waysider

We have a doctrinal forum for discussing such matters.

If I perceive a rock to be a jelly doughnut, it doesn't change the rock one little bit. The only thing that changes is my perception of it. Perception is everything.

Staged. And they KNEW it. With us, though, (rank and file) it's only in retrospect that we begin to comprehend how widespread the staging was.

How about when we sang "I Love You, Love You, Love You" to every guest who passed through our portals. We didn't know them from Adam but we were sure we loved them. edit: spelling

It's a matter of opinion. At least it wasn't plagiarized.

Your professor might have fared a little better if he had done a bit of etymological research before passing this off as "history".. HERE BTW. Why is it weird that he was German? According to the U.S. Census, Germans and German Americans make up the largest ancestry group in The United States.

Yeah, I see where you are going. You're saying we were athletes and thereby should have profited from yelling. There are several problems with that. The first, and not the least of which, is that the whole "athletes" metaphor being substituted for the warfare metaphor is not scripturally sound. Secondly, you are drawing a comparison between modern day sports culture and whatever it was they were doing in ancient Rome. Do I need to elaborate beyond this?

You weren't alone in that respect, I can assure you. Were there ever times when you might have doubted it's veracity, if even for a brief, glancing moment?

Scripted. For sure. What I'm looking for here are those moments when you may have had a sudden realization you were part of a scripted event. Remember a movie called The Truman Show? It (The TV show within the movie) wasn't really entirely scripted but the idea is similar. Here's a brief overview: "In this movie, Truman is a man whose life is a fake one... The place he lives is in fact a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors who play their roles in the most popular TV-series in the world: The Truman Show. Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited. Until one day... he finds out everything. Will he react?" (SOURCE) The other day, there was talk on another thread about Jesus Freaks and The Jesus Movement. I looked at a few things on YouTube that caused me to reflect on my own distant past. WARNING! If you look at any of it closely enough, it's almost certain to evoke some type of reaction.

Self delusion...yeah...I think that's it. When you act in a stage play, you practice delusion. But you're only deluding the audience, not yourself. Oh, sure, with method acting you temporarily delude yourself but, deep inside there is still some sort of line of demarcation. With self delusion, you cross that line. And sometimes when you are behaving under self delusion, you have moments of awareness, even if only briefly, that you look back across that line and wonder if you are really "you". I had one of those moments in FellowLaborers. One day I looked in the mirror and wondered how on earth I went from being a young man with a guitar, busking in a public park, to this person who had forsaken his dreams and went to live a completely different lifestyle in a far-away commune. Like looking into the mirror and seeing someone else look back at me. How did I get here? Who have I become? That's what I'm talking about.

Isn't dorkiness really an evolutionary process, moving from one phase into the next?

Aside from repeated reference to the word "perception", this has no bearing on the concept of this thread.

When you were in The Way, did you ever feel like you were a character in some sort of stage production? By that I mean, during the PFAL class (as a grad) there were specific cues you played off of to laugh or feign excitement. It was like acting in a play......"and the sign said,'millions now smoking'..... Hahahahahaha" Is this making any sense? OK, I'll try this.... Suppose I tell you a joke about a guy who walks into a bar and sees a midget on a barstool...You think it's funny...You laugh...Now I tell you the exact same joke, with the exact same delivery, 53 more times...Is it still funny? So, then, if laughter is not a required part of the script, why do you laugh?

I think a lot of students thought PLAF (The Wonder Class) was boring but were afraid to admit it for fear of being the dissenting voice.

I heard this many, many times. In fact, there is a poster that hasn't been here for a while who believes that PFAL replaced the Bible and that when Christ returns he will be holding a PFAL book in his right hand..

Is he JP's kid?

Wasn't Magoo that short-sighted guy who couldn't see reality, though he looked straight at it?

More like the elephant in the parlor. We had to be coached to laugh at jokes that weren't even funny the first time and act "amazed" at the teacher's revelations.

Sounds like a classic case of ."Us, and them And after all, we're only ordinary men. Me, and you. God only knows it's not what we would choose to do."

Yes, there are people who think this. My personal opinion is that the Jesus hippie movement was a cultural reaction to current events and conditions of a turbulent era..

Things in the past seem dorky because we've outgrown them.....most of us, anyway.

Then again, maybe he's hip to the reality and sees it as a chance to ride the gravy train.

Yep. MLM 101 (No student left behind)

It must suck being , having to relive that one high-school-football glory moment over and over and over.....