How Screwed Up Are You?
How Screwed Up Are You? is the title of a guest post on the Ambassador Watch blog. This post was written by Dennis Diehl. Dennis was formerly a WCG minister but since has “thought differently” about that. The difference is that Dennis has actually repented, not merely regretted the way Ron does. I believe that Dennis became a WCG minister about a decade before Ron did but hasn’t made anywhere near as much money from his ministerial career.
Dennis’ post relates to the effects of prophecy on people, whether promoted by “The Spokesman Witness” or one of the other false prophets who resulted from Herbert Armstrong’s own promotions. I recommend clicking on over and reading what Dennis has to say. And perhaps leave a comment there, although it will be a short while before it shows up as webmaster Gavin has had set up comment moderation to deal with a few whackos who’ve posted there.
has this buy become an aethiest as a result of his bad experience with wcg?
todd says:
August 14, 2009 at 09:58
has this buy become an aethiest as a result of his bad experience with wcg?
There is an article entitled “I believe:Commentary by Dennis Diehl” at Ambassador Watch dated
Jan. 15, 2009. In it he states a lot of things he no longer believes in, and apparently the Bible is
one of them, although it looks like he does believe that there is a God.
To me, I think the article “How Screwed Up Are You” is excellent.
Probably a lot of us who have had an experience in WCG or a splinter group have seen people go to
any one of the many different beliefs that are out there, including atheism.
I know for myself, it isn’t as easy as “I no longer believe in Armstrongism any more”.
It doesn’t seem like people get off that easy, because the whole cult thing is a kind of programming
that “screws up” (and alters) a person’s cognitive processes. At least it seems that way to me.
And once a person comes to realize that what they had believed in for so long, what they were totally
convinced of, is just a bunch of lies, walking away from it is just the first step.
Now, the person has to answer to themselves, “Well, what DO I believe in?”, and that can take a
while to work out. The former belief, no longer valid, has to be replaced with something else, and it
may require starting “from scratch”, all over again.
And in the process of doing that, one comes to see “How Screwed Up” their beliefs have been, due
to their cult experience.
Just my two cents.
Beliefs are just beliefs. They are not truth as such. Beliefs are just ideas we all agree on and if enough agree on the belief, then one can have their very own church. They are thoughtforms based on what others believed and wrote down. It’s obvious that the key players in the NT had different beliefs about the meaning of Jesus. James and the Jewish Christian church saw him as a messiah now resurrected and soon to return. Paul saw him as a cosmic being and to be honest, only ever met Jesus in his head through hallucinations. Paul never quotes Jesu or tells us anything about him as we read in the Gospels. Of course the Gospels came along long after Paul was dead. If Paul was such a famous, intelligent above all his fellow Pharisees as he himself tells us and studied under the greatest in Jerusalem, why as a contemporarty of Jesus in the same town at the same time is he not one of Jesus chief Pharisee tormenters? The Gospels never heard of Paul nor he them.
At the personal level, I don’t label myself. I know what I don’t believe perhaps but not what I do believe. I don’t know, frankly, what to believe. All my antennae or up on someone telling me how it all is again. So if someone asks me what I believe I either tell them I am Non-Condemnational or that beliefs are rather whispy things that can come and go and perhaps just keeping the door of the mind open will instruct better than anything. I do believe I am confused. I believe I have to get a grip on anxiety which I am sure qualifies as GAD or generalized anxiety disorder. I believe I don’t like it.
I am not an atheist. Probably agnostic with hope yet confused and distrustful of the one man show in religion. I find the Bible and the NT Church to not be the rosy picture of unity and harmony of belief one can be lead to believe existed. I believe the arguing and posturing for position and attention started as the body was cooling. I believe I am exhausted and wish I was a paleontologist…….
PS Ron is a year or two older than me but I believe we went to college and into the ministry about the same time. He took over my first real church congregation in Ohio when I was transferred. I can’t tell you how many people called me after I left to tell me what a difficult person Ron was even back then. Always my way or the highway. I’m sure he must have found me be too soft on crime and way too willing to entertain the idea that the church didn’t know everything and could make lots of mistakes along the way. I am sure Ron must have loved it when Gerald Waterhouse came around whereas I could barely tolerate it but tried.
I’ve got Ron’s biography fairly well nailed down on the Biography page (link up at top). He graduated from AC in Big Sandy in ’75, wasn’t ordained until ’81, and didn’t go full time until ’82. ISTR that you graduated a few years earlier and then were hired right away.
gotcha..that would be right then. I was sent to Minneapolis in 72, the year I graduated. I never ran across Ron save by name along the way. I was scooped up in 73 by the Chicago regional director and I think that’s when the anxiety disorder began. My karma got run over by my dogma and what a mess. I am an idealist by nature so I really found out that I lacked the skills to duke it out with my peers in life. I guess I always thought churches and ministers worked together in “peace and harmony.” What a bad belief that turned out to be.
My karma got run over by my dogma – very clever.
Yep, the view from the pews is not the same as from the board or back room.
The good news is our beliefs create the reality we experience. We just keep forgetting that. Loved your article, Dennis. There’s one on my site you might like.
Dill Weed
Wow Dennis – thank you so much for that. I am certainly experiencing the same sorts of things. I feel like I am learning to let go, that it is all right to NOT ‘have the truth’ – that it is all right NOT to ‘search for the truth’.
And just be – at least for now.
Live, work, play and BE HAPPY (try very hard to be HAPPY!!).
As you say though, it is not easy to leave all the beliefs you held so dear, what you BELIEVED was ‘the truth’ – and just dump them! What’s next? Who knows – and at the moment, right now – I don’t care.
It’s a lovely Saturday out today, beautiful morning, sun is out – and I will have a good day.
I bid you all a good day too, and thank you so much once again for your article Dennis – you have articulated your depths so eloquently – making it so vivid, to me it was like looking into a mirror whilst reading it.
I do get annoyed whenever current events are labeled prophetic events. As Dennis said, this has been going on for 2000 years.
I don’t know what to make of it. The Bible says no man knows the day or the hour of the end. But at the same time, the Bible says certain things will happen in a certain order at a certain time. I don’t know how to reconcile these things. We’re not supposed to know when the end will occur, but at the same time, we are taught to recognize the events leading up to the end.
I just have to throw my hands up and say “I don’t care”. Not that I don’t care about Bible prophesy (which I do), but I cannot and will not look at some serious current event and conclude “that’s prophecy at-hand!” Because time will show it was just BS. All I can do is feel sympathy for those affected by whatever tragedy befalls them. When I think of the worst time of the past century, I have to think WWII. Things were bad, really bad. No doubt people thought that was the time of the end. But it’s now over 60 years since it ended. Things have been up and down since then, but never as bad. Will things get worse? Well, the Bible says it will. It’s not up to me to conclude when it will occur, so I don’t give a damn. When it’s PAST TENSE, I’ll start caring. When prophecy has actually happened unequivocally, I’ll buy it. In the mean time, I’ll just look to the Bible and try to be a good Christian. Constantly looking out for current events to label prophesy is akin to having our heads in the clouds, and I doubt we were meant to be doing that.
Thank you all for you kind comments and observations. “Just Be” That seems to be the lesson of the year for me. Things are as they are. Or as Eckhart Tolle notes, “You can’t argue with what is….well you can, but you will suffer.”
I don’t so much that I can be said to have repented of WCG ministerial perspectives as much as I myself outgrew them big time the last five years I was a pastor. I figured if WCG could eventually force me to go along with what they perceived as a better way, then I had the right to examine every doubt and question I had accumulated over the years myself. I hung myself with my last Feast sermon addressing some of these issues and was told “Dennis, we know you know a lot about Jesus…(history, contradictions, Midrash, redaction etc) but we don’t think you KNOW JESUS.” Argh…. I still don’t know him. I don’t what version is him.
I started with the Birth Narratives of Jesus and have to say that John Spong’s book…Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism was the book that addressed every question I could ever have had about those Birth Stories of Jesus which neither match nor were original to the text. They were added to combat charges of Jesus being a bastard and being born of fornication. Of course if Mary were a mere teen, underage so to speak and God did not marry what he impregnated, we have to ask if then God fornicated with Mary. If Jesus is begotten by the Holy Spirit, which another “person” then what’s going on here. Sounds more like an underage crime than a miracle. Explaining one contradiction always raises others and one can see that all through the Bible.
John Spong wrote me during that time and reminded me “you will not survive,” if I understood what He had written…
Dennis said:
I can’t tell you how many people called me after I left to tell me what a difficult person Ron was even back then.
“difficult person” That’s what immediately came into my mind the first time I heard Ronald Weinland’s voice. He could be a dictator of any small country. It is a good thing he does not have any military or intelligence training, otherwise the PKG could have it’s own black ops unit.
Kirrily said: Live, work, play and BE HAPPY (try very hard to be HAPPY!!).
IMO that is the best state of mind to be in. If we try very hard to be happy, we become happiness, and that happiness can infect those around us. That is the meaning of life.
I’m glad I wrote this comment. It shows Ronald Weinland as negative, sowing misery. Then, it shows one who is free from Ronald Weinland’s negativity, and once freed is happy.
Kirrily, that little motto you wrote is more powerful than aaaaaall those sermons by Ronald Eugene Weinland. (The Prophet????? of God)[Which god, the god of money or the god of lies?]
Dennis,
I read one of John Spong’s books and was completely horrified. I couldn’t believe any Christian organization would allow this man to stand behind the pulpit. He doesn’t believe the Bible, ok, that’s his choice, but a Christian church was absolutely not the place for teaching what he believed. The book I read was something along the lines of how Christianity has to change or die. I don’t understand why he wanted to associate himself with Christianity at all; he would have done better to just put the Bible aside and be honest enough to say “I can’t teach this anymore folks, because I don’t believe what these men wrote. So I am going to start my own group and call it ‘The Ground of All Being’ and teach them what, not who, ‘I’ believe god is.” Although I completely disagree with alot of what the WCG taught, I do think an organization has the right to expect their ministers to agree on basic fundamentals, otherwise it would be very confusing for the congregation. From what I understand, Mr. Spong did lose some of his congregation when he started teaching AGAINST the Bible; sadly the Episcopalians didn’t give him the boot.
If a self-acknowledged atheist or even a skeptic had written books such as John Spong wrote, I would not have agreed with them but I would not have been surprised; it’s pretty standard anti-biblical stuff; but to think he was teaching this garbage in church – that’s what rubbed me raw. We all have to choose what to believe; if the Bible is not a book you can put your faith in, then Christianity is not for you because without it you have no way to know Who Jesus is.
You’ve gone from one far end of the spectrum to the other. I gtuess it’s understandable that someone who was involved in a cult would want to get as far away from any of their teachings as possible; I just hope you will keep in mind what you said: that “beliefs are not truth as such”. Right now you’re confused and it sounds like your reading material is not helping; all they really have to offer is what THEY think others should not believe about the Bible and God; and even that boils down to their opinion, based on yet more opinions. My own opinion about beliefs like John Spong’s is that while he had the right to question the Bible and believe whatever he chose about it and about God; he had no credibility at all about Who or What God is.
Thinking a bit about what “confusion” is. Is it better to be “confused”, that is to have doubts as to what is true? Or is it better to believe in something no matter whether true or not.
For example, Ron’s followers are not confused. They have managed to tuck away whatever discrepancies there are and follow the prime directive (believe whatever Ron said in his latest sermon). I’ll take Dennis’ “confusion” over that any day.
‘J’ said: “When I think of the worst time of the past century, I have to think WWII. Things were bad, really bad. No doubt people thought that was the time of the end.”
A large number of people involved in, and affected by, WW2 had an excellent leader. Winston Churchill was the right person, in the right place, at the right time; and no, I don’t think he wrote that! But he did write: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” (Winston Churchill, 1942.)
Granted, he was talking about the war in North Africa, but those sentiments could easily apply to the wars in Europe and the Pacific. I think the point is that even if things get really, really bad there isn’t any evidence that it will cause the “end of the world” – whatever people perceive that to mean. History is littered with examples of similar bad times, including the expansion of the Roman Empire about two thousand years ago. Revelation and other parts of the New Testament (written about that time) are said to describe the apocalypse, and the second coming, which “will happen very soon”.
James Santucci wrote in the year 2000, “We are fortunate that the successful leaders—Jesus, Paul, the Prophets, Buddha, Zoroaster, Muhammad—reflect the best that humanity can offer.” We can only hope that if *we* enter times that become really, really bad, successful, excellent leaders will emerge that will reflect the best that humanity can offer, and that they will lead their countries away from the brink of disaster. If not, we can always learn from history, and remember great speeches like :-
“The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” (W. Churchill, 4 June, 1940.)
Dennis says:
August 14, 2009 at 13:26
“Beliefs are just beliefs. They are not truth as such. Beliefs are just ideas we all agree on and if enough agree on the belief, then one can have their very own church. They are thoughtforms based on what others believed and wrote down.”
That is so true. Beliefs are not truth as such.
It seems that there is very little of what I used to believe in that I can now consider to be true.
Did Moses part the Red Sea? Did the sun and the moon stand still for Joshua?
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t deny those things. But I can’t affirm them either, for the same reasons I couldn’t deny them.
But some things are self evident. I would think that it is a self evident truth that we should behave towards one another in a peaceful and civil manner, with love and respect.
There are a few things like that, regarding our behavior, that I think we can know to be true.
But there are so many other things, written in the Bible, that I don’t think anyone living on this planet can say they actually know.
Believe, maybe, but not know.
Mike (DDTFA) says:
August 15, 2009 at 00:36
Thinking a bit about what “confusion” is. Is it better to be “confused”, that is to have doubts as to what is true? Or is it better to believe in something no matter whether true or not.
I’ll opt for the confusion. And then hopefully, I can just give it up and say “I don’t know”.
Like Kirrily said “Live, work, play and BE HAPPY (try very hard to be HAPPY!!).”
That sounds good to me.
I hope it’s not too “screwed up” to believe that !
John Spong is a joke. Not a serious theologian.
“Is it better to be ‘confused’ than it is to have doubts as to what is true? Or is it better to believe in something no matter whether true or not.”
I have no interest in believing what is not true, and I don’t like being confused, so I choose a different option; not settling for anything but the truth. I understand being confused; I was in that state for a long time, but I hated it because I was going nowhere. It was like knowing nothing at all. Maybe that works for someone who doesn’t care, but I cared.
Obviously prophecy has different effects on different people. Our minds don’t all work alike, for one thing. What is easy for one person to accept may not be for another. Me, I don’t base my beliefs on what other people think, nor on what I was taught growing up, nor on what one particular church teaches. When I read Dennis’ article, all I could think was that because of his experience with the WCG, he feels compelled not just to offer an opinion on how Bible prophecy should be understood, but to reject it completely. His main objective seemed to be the ridicule of anyone who actually believes Bible prophecy. Maybe it was aimed at WCGer’s, but the fact is there are many other Christians who don’t share his view, yet they are lumped into the “screwed up” category nonetheless.
It has been my experience with God so far that He always keeps His promises. I have no idea whether any of the prophesied events will happen in my lifetime, nor do I see any indication in scripture that I should be worried about them. The problem with being in a cult is that they teach alot of things wrong. This does not, however, prove the Bible must be wrong.