A comment from another thread:
"I understand, everybody has a double-life to some degree."
What Weston seems not to understand is that LCG (and Armstrongism in general) encourages people to maintain a double-life, and to be more and more two-faced as they continue in the church, unlike many other churches that allow people to feel that they don't need to put up a false front of near-perfection.
There are of course a few brethren who for a while try not to live a double-life, and who try to admit their weaknesses honestly and sincerely as they repent and strive to be better Christians. Before too long, these people either run away from the falseness of ACOG spirituality or learn the two-faced ACOG standard and become twice the sons of hell they were before they joined their ACOG (Matthew 23:15).
In his sermon today, Weston made it clear that he is going to set a standard, and if you can't fake it you won't be allowed to make it in LCG. Does he not realize that this won't actually make the brethren holier? It will just make them more fake. Weston would rather have a church filled with people who know how to fake a certain level of Godliness, rather than a church filled with imperfect people striving honestly to reach a greater level of Godliness.
Perhaps the saddest part of the sermon came when Weston attacked innocent children and their mothers. He mentioned that when he was pastoring one large WCG congregation, there were perhaps 14 young women who had children out of wedlock and brought their babies to services. To Weston, this was a sign of scandal and liberalism. Other pastors might rejoice that a woman had learned a hard lesson, and that instead of aborting the baby or abandoning her responsibility she had repented of her damaging sin and was now seeking to live a better life. But that's not what Weston said today. Instead of praising the women for their repentance and desire to grow in difficult circumstances, he described them as if they were a terrible embarrassment to the congregation.
How will repentant sinners thrive in LCG, if they know deep down that Weston and their pastor see them as embarrassments and failures because of prior sin, instead of seeing them as God's children striving to atone for their earlier mistakes?
All in all, it was a sickening sermon that I would have expected from a man like Pack. I was one of the many who thought LCG would become more balanced after Meredith's death. I was wrong.