Leaderboard

The reason TWI originally flourished was because Wierwille was a narcissistic, sociopathic con man. Every other factor was incidental to that one. TWI fell apart soon after Wierwille died because he NEVER raised anybody up as an alternate leader, but surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants. The current leader of TWI came to that position because she also is a narcissistic, sociopathic con woman, but she doesn't have the same set of skills that Wierwille used to build the organization. Her skill set was in the sack instead of on the main stage at the Rock of Ages. ----- I Corinthians 2 has intrigued me for some time now. A few years ago I wrote a paper on 1 Corinthians 8:1-6 which deals with knowledge. A little over a year ago I wrote a 38 page paper on I Corinthians 12-14, and it strikes me that an understanding of 1 Corinthians 2 is foundational for both 1 Corinthians 8:1-6 AND 1 Corinthians 12-14. I intend to write my exegesis paper for BIST 6220 this semester on 1 Corinthians 2. There is one thing I can say for sure though, based on the research I did for 1 Corinthians 8:1-6, the cosmology the Corinthians held and understood was Stoic, not Platonic. When Wierwille taught that there are two realms, the spiritual realm and the senses realm, and that the laws of the spirit realm take precedence over the laws of the senses realm, he was blowing Platonic bovine fecal matter! The literal meaning of "spirit" is "air in motion." Things that have air moving in and out of them are alive. Things that no longer have air moving in and out of them are dead. So the word "spirit" took on the figurative meaning of "life-force", or "that which makes something otherwise dead alive." What 1 Corinthians 2 means needs to be re-thought. Love, Steve

Alas and alak, we get to the roots of the thing. Btw, this might also be the roots/foundation of the concept of gaslighting as we've experienced it in twi. It is inherently human to be curious. To explore. How can that be a bad thing? I gave Wierwille's organization 12 years in which I built my mental framework around his version of the Judeo-Christian origin story and world view. And several more years in which that framework kept me prisoner after I rejected the subculture. It was all a sham. As Twinky suggested, this seems like a tangent from the original question at the top of the thread. But really, I see it as getting to one answer to that original question. Twi isn't as big now as it was in the 1970s because so many people who experienced twi in the 1970s realized, for whatever reason, that Wierwille's flavor of Christianity (or maybe Christianity itself) doesn't provide a fulfilling, satisfying spiritual or otherwise experience. It also brings to life what so many people throughout the last few centuries have observed about religion. Here's one that speaks to me: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ― Albert Einstein