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From Cult to Christian, The Long Journey Home

September 29, 2010 By Randy Olds 7 Comments

Today I stumbled upon another blog of a woman who is chronicling her journey out of religious abuse. I lingered for a while, reading some of her posts…feeling her pain.

There are essentially three types of blogs that I follow. I have found a number of respected Christian scholars, most of whom are professors at one university or another. Of these, I tend to avoid those who are too far extreme either to the left or the right. I also follow a number of seminarians, of who most are working on advanced theology degrees. These advanced students often ask questions that others are afraid to ask.

The last category of bloggers that I like to read are those who have been involved in some sort of cult or “extreme fundamentalism” and are trying to find their way home. Many, but not all, of these spent time in the same cult that I grew up in, Armstrongism.

I read the professors and the academic types because I seek to learn from them. Although I don’t always agree with their conclusions, they delve much deeper into various theological ideas than I will ever find in a Sunday School class. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have weeded down the blogs that I follow to those who approach theology and the Bible with open minds and are willing to ask the same hard questions that I do.

And hard questions I ask.

I think that growing up in a cult will force a person to do one of two things. Either give up on religion completely, or start completely from scratch. I’ve seen a great many who grew up in the cult that I did who did the former, and I was very close to giving up on God my own self. How could I trust anything that any religious leader said when the one that I grew up thinking was “God’s Apostle” turned out to be blatantly wrong on 90% of what he taught?

Fortunately, God never gave up on me, and the day eventually came when I set out to once-and-for-all determine if Christianity’s claims had any validity at all. Through many, many painstaking hours of study and a few heartfelt prayers, I finally determined that the basic claim of Christianity must be true. That is, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived, died on the cross, and was resurrected three days later. And that He did it for me.

However, past that basic fact, I have had to prove nearly every tenant of the Christian faith for myself, and that is still an ongoing process.I had to start from scratch.

Just because a bunch of people came up with a creed or two, or a church committee developed a “statement of faith” is simply not good enough for me. Having been burned, and burned badly, by the Worldwide Church of God’s erroneous “statement of faith”, I doubt that I will ever be able to simply say, “Hey, that’s a great creed, I think I’ll go with it!”

So, as I read through the blogs of recovering fundamentalists, quivering daughters, and cult survivors of all sorts, I realize that it is much the same for all of these people. Like me, most of these have lost faith not in God, but in those who tell us who God is. Quite often, the cult survivors that I run across escaped the cults that they were in decades ago, but are still struggling to find a Christian church that they can feel comfortable in and a pastor that they can trust.

For me, it’s been over twenty years since I set foot in an Armstrongite church, but I know that I still haven’t fully recovered. Of course, I spent a good many years of those two decades in no church at all, and it has only been in the last few years that I really started digging into the Bible in earnest to find the message held within. But that too is often a hallmark of cult survivors.

The shell-shock of coming out of a cult often discourages survivors from any sort of church membership at all. And as I pointed out in a post last year, the experience quite often drives cult survivors into a stance of complete disbelief or atheism.

Perhaps the day will come when I read an account of someones journey away from spiritual abuse and it won’t hit that nerve that is still raw. Perhaps one day I will have, to my satisfaction, proven enough of the tenants of the creeds that I can stop asking so many questions. Perhaps one day I will find myself completely healed from having grown up in a cult, and simply call myself Christian, instead of “a-Christian-who-grew-up-in-a-cult-but-who-is-now-just-a-normal-Christian.”

Filed Under: About Me, Armstrongism, atheism, cults, Fundamentalism, Spiritual Abuse Tagged With:

Some Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 3:12-15

September 21, 2010 By Randy Olds 5 Comments

The images of little children displaying signs proclaiming that “God Hates Fags” got me to thinking about a post that I’ve had sitting in my “draft” box for a while now. From time to time I write about spiritual abuse, not just because I was a victim of spiritual abuse growing up in The Worldwide Church of God, but also because I come across others who are still victims of similiar abuse.. Whether it is children picketing with hate signs, or women oppressed by the Quiverful movement, or the many people who are still trapped in Armstrongism or some other form of Fundamentalism, victims of spiritual abuse still abound.

While I believe that the leaders of some of these Churches and movements will definitely have to answer to Christ at the Final Judgment, I find myself wondering what Christ will say to those who grew up in such churches and really just didn’t know any better. Although Jesus plainly said that it would  be “better to have a millstone around your neck and be cast into the depths of the ocean” than to mislead one of these little ones (Mark 9:42) and that obviously refers to those who lead their flock astray, Paul seems to indicate that we are responsible for what we actually know (Romans 2:14-15).

1 Corinthians 3:12-15 seems to indicate to me that there are going to be a great many people who will have an inheritance in the Kingdom of God who, at least at face value, may not seem to be living out a life anything close to what Christ advocated:

If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. 1 Corinthians 3:12-15

Now reading this passage in the context  indicates to me that the ones who Paul is primarily referring to as doing the building are the teachers and pastors, although the argument could be made that the individual Christian has some degree of responsibility. As James echoes in James 3:1, “Not many should be teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment.”

But what about the flock of those who have fallen victim to false teachings and as the result not lived out lives that would seem to represent what many others would would consider “good Christianity”?  And what about those who have become disillusioned with Christianity and left the fold as the result of these “wolves in sheep’s clothing”? It would seem to me that many of these never had much of a chance.

My own personal journey out of spiritual abuse and false teachings was a very long and painful one in which I spent a great many years rejecting Christianity altogether. During those years I battled depression and addictions and was not generally what most would consider a very nice guy. It was only when I reached a crisis point in my life that I embarked upon my journey to discover what the Bible really said and what the real claims of Christianity were. But what if I had died prior to that epiphany?  Prior to the point in time that I really started to truly seek and understand what the Bible really said, I considered myself to be a Christian, although I definitely did not exhibit any of the fruits of the Spirit.  I thank God every day that I finally “got it” and was able to finally to begin to move beyond the pain and false teachings of my youth and that He blessed me with a mind capable of reading and the Bible and hopefully begin to finally understand just a bit of it.

And what about those who may have learning disabilities and are really not able to to read the Bible with a degree of comprehension to determine what is true and what is false so far as what Jesus and the Apostles really said? We need to realize that for many, many centuries Christians were not even allowed to read the Bible and were basically at the mercy of the priests who told them what the Bible actually said. Is God going to deny them entry into the Kingdom because they received false information and acted on it in ways that we might find reprehensible? How much is God going to hod these types of people responsible for?

There is a lot more that could be said about this passage in 1 Corinthians, including some who have interpreted it to indicate some sort of Universalism. I have also read that the Catholics use this verse as a proof-text for Purgatory, but those are all for other posts. The main point that I wanted to draw out from this verse today is that Paul seems to be saying that there are going to be people whose works, as lacking as they may seem to appear, are going  make it into the Kingdom of God, even if by the skin of their teeth. And I tend to think that many who have been misguided by false teachers will meet those qualifications.

Filed Under: Armstrongism, Fundamentalism, Spiritual Abuse Tagged With:

Sermon Notes: A Man Should Not Pee Sitting Down

September 12, 2010 By Randy Olds 3 Comments

This is absolutely hilarious. Unfortunately, I am afraid that this King James Only preacher was completely serious. :o You have simply got to watch this all the way to the end.

Filed Under: Fundamentalism, Humor

Instead of Burning Qu’ran’s, How About A “Trade in Your King James Bible Day”?

September 10, 2010 By Randy Olds 4 Comments

I have not weighed into the controversy concerning the idiot “Biblically Challenged Person” down in Florida who is advocating burning Qu’rans on 9-11. Plenty of other bloggers have been bogging down the Internet bandwidth up and down the blogosphere and most of them have nothing but condemnation for this yo-yo extremely “biblically challenged person”.

However, while I was researching for my current series about the origins of beliefs about Hell, I had a novel idea. Instead of burning Qu’rans, how about having everybody in the United States trade in their archaic and misleading King James Bible for something a bit more useful, say a NRSV or a HSCB, or at least an NIV?

I wouldn’t go so far as to advocate burning a King James Bible, they could be useful for studying those curious critters known as Fundamentalists. I wouldn’t advocate burning any book, only tyrants do that. There are definitely some books that we could use a whole lot less of though, and in my opinion the King James Bible fits the bill (as long as it’s properly replaced with a useful translation of the Bible) .

Just getting rid of the noxious use of the word “Hell” in the Old Testament where it is used better than 30 times in the “official” 1611 King James Version and using the correct word of Sheol would be helpful to a a great number of Bible readers. And who can even really understand what they are reading with all of the “thees” and “thous” anyway. I mean, nobody (except for a fundamentalist preacher) talks that way anymore.

Not that I think that hate-mongerers such as Terry Jones or Fred Phelps (of Westboro Baptist Church) will let up much if we plopped an ESV in their laps and confiscated their King James. However, if the ordinary church-goers in many of these congregations had a version of the Bible that they could actually read and understand and was more true to the original languages, then perhaps they would actually read their Bibles and run these types of preachers out of town once they realized that what their preachers are advocating is in fact not  biblical.

It might take a while, but I wonder what might happen to all of the more “biblically challenged people” who want to do silly things like burn books if they had to actually start reading a decent translation of the Holy Bible? Perhaps eventually they might begin to understand the real meaning of Jesus’ message of love, grace, compassion and even of His message of salvation. And then we’d never have to worry about some Christian deciding to do something as decidedly non-Christian as burning Qu’rans!

Note: If I was a gambling man, I’d wager every penny I own that the ONLY Bible that Terry Jones preaches from is the “Authorized King James Version”.

Filed Under: Fundamentalism Tagged With: , ,

Theology for Our Children…And Theirs

August 25, 2010 By Randy Olds 2 Comments

Some time back I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is the counseling pastor at a local church. We were discussing a few of the many theological issues that I still have not fully resolved to my own liking. During the course of this conversation he made a statement that has really stuck with me and that I quite often use as a yardstick while working out my own theology.

Essentially what he told me was, that while I am attempting to discover who the God of the Bible really is, to be sure that the theology that I come up with is a theology that I would want for my children and my children’s children.

I think that in this ever evolving age that we live in, a statement like that carries more and more weight with each passing year. I sometimes rant about Fundamentalism, but to be quite honest there are many aspects of Fundamentalist Christianity that are enviable. The desire to live a holy life before God, shunning the “ways of the world” is not a bad thing. In fact, that is precisely what I believe that Jesus called us to do.

In fact, I believe that the pure and innocent lives that many who claimed the moniker of “fundamentalist” just a few short generations ago would be preferable in many ways to having to grow up in the increasingly secular world that we presently find ourselves in here in the 21st century. But those days of innocence are long gone and hiding our heads in the proverbial sand does much more harm than good. Realistically, the only way to possibly think that you can raise your children and not have them influenced by today’s secular and  scientifically advancing world is to live on some compound in the middle of nowhere (with no Internet access!), and pray that they never leave and experience the “real world.” So although I find some of the aspects of fundamentalism somewhat enviable, I realize that envy is really not for fundamentalism itself, but instead for the lost world from which that type of religion was viable. But the world has moved on since then.

So how do you develop a personal theology that you can pass on to your children that is biblically sound but that can withstand the rigors of a world where militant atheism, gay marriage, secular humanism and even Christians bashing each other over doctrinal differences is part of the daily news. How do you explain to them that God created the world when science has largely “proven” evolution. In an ever increasing “naturalist” world that denies the miraculous, how can you convince them that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead and that they should put their faith in Him, even when the shelves in the religious section of the local bookstore has an ever increasing number of books that will tell them that is a myth and that the “historical Jesus” was at best simply a gifted Jewish prophet. How do you instill in your children reverence for the Bible as God’s word, but still account for the fact that it really is not “inerrant” (with just a bit of research they will find out for themselves that inerrancy in the fundamentalist sense is kind of like believing in Santa Claus) without enrolling them in college level theology courses?

Well to begin with, ignoring science or claiming that the dinosaur bones that they have more than likely handled with their own hands by the time that they have graduated high school are a devious ploy of the devil to trick mankind simply won’t work (I was actually told that as a child).  We may be able to shelter our younger children by homeschooling them, but unless we send them to some fundamentalist university and then convince them to live in a world without television or Internet, they are going to eventually encounter real science. Although God could have made the world in six days, the overwhelming evidence points more to the direction that He may have taken a wee bit longer than that.  In developing a theological ideology for our children we simply cannot ignore what modern science is telling us, instead we must find a way to integrate the God of the Bible with what we have proven scientifically, otherwise they will quite often question everything that we ever told them about God.

(Now I am not taking a “naturalist” view here. Science has never disproved the miraculous and naturalism is an entirely different subject.)

Secondly, I am not going to teach my children to hate homosexuals or anybody else for that matter. While I believe that the Bible is fairly clear about same-sex relationships and thing that it take some fairly creative hermeneutical  gymnastics to justify homosexuality, I am not telling my children that “God hates fags” and is sending them all straight to Hell. (To my own embarrassment, I must admit that I once did just that.)

Thirdly and while I am on the subject of Hell, I have no plans to teach my children that a wrathful God plans on subjecting the damned to an eternity of torment either. Whether annihilationism or just a “separation from God”  does more justice to scripture on the doctrine of Hell I have yet to fully ascertain, but I am convinced that much of our current doctrine on Hell was a fabrication of the Catholic church, influenced  by Greek thought. And many of our youth today have a very difficult time reconciling what we claim is a God of love and eternal torment for the “damned”.

I don’t want my children to become Christians because of fear of Hell. I want them to become Christians because they love a God who they realize loves them more than they could possibly understand.

Fourthly, I do not plan on teaching my children that the Hindu or Islamic child that they sit next to in school is going to Hell if they never (in this lifetime) become a Christian. While I do believe that Jesus Christ is the resurrected Son of God, I simply do not have enough information to go on to make the assertion that all “good” Hindus or anybody else is going to “Hell”. While I would like to be a Christian inclusivist or even a universalist, I am not quite there yet either. What I do believe is that God, through His grace, introduced me to His Son, and that is the path that I must take. Even if there are other paths that lead to salvation, I remain convinced that the Christian path is the superior one and that is what I will teach my children. What God has in store for non-Christians is His business; my business is to represent His love to everyone that He places in my path.

Fifth, I have no plans to teach my children that God is some sort of cosmic ATM machine nor is He an Alladin’s lamp who will grant your every desire and make you healthy and wealthy if you just say the right prayer or send a big enough check to the church. I do believe that God does bless people, but more than ever I believe that those blessings simply come automatically when we begin to live a life such as the one that Jesus provided an example of. Not that God doesn’t supernaturally intervene at times for those who put Him first in their lives, because I do believe that He does. But when He does, I think that it is quite often either to bring glory to His name or to build our faith.

We no longer live in a world where we can simply declare to our children as dogmatic many of these areas of Christianity that in fact really quite gray and expect them to just accept it as fact because “we said so”. While I do believe that the Bible is inspired, I have also discovered that many of the things that I was told that the Bible said just simply aren’t in there. In today’s Information Age, we cannot expect that our children will not eventually make the same realizations.

So, as I continue to “work out my own Christ-centered theology”, I seek to craft a theology so that it will withstand the close scrutiny that I know that my children will give to it…and their children as well. Although Christ could possibly return before my children’s children reach the age where they begin to ask the difficult questions, I think that I owe it to them to have answers to whatever questions they may ask about God and the Bible in case He doesn’t. And I don’t think “because the pastor said so” will be sufficient in a world where today’s knowledge  is outdated six months from now and information (as well as misinformation) on every subject imaginable is only a mouse click away.

Filed Under: Apologetics, Fundamentalism, The Bible, theology Tagged With:

That Old Familiar Icky Feeling

August 18, 2010 By Randy Olds 7 Comments

Official Seal of Ambassador College

While browsing through some of the posts on the Stuff Fundies Like blog, I clicked on a couple of links in his Controlling the Flow of Information post. The links turned out to be concerning a certain Pensacola Christian College. After reading the (somewhat disturbing) links, I did a little reading about the school. Turns out they are an unaccredited Independent Baptist “university”, King James Only, are unabashedly fundamentalist and proud of it.

After only about half of the Wikipedia entry about the school, I was having flashbacks about Ambassador College. For the newer readers (I haven’t posted about Armstrongism in a while), Ambassador College was the extreme fundamentalist cult college where Herbert Armstrong encouraged all church cult members to send their kids. If your were lucky enough to live nearby (I only missed out by about 60 miles), you could send your K-12 kids to Imperial Schools to get an early start on their indoctrination brainwashing.

Although I was lucky enough to miss out on the entire 4-year plan, I spent a great deal of time in my teens at the Big Sandy Campus. We only lived about an hour away and were there for the various festivals pretty often and I had a few friends who actually lived there. Additionally I had the great opportunity for a summer of fun brainwashing for several summers at the Big Sandy campus for the YES summer camps ( I went one summer to the Orr, Minnesota camp) . We got to swim at Lake Loma (yes, Herbert W. Armstrong named the school lake after his wife), get taught brainwashed by the Ambassador College students about the wonderful World Tomorrow, and, if we were lucky unfortunate enough, actually meet Herbert W. Armstrong himself when he came to visit the campus. I actually met the man two summer sessions, and still remember the sense of awe that I felt in my poor, unfortunate teen-aged brain.

I can remember all of the little paths that led across the Big Sandy campus. The campus was actually beautifully landscaped (with the 3, yes count them 3 tithes that church members sent in…30%!) and the auditorium and buildings had some great architecture. I can also remember the fountain and the swans. In later years, I remember stories floating around about how it was told back in 1972 that those swans were actually going to take flight as a “sign” when “The Church” was going to “The Place of Safety” (i.e. raptured) prior to the Great Tribulation. I never have checked out the veracity of those “Swans Taking Flight” rumors, but my father claims that he remembers hearing about it pre-1972 (he never officially joined “The Church” but was allowed to attend services because of my mothers membership).

I can still vividly remember some twenty five years later how much I was looking forward to becoming a Young Ambassador. I was going to get a four year degree, meet a nice church girl (from the only One True Church!), settle down and teach brainwash children of my own about the wonderful World Tomorrow while we all happily waited for Jesus to come back and show all of the pagans who attended the “other” churches how wrong they had been. And who knew, I thought, with my Ambassador College credentials, perhaps I might one day be a Worldwide Church of God Pastor false prophet.

Oh, those were the good old days.

Back before I realized that I had a brain and could actually use it.

Back before I realized that God wasn’t out to get me and I found out about this amazing little word called “grace.”

It still surprises me how, after all of these years, I can still get that old familiar icky feeling whenever I come across stuff like this. I suppose a part of me still mourns for my lost childhood. A childhood that was stolen from me by an egoistical false prophet and his lackeys. I am also still sometimes surprised at the anger that I feel whenever I come across various people who are still spiritually abusing people with false teachings about Christianity.  I can feel the pain of those who have lost their faith because of cults or fundamentalism. I feel the pain of those who are still having to go about the long, hard task of gaining a realistic faith and having to decompress from the years that they may have spent in one form of fundamentalism or another.

I hope that I live to see the day where all religious abuse has ended. A day where everybody knows about the amazing grace of Jesus Christ. A day where nobody has to go through the spiritual abuse that so many people are still entrenched in right now and nobody has to worry about walking into a church and having a preacher yell at the congregation from the pulpit and have his deacons or elders bully them about whether or not they are “doing it right.”  Perhaps I will, although I doubt that will happen without God getting involved in a pretty direct way (by the parousia more than likely). I do think that the Internet age is slowing the legalists down a bit, but it definitely hasn’t stopped them.

Well, I guess that I’m done ranting. For a lighter look at things, check out yesterdays post. Tommorrow I’m going to get back to my live-blogging on “The Imitation of Christ By Thomas a Kempis.” I’m also reading “Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom“, so look for some blog posts from this interesting little book over the course of the next week or so.

Filed Under: Armstrongism, Fundamentalism, Spiritual Abuse
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