If we tell our own by writing them up and sending them to the Painful Truth or the Exiters Support Network, we are getting things off our own chest. Occasionally we will even get a e-conversation started with someone who reads our stuff and that is really helpful. An expensive professional would guide us more quickly to get the help we need, since he has been trained in how best to do so, but we can also receive much help through this unprofessional substitute. Also sometimes we even find a link to some really valuable information posted by a real professional, such as the Painful Truth's link to the site on how cults influence us unduly at http ://www.influenc eatwork.com/cult.html.

In the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD women often felt themselves especially abused by the teachings. Not to worry! We men were also abused. There was plenty of abuse for everybody. There was only one person who was beyond abuse, and that was the great fat founder himself, Pervert W. HARMstrong.

I don't want to make light of the extra load of abuse that women had to endure. We men on the bottom rung of the abuse ladder also contributed our share of female abuse. The whole organization was built on abuse from the top down. Hmmm. Reminds me of a certain teaching about God's government. Another way of saying it is that shit rolls downhill. Everyone in any organization tends to let bad things flow on down to those under his power, and he tends to keep for himself anything good that accidentally comes his way.

The whole HARMstrong empire was run very much like a college fraternity or a military boot camp, where everyone who enters must go through an initiation period of hazing and then later he can haze and humiliate other new entries. Equal opportunity abuse for all. And the whole time we were all doing this to each other we kept reminding ourselves that whoever wanted to be chiefest should be servant of all.

I used to play a lot of poker when I was much younger. There is a piece of wisdom involved in successful poker playing known as "Don't throw good money after bad." This means that when you have gotten to the point that you know your initial investment is hopelessly gone and you cannot possibly win, you should immediately get out, cut your losses, and don't continue to play that hand anymore just so you can find out what the winning player actually held with the cards that were not turned over and only he knew what they were.

The money you had invested up to that point was good when you put it into the pot because you still had a chance to win. Finally the point is reached where winning becomes hopeless, and then all the money you have invested so far turns into bad money. You can never get that money back. But the money you still have left to gamble on the next hand is good money. So don't waste any of your remaining money trying to linger around once things become hopeless.

This piece of gambling wisdom has a real life application. Once we realize the good years we have invested into what looked like a noble cause at the time were actually wasted and the cause has become obviously hopeless, we should cut our losses, get out of the game, and keep all our remaining years for doing something else with our lives. This applies to a job situation, a marriage, a destructive addiction, or involvement in a cult.

But it is too late to waste any more of our precious lives in worthless pursuits, and what could be more worthless than continuing in any form of destructive behavior? Once we learn our behavior has been destructive, it is time to change for the better.

It hurts when we have to start all over, because we know we have wasted a huge part of our short, finite lives. It hurts because we have regrets for what we wasted. It also hurts because we grew to know and love many people with whom we will no longer be associating. It hurts when we stop smoking, too, but we do so because we know intellectually that we will live longer and/or more healthily if we do. We can always make new friends. We can always get adjusted to living in a new area. Human beings can adapt to change.

Shortly after starting to have my writings posted on the Painful Truth website, I was contacted by someone whom I had known back in my early cult years. He had dropped out long before I did, and we have eagerly renewed our old friendship via email. He reminded me of something I had completely forgotten that shows just how sick old Perbert really was.

In the late 1960s I attended the Feast of Tabernacles in Jekyll Island, Georgia. Herbert the Pervert flew into town, delivered his sermon, got back on his jet so he could drink some more Dom Perignon and mercifully relieve himself of having soiled himself by making contact again with his drones, flew off to the next feast site eagerly awaiting his arrival and more words from God's true apostle, and we at Jekyll Island were left to inculcate his newest inspired teachings in our lives. I was riding back to my camp site with my feast buddy Bob and discussing the sermon we had just heard old Perbert give. This time he had told us that NOTHING was more important now than "doing the Work." It was even more important for us to "do the Work" than our own personal salvation was. I accepted it back then because I had given my mind over to the short, fat, greedy, stinking pervert and whatever he said was by definition right.

Since God doesn't change, I guess that means that doing the Work was more important during the time when Christ was in human form than His own salvation. Since His own salvation was absolutely essential to the whole plan, apparently He should have been willing to lose His eternal life and thus deprive countless billions of humans the chance ever to have eternal life in order to "do the Work", whatever that meant in His day. Evidently Jesus didn't believe this paradoxical lie of Herbert, since He managed to do what He was supposed to do and also kept His eternal life intact.

Does this "inspired" teaching from Herbvert reek or what? Exactly what kind of situation would have to occur in order for us to choose between "doing the Work" and losing our salvation? We were told that the only way we could lose our salvation was to blaspheme the Holy Spirit and thus commit the unpardonable sin. Herbvert had a particularly convoluted explanation of what the unpardonable sin was, but my understanding of his definition was to continue in some sin and willingly choose not to repent of it. How about lying, stealing, and adultery? Would that qualify us to lose our salvation if we continued in such activities and never repented? How about continuing to commit incest with a daughter, stealing tithes, lying to people who respected and believed you, nightly drunkenness, whoring around in massage parlors or in child sex brothels in Bangkok, or gambling away members' tithes and offerings for decades? Apparently Herbvert, Garner Stud, and some of their top ass-kissing minions did all these and never repented. We were told that to repent means to stop doing something bad. The only thing that stopped the master pervert was his death.

Putting the Clinton truth spin on HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's statement shows that what we didn't know was that when he used the phrase "the Work" he meant the process by which we willingly transferred all our assets to his fat ass so he could buy lots of quality things to stock his five mansions and give large bribes to his top minion lieutenants and write fat pay checks to his family members who did nothing but were called "consultants". In that sense what he told us was the truth (as he believed it at the instant he said it). But to us dumb sheep "doing the Work" actually involved spiritual, Biblical, and unselfish concepts, like saving humanity, spreading the gospel, obeying God, and sincerely trying to live a godly life.

We were told that true servants of God do not rock the boat, do not try to take the law into their own hands, do not try to overthrow the constituted authority, willingly accept wrong and patiently wait for God to fix the problem, obey their leaders even when they know their leaders are wrong, etc. After all, David didn't whack Saul when he could have, did he? David patiently waited for Saul to cease being the king through some means other than David's directly causing it.

How did God solve David's problem? He killed Saul. How did God solve all the problems in the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD? He killed Herbert the Pervert. Wouldn't it have been a lot better for Herbie if we had complained?

According to another WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD teaching on passively putting up with evil, God sets up over nations whomever He pleases, and sometimes they are the basest of men. (Hmmmmm. I wonder if sometimes God sets up over churches the basest of men. Interesting. Why didn't we ask about that one way back when?) We were supposed to trust God even to intervene in national affairs and solve our problems by replacing the nation's ruler if necessary.

Suppose you were a righteous Jew in Germany just before the final solution started happening. You trusted God to solve your problem, and then you were killed and burned up in an oven. How did God solve that problem? He had the USA destroy Germany, but not before Hitler's mad rule had indirectly caused forty million deaths all over Europe.

I often hear people say "If anything should happen, God forbid, then blah blah blah." Just when did God ever forbid anything? Did God forbid World War II? God let that happen, along with plenty of other horrors throughout all recorded history. God let two entire large cities in Japan be vaporized in 1945. The lucky ones were those who were instantly vaporized. The word "holocaust" means the complete burning up of something, according to the Greek word roots involved. Hitler's was not the only holocaust in the 1940s. There were also holocausts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since they were completely burned up in an instant.

Let's look at some Biblical examples of how true servants of God patiently waited for God to solve their immediate problems. Abraham gathered up his private army, rode off after the five kings, waged a successful war against them, and rescued his nephew Lot rather than sit around and let God solve the problem. David volunteered to kill Goliath, and promptly did just that when allowed to try. Jesus escaped from the mob who wanted to kill Him. Jesus drove all the moneychangers from the temple. Paul told Peter he was wrong when Peter wouldn't sit and eat among Gentiles.

The previous paragraph is used only in an attempt to disprove the concept of waiting for God to solve all our problems, assuming the Biblical record is true. If the Biblical record is not totally true and not internally consistent, then why should we even believe that we are supposed to wait for God to solve our problems?

How big does the problem have to be before I must let God handle it? Do I wait for God to tie my shoes in the morning? Do I wait for God to put food on my table or do I get a job, earn some money, and buy some food myself? Do I wait for God to improve my living standard (by "intervening" and "laying it on the heart" of my boss to give me a raise) or should I get off my lazy ass, go get a college degree, go to night school, learn to speak English better if I am an immigrant in the USA, and do all I can to make my services more valuable to my employer? Do I wait for God to remove the murdering tyrant who rules over my nation or do I move to another nation while I still have the chance? Do I wait for God to lower my taxes by setting up over my nation a less base ruler or do I write letters to the editor, call up radio talk shows, and run for public office myself? Do I wait for God to "inspire" a less abusive policy in my church or do I stop supporting the abusive bastard apostle with my tithes and go somewhere else that is much less abusive? Should a woman wait for God to "intervene" with her physically abusive husband or should she use deadly force to defend herself while he is viciously attacking her in front of honest and friendly witnesses?

Maybe my getting a job, moving, or defending myself in unarmed hand-to-hand combat is the way God wants to intervene. We were also taught that God does His work through human instruments. Maybe I am the human instrument God wants to use to "intervene" in solving my problems. Who can know? Whenever I see a TV drama or movie in which some poor helpless victim or witness to a crime starts screaming "Somebody do something! Help!", I yell back at the screen "YOU'RE somebody! You do something. Help yourself. There's nobody else around to help you, either. Get over your panic and think. Figure it out." Our whole American society is now geared to make us think that the government will solve our problems. All we need is one more law and everything will be good. We took this wrong attitude with us into the cult and transferred the responsibility from our government to God.

Waiting patiently for God to solve the problem sounds like a lazy cop-out me. Are we supposed to tell someone else "Be warmed and filled" or are WE OURSELVES supposed to give him those things that are needful to the body?

(a) Faith: Christ asked if there would be faith on the earth when the Son of Man returned to earth. I always used to think this meant I must have faith in Christ, especially when He returns, or I am in big trouble. More fear-based religion. Are we supposed to accept things on faith? Faith without works is dead. Maybe one of the works we are supposed to mix with our faith is the work of proving all things and holding fast to that which is good. How can you prove faith?

(b) Zeal: I was zealous for God once, which actually meant I was zealous for Herbie since whatever came forth from his mouth was the infallible word of God. Unless, of course, it was what issued forth whenever he had had way too much Dom Perignon to drink and his stomach spewed out the liquid in it because it was spiritually lukewarm. I became unbalanced. One of the things Herbie's minions told us repeatedly was that a Christian was supposed to be balanced. OK, so I also wanted to be balanced as well as being zealous. How in the hell do you both of those at the same time? When was the last time you heard of a balanced zealot?

Once at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jekyll Island, Georgia in the late 1960s the announcement Nazi told us that a certain non-member spouse who had come to the Feast had done something in a bad attitude and (can't remember now exactly what) made a scene or somehow come to the attention of the Nazi ministers. This true font of compassion standing at the podium then proceeded to announce in his most stentorian manner "Mr. (or Mrs.) So-and-so, go home! Take your bad attitude with you and go home!" How would you like to have your name announced to 10,000 people as being in a bad attitude and told to get up from your chair under the big tent, leave the tent, get in your car, drive back to Memphis or Richmond or wherever you had come from, and leave your good-attitude member spouse there to keep the rest of the Feast without you? I bet that family had a wonderful marriage right after that happened. Of course, this Nazi (if I could remember his name I would include it here so we would all know who that asshole was) was just following the Biblical example. We all remember when Jesus was feeding the huge multitude with the five loaves and two fishes that He saw someone there with a bad attitude and told him "Hey over there! Yeah, you! That's right, Zebediah Bar-Jonah. I'm talking to you! You take your bad attitude and leave this multitude right now! You're not worthy to hear my teaching." He did the same thing when He gave the sermon on the mount, too, if I remember correctly. And then there was this one: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, unless you are in a bad attitude, in which case you can just get the hell out of my sight." In the early 1970s Dan Truhitte, who had had a medium-sized role in the movie "The Sound of Music", got sucked into the cult and was a student at Ambassador College in Pasadena while I was there working in the Data Processing Center. I was also in the Deadquarters Church choir, and one night the choir was rehearsing for some performance in which we were to sing some popular songs. Dan, being musically gifted (as was evident from his singing and dancing in "The Sound of Music"), was temporarily directing our rehearsal. Many of us were getting pretty tired of all the rehearsals and the late hour of that particular rehearsal was taxing our benevolent spirit. Some of the choir members began mumbling to each other and perhaps even let their attitudes show on their faces. Dan glowered at us, chewed us out, and told us he could see hate on our faces. That comment REALLY made us want to stay there longer and do what he said. Those of us in the choir were not college students. We were employees, grown-up, adults, etc. I was in my late 20s at the time. Here we were receiving industrial-strength spiritual correction in public from an arrogant first-year college student. He just wanted to be a big Nazi like all the other "leaders" he could see on that campus. Come to think of it, he played a little Nazi tyrant in that movie, too.

When I worked in Pasadena in the early 1970s I had a very close friend who worked late at night in the Hall of Administration in the security department. His specific job was to monitor the radio that was used to dispatch security personnel for various tasks. He was privy to the comings and goings of all the top dogs. Once he told me that he learned through radio dispatches that Garner Stud was flying on a Friday night to Las Vegas, Nevada to spend the weekend there gambling. The Studmeister was the number two top dog in an organization which preached to all of us dumb sheep that gambling was a sin and that flying anywhere on the Sabbath was a sin. I also knew a man who worked in the business office at cult headquarters in Pasadena. This man told a friend of mine, who then told me, that Garner Stud would often go into the business office, help himself to a large handful of cash that had been sent in by loyal tithe-payers or other donors who had sent cash in the mail, and then King Stud would leave for parts unknown with cash in hand.

Herbert the Pervert taught us to keep the ten commandments. Boy, did we ever keep the third one meticulously. We wouldn't even say "God bless you!" when someone else sneezed, because that was taking God's name in vain. But yet the whole church took God's name in vain when it called itself the "Worldwide Church of God" and when we all claimed we were a Christian church. Since we were taught the Bible shows that Christ is God, anyone who calls himself a Christian and who is a hypocrite is taking God's name in vain. So is a whole church that hypocritically claims to be Christian. Read all the online Ambassador Reports or most any other web page on the Painful Truth or Exiters Support Network website to see if the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD was really "God's" church, if it was really Christian, and what its real fruits were (you shall know them by their fruits). If it wasn't a church that belonged to God, then whose church was it? Well, the Bible says you-know-who is the god of this world, the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD's top dog leaders were about as worldly as you can get, so then which god was the god of that church? Maybe most of the low-level members were sincerely trying to be Christians, but those at the top weren't. Another thing is that according to the fine print in the articles of incorporation there was actually only one "member" of the corporation known as the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD, and that was Herbie the Pervie, also known as "a corporation sole". The word "sole" means one, single, only one. The church was Herbie, and Herbie was the church. Totally. Lock, stock, and barrel. The 100,000 of us dumb sheep who thought we were members of "The Worldwide Church of God" were not. Herbvert the perbert was the only member. The rest of us were probably members of Christ's body, but we were certainly not members of the WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD.

After working at Deadquarters for a while in Data Processing, I thought I was pretty special. Then one Sabbath I happened to be in another southern California church area attending services, where I met a grizzled old member who had been in the US military a long time. I mentioned that I was working at Headquarters. I must have been beaming very proudly when I announced that wonderful fact, for he immediately asked me if I had been working there long enough to have acquired the viral disease known as "Headquartersitis".

I asked him to explain, as I was so young and na<ve that I hadn't yet lived long enough to know much about human nature. This is the same as what Lord Acton meant when he wrote power tends corrupt, and absolute corrupts absolutely. All of us working at Headquarters were immersed in unspoken hierarchical attitudes: members out field churches dumb sheep, weak world, crud, lower than whale shit on bottom Indian Ocean; Ambassador College students cream crud; we loyal HQ employees privy HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG's latest ramblings, could learn "new truth sooner everyone else, thus by implication must have been top level crud. Some mentioned every now then realized sheep crud there paying our salaries, but many people had since gotten over any qualms those kinds concerns.>

The same viral disease affects politicians and bureaucrats who move to Washington, D.C. to work at the highest levels of our national government. They quickly become full of themselves and start lording it over the people who put them there rather than continuing to serve others. They are called "public servants", meaning they are supposed to serve the public, but many of them quickly transmogrify into "public tyrants", just as Herbie and his minions did. Needless to say, I pleaded innocent of Headquartersitis to this grizzled old member, but I began noticing this malady in others around me.

Those who want to keep on believing in the sanctity of the Whatever Church of God cult admonish us to forgive the dead incestuous bastard, get over it, be warmed and filled, and move on. They may even tell us that we are supposed to forgive people who offend us 490 times (70 times seven), as Christ told Peter he must do. Does any rational person actually think God expects us to forgive someone else BEFORE he asks to be forgiven?

In 1991 I offended a person at a computer conference I was attending. My action had been weighing on my mind, and nine years later I ran into this same person at another computer conference and apologized to her. She told me that it wasn't necessary for me to do that, as she was a Buddhist, Buddhists don't hold grudges (bad karma to hold a grudge, I suppose), and she had long ago gotten over my offense. By the time I had thought of the proper reply, she had walked away. I wanted to tell her that she may feel she did the right thing by "pre"-forgiving me, but I couldn't forgive myself unless I personally apologized to her.

In the same way, it may be argued that we should pre-forgive others before they come to us and apologize for having raped our minds for thirty years, stolen huge amounts of our money under the false pretense of fear religion, consumed upon their lusts most of those stolen huge amounts of money, and failed to live honorable and exemplary lives that reflected the same moral principles by which they forced us to live. After all, if the Bible be true then God has pre-forgiven us because He first has to have mercy on us in order to grant us repentance. The teaching was that we couldn't even begin to think about our need to repent unless God first started to soften up our hard hearts to realize we needed to be forgiven, and then God would quickly forgive once we asked for it. So God actually pre-forgives us. The only problem with this is that we are not God. We are limited, fallible, selfish humans.

If we were to forgive others before they come around and ask to be forgiven, we are giving them carte blanche to do whatever they want with us. Pre-forgiving others cannot be distinguished from condoning their offenses. Put yourself in the place of the one doing the offending. You offend someone else, he forgives you, appears to let you get away with it, and lets you do it to him again and again. What would you think? You would probably think you had a genuine gilt-edged sucker on your hands, and you would take him for all he's worth. How can the one guilty of the offense ever learn he is doing wrong if he keeps getting pre-forgiven?

I was at a Feast of Tabernacles once after the supremely offensive Herbvert had died. During the sermon I was out in the hallway with my little child over my shoulder, walking back and forth while waiting for her to go to sleep. I ran into Roy Demarest, who was probably a pastor-ranked minion (oops, I mean minister) by then. I asked him why hadn't HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG ever apologized to us for all the horrible mistakes he made, like the failed prophecy of 1972. Demarest mumbled some mess about how HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG had actually apologized once to some church audience in Pasadena. WOW! That means he is eternally off the hook! No more bad karma for him, for sure for sure. The only problem is that there were still 90,000 or more dumb sheep in the ashes of what used to be Herbie's church who had never heard him apologize. And since this "news" was not reported in the Worldweird News, how would average church member Joe Blow out in Podunk ever know that Herbvert had officially "apologized"? Hearing of his half-assed apology made me even angrier than ever at the fat old perverted thief.

Well, Perbert can't apologize to anyone now, since he had mercy on the whole world and died in 1986 rather than inherit rulership over the world under Christ in the Kingdom of God which was obviously set up on earth exactly according to Perbert's schedule in September, 1975. So what do we do now? We wait for his anointed successor to apologize, that's what we do. Whenever I see Joseph W. T-cash ask me to forgive him and/or the church he governs, I guess then I'll have to do it. (Damn it!) Unless and until that happens, there will still be a HUGE load of bad karma going around on the great karma wheel of life.

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