Insignificant "Truths" Bruce Renehan
Daughter of Babylon
Dear Ed,
I hope things are well with you and yours. Periodically I peruse your web site to see what the latest scuttlebutt about the wcg is from your contributors. Sometimes it seems as though the wheels of progress move rather slowly with some of them. For example, many of them, as you know, still make outrageous claims about hwa being the one to "lead them to God" or to have taught them some vital truth that they never would have learned had they not been held captive in his cult. How sad, how truly pathetic to cling to such uninformed opinions.
I've been out of that cult since the end of 1992. In that time, I pursued my real education. I got a degree in liberal arts then went on to get a degree in psychology with a minor in biology. This was all by design, of course. I wanted to learn how to use my brain after 23 years of having "truths" and "new truths" forced upon me and never once having to think for myself.
What I have learned by my experiences is that the wcg or its self-proclaimed apostle were truly ignorant, arrogant, and opinionated but certainly did not have any valid practices worth holding on to after leaving. Even the most insignificant beliefs were erroneous. Let me give a couple examples:
Do you remember how important it was when armstrong was alive that members eat honey and never ever eat white sugar? In fact, no self-respecting church member would be caught dead without a gallon jug of honey in the house somewhere. My wife, who grew up in the church, and now has hypoglycemia, can verify that honey was something like manna to these people. Now, in the process of getting my minor in biology, I had to take classes in nutrition and chemistry. I was really surprised to find out that the molecular structure of plain white table sugar and bees' honey are practically identical. The only difference is that a hydrogen atom is placed onto a different carbon atom on the molecule but there is no difference in the number of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms in either molecule. There's nothing holy or sacred about the placement of the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is merely providing an electron to bind the molecule together. There is only one sugar that the body can use. It's called glucose. The body breaks down sugar and honey very quickly to form glucose for energy to feed cells. But these sugars are inefficient sources of energy. The more efficient sources of energy for the body come from the carbo-hydrates (such as potatoes).
The brain burns up 20 percent of the body's glucose reserve and (another thing I learned in my nutrition class) fasting for 24 hours is very dangerous for the brain. Once glucose reserves are depleted, which takes about 24 hours in healthy people, brain cells begin to die. Brain cells do not replace themselves. And so we can toss another wonderful "truth," held sacred by wcg members for decades, into the toilet.
Another teaching of the wcg was that carbon 14 dating was invalid and thus the dating of fossils was inaccurate. This teaching was most popular when the church believed that the discovery hominids were a Satanic plot to make people believe in evolution. (Another foible of the church's resident "intellectual" Herman Hoeh.) How does carbon 14 dating work anyway? Well the stable carbon atom has 12 neutrons and electrons in its orbit but out of so many thousands of stable carbon atoms there will be unstable carbon isotopes with 14 neutrons and electrons. Since carbon is absolutely essential in a living organism, the ratio of C14 to C12 atoms remains constant while the organism is alive simply because it is eating carbo-hydrates and so on to maintain its life. But what happens at death? Isotopes such as C14 are unstable and so eventually they change. (Even herbie knew that uranium eventually becomes lead after so many half-lives and he claimed this was a proof of creation--actually its not but that's another story). This rate of change is calculated very accurately by very intelligent mathematicians--not ministers. And so, this is why scientists know that fossils such as those of the Australopithecines, like Lucy, died well over a million years ago. But for years, the ministry in the wcg denied this. Oh, as a sidelight to all of this, scientists have not found any fossils yet that prove that any ancient humans ever lived hundreds of years despite the claim in the book of Genesis that people used to live as long as nine hundred years.
Now I realize that these are not biblical teachings necessarily. And, as I said above, they may have been insignificant "truths" of the wcg. As far as their biblical teachings, every one of herbie's teachings have been changed or discredited in the past 10 years by his predecessors. What teaching is it then, that these ex-wcgers feel was worth spending all of that time in the cult for? Was there really some "truth" there that they could not have gained on their own without herbie's revelation? I can't think of one valid thing that I learned during the 23 years I spent in that group.
Bruce Renehan
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