potato

I just got chills. that was an excellent summation of vpw's success and twi's failure. all I can say is thank god for the internet. twi leaders tried to make me stay off it, but I refused and it eventually led me to GS and freedom.

yeah, I remember that, too. he really went on about how miss america was supposed to be an example of human perfection, and here we had a perversion of what god intended holding the title, because she was deaf. he was really ....ed off that people would settle for second rate goods and ranted about how the devil was getting us to accept handicaps as "normal". god, what a nut job. it seems like I was living a different life, to even stay in the room and listen to that crap.

yeah, it sure was a turn-around, and I do feel that it was a PR move: "see how christian we are? we teach our people that it's not ok to be promiscuous or to commit adultery. sex before marriage???? no way!!!!!! craig martindale? excuse me, can you repeat the question??? I've never heard of any craig martindale, but look at how edifying this class is!!!!!"

yep, sure do. we were expected to give a minimum of 15% to get revelation from god. reminded me of buying indulgences. 10% meant you were safe from the devil. 15% meant you could be spiritual. the word according to lcm.

no, seriously. the coulters might be nice to look at (probably why they were picked to be the teachers), but let me tell you they drone on and on, and they droned on and on about celibacy if you're single, and also about how no believer should look outside of the household for a mate, and if there isn't a mate for you, then no sex, ever. since I was already dating an "unbeliever" who I really liked, I had a conversation with god about it, I can tell you. the class the coulters taught was all about what you can't do.

yes. all were expressly forbidden. I think that clas also had a lot more emphasis on the man being the head and the woman being his servant. since I was recently divorced, it pretty much seemed designed to make me condemn myself.

I was given very bad advice from leadership. I was told I don't appreciate my husband (now ex) enough. my ex is a pathological liar. I was told not to report a domestic violence event that injured one of my kids. it was a clergyman who said it. he was obligated by state law to report it himself because a minor child was endangered, but he was more concerned with how the ministry looked. twi didn't destroy my marriage. my marriage was a wreck and a farce. twi just kept me in it 15 years longer than I should have been, and made the aftermath devastating because of years of indoctrination that I was to serve the bastard who treated me like a dog.

I totally get you on this, michael. it's really hard for many professionals to relate to what living in a very controlling cult is like, and hence unless they have the training, they are at a loss as to how to help and can actually give bad advice that does more harm than good. I got lucky when I went looking for the people who helped me and my kids the most, because I looked for people with training and experience in domestic abuse. I couldn't even talk about the cult experience for a long time, but it was so intertwined with the domestic abuse that eventually I had to start talking about it. I got a lot of healing in the process, but I really needed GS and to know there were other people going through or who had gone through the same things.

there was very much an attitude in the early 90's that if a woman didn't spread her legs for her man, then whatever went wrong in the marriage was her fault. a branch leader who was caught stealing ABS and having an affair with a "new believer" that traumatized her so much she went up the food chain to confess was outted to everyone in the area, and in the aftermath the branch leader's marriage failed. word coming down from the LC's was that the marriage failed because the couple was only having sex a few times a year. sorry, don't buy it. I knew the guy well and the marriage failed because he was a dick. his wife didn't want to have sex with him because he was a dick. that's exactly how I felt at the end of my marriage. why should any woman have to have sex with a man who can't show her a shred of respect or treat her like a person? to hell with that. CF&S gave lip service to an equitable marriage, but the reality is that all it really did is set up the expectation that the woman should service the man whether she wanted to or not, essentially meaning if he got horny after beating her up, she was out of fellowship if she denied him.

I think the question was for skyrider, but I would agree with your assessment because I found myself doing things I didn't agree with at times, without feeling I had much of a choice.

actually I started a thread on it because the snowstorm thread is so long and has branched so many times. http://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=19165

maybe that's why I don't remember it. I was required to listen to so many tapes in so many special meetings, they all just run together now.

according to vpw, the original sin was masturbation. according to lcm, it was homosexuality.

I took every class except dealing with the adversary (I took the lcm version defeating the adversary). for some reason I don't remember lcm's version of christian family and sex, although I know I took it. I do remember the coulter's class. it was so awful it was one of the 4 events that led to my decision to leave twi. one thing I do remember is that syllabi changed regularly. grads were supplied new syllabus pages and directed to throw away the old ones. I don't remember how long my cfs syllabus was, but eventually I'll dig it out of my garage and find out.

what I remember most was Mrs. W's awkwardness when vpw introduced her at the end. she looked miserable.

yeah, read it already and it's irrelevant to my point. it doesn't make vpw special, it just means he had a lot of material being handed to him on probably a daily basis, and he could pick and choose what he liked the most. I didn't miss anything in PFAL and spent many years working the material, to the point that exploration into several of vpw's inconsistencies earned me a bad reputation. the fact that I've forgotten a good portion of it at this point is due to the fact that I've ceased to be concerned about it, I no longer study it, and I've actively replaced it in my brain with other things that are far more interesting. bottom line is, the only way PFAL stands as a system of belief is if you refuse to consider that vpw could have been wrong, a liar, mistaken, a narcissist, or any of the other things his life seem to indicate, because your ever-expanding base of special revelation given exclusively to this one man (usually by reading and copying other people's material) only works if you close your eyes to the possibility that the things he spoke or wrote could be anything other than revelation. it's a closed system. I choose never to be that gullible again.

the answer to why all the new revelation is pretty simple to me: the corps... a huge infusion of enthusiastic young people who already had a lot of experience studying the bible. don't you think vpw got to read their papers, listen to them talk about what they were learning, and then teach as much of it as he wanted without crediting the student?

fabulous post, sirguessalot! I think what I've been experiencing this past few years is a paradigm shift from "ONE rule" to a "rule-set" as you so elegantly put it. this is so well expressed, it moved me deeply:

I disagree that it taints the truth. I think what it does is make truth and lie so difficult to distinguish, that it might as well taint the truth. that's why leaders are to be above reproach, so that the truth the speak can't be hidden behind the sin of their lives, which speaks so much more loudly to witnesses. if it's true, then it doesn't matter who said it's true. but remember that even speaking in tongues is just noise if there's no love.

just noticed you pointed that out as well, RumRunner.

case in point: along came jesus.

I do too, I just wanted it out of the snowstorm thread :D people have a lot of viewpoints, and some of us are christian and some aren't. I've found since leaving twi that I don't need to be so concerned with worrying about having one source for my rules of faith and practice, and that I can go back to the beginning and start over from scratch, assessing morality and ethics and even the existence of god from different points of view. and I don't even feel compelled to make a decision on something just because someone else claims it to be true.

not really looking for the old "if you're not a christian, you're going to hell" type of discussion. courtesy of Mike: the 1967 version that we all heard in segment 31 Session 7 of THE CLASS: vpw contends that the truth must be your only rule for faith and practice. the problem is, the truth is defined by him in PFAL, thereby making PFAL and all derivative teachings the truth which must be our only rule for faith and practice, thereby limiting us to one source for truth: twi. it's the pitfall we all fell into if we stuck around more than a couple of days. truth isn't so easy to get an absolute grasp of, IMO. the final arbiter of truth is god, I suppose, if god exists. or math, if god doesn't exist. while we wait for the answer to that unknown, I wanted to explore vpw's assertion that we must have one rule for faith and practice.

you've now place vpw at the same spiritual level as Paul. you argue that none of the writings of a single person from the first century until vpw wrote a single thing by revelation from god. that's a pretty huge claim, and your only proof, which can't be proved, is that god made it snow just for vpw. btw, following your line of logic, if we reject the writings of vpw which have now attained god-breathed status, we're god-rejectors. not at all. this is what attracted me to twi in the first place, that there could be one source of truth, and that I could rely on it as my rule for faith and practice. thank you Jeff for so succinctly bringing us back to the logic problem in this thread!

the snowstorm thread branches yet again... my question is: is it necessary in life to have one sole source for your rule of faith and practice? Mike seems to contend that everyone needs to have one, and only one. I disagree and would like to start a discussion on this topic. and I do believe that this falls under "about the way" and not doctine, because it's something that vpw pushed hard, leading us to give up all outside points of reference by which to judge whether something is right or wrong.