Teenage Wasteland

Growing through adolescence into adulthood is not an easy experience for most teenagers. For Church of God teenagers, it's even harder. Much harder. Going through absolute hell might not be too strong a description for many of them. Observing COG doctrines, repeated absences for cult church holy days, explaining the controlling COG Talmud to your peers in the public school system can create a world of conflict, angst, embarrassment, and difficulty for you all on it's own. 


Hopeless, hapless UCG teens told to expect the imminent collapse of the US, brutal German captivity, and the great Tribulation to begin shortly thereafter, can forget about participating in sports, band, or most anything else important to higher education in high school. They can scratch through the calendar days for thrilling Friday night football games, anything having the remotest thing to do with Christmas, dating anyone outside God's true cult church, senior prom on the Sabbath, and preparing for many future jobs and professional occupations.


Your triple-tithing baptized parents, and the ministry in good standing, it is said, receive the Holy Spirit. God is calling them. They get to become God "as God is God". Try dealing with this mindset, while having the one true cult church on earth dictate every aspect of your personal life twenty-four hours a day. The ultra-authoritarian, dogmatic, robotic COG mindset doesn't develop or tolerate true critical scholarship, accreditation, peer-reviewed independent thought or freedom of action. Just think of your developing adolescent sized, fantastic, neuroplastic human brain. Now, next slide up- see your incredible brain shrinking, shriveling up while on UCG. Get the picture? If it's not your parents, it's the arrogant, inept ministry controlling what you do with all of your time, talent and money. Or not do, such as stone-age throwback, AC troglodyte David Pack, prohibiting blogging, censoring COG use of the Internet.   


UCG's Ryan Shallenberger and Micah Gunn in this song lament a cold and broken UCG, wondering about the next crisis arriving on their horizon. It's Simon and Garfunkle revisited, with some Bob Dylan thrown in for good measure.  Way to go, guys. Make an album!