Rocky

Well, I've been thinking about that... and how easily people get conned (in general) these days. So I found an intriguing essay about classic literature that contrasts with VP quite well. https://medium.com/@spencerbaum/3-reasons-why-you-should-read-more-classic-literature-in-2019-e762cb5c910c Call me Ishmael. The famous opening sentence of Moby Dick, so short and provocative, is welcoming and familiar to the 21st century reader, who is accustomed to snappy prose with short sentences and lots of white space. A few sentences later in Melville’s masterpiece we get a sentence that’s more representative of the novel to come. In just a bit I’m going to quote that sentence, and insist that you read it. And I mean really read it. Don’t skim it. This essay is about to make the argument that there is value to the way the classics force us to slow down and concentrate, and it will be easier for you to understand that point if you experience it first. Here’s the quote from Moby Dick. Please read it slowly and carefully: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." This brings us to the first and, to my mind, most important reason to read the classics in 2019 2020. 1. You should read classic literature because it forces you to think deeply and concentrate. 21st century media is hell on the attention span. But you already know this. You know that our digital devices are shortening our attention spans, teaching us to only skim the surface of ideas, and making us addicts to tiny dopamine bursts that come from (among other things) the Like and Share buttons. As we near the end of the second decade of the 21st century we’ve developed widespread awareness that our devices have made us shallow thinkers. We’re less cognizant, however, of the effect of the content itself. Or the style in which the content is written. Have you ever wondered why so many of the articles you read, like this one, are organized in numbered lists? Or why the writing in these articles is so often organized into ultra-short paragraphs, many of them only one sentence long? We, the content creators of the 21st century, have learned to write in snappy lists with short sentences and one-sentence paragraphs. We write this way because this is what you, the content consumers of the 21st century, choose to read. You like content that is clear, concise, simple, and to the point. You’re in a hurry (always), and we writers know, God do we know, that we are competing not just against other essays or other books, but against the endless siren songs of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. We know that if we ask too much of you, say, if we give you a long sentence or, God forbid, a long paragraph, we might be taxing your mind more than you’re interested in having it taxed. We know that a complicated, multi-layered thought, one that might require you to slow down or reread a sentence or look up from your screen and think for a minute is too much to ask when your phone is bursting with notifications and there’s a new video on your favorite Youtube channel and everyone’s talking about that new show on Netflix but you haven’t even seen the last new show everyone was talking about yet and you’ve got ten tabs open on your browser and 3,000 unread books on your Kindle and holy hell who has time to consume it all just open my vein and fill it with listicles please! There’s a cost to all this. In the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction), Nicolas Carr looks at all the research in neuroscience and psychology about what the Internet is doing to our brains and determines that, yes, our ceaseless attempts to skim this glut of information is making us shallow thinkers who are far less capable of deep, focused, intense thought than our parents and grandparents were. You should read the classics in 2019 to unlearn the shallowness and impatience you are learning in your hyper-accelerated 21st century life. When you read Melville (or Hugo or Austen or Tolstoy or Plato or Shakespeare) you are sharing headspace with someone who is much better at slow, deep, meaningful thinking than you are because they’ve never lived in the shallows like you do. ***** The essay continues, but I hope you get the point. Wierwille obviously didn't want you to THINK.

Actually, it was Human without the bean who said it. In addition to Shaz' reply, (and I've been able to reflect on this for more than three decades) yes, we grew up. When we were children, we had no knowledge or experience to draw on to evaluate what we saw, heard and experienced in TWI. And for some (i.e. those who decided to never look to anything outside of the cult for insight) they may have never figured it out. Further, when we were children, we may have been religiously indoctrinated or emotionally prepared such that we were more prone to the particular line of b u l l s h i t Wierwille was peddling. EVERYone gets conned in life, in some ways or others. We got conned by Wierwille. What's important is that we eventually saw through the con.

FWIW, IMO, believing that the 10 commandments were given by God to the Israelites one at least kinda has to side-step cultural history and anthropology too.

Good luck getting a straight answer from him on that.

I get your point, and I don't disagree. But I'm not entirely comfortable with harshly confronting anyone's personal story/experience either.

It may just be a technicality, but doctrines are written down. Practices, which I believe more fairly characterizes the situation with "loosening up" aren't necessarily documented as official beliefs. It probably would have been eradicated at some point well before the actual litigation if it had been a doctrine. That said, I don't discount your experience in any way, brother.

And I remember Wierwille haranging me for making a mistake of some kind regarding hook up of A/V telecom equipment later that year. And another time when Loy told us about the Jim Jones situation in Guyana.

I also remember encountering a person at the KC airport while waiting (with a bunch of others) for our ride to Emporia for the first day in-res for the 9th corpse. He tried to tell us that Wierwille was a false prophet... of course, none of us was, on that day, ready to listen to that.

Practical experience with direct supervision? If that doesn't shout CULT, nothing does. Also, it's very creepy. Aka the blind leading the blind.

Here's a theory: WHY did they need a Sabbath way back then? Because God said so? Or "did God say so" because otherwise they wouldn't get any days/time off from work? IDK, but if it was that important to me, I'd want to explore historical records for the sociological practices of the time.

This city boy had to wait until age 20 to learn it. But 45 years hence, I still remember.

Why is this important to you? (Please respond succinctly) Oh really?

Congrats to you for the life you've emerged into. There's obviously a lot more to our experience on this planet than what any of us has been able to learn only from the Bible.

Well, it wasn't that bad.

I learned, at ROA 75, how to kill flies with my bare hands.

I thought "Dotty" was VP's wife Dorothy, not Dorothy Owens. As in "thank you Dorothy, thank you Rhoda..."

Preferably, someone you'd want to learn something from.

TL;DR

Why do you keep responding?

Did any of the videos of classes ever have credits showing who did what to make the video happen? It's been a LOOOOOOOOOng time for me, but I don't recall ever seeing any.

It's up to you to make your case.

Totally! Gives the audience (viewer) a greater sense that they are REAL people, in many ways just like us. I've been very much enjoying Colbert and Seth Meyers especially. Even better when they include their young children. Like Jimmy Fallon did in one vid I watched last night... and Meyers two sons were there at the end of his vid this evening.

"I dont understand why you are saying I am being selective..." There you go... I highlighted it for you. Do you still not understand?