waysider

This is a statement that was made recently on another thread regarding people who were adversely affected by the depraved lifestyle of VPW. ********************************** "You see we did not select VPW to "put it all together" and distribute it around the world. God selected Dr to get the job done and it got done. Anyone hurt in the process would have probably gotten hurt some other way, and either way God is there to help them get healed if they want it." *********************************** I'm personally at a loss to understand the sort of rationalization it would take to accept this statement. Any comments?

I was never involved with any splinter, though the last twig I attended was a bit on the rogue side in regards to "towing the line". I have often said, and this is, of course, just opinion, that the lifestyle that evolved from our involvement played, perhaps, a larger role in our destinies than the actual scriptural tenets we adhered to, such as "four crucified", "Jesus Christ is not God", etc. Something that I think was overlooked in The Way was the reason believers met as they did in the first (and second and third) centuries. There is speculation as to the actual reasons but, for all intents and purposes, it can probably be summed up as "necessity". They really had nowhere else to meet. Couple that with the persecution and a pattern begins to evolve. These "churches" were autonomous. They didn't emanate from a central location. Early groups during "The Jesus Movement" bore some similarity in that, they too, were decentralized. They had few formal meeting centers and thus they enjoyed a level of autonomy. And, in fact, there were pockets of groups, twigs, inside The Way in the earlier days that were operating in a similar manner. Wierwille changed all that. He centralized everything at HQ. Yes, we continued to meet in homes. We weren't however, "home fellowships" in a strict sense. We were "cells" of a centralized organization. This is one of the biggest realization I garnered from my Fellow Laborer experience. Here we were, living in a commune, pretending to be replicating the lifestyle of the first century "believers" when, in reality, we were living a contradiction. Every move we made was dictated from the outside. That's not how the church existed in the first century. From what I have observed, many of these so-called splinter groups favor the home meeting format as well but are really nothing more than a perpetuation of the cell group structure. If that's what they really want, more power to them. I think people need to take an honest look, though, at what they call "home fellowships" and see if that is an accurate description before they decide to declare allegiance.

50 years ago

Chance--Man On A Mission

Which of these are you handing out?

Sorry, Twinkie It's amazing how these simple critters can bring so much pleasure to our lives.

Here is an example of a question that would warrant a short answer. QUOTE (Mike @ Jan 30 2009, 12:19 PM) * Christ formed within is Christ in you THE GLORY, whereas pneuma hagion is only the token, the hope of glory to come. It came. My response Reference? **************************** Care to explain why you think that would require a lengthy answer? Mike's answers aren't short because he doesn't want them to be short. He dodges the questions. He takes a simple question and responds with lengthy jibber-jabber that makes no logical sense in context. Then he belittles his audience by telling them they are either suffering from attention deficiency or just not smart enough or caring enough or their memories are faulty, or they lack proper study skills or they're not spiritually sharp enough to get "it", whatever "it" is. Then he cries, "Boo Hoo, poor me, I'm living a life of martyrdom for such a noble cause. Nobody understands me." Like the old saying goes, "You made your bed, now sleep in it." It's really just that simple.

-------------Da Boss

How can I know if I want his answers or not if he never brings them out in the open? Am I bothering him? I don't think so. He is, after all, the one who continues to broadcast and re-broadcast his PFAL infomercial. Why advertise if you don't expect anyone to respond? Mike spends inordinate volumes of time and space pitching his product when he could simply answer a few simple questions and be done with it. I don't feel the least bit of sympathy. If he feels it's taking too much time, maybe he should rethink his priorities and be a bit less evasive. Now what would you give for it? Wait!!------There's more.

My questions have all been very straightforward. They are the type of questions that require short and to the point answers. Perhaps if Mike didn't devote page after page after page to dodging them, he would have the time to answer them.

You dodged my question---again. (Not that I'm surprised.) My question was---"What does PFAL say we should expect of our ministers and teachers?", not how they are chosen? You're the guy who says he knows more about PFAL than all of us. Surely this should be easy-------AND SHORT!

He sounds like someone I would like to have known.

I don't need a scripture to tell me the man was unrepentant. His lifestyle was a manifestation of his attitude toward repentance. But since you insist: As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

Ya know, I'm just curious. What does PFAL say we should expect of our ministers and teachers? Seems like we ought to go there and see if it's going to be our "only rule---".

Pardon me for saying so, Mike, but that's a wagon full of equine excrement. The class is riddled with errors, not just disagreements over doctrine, real honest to goodness errors. You dodge and dart because you really have no genuine answers. I used to have a U.S. History teacher who demanded answers be given loudly and clearly. He was fond of saying, "When in doubt, mumble." Maybe we could rephrase that to, "When in doubt, dodge and dart." Your sole purpose in posting here is to present what is, in essence, an "info-mmercial" for PFAL. If someone is paying you to sell this garbage, I recommend you get the money up front and stash it in a secret bank account before your customers discover what a poison filled product you've been pitching.

Maybe you could just post a synopsis.

Define "soon", please

Was it buried, lost, dismembered or dead, Mike? Poop or get off the potty chair.

So now you are proposing that the word was DEAD? That has a final sort of tone. If it was DEAD, how did Bullinger, Stiles, Leonard, etc. bring back to life the portions they contributed to Wierwille's PFAL?

Expanding one's view beyond a narrow, error filled Bible class would hardly qualify as getting bogged down with a few trees. In fact, it would seem that it might even increase one's ability to see the whole forest.

The integrity of Phil is always at stake!

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/medical/a/aa051601a.htm Jacobson's Organ and the Sixth Sense Human Extrasensory Perception? By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com See More About: * vomeronasal organ * esp * flehmen reaction * sense of smell Traditionally humans have been thought to come equipped with five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Animals possess several extra senses, including altered vision and hearing, echolocation, electric and/or magnetic field detection, and supplementary chemical detection senses. In addition to taste and smell, most vertebrates use Jacobson's organ (also termed the vomeronasal organ and vomeronasal pit) to detect trace quantities of chemicals. While snakes and other reptiles flick substances into Jacobson's organ with their tongues, several mammals (e.g., cats) exhibit the Flehmen reaction. When 'Flehmening', an animal appears to sneer as it curls its upper lip to better expose the twin vomeronasal organs for chemical sensing. In mammals, Jacobson's organ is used not simply to identify minute quantities of chemicals, but also for subtle communication between other members of the same species, through the emission and reception of chemical signals called pheromones. In the 1800s, Danish physician L. Jacobson detected structures in a patient's nose that became termed 'Jacobson's organ' (although the organ was actually first reported in humans by F. Ruysch in 1703). Since its discovery, comparisons of human and animal embryos led scientists to conclude that Jacobson's organ in humans corresponded to the pits in snakes and vomeronasal organs in other mammals, but the organ was thought to be vestigial (no longer functional) in humans. While humans don't display the Flehmen reaction, recent studies have demonstrated that Jacobson's organ functions as in other mammals to detect pheromones and to sample low concentrations of certain non-human chemicals in air. There are indications that Jacobson's organ may be stimulated in pregnant women, perhaps partially accounting for an improved sense of smell during pregnancy and possibly implicated in morning sickness. Since extra-sensory perception or ESP is awareness of the world beyond the senses, it would be inappropriate to term this Sixth Sense 'extrasensory'. After all, the vomeronasal organ connects to the amygdala of the brain and relays information about the surroundings in essentially the same manner as any other sense. Like ESP, however, the sixth sense remains somewhat elusive and hard to describe.

Smells also retain an uncanny power to move us. A whiff of pipe tobacco, a particular perfume, or a long-forgotten scent can instantly conjure up scenes and emotions from the past. Many writers and artists have marveled at the haunting quality of such memories. In The Remembrance of Things Past, French novelist Marcel Proust described what happened to him after drinking a spoonful of tea in which he had soaked a piece of madeleine, a type of cake: "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," he wrote. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses...with no suggestion of its origin... "Suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was of a little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings...my Aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea....Immediately the old gray house on the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set...and the entire town, with its people and houses, gardens, church, and surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being from my cup of tea." Just seeing the madeleine had not brought back these memories, Proust noted. He needed to taste and smell it. "When nothing else subsists from the past," he wrote, "after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory." http://www.hhmi.org/senses/d110.html

Are there really only 5 senses?