You may not be familiar with the Philadelphia Church of God, a spin-off of the Herbert W. Armstrong cult. They have a magazine and a website (The Trumpet) that most of the time is obsessed with heralding our doom at the hands of the greatest threat to mankind ever known.
Catholics.
I found this particular passage to be a concise compendium of the kind of crazy they promulgate there.
After citing attacks of against the Catholic Church by secularists in Spain and Islamists in Iraq, writer Brad McDonald warns of the greatest threat. A pissed off Pope.
Although there are fundamental differences in motivation between the anti-Catholic activities of Spain’s secular homosexuals and Iraq’s radical Islamists—as well as the other anti-Catholic forces in Europe and throughout the Middle East—it is important to remember that they all have the same goal: namely, the elimination of the influence of the Catholic Church.
This will prove to be a foolhardy and dangerous ambition!
Just watch—the combative forces of secularism and radical Islam will arouse the fury of the world’s most terrifying institution!
You don’t need a degree in international relations to know how Benedict and the Vatican will respond to this ongoing provocation. You merely have to be willing to read the history of the papacy, of the Vatican and of the Catholic Church. To consider the Council of Nicea in 325, during which Catholicism was institutionalized as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Or the history of the Vatican in the ninth century when it provided moral and spiritual support to Charlemagne as he purged Europe of “heretics” and solidified Europe as a Catholic continent. Or the history of Pope Urban ii, who in 1095 rallied tens of thousands of Catholic Europeans to take up their swords and do their Christian duty by descending on the Middle East and purging Muslims, town by town, head by head, from the Holy Land.
Or the history of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Spain’s monarchs—carrying out orders directly from the Vatican—slaughtered thousands of Jews, Muslims and even homosexuals. Or the history of Napoleon some 200 years later, who set about conquering Europe after being crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by Pope Pius vii. If you’re interested in recent examples, then study the history of the pope and the Vatican during World War ii giving moral and spiritual cover to Adolf Hitler as he rounded up Jews, stashed them on trains and funneled them into the gas chambers.
The Catholic Church has been around for nearly 2,000 years: Not once has it keeled over in the face of confrontation!
But truly this is the tip o’ the iceberg for these folks. Just about every week they have an article warning that German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a nominal Catholic, might be the prophesied Catholic “great monarch” and the beast from the north or Revelation fame.
These people are followers of the late Herbert W. Armstrong. They believe he was a prophet of God. Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia about Herb.
- Worldwide Church of God (WCG) members believe that Herbert W. Armstrong was Christ’s apostle since the first century. Armstrong taught that God only works through “one man at a time” and that he was God’s man for his time. * Armstrong taught a form of Sabbatarianism, stating that seventh-day Sabbath (Saturday) was an eternal commandment of God and should be kept from sundown to sundown as a day of rest.[51] The Worldwide Church of God accordingly met on Saturdays. He believed that the observance of Sunday as the “Lord’s Day” was a papal and/or satanic corruption introduced without authority from God or the Bible.[52]
- Armstrong adhered to a form of British Israelism which stated that the British, American and many European peoples were in fact descended from the so-called Ten Lost Tribes, using this belief to state that biblical references to Israel, Jacob, etc., were in fact prophecies relating to the modern day. In the course of this teaching, he also accepted the concept of an Assyrian-German connection and often made identifications of other nations in “Bible prophecy”, such as Russia and China.[53]
- As a result of this, Armstrong believed that a unified Europe (identified by him as a “revived Roman Empire” and as the “beast” of Revelation 13) would oppose Jesus at his second coming in the battle of Armageddon. Furthermore, he stated repeatedly that this unified Europe would have previously defeated and enslaved the American and British peoples.[54] He often pointed to the European “Common Market”[55] or European Community as its precursor, but tended to refer to it as “a kind of United States of Europe.” Splinter groups today usually identify the current European Union as the unified Europe Armstrong devoted much writing to.
- Armstrong taught that God’s purpose for mankind was to “reproduce himself”, and that the process of being “born again” was not instantaneous—that the believer (as a result of baptism by immersion) was only “begotten” until reborn as a spirit being at the return of Jesus.[56] These “begotten” believers were referred to by him as the “firstfruits” of a divine harvest and were perceived as the “true Christians” of the current age. The (re)birth of the “begotten” was referred to as the “first resurrection.”
- Armstrong continually preached that Jesus Christ would return to the earth to “rescue” humanity from the brink of self-annihilation, resulting in the establishment of “God’s government” and a 1,000-year period of utopia under the rule of the reborn “spirit beings”, or the aforementioned “firstfruits”, during which the living would voluntarily accept “God’s way of life.” [57]
- Armstrong did not accept the concept of eternal judgment in this life. He believed that those who had died as unbelievers prior to the return of Christ existed in a state of “unconsciousness” (see Soul sleep) until a second resurrection, during which they would be offered the choice to submit to God’s government.[58] As part of this tiered resurrection, the truly “wicked” who would not accept God’s government and laws in any form would be judged guilty of rebellion against God and annihilated (cease to exist) in a third gathering and resurrection. He identified this as the “second death” mentioned in the book of Revelation.[59]
- In Armstrong’s view, the scourging of Jesus prior to crucifixion “paid the penalty” for physical disease and sickness, allowing the option of divine healing.[60] The crucifixion itself was considered to be the act which enabled God to allow humanity into the three-tiered resurrection scheme, as Jesus had paid the initial death penalty for breaking the Law.
- Armstrong did not accept Trinitarianism, believing it to be a doctrine of satanic authorship as part of a “counterfeit Christianity” (which he identified as the Roman Catholic Church). He believed that the Holy Spirit was part of God’s essence, a power from him that suffused all creation and through which God was omnipresent and able to act at all places and at all times.
Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.
I just thought I would share. This kind o’crazy should not be hidden under a bushel basket.
