TheEvan

HCW, my contributions haven't reflected on my good times or lack of them while in. I'm just sharing history, first hand accounts, etc. Facts. Just "sharing" some nice things that establish the man as a liar & thief long before you ever knew him. I thought of that liar and thief as a man of God. He wasn't a man of God. Therefore I was conned, pure & simple. Just like the poor victims of his predations in the coach. Conned. Manipulated. My experience, like everybody else's, was mixed. I've come to believe that it was part of God's plan for me. He has used the experiences for my benefit time & again.

Oh, one other thing for you Bible believer types out there in happy Bible land: It says holy men of God spake. Doesn't that disqualify Wierwille. Before you answer, carefully consider the works of the flesh listed in Gal. 5. Consider how many we know he indulged.

Mike, any chance you'll cop to the fact that Piffle was co-opted from another man and wasn't the result of revelation after all? That is, after all, what happened. Then it morphed, constantly. Well, until it was codified & ossified into a filmed version. I suppose you could say the morphology was heavy rev. But you could say most anything.

Went to my favorite purveyor to snag a few bottles on the cheap and the place was closing down. I bought 6 lovely zins, reg. 19.99 ea., 3 for 10 :eek I rounded out the case with even pricier stuff. THEN they gave me a 20% case discount. Out the door under 70 clams. Wow!

Over the years, both here & on Waydale, I've seen countless posters come in and call the time of their entry into 'the ministry' as the good old days, the days that really were happenin'. I could argue that socks or me, with our entry in '69 & '70 respectively, came in on the really good old days. So it seemed to me. To me the big change was when Wierwille staged a coup on the Way West&East and coopted those ministries as his own (a familiar pattern if you follow what he did to BG Leonard). So to you, the big change was when Harry died. Yeah, he was different after that, but i didn't see a marked change in Der Veg, just a continued slide in the direction it had charted years earlier. For others, their time of entry was dem golden days. Back to Leonard. Being cataloger of old photos and such, surely you are familiar with the photos of Wierwille's first two "PFAL" classes? Well, most everybody was, as they were published often enough. Did you ever see the rest of them? Like the ones picturing the water baptisms? I did. But i didn't see them in Da Way. I saw them in some old newsletters displayed at BG Leonard's 90th birthday party, which we hosted for him. I was just casually leafing through some old ones and you can imagine the jolt I got when my eyes landed on a familiar picture. It was the old "1st Piffle Class" photo I'd seen so many times. As you know, Wierwille had recently taken Leonard's class. He returned to O-hiya to teach Leonard's class with Leonard's blessing. The accompanying article was about this Rev. Wierwille teaching CTC's Gifts of the Spirit course to members of his congregatin in O-hiya. Hmmm. Turns out wierwille lied to the man, co-oted the man's work as his own. FAMILIAR PATTERN! All of which disqualifies him in any way from having been in public ministry of any kind. Period. However you burnish it and photograph it with a warm hazy glow, the conclusion is clear in the harsh light of day.

Scientifically, the burden of proof lies with the claim.

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HCW, in your capacity you surely interacted with the historian? My guess is that your historical photo project fell under her. She & I talked a few times. The more she learned the more trouble she had giving the tour. Once she told me she thought that by the time VP left the church his integrity was shot. She couldn't bring herself to write any history past the move to the farm, so she said. Yes, there were serious moral failings back then, any of which would biblically disqualify him from public ministry. Not my call, I'm talking the Bible here. I understand your experiences are your own, but I think there is some serious rose tinting on your glasses.

Shaz said Boy, ain't that the truth! You should've heard the way the Trustee cabinet, Don & Howard, and other auditorium committee members talked about the Old Goat. They bypassed him whenever possible. When it came to something that HAD to through him, Howard advised the person to say such & such. "And you tell him that, he'll get mad and say 'the hell with it, do whatever you want'". The next committe meeting the poor stooge reports telling VP what Howard told him to. The result was a verbatim "the hell with it, do whatever you want." If VP had teh character to be a person to respect at least ONE person of the top leadership in those meetings would have stood up for him. Alas, he'd long since blown all of his brownie points in the coach & elsewhere and none of those people showed him the smallest bit of respect.. HCW, you didn't sense the unreality around HQ at the VP's passing? Business as usual the next day, too. Very strange.

Sunesis' observation squares with mine. As does oldies'

Hearty congratulations. May you ride off into the sunset together in absolute wedded bliss!

If there is pending litigation, LLP, I doubt see me can fully answer. I'll let her handle that. I'd like to address the "either/or" scenario you present. There are many other possibilities. Abusers, pedators & pedophiles don't operate in a clearly demarcated environment. They walk in a shadow world where a lack of clarity set the scene. Their victims are put in a scenario that provides 'disconnect' from the event, all done with diabolical cleverness. They are usually silenced by shame or fear or other factors. Therefore it is normal & expected that the mechanism wasn't obvious. That's how predators work. But there's always somebody to come along and declare with indignation that 'I'd NEVER let that happen to MY child!" Implying, of course, that somebody other than the EVIL predator was at fault. All of which exhibits a singular, even perhaps an obstinate, lack of understanding of the problem.

To be authentic is rare enough. It's something I strive for. But the environment, beliefs, lingo, culture, "feel", expectations, group dyamic, etc, produced such an unreality! So freaky. It's hard to know how to "get back". Sometimes just 'letting go' and "being" works. Sometimes we need a bit of help...

Memory? Of what? And what, pray tell, is memory? I seem to have forgotten. Alfakat, if YOU don't remember, NOBODY does! I'd bank on that one, probergeness.

I knew a corpse guy who said he wanted to be a prophet because it would give him a license to be an a-hole. Yeah, he got ordained....

Interesting, Keith, especially when you consider Wierwille's emphasis on self-determination and freedom of choice. certainly, free will can be understood to be implicit in teh Bible, but it is certainly not explicit. Why? I think because man's problem isn't that he fails to exercise free will. His problem is because when he does, he makes such bad choices! But submitting one's will to God and being under his control and authority was a concept not in the Way lexicon...

So true, 3 Cents. We had a 'manufactured reality' that made many things 'feel' like this or that. The proof that most of the folks that I "loved" then weren't really my friends is that the friendships didn't survive da Way. But there were some wild feelings I had to dredge through on my way out. Funny, because I'd been pretty cynical about the Gulag for some years (ask alfakat, he knows!) yet i could scarcely drag myself from it. I so admire my friends that smelled a rat earlier and calmly walked away.

Forgive me if you answered this before, BF, but what is your position, dispensationally speaking, on salvation for pre-Pentecost people?

I think the terminology rubrik goes, in a way, to the heart of the discussion. Perhaps one reason the names are so uncertain is that the Bible itself doesn't bother to name the time periods, or to give the time periods any particular name. Therefore, any terminology must be manufactured outside the Bible. With that in mind, I guess it doesn't matter what it's called, since it's extra-biblical to begin with. But I'd argue that biblical concepts such as propitiation and atonement deserve to be called what they are. And in that sense, terminology becomes important. Honestly, I think Wierwille pulled a fast one when he gave it the "I don't like the word dispensation, let's call it administration" punch. Perhaps it wasn't his intention, but when you do that, you can just start telling people this & that, totally unsupported. At least hieing to the biblical term, dispensation, possibly keeps the argument on grounds that are arguable from within the scriptures. Manufacturing terminology smacks, to me, of the old "read what's written & if it's wrong i'll tell you" fast one.

Good One SZ!! :D-->

BF, I think you make some reasonable points in your 'administrations" summation above. At the same time, most statements really are at the least arguable, and worst they're unsupported & just speculation. Now I understand the system of logic that produces such conclusions, but i question the soundness of the logic. Taken at face value, some statemetns come off as wild fabrications without any direct support: "Man was born as body and soul creations possessing a sin nature. Men (and women) could have spirit upon them both before the law was given and afterward until Pentecost." Hmmmm "Upon and following the day of Pentecost, I was now available for a person to have spirit within them. There was never any record of a person being born again before Pentecost. Upon Pentecost, there was." Says who? "First the rapture (or gathering together for those of you who don't get come up in whose terminology belongs to who). The rapture changes how God deals with the body of Christ. People will get new bodies." "But, I certainly know that the conditions necessary for the new birth did not exist before Pentecost." On this last point, if people before Pentecost could not be saved by grace through faith, how then were they saved? I think this is an essential point. Orthodox dispensationalists do not believe as Wierwille did...that these people were saved by keeping the laws of God. What say you?

All the speculation as to the particulars seems like so much mental masturbation to me (And, apparently, it was a bit more than mental for others!). I already know what the original sin was. It was disobedience.

Wierwille navigates the fires of hell in a WowMobile:

And let the car be FRENCH! How about a beat up old Puegeot? Or, better yet, a Renault Dauphine. HAHAHAHA! But since they deserve a SPECIAL place in hell, I say they be consigned to the worst old Citroen money can buy.

Sorry VL, in my hasty reading of the thread I misattributed things to you. They rightly delong to Dave. And Geo., meaning the St.