The Background Story of This Blog for Context of My Writings.

I spent a great deal of my life in a fundamentalist dooms-day cult, which, unfortunately, sprung forth extremely literal, physical interpretations of all things scripture. These literal interpretations of allegory and parable led the Church - the Worldwide Church of God - to the strange beliefs of fictional fantasy that we embraced with aching fervor. Just yesterday, while researching into the past, I read a member's letter that she had written into the Church. She had embraced fully a fantastical, completely fictionalized newspaper of what we believed the world would really be like about 20 to 30 years down the road. This person even stated she wishes she could have shouted out on the rooftops what's really going to happen, "because it's all true". I felt instant empathy for her - because we all, who grew up in the cult - experienced and felt such emotion in one degree or another.

In this fictional newspaper - which we called "The New World News" - all the plot-lines of a Disney movie with great potential were there. Friendly lions and lambs. Dancing rattlesnakes. Beautiful, lush farmland with abundant crops Glorified spirits that would pop in and out and keep people out of trouble during the 1,000 year Millennium and reign of Jesus Christ on the Earth. We - who were members of the Worldwide Church of God - at least, those of us who were baptized - would have been those glorified spirits that would rule over the Earth under Jesus - correcting, admonishing, and ensuring that the Law of God was strictly enforced all over the world - literally, in the words of the founder of the Church - "forcing" all the world for the first time in their lives, to be happy. We would be administering an autocratic dictatorship with the force of a lion - all in love, of course.

While glancing through this "newspaper" of what many of us honestly came to believe - and why we all trekked hours and days to attend a yearly conviction that envisioned exactly such a scenario (with sermons often describing just such a world),  I can only shake my head at how physical of an interpretation everything was to us.

When we read scripture - we saw it through one framework - the framework of one vision. The context of the scriptures, the writing style of the generation of which it was written in, the "big picture" - all of this was thrown out for a cherry-picked, here a little, there a little, already pre-conceived idea of exactly what the Bible was all about. The founder of the Church admitted he "threw everything out" that Christianity taught - because he was convinced of it's counterfeit nature - and started from scratch to develop in just a matter of months his own version of what the scriptures said, and what they meant. The founder himself claimed that this reasoning was divine inspiration from Christ himself - taught of no man. Using this claim, he called himself an Apostle. Listening to that claim, we all believed him.

Through this narrow-vision window of scripture - and adding to it several other interpretations from various sources such as the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Seventh-Day-Adventists, a Spiritual Stew of Leftovers was combined into what we accepted as our every day reality. We believed that God had sentenced man, after Adam's fall, to a sentence of 6,000 years without God, where we were cut off from Him completely - except for those in our Church who were specially singled out to be trained to rule and reign with Christ in the millennium. To force this viewpoint, we came up with many prophecies (that failed), another Gospel (that prioritized his Message over His Person), Mighty Ministers, (whose word was as good as if it was Christ), Changes in scripture (which resulted in Bibles ridden with scratch-outs and changes throughout), and a focus on worldly fruits (growth, money, buildings, attendance) instead of spiritual fruits. (you know them - love, mercy, gentleness, etc.). This church brought in, through the enforcement of a three-tithe+offerings system, tens of millions of dollars and an extravagant, expensive headquarters campus. We were all in.

We unashamedly and thoroughly condemned all other churches as Satan's churches. We unashamedly criticized all other Christians as pagan, and members of Babylon, the great false religion - who blasphemed God by going to Church on Sunday and keeping Christmas. We isolated ourselves as a people, and set ourselves apart by the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, the annual Holy Days as is in the Torah (but not really), and by having the name of the One True Church. Yet on the inside, we were a festering, simmering pool of arrogance and vanity, wreaking with unashamed abandon the fruits of the world - a church full of pride, infighting, scandal, immorality, abuse, and wickedness - all of which the ministry attempted to cover up through the appearance of high culture and good public behavior.

Through a doctrine of fear, submission, and authority - a belief of a great world war that only our church would be saved from - and the promise of kingship and rulership in the great new world that was to be - the Church thrived mightily, until the death of it's founder.

After the founder of the church died, the administration internally began the changes that would lead up to the great hydrogen explosion that sent a destructive shock-wave throughout the entire church with just one bang of a sermon. In one sermon, the entire construct, framework, glue and nails that held the Church together were blown to shrapnel with the force of a major tornado. In one sermon, "all one body we" turned into "where the heck am I going to go, and what in the world am I going to do". And within weeks - what was once a relatively unified body scattered - marriages split, friends broken, congregations separated. And all that was left in just a matter of years were memories, as the massive headquarters was sold off, and the colleges were closed.

What's left now is a very small, completely changed to evangelical Christianity mother church, countless splinter churches that still hold to the teachings of it's founder, most of which are led by people who would be better suited in the circus than running a church. It's a spectacle - a horrible, ugly spectacle to behold. Even worse, they seem completely deluded in the belief of their actions.

Like we all were once.

I write this to share where I come from. I write this as a person who is currently recovering from very hard experiences in this cult. I write this as a person who nearly died several years ago directly and partly due to the actions of the cult. I write this as a survivor - and as a human.

Not every post on my personal blog is going to talk about this experience. Some posts will be funny, and humorous. Many will be non-related. Some might be irrelevant and rambling, bordering on insane, possibly (kidding). There will also be poetry. But there will NOT be politics. Posts that help to disprove Armstrongism will not be here - they'll be on another blog I contribute to (but do not own), Banned By HWA, linked on this blog. But when I talk about "my experiences", this is the background that I am relating to. I hope you find this short entry useful in the future.