potato

I heard the lies first hand, and in many cases, the "other side" of the story directly from the person who left. the particular case where the RC lied about a couple who left, I did hear about their reason from a mutual friend, but I witnessed their reason for leaving directly, because the RC told a lot of lies and is pretty much a back-biting bastard.

Ham, here you go: it's hoity-toity: http://www.snopes.com/language/foreign/hoity.asp

this is a pretty accurate assessment of what it was like when I left. leadership will lie about you once you're gone... I don't know what they said about me, I didn't try to find out. I just heard enough crap about other people who confronted leaders about lying to people, who walked away when it didn't change. leaders said the cop-outs loved money, or their marriage was a mess because the wife was running it. even in the less confrontational, "more loving" twi, I was treated pretty badly during my divorce. people made veiled accusations, I was shunned when I asked for help taking care of my kids so I could work. the RC told me not to report physical abuse, but by law he was required to because a child was hurt. same guy who spread lies about people who confronted him about lying. there's no love there. I went to a different area and heard one of the leaders spouting off about why twi doesn't need the internet to reach people. same stuff that came out of lcm's mouth. twi isn't even a cistern. it's a cesspool.

why do you write in blue, WD? it does make your text harder to read.

I think I get you. the meek love admonition, so that they'll grow in the lord. if you didn't love it, you weren't meek. so you talked yourself into loving it no matter how you really felt, or how sick you felt at the time. those were just devil spirits tempting you to doubt the word, right? so tell them to get lost, and convince yourself that the evil playing out in front of your face is really the good.

thank you :) nah, I really asked thinking about it for everyone in general. things get knocked around on the board sometimes as if everyone involved in the discussion is christian, but I was actually interested in insight from anyone, from any pov. Mike's long informercials kept it centered on what pfal grads and christians should believe, which IMO kinda muddied the waters of what could be a nice open discussion. I think this would apply to any set of standards. if you live by any rule set, if you think at all, understanding should grow.

his position was that they should have been aborted. people who became disabled were another thing altogether, if they couldn't get healed it was their fault, but he had a lot of hate toward imperfect people who should have been aborted corrupting the gene pool.

does this just apply to christians? what about people who don't believe in god? the flaw I see in this line of reasoning is that who's to judge what the "sure source" is, especially for all humanity? and won't the standard evolve as your understanding of it does? I know that truth does not change for god, but none of us are as smart as god, or can be as sure as god, so out of necessity our concepts of god must evolve as we consider the sources, learn from the sources, and adjust our rule-sets according to what we've learned, hopefully always for the better.

he said a lot of violent, sadistic things like that about homosexuals. I lived in the 250 mile radius for years, and heard it enough to understand now what a hateful person he was toward anyone not as beautiful and perfect as he was. he said a lot of nasty things about disabled people as well.

thing is, the "word" was supposed to make us stronger. the "ministry" was supposed to be a safe haven. I'd already been hurt. spent time in therapy, was making good, positive changes in my life. the "promises" of god attracted me because I wanted to be stronger, serve god, and be around people who lived a loving lifestyle. twi was just not the place to find that, and the damage done by leadership put me in a place worse than I'd come from. so yeah, life hurts sometimes, but I find that in post-twi, now that I'm in a place where I've learned to think for myself, I handle the hurt better and I'm not in constant fear of someone melting my face over trivialities. I'm better equipped to handle the tough things in life now that I've shed the false trappings of pretended strength we were taught in twi.

probably depends on where you are, but plenty of A's are still tolerated and in fact are in key leadership positions. I just left in 2006, so I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. it's still the same "ministry" as it was when lcm took it over, it's just that now the upper echelon doesn't care as much about what people do because they have all the abs they need to have a comfy retirement. twi is a big joke, especially from the pov of "research ministry".

thanks you guys. I would have done it myself if I hadn't had to fly out the door, and I would have hated to see that post disappear before it could be discussed. so gawd (watch out, wayspeak in use) in his foreknowledge knew that women would be raped and drugged and the time and money of good-hearted people would used to buy toys for the man of gawd, so it MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN VPW since it was going to happen anyway, and gawd would heal them if they wanted it and were meek enough so it's ok, and we all gotta remember that AT LEAST WE GOT "THE WORD" because obviously, only vpw had the right heart to receive what gawd had to tell him. excuse me while I puke.

yep. I saw plenty and was too afraid to speak up and be noticed. lots of people felt that way. the brave ones left in the night. the lucky ones got thrown out. the rest of us hoped we weren't the next target while pretending we had it all together. we hid our catholic alliances, homosexual sympathies, liberal sentiments, and humanitarian tendencies, until we believed we weren't one of those people and that we were living the more abundant life.

Mike, herein lies the big issue. most of us moved beyond PFAL defining our every thought. there is no need to bring it back to the class, and that realization was what prompted me to start this thread. we've all had to rethink the doctrines of vpw, lcm and twi in general. I don't really care at this point what vpw has said is necessary, because I don't respect his teachings. I am, however, interested in hearing what other people have learned in their personal lives about whether one rule applies to them and how. you haven't shared a single thing about how having one rule has benefited you (at least not that I noticed, all I've seen are you charging us with how much we should get back to what we were tautht). I agree with sirguessalot, perhaps a blog would be more your thing, then you can distill some of you voluminous points down to points that won't just sound like you're regurgitating vpw. I'd also love to see this, perhaps as a new thread. Shaz, if you'd quote the post where Mike said those things about the victims getting it from someone other than vpw if he hadn't abused them, I'd sure love to see a thread on that because I have plenty to say about how people end up victimized by sharks trolling for victims and setting themselves up as saviors to get access to them.

please refer to godel's incompleteness theorem. I refuse to measure the validity of "one rule" within the system that asserts its necessity.

Mike, you're again engaging in circular reasoning. what we were taught on "one rule" is only valid if it's true. you can't prove it's true. therefore you can't use "what we were taught" to demonstrate that Mark's offerings are invalid.

I would like to submit at this time that vpw's obvious psychological issues compelled him to negate the validity of internal debate because of his own discomfort with it, and to construct an artificial system requiring submission to a single source that replaces multiple centers of reference (or learning). such a system eliminates the need for critical thinking. it eliminates the need to study other points of view. very convenient for the lazy.

"vpw made it live for me through pfal. because it lives for me, pfal must be true. because pfal is true, it must be god-breathed." very, very subjective judgment. that would be nice. I'm not going to read pfal again. oh, and thanks to those of you who've tried to bring that thread back wherever it wandered off to.

I think that is where twi utterly failed. vpw's "one rule for faith and practice", his interpretation of the bible rolled in with "special revelation" that set him up as a despot, failed to rest squarely on the two rules of jesus, the cornerstone of christian faith.

rascal, I don't think I've ever disagreed with you before, but I can't help but speak out about this. sirguessalot did not attack Steve, he called him on the carpet because Steve crossed a line. this is not a thread about whether we should be christian or not. I'm not a christian, so I found Steve's spirit warning to sirguessalot even more offensive than his pronouncement the Mike is possessed. I think Mike is full of it, and yes I did mention channeling because the process that Mike was witnessed describing sounds more like channeling than anything else, but I'm not going to judge channeling here. I'm not here to judge people for being christian, being your type of christian, or for not being christian. again, I think this was way over the top. sirguessalot didn't blast anyone for their beliefs, and yes he's into some weird stuff, but so am I and I've learned some things from him that have really helped me on my path to letting go of the 20 years I spent in twi. when it comes right down to it, christian faith is weird and illogical and it would be nice to discuss things from the point of view that no 2 of use are going to agree on every point. that freedom is precious to me. I've been thinking about these things a lot lately as well. there will always be things we don't understand. some solutions seem right at the moment then are replaced with better theories. understanding evolves. the concept of multiple rules doesn't make as much sense to me as sirguessalot's "rule-set" concept. it allows for evolving understanding so is perfect for someone like me who plans to learn and grow all my life.

Steve, I hope you'll try to remember that not everyone here is christian. the point of this thread is should we be bound by one rule of faith and practice as described by vpw in pfal, I wasn't interested in discussing the validity of core beliefs of christianity except as they relate to vpw's claim.

I find your advice laughable, considering how many revisions occurred in vpw's "only rule", plus the idea of a "premature rule"... what the hell would that be, anyway? is it like a premature baby that has to be hospitalized, or is it what happens to guys if they don't think about baseball? I suggest anyone who thinks they have all the answers is pretty arrogant, which is why it doesn't bother me at all to be a "work in progress" and spend my entire life considering differing points of view. my rule-set will adjust over time, as I learn more. thinking I've got all the answers would be limiting to growth. so, at this point, I think my original question, "is having ONE RULE for faith and practice necessary?" has been abundantly answered and the answer is NO, one is under no obligation to limit oneself to a single viewpoint or source of information, and in fact I'd go further and state that the more you limit yourself, the more likely you are to lose your ability to think critically.

I'm actually suspicious of the idea that lcm ever "loved" god. I suspect he was like my ex in that regard, always looking for someplace to fit in and impress people. the most important thing to my ex is that people admire him. that's why he loved twi. he got a lot of admiration for his level of "commitment" because he was more than willing to let others do his thinking for him. he started out narcissistic, and twi only made him worst. IMO, that's a more realistic view of lcm than hoping there's the redeemable spark of a former self that probably never existed.

I know there's no page 1 from my ONLY RULE because it's severely limiting to personal growth and dangerous to the self to cut yourself off from all ideas but those of a single man. my personal growth has been a bit like what sirguessalot described, comparing ideas and concepts from different sources and seeing where they overlap. therefore, posting a page 1 would be impossible, unless I sit down to write down what I've gleaned from the many sources, gone through the exercise of distilling and organizing, so I can discover which is page 1. I suppose you'd want citations, too, even though you don't require them of vpw, which would take solid weeks to track down, and I'm a bit busy doing volunteer work at the moment even if I wanted to bother with writing an ethics treatise for my personal use. Mike is one of the people on here who I wonder if he's channeling, and simply won't admit that's what he's doing because he's ashamed.

I'm not arguing whether jesus was JUST a man, or the son of god or whatever. what I'm saying is it's a stupid argument to discount the ability to use our brains and compare opinions just because we're human. you said: so I'm saying that if you say Steve isn't smart enough to find an error in something you deem to be objective by virtue of being written by vpw because "all men are liars", how can you uphold the validity of vpw's writings if vpw is a liar and by extension using your logic, jesus is as well because if you believe vpw, jesus ain't god.