No matter the issue...

"People fear that which they do not understand, and ultimately hate that which they fear..." --

Can the devil die? And does it matter?

Speaking of heinous, hair-brained heresies, I suppose I could have been in hot water with his highness well before my Mach3 malfunction. One fine Sabbath afternoon, whilst huddled at the coffee urn with several fellow Re-COGs, the subject was raised regarding the devil's ultimate fate. During the course of the conversation, someone posed the question of why couldn't (or wouldn't) God simply kill Sir Satan after it was all said and done. There must have been a good whistleblower amongst us, because the next thing we knew, Pack rushed in to quickly silence such blasphemous heresy before it could gain momentum. "Who's saying the devil will die? Who's saying he can? Who's saying that God will kill him?" One would have thought someone had shown up at church services with a cigarette in one hand, a ham sandwich in the other, and a Valentine's card stashed in his sermon notes. Pre-apostolic paranoia and pseudo-deific damage control at its finest.

Want to work for Pack? Grow those sideburns and ixnay the goateeay...

At one point during my short stint at RCG HQ, Dave caught me in passing at the office and chastised me for my facial hair, claiming that it might create a weird impression of HQ if multiple mugs showed up sporting the look. (A couple of other staff members at the time must have been equally short on time in the daily morning mirror.) So, being the dutiful employee that I was, I went in the next morning sans goatee, only to be later told by Dave that he'd thought about it and it really was no big deal. Imagine that. As if three guys at HQ were going to start some kind of razor revolution. (I'm sure there's an example of that somewhere in the great book. Probably right across the page from the Sideburns Statute...)

"Dear Mr. Pack, Control our lives, please...

And we'll even pay you to do it."

That is the only possible thought people could be having when they make a commitment to Dave's RCG. If they would look at his Armstrong offshoot critically, they would see it for the cult that it is. They would see that Dave is a lying, abusive, thieving, controlling, narcissistic egomaniac who couldn't care less for their lives in the here and now, let alone their supposed eternal salvation. His only interest in people is to squeeze them dry of all their resources in order to fuel his own religious-industrial complex. Dave loves to bash PCG's Flurry for being a dehumanizing, title-grabbing false prophet, while claiming his own titles, bashing RCG's detractors and demeaning his own loyal supporters. This was something I witnessed on a daily basis during my time in RCG. And his claim to be the onlyest holding the fastest to the teachings of his HWA idol is itself misleading, and can be easily disproven by a simple side-by-side comparison of HWA's literature and Dave's versions of the same.

God and Devil

Since losing faith in all things religious, one of my biggest problems with bible thumpers is that they blame all the world's woes on the devil and give god credit for any and all that just happens to go "right." The problem is, even if it can be "proven" that there is a god, it cannot be proven in any way, shape, form or fashion that there is a separate, independent entity of "evil" parading around causing all the world's problems. Christians can quote the bible all they want, but that doesn't prove there is a devil. And while they're busy quoting the bible, they had best not forget that it is that very book that shows the "devil" can't do anything without god's approval. So even if they can somehow prove that "Satan" exists, the blame still goes all the way to the top.