Tzaia

Where would God be without TWI?

You can argue all those things, but TWI has a valid argument as well - that you (apparently) took a great deal of its work and passed it off as your own.

The reality, James, is that you could have made your work say the same thing using different words, because (as you said) sometimes you went a bit more "literal" in your translation. I don't know why you went the doctrine route, unless it was a justification for plagiarizing

Which is ironic given the number of Amway-TWI people I had to fend off over the years.

James, apparently there are enough similarities between the 2 texts that TWI noticed.

Please enlighten me (or anyone else). Why don't you just sell the TWI work?

I purchased an HP dv8t laptop with 8GB RAM and the 256GB SSD + 500GG hard drive configuration with every bell and whistle, including Win7 Pro 64bit - set me back nearly 3K - and it's fabulous. I went pro to have the XP virtual machine, which is happily running the one program (stylewriter) that won't run in Win7. The two things I do not like about it is that the network access is much slower - seems to be a carryover from Vista, and the nVidia video card randomly becomes unresponsive and has to recover - another Vista carryover.

I doubt if those who remain in (and are sold out) have any idea. Those that are not still there - some of them do. I had one butt-in-ski come up to me after we were all out and apologize for the level of interference. At the time, interfering just seemed like the right thing to do. There may have been some who deliberately inflicted emotional distress because they could, but for the most part I didn't see that. What I saw was a fair amount of emotional distress laid on people who who were being pressured (from higher ups) to interfere when they didn't believe it was warranted.

Not sure what the purpose was.

JAL persecuted? Obviously he's been mocked here. But persecuted? What's the whole deal against the Catholics?

Mrt - I don't want to further confuse you, but I can't help but point out that the current president of STF had to do research to determine that adultery and fornication is wrong in the eyes of God. Prior to his delving into the subject, apparently he didn't have any idea that either of those things were wrong - in this administration. I don't think that he was a practicing adulterer or fornicator, but that was probably more of a result of his lack of social skills and his idea of what an ideal woman looks like to him - than because he necessarily thought it was wrong. <== snarky personal observation. I was sitting in front of him at the Chicago conference back in '88 and had a conversation with him about it. How he managed to wrap his mind around what was going on all over TWI left me dumbfounded. To be able to do what he did comes from concentrating on the esoteric at the expense of the simple. Unfortunately, JWS has not outgrown that tendency. Furthermore, if you remove him from the confines of the premises that are the basis of his arguments, he can't converse. I've tried. Home fellowships - there's nothing magical about them. Reading from a bible - nothing inherently better, other than one has fewer opportunities to misquote. There is nothing that says reading from the bible makes a teaching any more coherent or godly. That's nothing more than a premise. It is not a fact. I really liked the way that TWI drew from seeming parallels in the OT to support its theology, yet ignored any parallels that didn't. STF does the same thing. One only has to listen to DG's latest teaching on tattoos to see that. (I chuckled through the whole thing) The point I'm trying to make is that STF is no less ala carte in picking and choosing what it wants to believe than any other organization. The only reason why it doesn't look like that is the ground rules of engagement are carefully laid out and all beliefs are checked against those ground rules. One of the main "ground rules" is the belief in dispensations. The other belief is in who Jesus is (or is not). Every belief is checked against at least one of the 2. The catch (and the thing that took me the longest to get) is that those ground rules aren't any more valid than anyone else's. Once I questioned the validity of those ground rules (i.e. how to study the bible, dispensations, and who Jesus is) then the whole thing fell apart as THE answer to gaining eternal life. It's just one of many ways of looking at it.

So are you saying that the blind leading the few into a ditch is preferred? I guess from a numbers standpoint that it's true. Do you know what happens to a person who disagrees with someone at STF? Try it sometime. Home fellowships may have moved the word over asia minor, but for whatever reason, it wasn't sustainable. I hate to confuse you with facts, but the entire area is about 99% Islamic. That tells me that home fellowships failed. Maybe the goal should be to understand why the concept failed, rather than try to recreate a moment. The very nature of miracles is that they are not reproducible, so creating a causal link between miracles and how one fellowships is really not possible, regardless of what they insist is truth. Obviously you haven't heard the level of damage that prophecy (in the manner that it is practiced at STF) has done to people. It's appalling, and apparently it hasn't been renounced. But why would they? It's used to make decisions, justify decisions, and overall run roughshod over other people's lives - all in the name of God. Don't let them tell you that abuse was an isolated incident perpetrated by people who are no longer involved. Every last one of them who are left had a hand in the abuse. I say if you can't refrain from using prophecy as a control mechanism, that you should restrain yourself from using it. Actually, there's nothing in the bible that says home fellowships are superior, but it is a belief that has been traditionally held and passed down to the current leadership of STF. Ironically, not a one of them has ever tested the validity of that belief. They simply accept it as being true and teach it as truth. Is there harm in that? Well only from the standpoint that it gets people believing that they are doing something extra-special when the reality is that home fellowships (or small groups) can create boundary issues in people who have problems in that area, either in respecting other's boundaries, or being able to set appropriate boundaries. The idea that small groups keeps people accountable is suspect. Invariably, someone gets the notion that accountability does not apply to them, and then the balance goes out of whack. I personally choose not to have to deal with it. Teaching people that home fellowshipping is best (in my mind) is the beginning of testing someone's boundaries. If they can get you to readily accept that on the basis of asia minor's home fellowship model, which I already pointed out was a failure, then getting you to accept other lines of BS is relatively simple. My experience is that every religious organization has its problems and struggles. STF's struggles and problems are pretty significant for an organization of its size and age, and that forced me to take a long hard look at what they were doing, and if its mission fit with what I wanted to align myself. Ultimately, the answer was no. I think people should be free to worship with whomever and however they want, but I also think that it should be an informed decision.

I didn't say you did. What sticks out to me (now as I'm a bit older) is how quickly I was willing to latch onto the "out there" beliefs.

There are several books in the bible that were written in Aramaic - and none of that is disputed. Lamsa can speculate all he wants based on the notion that the community language was Aramaic, but nothing has ever turned up that gives any credibility to his speculation beyond his "eastern" upbringing nearly 2000 years later.

I think for me it was the discovery that TWI (which wanted to take the place of my earthly family) was no less dysfunctional than the family it wanted to replace. I didn't know who Chris Geer was - never heard of him - but here he emerges from pretty much out of nowhere and talks like he had this relationship with a (now) dead person like no one else on the face of the earth. Maybe, maybe every word of it was true, but for me it wasn't an indictment of how everyone had let VPW down, it was the outcome of his choices. I remember asking my husband one time how people would deal with the death of someone who acts as though he's going to cheat it through his most excellent believing.

I *tried* to wade through it once. I thought it was incredibly self-indulgent - and how convenient.

Sorry - I'm breaking my own rule about the 2 word reply, but this was LOL funny. Why say it in 5 minutes if you can stretch it to 30. And doncha just love the scripted little intro that starts every "teaching"? The attempts to make is sound like it's not being read, when it is so obviously being read.

I wish I were more missional, but all I can muster right now is serving the flock.

For them, denial is a river in Egypt.

To a "right-fighter," not being right is something to avoid at all cost - even if it means ignoring the facts.

Not that a one of them would test their internal sound tracks by actually attending and submitting to a mainstream sort of weekend like Walk to Emmaus, or Great Banquet. Not that they weren't invited. Always an excuse. Anyway - it was during one of those weekends that I realized that my TWI/STFI mindset about mainstream religion was very different from the reality, and that even without the taint of Momentus and Personal Prophecy, STF had a lot less to offer in terms of living a Christian life than what I was seeing at my local mainstream church. Sheesh - the arrogance based on ignorance of it all. Oh BTW if any of you who were invited by me are reading this - the invitation is still open.

Oh, but they're so manly [smirk] in their "wait state".

[smirk] a few think they could have.

Much has been talked about that people were led, coerced, and manipulated in TWI. Apparently, all it ever took was planting the idea that "suggestion" actually meant "commandment" and then suggesting something. How utterly genius. No leading. No coercion. No manipulation past planting the original idea. It had to be amazing to sit back and watch it unfold. Imagine being able to suggest something and people treating it like it was a commandment. How powerful is that? Do you think he knowingly kept pushing the suggestions to new heights to test his power and influence? And why didn't it work with LCM? After all, he was the hand-picked successor.

Obviously, if you're not God-hungry, then something is wrong with you. Very subtle.