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MR. RADER COt1MENTS ABOUT FAITH
Editor's Note: After Mr. Armstrong's sermon in Tucson September 18,
Mr. Rader spoke to the congregation about several aspects of faith.
His comments were transcribed and now we would like to share them
with our readers.
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Greetings, everyone. Last week in Pasadena, when Mr. Armstrong spoke,
I commented that he's a very difficult man to follow because he not
only is such a powerful and inspirational speaker, but he chooses
those topics that are really in the front part of our minds. So I
sit here with yellow pad while he is speaking and I have to kind of
tick off those things which he's already said. On the other hand,
if I were to speak ahead of him, which I've had to do on occasion, I,
of course, would not want to preempt him. Thereforei, I trust that
you will bear with me today as I wander through some of the things
that I have made notes of as he has spoken, and things which I would
like to share with you.
First of all, I think most of you have probably recognized that there
are a lot of books out today. Even though you might not be reading
them, there is a tremendous increase in the reading audiences around
the world. And if you were to study the books in the bookstores,
look at the bestseller lists, you would find a tremendous emphasis
today on what has been called "how to do it" books. And if you look
at those books, you would see that they are dealing with how to
improve your position, how to become successful, how to get power.
"You too can be Number One" -- in fact, that's a title. Your
Erroneous Zones, another title on how to improve your position in
this life.
All of these books just simply make people more selfish, more ego
centric, more concerned about themselves rather than about their fellow
man. And it's rather interesting that this is the trend of the late
70s and probably will go on right into the 80s despite the fact that
most of us will recall that in the 60s -- particularly the late 60s
and early 70s -- we had what appeared to be a different movement,
short-lived as it turned out to be. That was the movement where our
younger people and our so-called enlightened people were more and more
concerned about the environment, mvre and more concerned about the
social issues of the time.
But right now, if you would just look on the bookstore shelves, you
would see one book after another, some written by doctors, some by
psychologists, some by sociologists, some written by people with not
even those credentials -- just people who thought it might be a good
idea to tell others how they, too, can gain success. And the
interesting thing is, in many cases, the men who write the books
never had any success until they wrote the books dealing with "YOU
TOO CAN BE A SUCCESS." And somehow or other, these books sell enough
copies to make two or three million dollars. And that makes the
particular authors successful.
I caution you about those books because it has become the kind of
chic thing today to think in terms of the behavioral scientists, who