So_crates

Or maybe like Troy McClure from The Simpsons: "Hi. I'm John Lynn. You remember me from such organizational greats as CES and STFI..."

What would I have done differently. There's so much. Where to start. I wouldn't have married my ex on faith I wouldn't have chosen my major at teh university based on faith I wouldn't have wasted a night hitchhiking home from twig 12 miles in the dead of winter I wouldn't have later, when I moved into town, have walked an hour and a half one way to get to twig. I would never have gone WOW I would never have wasted 10 years of my life waiting for someone I loved, believing she was going to show up one day. I would never have put my faith in God to get my car fixed. I wouldn't have wasted another 5 years of my life after I left the ministry trying to figure out what I did wrong. I would have spent less time praying and believing and more time doing. I probablly would have went out to find my fortune in the world, rather than waiting on the Lord and sacrificing my youth, my talents, and everything I could have done. Trust in the Lord. Who would have guessed my life would wind up being a cautionary tale? Enough? There's more. These are just the high points. SoCrates

Here's my take on a middle of the road theory. I basically says sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Can you imagine sending a man to the moon and telling him the same thing? Well, we have this new rocket, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Sure, you have a 50% chance of your forwarding address being Kingdom Come, but the upside is you have a 50% chance of making it into orbit in one piece. Really, who would take a deal like that? People seldom base their lives on what could be. You can see what happened with the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen with the Busch tax cuts. Everybody held onto their cash. Now that we know things are starting to loosen up a little. Effectual freverent prayer availeth much. How? Back when I was with da vey, I wanted to write a story about a person who became more than a conquerer. I asked my frend how we were more than conquerers. He didn't know. I asked and advanced class grad in the twig. He shrugged his shoulders at me. The point of the story is folks are real good at quoting scripture, but, if its a bunch of words strung together with no disernable meaning, it doesn't help. I'll give you another example. Just before I stopped ABS, I was searching for the reason I had failed to have the windows of heaven pour open (as Malachi promises)(heck, I would have been happy with a living wage and a decent place to live). My twig leaders wife told me: "Have you taken the word and made it your own?" I asked her what that ment. She said have I made it a part of me. A part of me? I haven't been in cat swinging distance of a church or twig since '86. Yet I can still rattle off retemories like they were right in front of me. As I've said numerous times: Its easy to promise; a little harder to produce. SoCrates

Yah, poison.

Don't know. At this point in time I'm leery (not timothy leary)of anything the ministry told me. However, according to them pharmakea is the same root we get pharmacy from. SoCrates

Sad. The guys a one trick pony forever looping back to the same bull. CES crashed so now we'll do something else. And this time it will be the Word of God, I promise, I promise. Somebody should ask him how long he intends on beating a dead horse. Too many people have figured out what its really all about to be suckered again. I feel for the people who haven't figured out what its all about. SoCrates

I believe John Ehrlichman perfect the I-was-just-obeying-order schtick. SoCrates

I heard a teaching once by werewolf where he explained the "witchcraft" word in the Spiit of the Flesh passage in Romans. According to him, the Greek word was pharmakea (sp? Its all Greek to me), which he linked to drug use, because according to him, many forms of witchcraft involved drugs. SoCrates

Both. The thread was inquiring into if anyone noticed anything occult going on in the upper structure of the ministry. But later I also questioned how what was going on could be kept secret. I mean, look at the Clinton-Monica Lewinski scandal or the Clarence Thomas scandal. Not forgetting David Koresh or the recent mormon cult. All these things found the light of day, but somehow da vey managed a supernatural silence over what was going on with werewolf and the craigmiester. SoCrates The answer to life, the universe and everything. Now to figure out the question. SoCrates

It wasn't too long ago I read something about Nazi Germany. One of the tenet it perpetuated was that Hitler wasn't responsible for the Holocaust, it was the people he put in charge under him. Having delt with da veys Christian Nazis, I wonder if this theory translates. Maybe all werewolf was interested in was mountains of cash and getting laid. Most of the spiritual holocaust goes to the people he put in charge under him. As Stalin once said,"I don't rule Russia, 100,000 clerks do." My psych professor also mentioned the true face of evil. She interviewed an ex-Nazi high up on the food chain. She said he wasn't evil like we imagine evil. She said his evil was more of an everyday evil--no matter what he was ordered he obeyed it as if it were a grammatical rule. Put these two things together and it could explain what da vey was really all about. SoCrates

So we start with werewolf telling us our believing affects reality. Dissolve...tine lapse. Werewolf gets the silver bullet. Craigmeister takes the mantle and continues the blame the victim script. Dissolve...time lapse. The great falling away occurs. Splinter groups form. J0hn L1nn teaches believing affects nothing outside yourself. Seems to me I put forth tons of believing and prayer and took some gigantic risks, praying they'd work out. Most fell flat. So the question comes: if nothing makes a dent in reality--its going to go chugging along at its own rate with its own purpose--why bother puting your petitions before God? Why bother having pistis? Maybe the Deist were right, maybe the whole universe was wound up like giant cosmic clock and everything is racing toward its inevitable conclusion. SoCrates

The answer is 42. SoCrates

Thats the reason I used the term occult in one of my other threads. I shied away from terms like witchcraft and magick, though they ae terms that best described what I ment. What would be the best way of expressing this? SoCrates

Sometimes my idle curiousity get the better of me. One of the things that's been on my mind recently has been werewolf's seduction script. Specifically where he says the king owns everything in the kingdom. Really!? Really!? If that was true why did God send a prophet to reprimand David when he was making the sign of the three throated frog with Bathsheba? Did werewolf or the craigmiester ever bother to explain this? SoCrates

When I was a WOW in '76, I started feeling da vey had lost, well, da vey. They were in the process of getting a little too legalistic. One of the girls in our twig had invited a guy up to her apartment. One thing led to another. Needless to say the next morning she came to me condemning herself. When she finished telling me the story, I smiled at her and said: "Welcome to the human race. You screwed up, in my book that makes you human." I talked to her a little, explaining if we didn't fowl up once in awhile, there would be no need for a savior. Yadda yadda yadda. When I was talking it over with my family coordinator, ,his first response was self-righteous anger. "She wanted it," he insisted. So now I'm teaching the guy that's supposed to be leading me about compassion and forgiveness and the fallibleness of being a person and how Christ sacrifice is worthless without all this. Now in retrospect, I see the irony of the whole thing. Here's this guy--a notch further along than I was in the ministry--ranting and raving about how wrong this woman was for a one night stand, meanwhile werewolf was in his rolling motel room wolf whistling at everything in a skirt. SoCrates

A squirrel that studies calculus!!? And I'm lucky if I can balance my checkbook. :) SoCrates

Let's just hope she never offers her staff Kool Aid SoCrates

Many of us don't realize how lucky we are I've been researching cults for a little ditty I've been doing and I would say under both vp and the forehead that was a very real fear. Looking at Jim Jones and David Keresh, there were some ominous parallels. Both these leaders demanded more and more loyalty from their followers. Usually it started with unreasonable demands(mark and avoid the gay purges?). Then, as an display of loyalty, they wanted access to all the woman (sound familiar?). They also had their followers live in constant fear of being attacked by outside forces (corps members have described having backpacks ready in case they had to rush off to live in the hills). For both Jones and Keresh, the final pledge of loyalty was death. SoCrates

One of the more amuzing things I've noticed: Back when I was with the ministry and up until abour a year ago, I could always go to a book on cults, turn to the appendix, and find something about da vey in all its lurid glory. Now I go to more recent cult books and they're not even worth a footnote. So, this is what da vey has become so small and insignificant, their members so few, they're a puppy f@rt in history. And this is how da vey will end, and this is how da vey will end, not with a bang but a wimper SoCrates

Idle curiosity here. Were there quotas on twig leaders? Were they required to rake in so much cash? I'm wondering because I remembered what an issue it was when I stopped ABS. SoCrates

To paraphrase your namesake, Groucho, if I agreed with you anymore I would be you. However, one of the things I've observed time and again in religions here in the land of the free and the home of the depraved is that the religion is about the money. SoCrates

I was trying to be polite. I was thinking something more along the lines of what we would call the black arts. With his prowless, I would consider tantra. He also had an unnatural hold over his victims. Think about it for a tick, with as many victims as he had, would a (for lack of a better term) muggle have gotten away with it as long without a leak developing somewhere? SoCrates

Thanks for tickling my memory, Rascal. You bring up yet another hypocracy or werewolf and his crew. This is another point I've never been able to understand--though I see it in many Christians (and definately in da vey's leadership)--even though they preach an afterlife, they insist on acting as if there is none. Thry preach there will be a day of reconing, but act as if somehow they'll escape it. Go figure. SoCrates

I understand TLB doesn't buy the above rationalizations, but there are those that do. To those who use the above rationalization, consider people like me. Its unlikely I will ever see the inside of a church again. Why? Because the whole Christian doctrine operates on the same principle: faith. Faith they're telling you the truth, faith they're being straight with you. Over Christmas, my family noticed I was going into a deep depression. Seeing my family surrounded by their families, listening to my mother praying to God and saying she was responsible for all the people there, watching my sister breaking into tears at getting a gift and telling her family how much she loved them. I didn't tell anyone the reason until I got out in the car with my mother. I was sad for all the things I will never experience. My mother was like, your 55, you can still have kids. Sure. And by the time they'll be adults I'll be 75. Why do it? Why won't I experience them? Because I put my faith in something presented by a con man and backed up by his minions. How can I be sure the next religion won't be charlitins telling me to have faith in their bull doctrine? And for those that rationalize that da vey prevented suicides: what of all the suicides it caused? The sadism of the leadership, the lack of compassion, the oppressive doctrine, the threats if you leave. All pretty traumatic things to endure. Then there's the whole beliving schtick: if you didn't recieve what you belived for, it was a reflection on you, not the faulty doctrine. Nice ripe slice of he!! there. Wonder how many people offed theirselves over that. This doesn't even touch on the werewolf-forehead thing. How many suicides do you think came out of that. Pregnancies that weren't wanted, people who felt they had let them selves down. I bet they hurt more people than they saved. Just think of me as the ministy's last angry man. SoCrates

Another example of where the way falls apart due to its own teaching: Werewolf once said in the class that devil spirits accuse you of doing what they're already doing. SoCrates