(I stumbled upon this essay in righteous indignation while trying to find a photo of Rodney Howard-Browne, who is depicted above, dancing his little grey flannel heart out when he's supposed to be preaching. This is yet another protest against the admittedly stupid and self-indulgent "Toronto Blessing" thing that I had hoped had died out years ago. I guess if you want to get down on the ground and squeal like a pig, that's OK with God, but it still reminds me of something out of Deliverance. An interesting side-note: this is the third time I have attempted to upload Rodney's little dance of joy on YouTube. It has already been taken down twice for violating community standards. Not for his dancing, but because they believed I was being disrespectful to Christianity. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned his arrest in 2020 for holding packed church services during the height of COVID!)
Carryduff Elim continues charismaniac deceit with ‘Transform Ireland’ conference
Isaiah 29:13: “Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people
draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but
have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught
by the precept of men.”
More charismatic heretics are to be imported
to our shores by CarryduffElimChurch this weekend as they host their ‘Transform Ireland’
conference on Saturday, 27 April.
Not content with having inflicted the God-defying and blasphemous antics of the self-proclaimed ‘Holy Ghost bartender’ Rodney Howard-Browne (pictured, below) on the poor people of Carryduff and the surrounding area, they are bringing more such characters to Northern Ireland.
On this occasion they are bringing in Ken
Gott and Tim Dunnett from BethshanChurch in the north east of England, particularly centred around Sunderland and Newcastle.
Bethshan is yet another of the charismatic
churches which has embraced the so-called ‘Toronto Blessing’ and all its outrageous claims and
manifestations.
Ken Gott is a very senior figure in the
modern charismatic movement in the British Isles and
indeed is credited with being the man who brought the Toronto Blessing to the UK.
This is, of course, the charismatic wave in
which people were noted to have fallen over with “holy laughter” and often
characterised by people lying on the ground in convulsions and roaring like
lions and barking like dogs, apparently under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
A farmyard scene, which anyone who has had
the misfortune of attending such events or anyone who has seen such videos on
YouTube will have witnessed, is in no way edifying and is utterly repugnant to
the Word of God.
There is no “reverence” or “godly fear” at
those sort of meetings.
Indeed, there is a report online from a man
who attended one of Ken Gott’s meetings back in 1995 in Sunderland. It is on a website called ‘Banner Ministries’, which, while we do not
agree with everything on the site, does feature this very intriguing, first
hand experience.
This is part of his account.
It says: “The band leader, between inane
choruses, encouraged us to “receive” whilst doubling up and making short
grunting noises at virtually every sentence, as indeed did other members of the
audience. The majority were laughing and thinking it a huge joke.
“We were also urged to ignore these strange
visible and audible manifestations and to “throw off constraint”. “It is
catching!” was Pastor Ken Gott’s appropriate remark, whilst he too doubled up
groaning as one with birthpangs.
“Great emphasis was placed upon wording such
as “River of God,
sets our feet a dancing, fills our mouths with laughter” and “We rejoice that
the river is here”. “Drink the new wine” was sung in prophecy by a band member.
“Strange wafting of hands by those around us
broke out, and a form of backwards breaststroke – “swimming in the Spirit?”
Twitching, doubling up, swaying and so forth was evidenced throughout the
audience. Significant comments from Pastor Gott were: “We have come too far, we
can’t go back” and “The world loves this” and “God is into parties”.
Then there is this, from the same account.
“Now for the “ministry time” of the evening.
This began by clearing the decks. Chairs were moved to the walls. Then the
designated teams wandered around zapping the majority of people. We were
approached but graciously declined to receive. When they ran out of targets,
they turned upon themselves and each other, this happening directly in front of
us. Before long the hall resembled a battlefield, bodies lying everywhere,
laughing, twitching, convulsing – and the teams wafting their arms over them.
“Before too long however, a large number of
individuals began sitting up from the floor, looking around them bemused and
bewildered, as if to say “What’s next?” It was at that point that my indignation
and dismay gave way to pity for these poor deceived and deluded people.”
Getting “zapped” by the ringleaders in this
deception is very much akin to what was happening in the video of Rodney
Howard-Browne’s antics which we linked to our previous article on him. You can
read the article by clicking
here, although the YouTube video we had previously linked to the article
has suddenly been removed by Rodney Howard-Browne’s ministry company, Revival
Ministries International. We couldn’t possibly guess why.
Anyway, here we have Ken Gott saying “God is
into parties”. What sort of a way to speak is that? Where is the reverence or
godly fear?
Pastor George Ritchie and Pastor Gavin Allen (pictured,
below) are the men in charge at Carryduff Elim and they bear a grave
responsibility for what they are inflicting on the poor deceived attendees at
that church.
They and their church were very much aware of
the article we had written highlighting the utter inappropriateness of having
the likes of Rodney Howard-Browne in your church’s pulpit.
Yet they were happy, despite having God’s
Word brought before them to demonstrate why Rodney Howard-Browne ought not to
be recommended to anyone, to persist with that event and now to arrange this
one.
We can only conclude that Carryduff Elim is
fully caught up in the ungodly excesses of the charismatic movement and urge
anyone who truly loves the Lord to separate themselves therefrom.
More than that, we would call on anyone
reading this who knows anyone who attends Carryduff Elim or who is planning to
attend this conference to share this with them to warn them of the great danger
posed by this ‘Transform Ireland’ conference.
Do not allow yourself or anyone you know to
come under the influence of this counterfeit Christianity, which says lots of
the right sounding things but is ultimately an empty vessel.
This is just one of those crazy things. A piece came into my head tonight that I hadn't even thought about in years - some sort of crazy whistling or pinging, only synthesized. Then I heard myself say, "That's Debussy." Yes, it was the Arabesque by Debussy, but whatonearth version was this?? Hadn't I heard it on TV a long time ago? Where, and when? All it took was to do a search on YouTube under Debussy Arabesque Synthesizer, and up it popped, over a dozen versions of the same piece: and it was the right one, the whistling, pinging one. This was created by Isao Tomita, one of the pioneers of synthesized sound.
But it didn't solve where I had heard it before. I had to go to the comments for that.
Someone mentioned that this piece was the theme song for a short program called Star Hustler that came on PBS in the '80s, usually late at night,. Later, as the name "hustler" increasingly came to mean prostitute, it was changed to Star Gazer. Jack Horkheimer, whoever he is, would come on and blather on for five minutes about the wonders of astronomy. He was fat, cheesy, decked out in a grey polyester windbreaker, a kind of bargain-basement Carl Sagan. Star Gazer was a crash course, fast and aggressive, a kind of "learn this or else" that made you feel even dumber at the end - but the only really interesting thing about it was the theme song.
Realizing that this DID come from somewhere, that it was an actual "thing", was a revelation. I had not imagined it. I've pulled information out of the internet like this before, and found my neurons exposed to certain things for the first time in decades. It's a weird experience. They say that every seven years, every single cell in your body is replaced. One by one, they die and are regenerated, until there's no original material left at all. In that case, it's a completely new me who is listening to this music - which means that, in truth, I've never heard it before.
This piece also jacked open the cover on a new genre, or a new composer of a genre - new to me, at least. I must admit that I had never heard of Isao Tomita, but he is everywhere on YouTube - master of the synthesizer before anyone was using it in movies or in recordings. I had a delicious album called Moog by Dick Hyman (and I've found that one again, too) which was a dinosaur version of synthesizer, quite primitive by any standard, but which I still love to hear, because . . . I've never heard it before! All my cells have been replaced multiple times since I first heard it in the '60s, so it's REALLY new to me now. I went through a time in my life when I feverishly took courses - not to get a degree, which I knew was useless and impossible, but just to try to learn something. One of the courses - Philosophy 101 or something - talked about how, if you had a table, and one day replaced a leg, then the next day replaced another leg, and so on, and so on, and then replaced the top. . . so that ALL the parts were now completely different parts. . . would it be the same table?
I am not the same table. I know I am not the same table, but I am able to hold on to the shape of the table I used to be, because of a little thing called Memory. Memory is a dense tangle like seaweed, with molluscs and clams and giant squid attached to it. Without it, I would be a piece of meat, plain and simple. But even animals need Memory, or they would not know who to flee, or where to fly. BLOGGER'S REALIZATION. My God, the Arabesque on the synthesizer is just like the X Files theme! I mean that whistly, swoopy effect that is almost human, but not quite. Whoever composed this eerie snippet must have been influenced by Isao Tomita. Or is it possible they had never heard him before?
The sky is falling! No, really. The true story of the War of the Worlds broadcast is much more mundane. Most of the post-broadcast hype was invented by Welles, aided and abetted by the media and even the radio station, who knew good ratings when they saw them. Yes, there WAS some public response and alarm from people who had tuned in late and hadn't heard Welles' explanation that it was just a drama. But it was nowhere near the scale that has passed into legend. For the most part, you NEVER hear this correction anywhere - I stumbled on it on a public access radio broadcast heard by very few people. As for Welles, he never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
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I've seen some bad ones, but this is BAD. It looks tiny enough to be a gumball troll, and while I had a few of them, they were too ugly to display anywhere. It looks as if someone has mercifully covered the gaping hole in his skull with a homemade pompom.
Worst of all, the sum total for this thing (in Canadian dollars) is $47.00! For that little piece of junk.
NOTE: This appeared on my Facebook page today. I really think I shouldn't use social media at all, as it seems to take me to a place I don't want to go. No one reads it anyway, do they? But today some shit went down that I really needed to write about, for myself if for no one else.
I don’t usually post rants on social media, but something happened today
that I have to report on. We love to walk around ComoLake in Coquitlam, an
urban park full of wildlife and old guys fishing and young kids prancing around
and people just generally strolling along in the peace and quiet. But when we
arrived for our usual peaceful stroll, I heard this godawful noise – a loud,
harsh, sustained buzz, even more irritating than those awful drone sounds – and
then I saw this streak of “something” speeding over the water, so fast I could
barely take it in.
I had never seen a model/remote control boat move that fast, rocketing
from one side of the lake to the other and making a sound so loud you could not
tune it out. Four guys were sitting on the shore on lawn chairs taking turns
operating this thing, chuckling and guffawing away like 8-year-olds doing
something naughty – but it got worse. The guy taking his turn at the controls
ran the model boat right up behind a Canada goose which was sitting peacefully in
the water, perhaps even asleep. It startled and took off a nanosecond before
the evil thing hit it.
I strode up to the giggling group of grown men and said, “I’m going to
report you for this. You’re harassing the wildlife in a public park, and that
is NOT allowed.” The guy looked a tiny bit sheepish and said, “OK, I won’t do
it again.” (I think he had been doing it for some time.) But I had more to say.
“The geese are nesting right now. They’re vulnerable. This is a safe place for
them, a sanctuary. This (and I began to cry) HURTS me to see.” The sheepish guy
sort of mumbled a half-assed apology, then went right back to assaulting the
lake and all the rest of us withthe
noise and the hurtling speed.
Every once in a while the thing wiped out, spun around in the water and
then reversed direction. It was going at such high speed it was literally flying
above the surface of the water, so what would happen if it really flew out of
control and hit someone? The geese weren’t the only ones in danger – there was
a group of old men trying to fish and have a nice social gathering, and the
atmosphere was completely ruined.
Bill was so upset he stalked off, but I ran into another trailwalker who
told me they hadactually covered up the
prominent sign saying, “WARNING: No motorized craft or remote control models
allowed” with a COAT. No kidding, so they think if the sign is covered up it’s
okay? The trailwalker and I commiserated for a while, then I noticed the racket
had suddenly stopped, and a few minutes later the four idiots had vacated, but
left the coat (a child’s coat, which they had probably found lying on the
trail) hanging over the sign. I took it down and tacked it up on a neutral
area, thinking maybe someone would come back for it.
But I was astonished at the – what? Why is it OK for a model craft
hurtling along at incredible speed to take a run at a living creature? Isn’t
this lovely urban park something of a sanctuary for the birds? This particular
lake attracts whole colonies of Canada geese, and soon
we’ll be seeing plump fuzzy goslings floating around in the lake. I have no
doubt these guys would love to take out a gosling or two, or maybe even the
whole brood. If I ever see those bozos again I will report them, or maybe I
should report them right now.
I don’t want to be a complainer, and there’s too much ranting going on
in the world right now, but this was atrocious behaviour in so-called grown
men. I suppose the rest of the time they’re out in the woods bringing down elk
and deer with rifles, drinking beer and guffawing at the sight of a magnificent
animal sinking to its knees, shot dead.
When I was a litttle girl, I dreamed of two things: having birds fly down to eat out of my hand, and having a horse of my own. I did own a horse for a brief period, until vet bills, feed bills and boarding costs (and having to ride my bike miles out in the country, including in the heavy snows of Southwestern Ontario) made it impractical. But I did love model horses, and collected a lot of them, mostly made of china so they were extremely fragile. I would have done backflips of joy to have THIS model horse, which is part of the Bratz doll collection. Oh, and by the way, I now visit Burnaby Lake regularly, and red-winged blackbirds DO fly down and eat out of my hand - in fact, they bombard me so much I have to wear a hat to keep them out of my hair. It seems my dreams DO come true - I just have to wait 70 years for it.
The kids are alright! These newborn goats are so new, they still have the umbilical cord attached. But they're already hopping around like they're on springs. They are so VERY tiny, so VERY fuzzy, and their Mama watches over them with such diligence and care. How I wish my mother had been a goat.