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[Any true innovator has taken things in directions that defy "what they were taught." To say otherwise does a great disservice to them and belittles their accomplishments. Any person who learned through independent study went "beyond what they were taught" because there was no teacher. Anyone who learned "hands-on" through experience with nobody over their shoulder went "beyond what they were taught" because there was no teacher. On the other hand, one can go around REDEFINING what it means to be a teacher or to have a teacher. However, isn't redefining a term or concept just so it agrees with vpw an awfully long step to make just to justify another factual mistake? He said something that was technically incorrect. It was also self-serving, as in "I'm 'The Teacher' and you'll only go as far as I teach you." Accept it was an error and get past it. I recognized this decades ago and the most thought I've ever given it was explaining it now and dismay that some people would rather come up with creative reinterpretations of the common usage of words rather than accept vpw made mistakes and this was one of them.]

Jesus DID need revelation to tell the guy to sell all he had and give to the poor. That would be word of wisdom. If the guy had done that he either would have been blessed enough to absorb the loss of his goods and/or he would have gotten more earthly riches back. Not Jesus' problem the guy made the wrong choice. Hmmmm.....actually, Jesus didn't say anything about that johniam. Nothing about being "blessed" enough to absorb loss of his stuff or that he woudl have gotten "more".............right after the he spoke to the difficulty that a person of wealth has to "enter the kingdom of God"....................when you or I say things like that we are doing exactly what Jesus said NOT to do and what would be a PROBLEM for people - that is attaching earthly wealth and goods to God's kingdom. There was no quarantee of anything to that guy in the record as far as his wealth went - that's what he was to give away.......capiche? I was talking to someone about this once and they were apparently brain dead from having listened too many times to VPW saying "Dahts right, kids!" because they immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was saying that there was something wrong with money or having stuff or that God didn't want to "bless" people with "abundance". Which isn't what I'm saying and has nothing to do with this.......as geisha has noted, the issues are different.

And therein lies the crux of the issue. In The Way, we were told we were being given the necessary tools to do independent research (cough), yet if one were to venture outside the prescribed doctrine of "The Blue Book", chastisement was sure to rear it's ugly head quite quickly.

Lots of problems with that explanation. First, there is a glaringly apparent contradiction presented in Jesus' answer. Here, when addressing the subject of eternal life, we find him telling the man to follow the commandments. (works) When the man says he has followed the commandments, he tells him to sell his possessions and give aid to the poor. (more works)......How does this fit with salvation by grace, as presented in the epistles?...Simple, we just treat the Gospels as a predecessor of the Epistles....The "mystery" was not yet known...Except, the Gospels were actually written quite some time AFTER the Epistles. Well, then, let's just say say Jesus was speaking in response to revelation....So, why would this revelation require that Jesus present something contrary to what had already been presented in the (written) epistles?....Oh, I suppose you could say that, even though it was written in a "post-Jesus" time, it was depicting an event that was concurrent with Jesus' presence....However, it's contrary to John 3:16, as well....As presented in Wierwille's Advanced Class, revelation can never be in opposition to the written word........Even if we say it was revelation to a specific incident, as was Wierwille's explanation in the Advanced Class, this would have Jesus using/speaking a misrepresentation of scripture...Would God, being all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present have to give revelation to Jesus to tell a lie/misrepresentation to get His point across? Maybe the honest thing to do with something like this is just say, "I don't know." instead of creating scenarios that would have Jesus getting special revelation to lie to someone. Is that off topic? I'm not sure. I think, though, it demonstrates how someone (VPW) could take a little bit of knowledge, misinterpret it, misrepresent it and spin an entirely theological concept (word of wisdom) around it.

psssst......hey.....You do realize VPW wasn't really a "Dr.", don't you? But you really don't know that. Jesus could have said that because he was dealing with a rich person and he simply wanted to put him to the test, so to speak. Why would he need revelation for that? Simply stated there is no proof he needed revelation to tell the guy that.

You certainly do have a great disdain for higher education, don't you, John. Why do you suppose that is? Is it, perhaps, because we were conditioned to adapt this attitude in the PFAL class? I can't remember which particular session it was in, off the top of my head. Maybe someone here can supply that information. At any rate, I would have hoped you would have come away from the book with a realization that The Way, and Wierwille in particular, were not what we thought they were. He went two weeks without "missing anything"? hahahahahahahah! Maybe what he went 2 weeks without missing was sexual gratification from the women he seduced. (Remember, John, as a professed Christian, that would make these women your sisters in Christ. How does that make you feel, knowing he treated your sisters with so little respect?)

I prefer to say that "the Theory of Evolution" HAS NOT MADE ITS CASE. If it is true and correct, I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to support the major points that are claimed. Adherents to it tend to make "a leap of faith" and condemn the heretics who don't subscribe to it. One of the more fascinating things about the history of the idea is that it supposedly is based on Darwin's work- and Darwin has been proven WRONG on so many points. Darwin made a lot of suppositions that have been proven wrong- and it's on those suppositions that his entire framework was built! I mean, come on, the man believed in Lamarckianism! That's the thing that says that giraffes stretched their necks a lot, so their children had longer necks when they had kids. This is the same kind of thinking that says Arnold Schwarzenegger's kids should have been born all brawny and bulky. I'm open to dialoguing on what the actual evidence says, but I think it's more accurate to say that all extant theories as to "the origin of species" are as yet unsupported and unproven. I'm ok with someone presenting an argument for "Darwinism" but not ok with the presentation of it as definitive. I'm also aware that science is self-correcting. However, it can take any number of centuries before the establishment accepts one thing when it WANTS to believe something else. We had an amazingly long stretch of scientists who WANTED to believe in Steady-State, even though there was no evidence for it, and all evidence supported "the Big Bang." They found it PHILOSOPHICALLY acceptable, and the idea of an origin in space and time was so repugnant to them that they embraced a speculation with no evidence rather than truly use a scientific approach. We also had many centuries before geocentrism was rejected for heliocentrism. Personally, I think we may face centuries before this one is changed- like geocentrism- and only with kicking and screaming- like Steady State. Too many scientists take this subject PERSONALLY and approach it UNSCIENTIFICALLY as a result of their "faith". ================================ On the other hand, there are some ignorant people who are undereducated, and reject evolution because their pastor says its wrong, and not because they've truly examined the evidence, and wouldn't understand the evidence if they saw it. The earth and the universe APPEAR very old. The claims that the Earth has been around for only a few thousand years are either based on lack of understanding the evidence, or else a faith-based approach that says God made the Earth a few thousand years ago and made it so that it LOOKED very old. (I can't say He did not- the evidence supports either conclusion, but the latter is unable to be proven or disproven, as it's entirely faith-based.) Then there are the amazingly-ignorant. I missed lcm making wild claims about history, and that's a good thing. I can almost hear brain cells shutting down when I look over some of his exposition.