I received the most recent Trumpet yesterday and there is a long article about the PCG’s new Imperial College of Edmond. Even in this article, written by Stephen Flurry, evidence of Armstrongian anthropomorphism abounds. Writing about the Tower of Babel (which they believe was an actual event), the Babylonians began building the tower, and “This got God’s attention.”1 It sounds as if God was watching television or something — chillin’ with the Son — and therefore completely oblivious to what was going on down on earth. Then suddenly he noticed it.

Later, after bemoaning the evil of modern education, he tries to explain that God is not anti-education: “God is balanced (Phil. 4:5). He expected mankind to use their minds to discover and create new things . . .”2 God wasn’t sure, in other words, whether humanity would progress cognitively, but that’s certainly what he expected.

Of course he didn’t know because he chose not to know. Yet if this is the case, how did he inspire prophecy to be written? He seems to think just like us, according to the Flurrys: “The Bible is like a magnificent summary of the way our Creator thinks.”3 He thinks in a linear, temporal fashion, then.

The story of the Tower of Babel is interesting from a non-Armstrongian perspective too, for it is an example in the Bible of strongly anthropomorphic imagery. When you read the account in Genesis, it sounds as if God was a little nervous about the whole thing. “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”4 God seems to have been a little nervous at this point.

These people are so stupid. And there’s no arguing with them, either. They have the perfect clincher to any argument: I, as a critic, am not called out; I am deceived by Satan (or by God, if I was in the WCG and allowed this “strong delusion” to come over me) and therefore nothing I say is of any value.

1 Flurry, Stephen. “Education with Vision.” The Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2001, 2.

2 Ibid, 3.

3 Ibid

4 Genesis 11.6 (using the King James version, in keeping with the PCG).