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Payday is next week. Know what I mean, Vern? Thanks for all you do here.

Timing is everything.

Yep......we all have our reasons. Probably, like many of us, it's a combination of things. After 16 yrs with rosalie at the helm......who wants to follow a rosalie-clone? And, a peer? GSC and internet has totally exposed the ruse......making witnessing-to-a-scam a losing battle. The wierwille-mystique is over, the martindale-error crashed, and rosalie-era fizzled out. At age 52 (?).......it just ain't all that satisfying to bark orders to sycophants anymore. Life, career, retirement........at this stage, better make the most of what's left. The monotony and repetition is absolutely mind-numbing..... Jean-Yves is the lead dog for the next 20 yrs......and who wants to follow that?

Greetings, ImLikeSoConfused! I would have responded to this thread sooner, but I had a heart attack on February 9th which landed me at the hospital DOA. The docs resuscitated me and I've spent the intervening time in physical and occupational therapy, without access to the internet until last Friday. One of the things I've gained from the experience is a partial appreciation of how many people really do love me, including many of my fellow posters here at GSC. There is a difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching draws the auditor's attention to something. Teaching purports to explain the nuts and bolts of how a thing works. Wierwille preached many truths that were straight out of the Bible. Otherwise, no one would have paid any attention to anything he was saying. But in his teaching, Wierwille often directly contradicted the very truth he was preaching at the time. Many people who took to heart the things Wierwille preached got the results that God's Word promises. You yourself know all too well what can happen to the people who take to heart the things Wierwille taught... delusion... being played. One of Wierwille's greatest sins was to attribute the credit for the good things happening in peoples' lives to himself and his classes rather than to God through the Lord Jesus Christ. The flip side of that same coin was to attribute peoples' failures to their lack of believing rather than to the flaws of his teaching. This is the main reason I don't recommend Wierwille's writings to anyone else. It's just too much work... confusing work at that... separating the truth from the error in PFAL, etc. If you think one of your friends or acquaintances could benefit from a truth of God's Word, then simply speak to them the truth that you know. You don't have to explain the whole Bible to them. You couldn't if you wanted to. Nobody can explain the whole Bible, and ANYONE who tells you otherwise is trying to pull a con. No legitimate scholar would make such a claim. Love, Steve

From the Wikipedia page on Cognitive Dissonance (recommended reading, by the way). Emphases are mine: The attempt to eliminate cognitive dissonance by the latter methods was a major TWI tactic. Remember "The Word of God is perfect, so it cannot contradict itself"? Yet, we know the book contradicts itself more than a Washington politician. So what does TWI do? Call them "apparent contradictions." See? That papers over the reality of the contradictions. How many times did Peter deny Jesus? Let's ask Matthew. Three. Let's ask Mark. Three. Let's ask Luke. Three. Let's ask John. Three. Let's ask TWI: SIX! Why? Because the details of the denials differ, and in order for them ALL to be true, there had to be six denials. This is easily resolved by eliminating the phony requirement that the Bible has no contradictions, but we can't have that. So we refute the contradiction and seek moral support from people who share our beliefs. .... To WordWolf's point: I know that not everyone is interested in my personal journey. I shared it in Seeing the Dark because I felt it was in order. I continued it here because I had already opened that door and I thought it would be better to redirect the conversation from other threads where it was being used as a form of ad hominem (rejecting my arguments because I'm the one making them, rather than on the merits of the arguments). I mistakenly thought we could discuss what makes a person an atheist without the kind of dishonest hostility that greeted me from post 2. You will observe, I think, a decent amount of time between the first post and my second. That was deliberate. If there was no interest in the discussion, I was prepared to drop it, just as I dropped multiple subjects in this forum before that troll decided to come along and malign my character.