There is one gospel message that many in the Church of God are good at and that is spreading conspiracy theories. Due to the endless stream of sermons, articles and videos pumped into the minds of church members on the "Prince of the poser of the air" who was actively seeking to thwart humanity in every aspect of life. Church members found the bogeyman hiding all over the world in books, TV, movies, papers, magazines, music, businesses, religion, and in the minds of every human on the earth, except of course, in the enlightened COG members. They and they alone could see though all of the corruption and subterfuge going on the world around them. Satan was busy as hell and they were having none of it! Expose him and his agents of darkness with everything you could. So stories were dreamed up, exposes created, all breathlessly whispered or broadcast on Facebook as truth.
Case in point is the photo above circulating on various COG members Facebook pages and on conspiracy laden conservative Christian pages.
One of the hallmarks of the Church of God is that it always claimed it NEVER lied about things to the membership or the world. It was all God's truth directly inserted in the mind of Herbert Armstrong and every single minister that ever preached a sermon. Yet, church members post crap like the above picture on their blogs and FB pages in self-righteous indignation. Never once do any of them ever check into the facts surround some conspiracy. If there might be the slightest grain of "truth" in the story then it is good for posting.
Matthew Herper from Forbes Magazine writes about this controversy:
The fetus-derived cell line we’re talking about was created around the time I was born. This is 35-year-old technology. And it is widely used in cell biology. And there is no way you’ll consume them or that the cells would cause any health problems.
The cells, calledHEK 293 cells (that stands for human embryonic kidney) were taken from an aborted fetus in the 1970s in the Netherlands. Bits of chopped up DNA from the adenovirus, a virus that causes a pretty severe cold. The kidney cells were forced to take up bits of DNA using a technique invented in 1973 that used a calcium solution. The resulting cells don’t act much like human cells at all, but they are very easy to work with and have become workhorses of cellular biology. That’s why they’re used in the development of drugs and vaccines. No new fetal tissue has been used to keep the cell culture going; the use of this cell line isn’t leading to new abortions.
A tiny company called Senomyx has been working to use this new technology to create food additives. Senomyx has isolated receptors found on cells that detect taste, and added them to the HEK cells. This allows them to test thousands of potential taste additives to see whether they might taste sweet or savory with a speed that would be impossible with human taste testers. Synomyx has announced collaborations with Pepsi, Nestle, andCoca-Cola. Famous Food Companies Caught Using Aborted Babies for Flavor Additives