waysider

I don't know if this is off topic. It seems like it is somehow related, at least to me. When I finally came to accept that I had been duped, I wasn't angry or bitter. On the contrary, I felt a sense of relief. It suddenly all made sense to me. I've said before, I regret anything and everything I did that caused someone to take the class or become involved with The Way. I apologize for that. I was never a mean or overbearing type of person, before, during or after my involvement. This, in itself, created quite a bit of inner conflict for me because I couldn't bring myself to do some of the things TWI required of me, such as expel someone from the class for minor tardiness infractions without first considering their personal circumstances. There are lots of other examples, of course. I think we all have several we could cite without me being specific. On a related note: We are all ultimately responsible for our own actions. However, and I've said this many times, sometimes those actions were the result of pretense and fraud. My often cited analogy is this: You want to buy a used car so you shop for the best deal. Mileage is a big deciding factor for you. You find one that fits your requirements and it has low mileage so you buy it. The decision was yours. Later, you discover that the seller had doctored the odometer to give a false, low reading. They must share in the responsibility for the decision you made. Lots of us became involved with The Way or the various training programs because we based our decisions on information that was fraudulently presented to us by the organization. Understanding how it all blends together is what alleviates the anger and bitterness and brings the sense of relief.

Not only did VP not have scriptural references, he flat out said, "I can't show this to you in the Bible, you'll just have to trust me. This is what Father showed me." That may not be an exact quote but I'd bet you it's pretty darn close. So, there it was , a massive red flag that none of us apparently gave much notice. It just sat there like a duck. BTW, in the class I remember, it involved a bit more than masturbation. I've posted it before and it drew an "Ewwwww!" response.

No one has asked to see your DD214, MRAP. That's not how this place works.

I certainly didn't mean to insult you. I'm merely pointing out that what you are promoting is heavily invested in inerrancy, Theopneustos, dispensationalism, etc. In other words, the core tenets of Way Theology. These are the kinds of things that fuel the tendencies toward contortions. If you so desire, pick one and discuss it or refer to a previous thread where such subjects have been explored individually, many in great detail.

It's a fluid state of being. Almost no one experienced simply one or the other and stayed around The Way for any length of time. Recognizing that and how those states of being influenced your life is an important part of personal growth.

I'm not sure you realize it but what you did here and elsewhere on this thread is rephrase session #1 (and other sections) of PFAL...... Inerrancy, God-Breathed, dispensations, private interpretation, guaranteed salvation("I didn't say it, you did"...VPW)....Not unique to The Way but certainly at the core of Way Theology.

Well, in case you're still wondering, he stated what he believed to be the answer to that question in Christian Family & Sex. You might want to review your class notes.

Seriously? Who's attacking you and how did you arrive at that opinion? The question has been answered several times in different ways. Topics will naturally weave in and out of focus as discussions progress. The most problematic off topic posts are the ones that intentionally attempt to derail the thread. If you have a problem with something drifting too far off topic, the proper thing to do is contact a moderator. Lengthy discussion of the discussion itself (meta discussion), rather than the topic, is also detrimental to the flow of a thread. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Yep.

"And whether or not anyone in this day and time is Christ's ultimately boils down to whether or not one believed (not merely thought, or guessed, or supposed, or said the words ...or anything else less than what it means to believe) in the death and resurrection of Christ." This is but one definition of what it means to be a Christian, one that was promoted heavily in the PFAL class and allows for dispensational thinking. To a large part of the world, though, a Christian is someone who assigns great value to the teachings of Christ and attempts to pattern his or her life in accordance with those teachings. Personally, I place more value on that than whether someone fleetingly believed Romans 10:9&10 and then reverted back to a life of debauchery. Most of what we call Christianity, today, isn't really based on Christ, it's based on the Pauline Epistles. Someplace along the journey, Jesus seems to have taken a back seat. If the only Biblical teaching we ever focused on was The Golden Rule we would have more than enough work to busy ourselves for the rest of our lives.

This is a bit of a tangent regarding viewing the source. There is a commonly held belief that being in the Way Corps gave participants the opportunity to learn at the the teachers feet (or however that saying goes). I'm sure that was the case for maybe the first or second Corps but, as it got bigger and bigger, that concept became a pipe dream. By the time I got to FellowLaborers in 1975 there were 50 of us. True, we saw the limb leader every day at dinner for 1/2 an hour but, other than that, we only saw him once a week at our weekly FL night, as he stood at the podium to "teach". More often than not, the "teaching" was nothing more than a butt chewing for what was perceived to be our endless shortfalls. Yes, you could schedule an appointment to speak with him in private if you felt the need. Do you have any concept of how inconvenient that was, given our housing was probably about 15 miles from limb HQ and our schedules were booked from 6:00 AM until midnight? And, the Way Corps was an infinitely larger scale operation. International HQ was less than hour away by air. Wierwille had a plane. We had a small airport about 15 minutes away that could have handled it easily. I was in the program for 2 years, graduated and went back for a third year. (I've told the story here before.) That's 3 years total. Do you know how many times Wierwille visited our program in those 3 years? Think of a goose and the shape of the eggs it lays. Yeah, never. So, please, put to rest the idea that people in the programs had opportunity to learn at the teachers feet. On a very limited basis, there may have been a kernel of truth in the early days. Mostly, though, it was just a hyped up sales gimmick to lure in the naive. edit: In a small sense, we were like soldiers. We weren't consumed with wining the war. We were just trying to stay alive for another day. Wierwille devised the battle plan. He was "the source".

"So there I was was, getting nowhere with my basketball career, while I watched far less talented players advance their careers by leaps and bounds. I said "God, give me something that will make me stand out and I promise to lead others to the greatness of The Hoop. Just like that, the ball jumped out of my hands and spun in a most unconventional manner. Through the hoop it went, as snow began to fill the arena. And that, keeds, is how the hook shot came to be."

Santa Claus will always be real to those who never dare to question his existence.

That's just what bullies do. They take credit for other peoples' accomplishments. Sometimes it's blatant, sometimes it's subliminal. People who haven't come to the realization you eventually came to might go to the grave thinking that topic originated with Rivenbark or, worse, that she was the recipient of divine inspiration.. Your effort to understand it was not at all wasted. It served to teach you a much more important lesson about yourself and about the importance of validating sources. You learned from it. Those whose opinions remain the same, apparently, did not. Who's the winner?

Here's a problem that coexists with the idea of everything having to fit. (Or, maybe it's merely another facet of the same problem. I'm not sure.) Members of the inerrant camp are of the opinion that every individual word included in "THE WORD" must have originated directly from a divine source, as indicated in II Timothy 2:15. According to this line of thinking, God must have had some obvious or hidden motive in what He said, where He said it, how He said it and so forth. This assumes that the authorship was unquestionably divine. It's a major stumbling block. It's probably tripped up more people than we can ever imagine. As long as the stumbling block remains, nothing will ever truly "fit" in the way that advocates of inerrancy insist it should. People will continue to play Biblical Twister, Scriptural Pickup Stix, Divine Dominoes and Jehovah Jenga until the ends of the earth. In doing so, they may be be missing the forest for the trees. Ironically, people don't seem to have this problem when considering the lessons of Aesop or other writers of mythical works. They enjoy the freedom to explore outside the confines of perfection. Biblical students will too often deny themselves that luxury. It's a pity, really.

The lucky ones, that is.

......... But you could return to your old community if you were from an elite group that was influential or likely to bring in big money or bring in "big" names or you were part of one of the families that were highly connected in TWI. There was always a trophy mentality in The Way. "If we could just get (big sports/music/film star) to take the class, people will be lining up to sign The Green Card." It's a popular sales technique. We see it all around us. Some big name, popular star uses a particular product so "it must be good". They got special treatment in The Way. It was part of the marketing plan.

This should have been on The Green Card. "Enables you to trade your spirituality for a pot of beans."

I didn't see any indication of that. But, then, I can't really ask, can I?

Sorry, I should have been a bit clearer. I was referring to the guy who runs that Way of 21st Century site. Geeze, it's like he copied the gas pumps story and just changed the incidentals.

I just decided to look up a guy on facebook from the old days, before I decided to "move up the ladder". Something on his wall/page or whatever that thing is called said something along the lines of "Don't even bother to contact me unless you hold the teachings of VPW in highest regard." Yikes! You tell me..... victim or oppressor?

"(That being said, probably no one will care (or dare) to answer, but these are the kind of questions that I have pondered myself for many years." Take his prattle out of a religious context and his narcissism becomes much clearer. The "I'm not worthy" schtick gets a bit tiresome at this point in my life.

PFAL is the herpes virus of the religious field. It seems to disappear for a while and then...BAM!... there it is again.

Responding to this: "I am quite certain this forum thread will be offensive to some (depends on your circle quad) because some folks out there held corp folk in highest esteem (in some ways I still do) and some loathe corp folk just like I do. What I like most about corp folk is that mostly but not absolutely can validate the teachings of vpw and that includes all the things he took from folks like Bullinger, etc. but you would have to post on the doctrinal forum to do that which seems below some corp folk level. Yes, I recently learned about levels here on GSC, I was elated to learn I was down there in doctrinal being spoon fed, I am ignorant having not sat at the feet of the master so ask and listen on the most stupid things I am allowed to ask; guess I caught the elevator. You see, one of the primary things a person leaving twi wants to know is what is crap and what was true." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was never in the Corps. I was in a program called FellowLaborers. FellowLaborers, for those who don't know, was sometimes referred to as the bastard stepchild of the Corps. We were in-rez at Limb Hq for 2 years and followed the same set of principles as the Way Corps. We lived communally in a block of rental townhouses. (~50 participants/8 townhouses) One of the major differences between the Corps and FellowLaborers was that we were NOT allowed to have sponsors. We had to hold down full time secular jobs, in addition to our duties as FellowLaborers, and pay our own way. We had a housing fund, which covered rent and utilities, a "Manna" fund to cover the cost of our food co-op (can't pay=can't eat), a "household fund", which covered the cost of incidentals for our townhouses (6 to a townhouse), such as toilet paper, dish soap and various other exciting things. We also had personal expenses such as laundry, personal clothing, gasoline and the like. We had to ABS and were technically required to sponsor someone in the Corps. (I say technically because no one ever had much left over for such a requirement so it was virtually winked at if someone couldn't cover their pledge.) OK, with that out of the way, here's my point. People who weren't in the program seemed to think we were being exposed to some kind of in-depth Biblical insight, studying the meat of the word and all that kind of jazz. Well, the truth is, we probably read the Bible even less than you folks in the local twigs. Who had time? We were too busy weeding our communal garden, making mayonnaise from scratch or mixing huge batches of familia. We had no time to spend on any "in-depth" research. We read and reread and re-reread the same old stuff everybody else read (blue book, PFAL collaterals,etc) When we had our weekly teaching night, it was hit or miss on subject matter and usually pretty much focused on how much we had "screwed up" the previous week. We were never quite good enough. We weren't special. We weren't elite. People in our hometowns may have thought we were but, truly, we were not. We were just a misguided bunch of schmoes, trying to make it from one day to the next, with precious little time or wakefulness to ever look at the bigger picture. I can't speak for the Corps experience. I suspect there are fundamental similarities. So, please, stop thinking program participants have an inside scoop and can bring a more profound and scholastic understanding to the discussion, especially on doctrinal issues. Some can, of course. But, that's because of what they have to offer as individuals, not because the programs made them excel. I hope that made some sense.