Rocky

Charity, you SURMISED correctly. I just viewed a YouTube short that calls out mindlessness. IOW, acting/believing because someone told us something which we accept without challenging. Victor Wierwille gave absolute (private) interpretations of scripture. In many cases, some of us wrote notes in our bibles to memorialize those absolutes. I don't subscribe to William Brooks' interpretations/declarations. BUT, I can't argue with his notion/desire to challenge what he was taught. That's the whole idea behind Proverbs 2:1-5. Here's another caveat: while I wouldn't discourage him from challenging any given teaching/interpretation/declaration of twi, I would counsel against anyone accepting his claims without challenging them mindfully. IOW, he would have to make sound arguments for how/why what he claims to be true is actually true.

Yawn...

Steven Hassan interviews attorney Carol Merchasin Includes but is not limited to religious cults. Bottom line: The Way International has historically done at least some of this, whether or not it still does. NOTE: it's still understandable at 1.75x or even 2.0x... to save you some time.

I'm not sure you have any data to back up that claim. However, that no one on this thread claimed cults are the only source of undue influence and coercion.

Shady or good ideas? rhetorical question.

Perhaps you skipped the YT video. Hassan studied undue influence and has written about it. That's the point of this discussion thread. Yeah, to make a sale, one has to find potential buyers. But the entire ministry of The Way International was about undue influence and high demand practices.

It's entirely possible whoever it was just connected a few dots to the plot of Paper Moon with Ryan and Tatum O'Neil.

I have now listened to the entire hour long YT clip. I sped it up to 2x. It was still very clearly understandable. Most importantly, I believe this is one of the best discussions I've heard about UNDUE INFLUENCE in the 35+ years since I left TWI. Hassan and Boyle-Laisure parse out some VERY important legal and psychological/behavioral issues that clearly implicate Victor Wierwille and Loy Craig Martindale as cult leaders.

Robin Boyle Laisure teaches at St. John's University School of Law https://www.stjohns.edu/law/faculty/robin-boyle-laisure On her faculty page, she lists her books and articles. This one got my attention: Undoing Undue Influence: How the Doctrine Can Avoid Judicial Subjectivity by Omitting the Vulnerability Element The YT video also mentions things that have been taught in Way Corps training and sexual coercion by way of drugs. For example (but NOT limited to this practice), having trainees write autobiographical information (i.e. from Birth to the Corps) that to be used for psychological manipulation (e.g. shaming).

Steven Hassan interviews law professor Robin Boyle-Laisure. Witnessing and Undershepherding? Cults CAN purchase prospect information on young adults online. Does anyone have any inside information on whether TWI has, openly or in a clandestine manner, tried do this kind of prospecting?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55271743-forgery-and-memory-at-the-end-of-the-first-millennium

Recognizing the complexity of life and the fact there's more answers or ways of looking at the matter doesn't mean I know what other options might be. Life is complex despite with Johnny Townsend claimed 40 to 50 years ago. I can tolerate that complexity even if I'm uncertain of the paradoxes enough to articulate them. Townsend, IMO, was spouting cult propaganda back then to present shiny objects to distract young people like us (well, we were young then) to keep us from thinking outside of the overly simplistic box that Victor Wierwille had us confined to at the time.

Sorry, my response in my previous comment is the closest I can get to "assessing the accuracy" thereof.

I have framed my answers to several questions/comments/posts on GSC the last few years thus: the bible is an anthology of stories. Do I take those stories literally? Definitely not. Do I believe I understand... anything... adequately or fully? Of course not. The closest those stories come to factual truth, IMO, is taking them as human records of the times (histories) of humans in the context of the lives and cultures (anthropology and archeology) at the time they were recorded.