Two New Reviews

Adventists Today Online has posted a review of our book. 

www.atoday.com

As we well expected Tompaul Wheeler, the reviewer, was hardly thrilled with the book.  He spent most of his words on the section of Ellen White. He did not tackle the main body of the book which dealt with the history and doctrines, but I don't want to review the review.  

We also received a better review from Hugo Mendez at:

www.sda2rc.blogspot.com

We just thought you might want to check them out. 

It is hard for people to place themselves in the position of our intended audience--former or inactive Adventists who feel hurt, bitter, disappointed or disenfranchised by the SDA church, so I am not upset with bad press. All my husband and I care about is that the book gets into the hands of the people that need it. 

Feminism: The Boobs that Stick Together

I think it had to be some ingenious men behind the women’s movement. These Joes who, after 30 years of a 9 to 5 existence and a couple stress-induced heart attacks, peered into the lives of their housewives and decided it wasn’t fair. It was time for the women to carry the financial weight for a while.

Scheming like Mark Twains, they pulled the, “Oh I am having so much fun out here painting the fence!” routine. The joke backfired with these men’s 35-year-old grandsons keeping fit with the wii as their daughters slave at two jobs to pay for it. The problem is the women didn’t get the joke and now the gender reversal seems permanent. 

Maybe I shouldn’t blame men (that would be so female of me).... But it is hard to believe we are really so stupid and masochistic that we did this to ourselves. Oh, we’d been complaining about our rights for years, but the Fall of Women didn’t really become a screeching, illogical, full-fledged hissy fit until the 1960’s. Little dissatisfied housewife, Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique, “found herself” in blaming men’s sexism for all the world’s unhappiness. She captained a cackling breed of loud-mouthed females who chimed in, “Those rotten men, they make us so mad! They shouldn’t get to have all the power. They make more money!” It’s shrill hypocrisy was exposed when they burned their bras and complained, “It isn’t fair! Men judge us on our breast-size!!” 

It began to be drummed into our tiny girl heads: true feminine bliss and justice is for us to have men’s jobs and power--no, actually MORE power! (After all, it the housewive’s revenge for all those years of having to vacuum and iron while their husband were off frolicking in the fields singing beer songs in unison all day long.) What typical feminine illogic to demand from men they enact laws handing over their positions so we could oppress them. (Wince.) Men are so generous, they actually did it. They couldn’t help it, we cried.....

Let’s be honest, ladies, we are not the best problem-solvers. If we were, we would not have needed the women’s movement to rescue us from our own victimhood. We irrationally assumed our misery was because the male didn’t respect us. Come closer so I can let you in on a little secret: in general, men would LOVE to respect women, they just expect them to earn it--like they did. Truth be told there is no more relentlessly oppressed group today than the male. They are bashed and ruthlessly demeaned by every female comic, liberal newspaper and sitcom--not to mention all the laws giving the jobs they qualify for to those women who don’t. But they take it and never whine. Maybe, women, we could take a lesson from their sense of humor and their ability to take a punch. 

I can imagine all the handwringing from my sisterhood. “Some men really did treat women badly!” But if you didn’t notice ladies, there have always been both rotten men and rotten women. Yet, again with the female logic, rather than using our true feminine power to make men worship at our feet, women decided to become “equal” by choosing to become one of the wife-beating bubbas. We have been “liberated” from sexism and unabashedly enter wet t-shirt contests so men can get gratis peep shows. Now men freely cuss in front of us and blush at our own potty-mouthed, belching, rear-scratching liberty. Women can look as sloppy as men, wear combat boots, have six-pack abs and professionally wrestle, wear clerical collars, make lawyers rich in sexual harassment and no-fault divorce lawsuits, keel over with a stress-induces heart attacks, divorce their husbands and relieve them of having stress-induced heart attacks. 

Thanks to our radical grandmothers we deem it our sacred entitlement to shamelessly discard our virginity by popping a contraceptive and wearing such sexually explicit clothing we advertised that we were ready and waiting to get an STD for free. But, no worries, abortions can take away any unwanted permanent outcomes of our promiscuous lifestyle.

The eighties-liberated woman bellowed that we didn’t need fathers to screw up our children. So after releasing him from sexual responsibility, we cry foul and call him a dead beat dad when we keep his child, then we vengefully sue and jail him. What? We have the right to change our mind, remember? (Or maybe that was the old, oppressed woman who had that right?)

For forty years a lovely group of women’s activists can be found in that quilting-bee group called, NOW (National Organization of Women). Among other things, they lobby congress to enact laws making men stop beating their girlfriends and wives. Let me give women a suggestion that would save NOW a lot of money: learn from men. They don’t go around whining if they get beaten up, the take self-defense lessons. If a women feels particularly petite, hand her a Colt forty-five. That would end male violence.

NOW also seeks to legislate against “soft hate speech”. What would be an example of “soft hate speech”?  Your bottom looks fat in that dress? I guess we’re going to put a man in the stocks for calling a woman the demeaning “sweetie.” The feminists have made our lives so much better because of gender-based affirmative action and non-sexist language. That “herstory” instead of history, really spelled justice to me and how that Ms. thing caught on! Firefighter instead of fireman.... now that forced men to respect women.

You think I am being hard on my sex? There is no way I could be as hard on them as we have been on ourselves! Wearing tight curlers over the generations must have affected our brains, for we don’t see that everyone has been discriminated against: Fat people, ugly people, short people, stupid people. So how do short, ugly and stupid men combat these inequalities? Ask the Three Stooges--they laughed all the way to the bank.

The feminists will claim the credit for the list of fabulously successful women today, but honestly it’s the law of physics, not affirmative action, when cream rises to the top. I can give you a history of powerful women who somehow changed the world without the benefit of NOW.

So what did the feminist movement take away? We lost: men paying for the privilege of dating us, fathers who cared enough about our virginity to quiz our suitors, men standing when we came into the room, opening doors for us and saying, “yes ma’am,” strong marriages and families, men making lifelong commitment to us that inspire them to mature, the choice to stay at home with our children influencing their characters, time to cook a nice, healthy meal, and when all is said, the women’s movement actually took away women’s true power--our femininity. (The smart, gutsy woman of our past knew if we really needed something, we didn’t expect the government to demand it, all we had to do was put on a smile, some perfume and ask sweetly.... Oh how demeaning!) Yes, we have come a long way baby, and now we are worn-out from working full time and have successfully butchered our family and culture. Feminism led us like lemmings, off a cliff.

Dearest Grandmama, 

If you really had our best interests in mind as women, if you wanted us to not only equal men but excel above them, why did you place before us the lowest, coarsest in men to emulate? Why did you insist we become the power-hungry, materialistic, self-centered, troglodytes? If you had contemplated history, you would have chosen a better role-model. You would have been influenced by great men like Aristotle who taught that to achieve happiness you must sacrifice self to do what is right. You devalued and tossed away the greatest power on earth. Like Dorothys with the ruby slippers, we had the power of happiness all along right at our feet, if we only would recognize and nurture it. The power of women is to give life and to love.

__________________________________________________

The Ten Commandments and Abortion

Once a close SDA relative of mine told me that if the entire Bible was found to be phony, if everything on earth and heaven disappeared that the Ten Commandments would still be there. He even insisted that God Himself is subject to His own laws, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

Adventists build a great deal of their remnant status doctrine from the Revelation 12 text that says the remnant are those who keep the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus. Somehow keeping Sabbath (4th commandment) proves that their church alone fulfills this prophecy because all other denominations keep only nine of the Ten Commandments (they don’t rest on Saturday, but worship on Sunday--breaking the fourth commandment.) 

While I would dismiss the premise on many levels, for argument sake, let’s analyze this idea. 

Adventists claim they keep ALL ten. 

We could spend some time explaining how teaching all Ten Commandments is vastly different from the text that claims the remnant keep all ten. So do all members of the church honor their parents? No one has ever committed adultery? or stolen? Do Adventists keep ALL Ten Commandments? My guess is no. So preaching all ten is very different from keeping them and if they don’t keep them ALL perfectly--then they are no different than anyone else. They just fail at keeping ten instead of fail at keeping nine. But that is not the point I want to make.

Adventist do not even believe in all Ten Commandments. They have flagrantly thrown out the sixth commandment (Commandment 5 for Catholics.) “Thou shalt not kill.”

Adventists have no doctrine against abortion. They have a wishy-washy text that suggest “guidelines” for abortion--it is not even listed under “official statements” on their website:

http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/guidelines/main_guide1.html

The text of the guidelines are carefully crafted to allow for members to be either pro-choice or pro-life. I know, I was on the 1988 committee held at Loma Linda University, chaired by Albert Whiting that sent recommendations to the GC Executive Committee that ended up being the 1992 Abortion Guidelines.

The guidelines do not state that abortion is wrong, that it is against the fourth commandment. It contains expressions like, “Abortion is one of the tragic dilemmas of human fallenness.... Attitudes of condemnation are inappropriate in those who have accepted the gospel." The Adventists would NEVER suggest this sentence for the fourth commandment. “The decision to worship on Sunday is a tragic dilemma of human fallenness... Attitudes of condemnation for those who choose to worship on Sunday are inappropriate in those who have accepted the gospel.”

Adventists do not seem to have a problem with standing firm for the fourth, but not the sixth commandment. The published abortion guidelines are practically immaterial because they are a “front” for a hospital system that can choose to abide or disregard them. Some Adventist hospitals perform abortions -on-demand and are used by doctors to even do late-term abortions. 

The church and its members are intimately connected with the abortion business. SDA Pastor George Gainer presented a paper at Loma Linda University in 1988 at an ethics meeting chaired by David Larson. It reported the story of how the SDA Hawaiian Conference paved the way for legalized abortion in that state that eventually spilled over to the mainland’s Roe vs. Wade decision. Adventists have ping-ponged back and forth through its history on the abortion issue. Adventists pioneers taught abortion was nefarious murder. Then it flew to the other side where during the 1960's the General Conference President, Neil Wilson, made a public statement that because of world overpopulation the Adventist church comes down on the side of legalized abortion. 

In 2000 I was told by Dr. George Reid (director of the SDA Biblical Research Institute a theological branch of the General Conference) that not only is the church pro-choice but that “Washington Adventist Hospital had become an abortion mill.” Jan Paulsen’s secretary also told me that Adventists are “pro-choice.”

Most recently, Irving “Bud” Feldkamp, owner of the nation’s largest privately-owned abortion chain (17 family planning clinics) and member of the Adventist church made news. His two daughters, two sons-in-law and five grandchildren were killed in a Montana plane crash.

http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/646579835.html

http://news.adventist.org/2009/03/in-us-three-adventis.html

This is how the Adventist News Network reported it:

Three Seventh-day Adventist families are among the 14 victims killed in a March 22 airplane crash in Butte, Montana. All three families were members or regular attendees at congregations in Northern California (they also reported that several of the victims had attended SDA colleges.) ...Church officials said the tragedy was a loss to the Adventist community. 

While we would not expect the SDA church to announce two of the families were children of Bud Feldkamp, notorious employer of abortionists who continue to butcher thousands of innocent children and who most likely gives blood money to the church, the fact that the family held such close ties to Adventism makes one wonder why the SDA church hasn’t loudly protested against Feldkamp's profession.

Dr. Edward Allred, also raised SDA and graduated at an Adventist University, was for many years the nations foremost abortionist and is rumored to have sold some of his abortion clinics to Bud Feldkamp.

Those who believe Adventists to be the only church to promote all Ten Commandments need to rethink their position. As long as they continue to cave on the sixth commandment, as long as they allow abortions in their hospitals and don’t stand against the abortionists and abortion clinic owners who consider themselves SDA, they really have no higher ground position on the Ten Commandments than any other church. 

Those Adventists who think like my relative are really in trouble because they are basing their beliefs on sandy ground. So if you are looking for a church who keeps the Ten Commandments in order to the be the official remnant church of Revelation 12, Adventism would not be it. The Seventh-day Adventist church is making a very false claim. They could not be the remnant any more than any church who--as they insist the prophecy states doesn't keep all the Ten Commandments.

Adventists really only keep nine.....