Steve Lortz

I don't think he was planning anything after POP was read. I thing Geer had him on the ropes. All LCM could do was react, and he didn't do a very good job at that. LCM called them the "Fog Years" because that was his state of mind. Love, Steve

Thanks for the timeline, Skyrider. I was in residence as a member of the 16th Corps at Camp Gunnison when Geer read The Passing of a Patriarch to the Corps on Corps night. That was just a few days before the end of the block, when I dropped out of the Corps because my Pop had a stroke and my Mom went into the hospital for surgery on the same day. I had to go home to Indiana to help take care of them. It was easy for me to get over to HQ and to schmooze with my 16th Corps buds who were quartered there, and other old friends, so I got a little glimpse of what was going on. In The Passing of a Patriarch, Geer never breathed a word about the rampant adultery. I think he kept it as a card up his sleeve to blackmail the Trustees into giving him the things he wanted. I think that is the reason they were so obsequious to him. I was stunned by the lack of effective leadership from the spring of '86 to the spring of '89. That was when I realized that Wierwille had NEVER trained anybody to lead. He had surrounded himself with flattering yes-men who couldn't find their own ways out of a paper bag, much less lead others. In the spring of '87 the twig coordinators in our branch found out that Martindale had propositioned a girl who had gone into the Corps from our branch, and we began trying to get some kind of accountability. Shortly thereafter, our Area Coordinator came to town and excommunicated our entire branch. The "mark and avoid" language hadn't developed that far yet. I don't think the events between '86 and '89 could properly be characterized as a "mass" exodus. Many, many people left or were kicked out as truth filtered out, or as people lost confidence in the Trustees. But I think most of these disassociations were relatively small and for local reasons. I think the Way Corps' response to Martindale's letter requiring personal fealty was the first thing that we might recognize as a mass exodus. Love, Steve

When I originally wrote the sentence, I used the word "earliest", but I changed it to "early" for just the reasons you cited. I think I and II Samuel were probably the first books originally composed at Solomon's scriptorium, and those would be earlier than some others. I think the writings of Moses, etc. were upgraded, probably put on more expensive material, using the latest script. I don't think Moses would have written in the Proto-Sinaitic script. Heck, I think he could have written in hieroglyphics! Maybe it was Moses that converted the Proto-Sinaitic script into Paleo-Hebrew. I'm not writing this stuff to kick up any arguments. It's like shootin' the breeze around a campfire, and I'm enjoying all sides of it. Love, Steve

Thanks for your two versions of Jack and the Beanstalk, Roy! I used to teach Humane Letters to seventh-graders. The class was a combination of history, literature and writing. The purpose was to introduce youngsters to the fact that the questions of life usually don't have pat, textbook answers, and to teach them the rudiments of how to think for themselves: curiosity, imagination and reason. Some years, I used the stories of Greek literature as vehicles. Some years I used northern stories like the Volsunga Saga, Beowulf, King Arthur and Tolkien. We were an interdenominational Christian school, but we never used the Bible at the middle school level, because the kids thought they had already learned all there was to know about the Bible characters from their Sunday school lessons. They had all the answers, so to speak, and didn't need to think anymore about what they were reading. One day, shortly after they had begun reading Homer's Iliad, they became uncomfortable because they were beginning to realize it wasn't a story about good guys versus bad guys, and it wouldn't have a "happy" ending. They came to me during a break (They were reading the Iliad in another teacher's class. I was teaching writing to this particular group of students at the time.) and asked, "Why are we reading this?" I spent two hours leading them in a Socratic discourse on how the moral imagination feeds on story, and how a person's moral imagination, when internalized, becomes a person's conscience. I told them the Iliad is not a story of good guys versus bad guys, but a story of deeply flawed characters, trying to do the best they knew how, under very difficult circumstances that they couldn't control. Then I asked them what sort of people WE are, and led them to see that, we also are deeply flawed people, trying to do the best we know how, under very difficult circumstances that we can't control. I told them that when they found themselves confronted by a moral decision, they could ask themselves, How would Achilles have handled this? How about Agamemnon? or Paris? or Hector? They would have fodder for their moral imaginations to aid in making moral decisions. At the end of the two hours, the students were very enthusiastic about pursuing the Iliad, because they knew why they were doing it and what they were looking for. We could only hope that as they matured, the students would take the tools they acquired in reading about Achilles and apply them as they read about David. Then David would no longer be a 2-dimensional, flannelboard character to them, but the multi-dimensional person he really was, and in arriving at a better understanding of David, the students could also reach a more realistic and powerful understanding of who our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is. I found reading the two versions of Jack and the Beanstalk to be a delightful experience, Roy! I think if I was still teaching, I could use comparing these versions to teach my seventh-graders for two full weeks on how to recognize the inspiration and "inerrancy*" of scripture. Love, Steve * - I DO believe there is a level of understanding where the Scriptures are "inerrant", just not at the level popularly assumed.

I recognize that there was a lot more going on, and a lot earlier than my quip on Hershal Shank's quote might indicate. Since I was in grade school myself, and I realized that the characters in history were people just like me, I've always tried to picture what the experiences must have been like to the people who were going through them at the time. I believe the very earliest books of those that have come to be regarded as Biblical (Genesis through Ruth?) were in writing before the wealth of the kingdom under David and Solomon made a full-time, professional scriptorium possible. I think I and II Samuel were first composed in Solomon's scriptorium, probably in a more advanced form of Hebrew, and the earlier books were copied into an up-to-date style. I really liked the article you appended to your post! That kind of cultural thing has always fascinated me. Did you know that, instead of using toilet paper, Romans used a sponge tied to the end of a stick. There were slots at the fronts of toilets for the user to thrust the stick through for use, and a little pool of running water in front of the toilet for the Roman to wash his sponge off afterwards. When you try to figure out how they thought, it's amazing! Love, Steve

Dave Arneson, the inventor and co-author of Dungeons & Dragons took Foundational PFAL about a year or so before D&D was published in the fall of '74. He faithfully practiced abundant sharing, and 10% of the royalties he made off of D&D went to HQ. It was no small piece of change! In the tens of thousands per year. The people at HQ knew him. Whenever they came to the Twin Cities, Arneson got invited to the parties "regular" believers didn't even hear about. They were all buddy-buddy to his face, including Wierwille himself, but then they turned around and excoriated D&D as the work of the devil in their classes. Love, Steve

Thank you, TrustAndObey, for your insight, and for directing my attention to Hebrews 8/Jeremiah 31. And thank you, Bob, for starting this thread and inviting me to join it. I hope I haven't derailed it too much :-( How wonderful it is that God brings me to a relational understanding of judgment through a relational experience here on this thread! Love, Steve

Cool, cman! I've been working for seven or eight years on a paper I call Exercising Judgment, that your love may abound. During my stint as a classical teacher of humane letters, I learned that education is relational, and since then, I've been seeing that EVERYTHING is relational (and I could quote, cite and reference business management textbooks saying as much, using APA format). Just yesterday, I was bemoaning the fact that my paper, as it currently stands is not relational. It only deals with the internal operations of exercising judgment. As I was writing my last post to you, I finally understood what I need to do to draw out the relational aspects of exercising judgment. Thank you! and thank the Lord! Love, Steve

Most excellent observations, cman! I think God talks to people a lot of the time without the person doing the speaking even realizing what's going on. Proverbs 4:23 tells us to keep our hearts with all diligence for out of them are the issues of life. Romans 5:5b says that the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit He's given to us, and Matthew 12:34b tells us that out of the abundance of our hearts our mouths speaks. If we prepare our hearts through our habitual thinking so that our attitudes of heart are what God would want them to be, then the love of God can flow from His Spirit, through our hearts, and out into expression. Unbeknownst to us as we speak, a hearer can receive exactly the words he or she needs in order to recognize that God loves them. When a hearer receives those words, they will usually confirm something that the Spirit of God has already told them subjectively. Love, Steve

Dittos. There are three places in the Bible where we are told "In the mouth (singular) of two or three witnesses (plural) shall a matter be established." I think this means we are more likely to find the truth if we look at the places where two or three independent witnesses agree, than we are to find it if we listen to only a single witness. I think God intended the written Word to serve as an objective witness to His will, that is, the words actually written in a specific copy of the Bible do not change over time, or according to whatever person is looking at them. I think that God communicates subjectively with individuals through inspiration from His Spirit. I think that the Word lives in a person where the objective words of the written Word agree with the subjective words of the Spirit of God working within that person. When people magnify the written Word and ignore the Spirit, they wind up in Pharisaism and legalism, as The Way International did. When people magnify the Spirit and ignore the written Word, they wind up in emotionalism and spiritualism, as CES/STFI did with "personal prophecy". In the fall of 1987, when communication through the Way tree between individual believers was breaking down, I took a 30-day bus trip around the country... not so much to speak as to listen to what was being said in different parts of the country. Almost everywhere, I heard Corps people saying "Multiple centers of reference cause confusion" meaning "Headquarters told us not to listen to anybody but them." That was what sparked my interest in the "mouth of two or three witnesses" verses. I feel wiped because my meds were out of whack last night. I hope everybody has a good night tonight! Love, Steve

Just goes to show, skinks are much more sensitive to B.S. than people are. Love, Steve

For anybody interested in the nuts and bolts of how the Bible came to be written, the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2010, Vol 36 No 2) has two interesting articles. "How the Alphabet Was Born From Hieroglyphics" which shows how illiterate, undocumented Semitic workers in Egypt without green cards invented alphabetic writing, the Proto-Sinaitic script, during the Middle Kingdom. "Oldest Hebrew Inscription" shows how an inscription written in the Proto-Sinaitic script was found during excavation of a small Israelitish fort on the border with the Philistines. The fort was dated to late-11th, early-10th century, about the time of David and Solomon. At the end of "Oldest Hebrew Inscription" Hershal Shanks wrote, "In short, if this was all present in the tenth century at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, out in the boonies, just imagine what was in happening Jerusalem." I like to think there was a scribal community in Jerusalem at the time, putting the early books of the Old Testament into written form for the first time, using the new-fangled Paleo-Hebrew alphabet! Love, Steve

Thanks, waysider. The copy I ordered of Paul and the Stoics came in the mail today, and it looks like it's going to be a looooooooooooooong read. It's 304 pages of dense text with 73 pages of notes. I read the preface, and scanned the table of contents and the index without finding any immediate references to the conflagration, but who knows what might turn up in my reading of the book? The nugget I'm looking for, if there is one at all, might just be buried in one of the notes. In the preface, Engberg-Pederson describes the position of his book within a discussion regarding Paul that has been going on for about 100 years now in the scholarly community. Engberg-Pederson mentioned the work of James Dunn, which I am passingly familiar with, so that upped E-P's "street-cred" a bit in my eyes. The scholarly discussion that has been going on this past century is like the topic of this thread, only writ large! It has been an effort to understand Paul's writings in light of the first century dialogue, rather than Reformation caricatures of that dialogue. Before E-P's book, most of the work had been done to understand Paul's dialogue with Second Temple Jadaism. Paul and the Stoics is the first extensive, detailed examination of Paul's dialogue with the dominant gentile system of his day, and as one might imagine, Engberg-Pederson concentrates on Stoic ethics, hopefully not to the exclusion of Stoic cosmology. Books like this make me shudder at how shallow, biased and self-serving the research efforts of TWI and the off-shoots are, and how arrogant our former leaders were and are to even call what they do "research." I will be reading for awhile, but I'll also be clearing off the tabletop to fight a battle between my orcs and my Roman legionnaires from time to time. Love, Steve

James D. G. Dunn is just about the best current New Testament scholar I've found in my all too brief and spotty survey of the literature. He has written a number of good books. Two that may bear on recent topics of this thread are The Partings of the Ways: between Christianity and Judaism and their significance for the character of Christianity (1991) and Unity and diversity in the New Testament: an inquiry into the character of earliest Christianity (1977). Dunn holds that just as there was a spectrum of beliefs in Second Temple Judaism, there was also a spectrum of beliefs among the people, initially Judeans, who came to Christianity. He believes the thing that held Christians together was the confession "Jesus is Lord". This confession contains two elements, "Jesus", a real man who was really crucified, really died, and was really resurrected, and "Lord", the truth that this man has been invested with some sort of divine authority. If we reconstructed the diversity of New Testament positions on a left-right scale, with right being conservative and left being for change, then the extreme left would be the gnostics, the moderate left would be Paul, the center would be Peter, the moderate right would be James, and the extreme right would be the ebionites. On the extreme left the gnostics went too far for most of the church to consider them to be Christians, because they denied that Jesus was a real man. They played up the "divine" business too much. On the right, the ebionites went too far in the other direction by regarding Jesus as just another man, with no special, unique exercise of divine authority. The gnostic and the ebionite positions were BOTH rejected by the majority of people who considered themselves to be Christians, but the positions of BOTH Paul and James were considered to be valid. It was through Peter that the church was held together in its early days. It would seem that Luther read some of his aversion to the legalism of medieval Roman Catholicism back into Second Temple Judaism, and ignored the context of some of the things Paul wrote about "grace through faith". That may be why Luther thought that James should not have been included in the canon. But the early Christians themselves regarded James' opinions to be solidly within the bounds of their faith. All for now. Love, Steve

Having written what I just did in my last post, anybody wanna taste some of the icing I've been thinking about? What if the word "body" didn't mean "carcass" to Paul, like it does to us, but rather "the whole of that by which one thing moves another", sort of like our word "interface"? What if the word "soul" didn't mean "the immaterial component that houses identity" but rather "the whole of the self"? What if "spirit" didn't mean "the substance of a parallel cosmos inaccessible to the senses" but rather "the whole of a person's life as evidenced by that person's power to move"? That would change our understanding of I Thessalonians 5:23, "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (I left out the words added by the English translators.) Are these a listing of the components of a three-part being? Or are they three different ways to view the wholeness of a person... the wholeness of interaction, the wholeness of self and the wholeness of life? Coupled with a careful reading of Genesis 2:7, these meanings could raise some serious questions about the assumptions regarding salvation held by the church since the fourth century, and those assumptions were only modified by Wierwille in his interpretations. The thing is, these WERE the meanings attached to the words "spirit" and "soul" and "body" according to the world-view of the Stoics, the world-view that was dominant at the time Paul wrote, the world-view most of Paul's readers took for granted in the first century. Were these the meanings Paul intended when he wrote? I don't know. If, when Paul wrote the phrase "from the foundation/down-throwing/over-throw of the cosmos", he was referring to "the conflagration" of Stoic cosmology, then it would reinforce the idea that the words "spirit", "soul" and "body" were also meant to carry meanings that were Stoic instead of neo-Platonic. I rummaged around at the university library for awhile, and couldn't find the phrase pro kataboles cosmou in any of the reference books on Stoicism. I've got a book on order called Paul and the Stoics by Troels Engberg-Pederson. Maybe I'll learn more in it. For several decades, whenever I want to take my mind off things, I play with toy soldiers. I think I will go play with toy soldiers, before I make myself sick by eating too much icing too fast! Love, Steve

I think God's plan of salvation is this, whoever confesses with his (or her) mouth the Lord Jesus, and believes in his heart that God raised Jesus from the dead will be saved. That is the substance. All the other jots and tittles are icing on the cake... very delicious icing, but it can make a person sick if he eats too much of it too fast because he mistakes the icing for the substance. I do that sometimes. Love, Steve

It's good to see you, too, JJ! Stories are what the moral imagination feeds on, and when a person internalizes his or her moral imagination, that's what becomes the person's conscience... the stories... not the grammatical minutia. The historical side of Christianity, and the stories about and by the people who wrote, have been instrumental in me being able to rebuild my faith, too. I'm working on finishing a degree I started over forty-two years ago. We just finished a module called "Leadership Seminar" in which we read a pamphlet called The Servant as Leader, written in 1970 by Robert K. Greenleaf. Here is a quote from pages 19 and 20: "Alfred North Whitehead once said, 'No language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a leap of imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience.' Nothing is meaningful until it is related to the hearer's own experience. One may hear the words, one may even remember and repeat them, as a computer does in the retrieval process. But meaning, a growth in experience as a result of receiving the communication, requires that the hearer supply the imaginative link from the listener's fund of experience to the abstract language symbols the speaker has used. As a leader (including teacher, coach, administrator) one must have facility in tempting the hearer into that leap of the imagination that connects the verbal concept into the hearer's own experience. The limitation on language, to the communicator, is that the hearer must make that leap of imagination. One of the arts of communicating is to say just enough to facilitate that leap. Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much. "The physicist and philosopher Percy Bridgeman takes another view of it when he says, 'No linguistic structure is capable of reproducing the full complexity of experience... The only feasible way of dealing with this is to push a particular verbal line of attack as far as it can go, and then switch to another verbal level which we might abandon when we have to... Many people... insist on a single self-consistent verbal scheme into which they try to force all experience. In doing this they create a purely verbal world in which they can live a pretty autonomous existence, fortified by the ability of many of their fellows to live in the same verbal world.' This, of course, is what makes a cult--a group of people who thus isolate themselves from the evolving mainstream. By staying within their own closed verbal world they forfeit the opportunity to lead others. One of the great tragedies is when a proven able leader becomes trapped in one of these closed verbal worlds and loses his ability to lead." Lots of food for thought there! Imagination is simply the mind's ability to form an image of a thing not present. The images have to come originally from a person's experience. Communication doesn't happen until the "words" spark a connection with the hearer's experience through imagination. Since every person's experience is different, words can NEVER spark identical meanings in two different people. How do these thoughts affect our assessments of "inerrancy"? The business about cults was written only three short years after Wierwille committed PFAL to film. Observe the last sentence, "One of the great tragedies is when a proven able leader becomes trapped in one of these closed verbal worlds and loses his ability to lead." Remind you of anybody? How about every one of Wierwille's would be successors, both at the original root and in the splinter groups? It reminds me of me. Love, Steve

"weak Christians"... "spectator Christians" HAH!!!!! Wednesday night I went to "Men's Fraternity" at a local church. The group has been going through a workbook on "Authentic Manhood." Wednesday night the instructor scrapped the workbook and launched into a spontaneous discourse on the exercise of faith it had been to raise his children when they were teen-agers. By the time he was finished, it was one of the most touching and moving expositions of God's love for me that I have ever heard. Love, Steve

One of the beautiful things you've done with your posts, Bob, is to demonstrate for me what a wide range of opinion is subsumed under the single word "inerrancy." Here's where I currently stand on the issue. I think the primary way that God communicates with people is by way of subjective inspiration through His spirit (Spirit? I'm not sure where I currently stand on capitalizing "spirit"). I think the things that have been written about God (the Scripture? Scriptures? scripture?) can be used by God as an objective, secondary witness to either confirm or deny things I think He might be trying to communicate to me. The question that has driven me since leaving CES has not been "What was actually written in the original autographs?" but rather "What did this mean to the people who originally wrote and read it?" "Inspiration and the inerrancy of Scripture A Believers discussion of what to do with Holy Writ" What an example of the limitations of writing (not that I think this particular thread title is Holy)! You see, the context tells me that the word "Believers" is intended as a possessive, though it lacks an apostrophe that would definitely make it so. The omission of the apostrophe opens to question whether the word "Believers" is singular or plural. Does the indefinite article "A" refer to "Believers" or to "discussion"? Is this thread a singular-believer's (presumably Bob's) discussion of what to do with Holy Writ, or is it a multiple-believers' discussion? On the surface, the previous paragraph may look like a series of frivolous questions, but consider this, in antiquity the written part of a letter did not constitute the whole of the letter. It was an age of almost universal illiteracy. When Phoebe delivered Paul's letter to the Romans, she didn't have them sign for a registered envelope, and then just leave. She read the letter out loud to the congregation(s). There were no mikes or speakers in antiquity. There were no public address systems. Classical rhetoricians had developed a standard system of exaggerated inflections and gestures to help communicate the meaning to those members of the audience who were at the very edge of hearing distance. When Phoebe delivered Paul's letter to the Romans, she didn't read it the way we might today. It was more of an operatic performance, with stock inflections and stock gestures to make the meanings clear. To the Romans, and to Paul, the letter was not just the written part, but the whole performance. Paul probably rehearsed Phoebe before she left, to make sure she communicated what he wanted. The written part of the letter was just the "score" for Phoebe to follow as she performed. If anybody wants to read more about this, I recommend "Books and Readers in the Early Church" by Harry Y. Gamble (1995). After Phoebe left, the congregation(s) at Rome preserved and copied the written potion of Paul's letter, but as the generation who had heard Phoebe's performance died out, the clarifications of the inflections and gestures were lost. How many questions arise in our interpretation of the title of this thread because one apostrophe is missing? In antiquity there WEREN'T any apostrophes! There weren't even any spaces between the words! Love, Steve

I second soul searcher in thanking you for your post, geisha! In the early days of CES, I was on the Dialogue staff and I helped proof read some of the books John, John and Mark put out. I compiled the index for one of them, I think it was "Is there Death After Life?" They gave me a typescript of "Don't Blame God" to proof, and it just about killed any enthusiasm I had previously had for CES "research." If I remember rightly, it was while they were working on "Don't Blame God" that they came up with the wonderful idea that God can't have foreknowledge, because if He did, that would make Him responsible for evil. Wierwille taught that the passages in the Bible that seem to indicate God does unpleasant things were simply "idiom of permission" or weren't addressed to Christians. CES took those teachings to another order of magnitude with all sorts of tortured rationalizations. I think they believed their teachings about "Don't Blame God" were major, if not the most important, selling points for their class, "Introduction to God's Heart." CES ran into big problems with their God's lack of foreknowledge. How can we rely on the accuracy of prophecy if God doesn't have foreknowledge? On what foundation does our hope for the future rest? They fell back on the old feature of determinism, if you could know where all the particles in the universe were located at a given moment, and you could know how they were moving, you could extrapolate everything that had ever happened since the beginning, and everything that will ever happen until the end. They concluded that God's omniscience doesn't depend on foreknowledge, but rather on being aware of where all the particles are, and how they are moving. But... that raises two other problems, one physical, the other theological. The physical problem arises from the truth that the quantum-mechanical model of the universe, which actually works on scales where the deterministic classical-mechanical model doesn't, eliminates determinism at a fundamental level. The theological problem arises because, if the universe is sufficiently deterministic for God to predict that some guys are going to be rolling dice over Jesus' coat a thousand years before it happens, how can it be said that human beings have any meaningful degree of free will? CES posited that human beings DO have free will, but there are enough deterministic factors in play for God to deliver accurate prophecies. In essence, they simply denied that a contradiction exists. They didn't comprehend how far their rationalizations had taken them from physical and Biblical actuality. In my opinion, the CES rationalizations have turned their God into a Pillsbury Doughboy (punch him in the stomach, and he just giggles), perpetually on the ropes at the mercy of a nearly omnipotent devil. To say God can't have foreknowledge of an uncertain universe is to limit God's point of view to that of man, a whopping diminution. I would rather have a God who is responsible for evil than a God who is irresponsible. Love, Steve

So there I was... I wasn't just surrounded by twiggies... I WAS one! Group-thinker, extraordinaire. A couple of years after I took PFAL, I went WOW to Tucson in the 40th Anniversary Wave. After that, I coordinated a twig for two years, and then went into the 16th Corps. I was in residence at Gunnison on the Corps Night when CG33r read "The Passing of A Patriarch". Coincidentally, my Pop had a massive stroke, and at the end of the block a few days later, I dropped from the 16th Corps and went home to help take care of him. My home is in Indiana, and I was able to get over to headquarters frequently, so I had a ringside seat to watch the implosion during the early fog years. I disassociated from TWI in 1986 when I found out about the sexual predation from a girl I knew who had experienced it firsthand. But I went to the ROA in '87 and took whoever I could out to the woods to tell them the truth about what was going on. That was my last involvement with The Way International. When JAL came back to Indy in the late-'80s, I started attending his early CES functions. In the early days of CES, John, John and Mark were willing to re-examine the things we had been taught in TWI. They rejected the law of believing as turning God into a vending machine. They recovered some appreciation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But they out Weirwille-ed Wierwille with "Don't Blame God." I slumped back into the same sort of passive acceptance I had experienced in TWI. Then came Momentus. About a year after I took the Momentus training, a few people started speaking frankly about the horrors they had suffered as a result, and I recognized elements of my own experience. It dawned on us that we hadn't suffered because WE had been screwed up, but because MOMENTUS was screwed up. When we brought this to the attention of the leaders of CES, they seemed incredibly blind to common sense, and the havoc they were wreaking on their followers lives. I had to leave CES in about '95. The Who's song "Won't Be Fooled Again" took on a lot of significance for a number of us. I haven't been closely associated with any religious organization since, though I did teach humane letters to seventh-graders for five years at an interdenominational school. That was a lot of fun, and we faculty members enjoyed discussing the things of God while agreeing to disagree. Right now, I don't think there's a Christian group on the face of the earth that wouldn't consider me to be a heretic in one way or another. A few years back, I read a book called "The Origins of Stoic Cosmology" by David E. Hahm and found out that Stoicism was the default popular philosophy in the Greco-Roman world from about 300 BC to about 200 AD. During the past couple of years, I've been reading Augustine, looking for the neo-platonism HE took for granted. The other day, I learned about a book called "Paul and the Stoics" by Troels Engberg-Pederson, and I ordered a copy. I'm waiting breathlessly for it to arrive. But enough about me. Love, Steve

In this post, I'm going to talk about the relationship I had with God before I got involved with TWI, not as any sort of boasting, but because there were a number of things I had learned BEFORE I had ever heard of The Way International. And those things influenced both what I thought of TWI while in, and some of the things I've had to flush from my mind since. I was not a particulary religious youth, but I went to a denominational college because it was located in my home town and my Pop wouldn't have to pay extra for housing expenses. I didn't belong to the denomination, so I was one of the token heathen on campus, but I DID read the Bible as a result of course requirements. Even though I didn't understand or trust the Bible, I had read it as an adult. In 1973, at the age of 24, I came to the end of my rope. I was going crazy. I was by myself, sobbing. There was nothing I could change about the place where I was, the people around me, or even my own schedule or lifestyle, and I knew I was as close to the brink of going crazy as I had ever been. I was going to go crazy if something didn't change, and there was nothing outside myself I could change. I began to hyperventilate. Without any expectation of result, simply because it wasn't the only thing I hadn't already tried, I cried out "God help me..." And as I did so, I remembered reading a verse where Jesus had said he would do whatever we asked, if we asked in his name. So I finished up, "...in the name of Jesus Christ." Immediately, my breathing returned to normal, and I began a process I can describe only as God teaching me how to change the things that were in my heart. I believed in reincarnation at the time, and I thought of Jesus as an ascended master. I learned from a book called Real Magic that I could work magic through my believing, and that the paraphenalia of magic work as objects for focusing believing. I thought that I could sometimes get results using the name of Jesus Christ because it was operating as a focus. I also made it a habit to express thanksgiving when I prayed. For a time, I was working at a job that required fine manual dexterity. One day at work, I found myself getting so upset that my hands were trembling. I couldn't do the work. I needed to call my then-current girlfriend that evening, and I very well knew that we might break up as a result of the phone call. I took a break, went out back and paced around. As I paced, I talked to God. I said, "God, I don't know what's going to happen tonight, but I'm going to accept whatever happens as your will. Thank you in the name of Jesus Christ." Instantly I was inundated with peace, and all the anxiety was washed away. I was able to go back in and work. A couple of years later, in the fall of 1979, I was invited to a twig meeting and I went, out of curiosity. The young lady who did the teaching taught on Philippians 4:6&7, "Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." That teaching got me intrigued. I knew it was real and I knew it was spiritual, because I had experienced it out behind work that day. But that was the first time I had ever heard anybody teach anything I personally knew to be real and spiritual from THE BIBLE! It was like God tapping me on the shoulder and saying "There's something I want you to learn here, boy." One thing led to another, and I took PFAL in July of 1980. "Power of attorney" and "the law of believing" seemed (super)natural enough to me. My brother and I had been trying for a dozen or so years to figure out what happens to people when they die, and I found "the dead are not alive" revolutionary for my thinking. But it took me awhile before I bought into what Wierwille called the "integrity" of the Word of God. One day a few months after I had taken PFAL (I think about the same time I took the intermediate class), I was reading along in the Old Testament, and I noticed a particular word, and from the context I thought "I bet it's "thus-and-such". I looked it up, and found out it WAS "thus-and-such". That was the spine-tingling moment for me, when I sold out to The Way International. It's time for me to take my insulin again. More later tonight. Love, Steve

"The suggestion of a general is paramount to an order!" That used to bug me no end. TANTAMOUNT! The word is TANTAMOUNT, not paramount! Love, Steve

Thanks, RE, for inviting me over to this thread, and thank you too, Waysider, for helping me figure out how to get here. In this post, I don't want so much to tell you what my views on inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture are, but to lay the foundation for doing so by telling HOW I came to my current interest in the Bible. When I was a grade schooler, my Mom took us to Sunday school and church. Not every Sunday. Just often enough for me to be embarrassed that I hadn't known to memorize the verses the other kids were memorizing. She told us that we could make up our own minds about going when we reached junior high school (called "middle school" these days). I do remember listening to a sermon on Acts chapters one and two on one particular Sunday, and wondering what the heck was going on. It was a very small United Church of Christ congregation, and the minister was using the King James Version, so I was hearing about "the Holy Ghost". My expertise on ghosts at the time was derived from Casper the Friendly Ghost comic books. I knew Jesus had died not long before the beginning of the book of Acts, so I figured the Holy Ghost was Jesus' ghost come back to haunt the world. That was the extent of my theological thinking as a child. When I reached junior high, I stopped going to church. I also became very interested in the books of H.G. Wells, including his "Outline of History". There was no "History Channel" back then. Without even realizing what I was doing, I accepted the materialist view of life. When I went to college, I attended a denominational school, not because of any denominational affiliation, but because it was located in my home town and my Dad wouldn't have to pay housing expenses. As a degree requirement I had to pass nine hours of religion courses. I took three hours of Old Testament and three hours of New Testament. Those classes were pretty tolerable. For the most part, we simply read the Bible. The instructor, Dr. Marie Strong, bless her memory, taught a bunch of stuff about "J", "P", "E" and "D", and I figured the Bible must have been put together by an insane editor. (I learned some important life-lessons from Dr. Strong, though, in her side stories to the lectures!) Next, I took three hours of Christian Beliefs, but I flunked that class for arguing with the instructor. I had to make up three hours, so I took Biblical Archaeology. That was one of the best classes I ever took! I was an art major, and I learned more about what art is from that archaeology class than from all my art apprish classes combined. Biblical Archaeology was taught by a crusty old Dutch professor who had been hauled off to Berlin as a boy to work as a slave in a Nazi bakery. He could make the Bible stories about the Assyrians LIVE! When birthdays were pulled in the first draft lottery in 1969, mine came up #8. I knew I was gonna go, so I enlisted in the Navy. (I am presently working to finish a bachelors degree, all these decades later.) I came away from that first round of college thinking that Jesus had said some pretty profound things. I had read the Bible as an adult, but I didn't understand or trust it. My materialism had been shaken by then, and I started studying Edgar Cayce. I thought of Jesus as just another one of the ascended masters. A ouija board told me that I was Jesus reincarnated, but I KNEW that was hogwash... (I'm not going to be able to tell everything I have to tell in one sitting. It's time to take my insulin and give the cat his shot, too, so I'll come back later and finish this. After that, I will be able to launch into the topic of inspiration and inerrancy along with the rest of you) Love, Steve

Cool! I was away from Greasespot for a time and the format was changed. When I scrolled to the "archived" stuff at the end of "About the Way" in the new format, I thought that was "all she wrote". I had been in the "About the Way" section instead the forums homepage. Thanks, Waysider! Love, Steve