Rocky

Really? You seemingly admit you didn't understand my response to you, but then indicate a particular judgment about my intention? I posed questions. That's what one reasonably does when seeking clarification(s). Isn't that what discussion forums are inherently about? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. iykyk

That's what I figured.

Do you mean at some point there WAS some hype and commitment to the underlying Word of God, the overall body of Christ, or anything [at all] related to building virtue? Has The Way Corporation ever given any commitment to living godly lives, or concern for the overall body of Christ? I suppose the answers are or would be subjective.

From the Daily Stoic website: In stark contrast to the cult notion of whether you're being protected by God or whether God will even "spit in your direction." This Timeless Adage Will Determine Your Destiny This is not another note about memento mori. It’s about a different immutable, inescapable law of human existence that comes to us from the Stoics through Heraclitus (one of Marcus Aurelius’ favorites): Character is fate. After death and taxes, this is a timeless adage that the Stoics believed will determine our destiny whether we like it or not. And just a quick glimpse around the world and across history confirms it: Liars and cheats eventually destroy themselves. The corrupt overreach. The ignorant make fatal, self-inflicted mistakes. The egotistical ignore the data that challenges them and the warnings that could save them. The selfish end up isolated and alone, even if they’re surrounded by fame and fortune. The “robbers, perverts, killers and tyrants” Marcus Aurelius wrote about always end up in a hell of their own making. It’s a law as true as gravity. Bad character might drive someone into a position of leadership—because of their ambition, their ruthlessness, their shamelessness—but eventually, inevitably, this supposed “strength” becomes an Achilles’ heel when it comes time to actually do the job. Who trusts them? Who actually wants to work with them? What kind of culture develops around them? How can they learn? How can they know where the landmines are? If you want to know why things are the way they are right now—on Wall Street, in politics, in Silicon Valley, on college campuses, [in corporate leadership of nascent religions] everywhere—it’s because character is fate. And for too long we have ignored the predictive—no, *prophetic—*power of character. When you make excuses for liars and cheats and egomaniacs because they agree with you, or they might benefit your business or help your cause in the short term, not only do you do so at your own long term peril, but you are exhibiting bad character yourself. And that is what will come back to bite you. That is what is biting us right now, on every continent, in every corner of culture, at nearly every turn. Because character is fate. Always has been. Always will be. **** When I think of Ecclesiastes and the truth of no new thing under the sun, I don't see it as a limit on technology or exploration, even of the heavens. But I do see it as that the ancients had enough experience with human nature to recognize that character is fate.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs 2%3A1-5&version=NIV

Taking this insight back to how people on GSC have described the conduct of TWI's foundational class (often) by young people without sophisticated education/training, for those who have gone through such classes, can (for those open to recognizing) have the lightbulb of understanding come on. You say you had questions about something in the PFLAP class when it didn't sit right when you first heard it? You were told to hold your questions until the end of the last session. Instead of a class coordinator reading the questions and cogently explaining logical, rational answers, what happened? Rarely, if ever, was anything done except gloss over the elephant in the room (said questions) hoping nobody would notice the silence... or the glossolalia (a cacophony of chaos) with everybody excitedly uttering "words" they didn't understand. What happened to the cognitive dissonance in your mind? Did you chalk it up to having made a free will decision to decide your questions were no longer relevant?

Did you forget about Hilary (only one L)?

They OWN American Christian Press still?

Express yourself, good buddy!

Con artists use these psychological tactics to manipulate people to believe them every time No matter how smart you are, anyone can be easily swayed by emotions. January 25, 2016 (Inc. Magazine, this article is an excerpt from Maria Konikova's book, The Confidence Game) The confidence game starts with basic human psychology. From the artist's perspective, it's a question of identifying the victim (the put-up): who is he, what does he want, and how can I play on that desire to achieve what I want? It requires the creation of empathy and rapport (the play): an emotional foundation must be laid before any scheme is proposed, any game set in motion. Only then does it move to logic and persuasion (the rope): the scheme (the tale), the evidence and the way it will work to your benefit (the convincer), the show of actual profits. And like a fly caught in a spider's web, the more we struggle, the less able to extricate ourselves we become (the breakdown). By the time things begin to look dicey, we tend to be so invested, emotionally and often physically, that we do most of the persuasion ourselves. We may even choose to up our involvement ourselves, even as things turn south (the send), so that by the time we're completely fleeced (the touch), we don't quite know what hit us. The con artist may not even need to convince us to stay quiet (the blow-off and fix); we are more likely than not to do so ourselves. We are, after all, the best deceivers of our own minds. At each step of the game, con artists draw from a seemingly endless toolbox of ways to manipulate our belief. And as we become more committed, with every step we give them more psychological material to work with. If it seems too good to be true, it is--unless it's happening to me. We deserve our good fortune. Everyone has heard the saying "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is." Or its close relative "There's no such thing as a free lunch." But when it comes to our own selves, we tend to latch on to that "probably." [...] And yet, when it comes to the con, everyone is a potential victim. Despite our deep certainty in our own immunity--or rather, because of it--we all fall for it. [Or in the case of The Way International and Victor Wierwille's private interpretation party, WE all FELL for it]. That's the genius of the great confidence artists: they are, [or in the cases of Victor Wierwille and Loy C Martindale, they WERE] truly, artists--able to affect even the most discerning connoisseurs with their persuasive charm. A theoretical-particle physicist or the CEO of a major Hollywood studio is no more exempt than an eighty- year-old Florida retiree who guilelessly signs away his retirement savings for a not-to-miss investment that never materializes. A savvy Wall Street investor is just as likely to fall for a con as a market neophyte, a prosecutor who questions motives for a living as likely to succumb as your gullible next-door neighbor who thinks The Onion prints real news. **** Cases in point: how many celebrities, with how much money, fell for the sophisticated Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff? How many ordinary people spend months or years in Amway or other MLM games before they realize the time and resources they've squandered? How many followers of Victor Wierwille shuffled off to Amway to make money because they were comfortable with the business structure? How many more followers of Wierwille shuffled off to the various splinter cults, are happily still involved there in or after X number of years chalked it all up to experience and moved on? Now, what were the bullet points of benefits of the PFLAP class listed on the Wierwille-ite green card, again? What hooked you into taking that initial indoctrination class? Then... What were they teaching in their Witnessing and Undershepherding class?

I totally agree. The quotes Prof de Waal includes are primarily philosophers rather than neuroscientists. The philosophers, I suspect (I'm NOT an academic and didn't take any philosophy classes in college) are considering not what happens between one's ears but a more macro view of how society (environment(s) outside of the mind) do or do not relate to choices any person makes. Further, the deterministic view -- the range of our available choices in any given situation are essentially nil -- seems bizarre to me too. Yet, when someone says, you're not what you eat, but who you meet, I can see how that might be at least partially true.

Some food for thought. In Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton felt that the fallen angels had too much time on their hands, so he sought to occupy them with a discussion topic. He chose free will. We all have the impression that we possess free will, although it lacks a clear definition and may be a total illusion. As Isaac Bashevis Singer once put it, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.” It is the perfect topic for eternal debate. This debate relates to the emotions, because free will is often conceived as their opposite. Making a free rational choice requires us to deny or suppress our first impulses. In fact, the whole idea goes back to the debate over how much our mind is shaped by our body. Those who believe in free will argue that we can simply set aside the body and its nonvolitional desires and emotions and rise above them; humans—and humans alone—can fully control their choices and their destiny. The opposite is a person without self-control, which philosophers have dubbed a wanton. A wanton follows whichever impulse hits first, whichever urge is most pressing and satisfying, and never looks back. Regret isn’t something you’ll find in a wanton. Young children and all animals are said to fall into this category. We may capitalize Free Will to convey our reverence for a concept so central to human responsibility, morality, and the law, but if we can’t measure it, how will we ever agree on it? Some say that free will boils down to making choices, but even bacteria make choices, and certainly all animals with brains have to decide between approach and avoidance, which prey to single out from the flock, or whether to travel north or south, and so on. The squirrels in my neighborhood decide whether to cross the road. Sometimes they do so right in front of my car, making me nervous. They run halfway, then quickly return, unable to make up their minds. Pairs of bluebirds in my backyard, getting ready to build their nest, visit every empty nestbox, hopping in and out multiple times, the male alternating with the female. They’d make excellent subjects for a House Hunters episode. After weeks of scouting, the male puts a few branches or grass stems into one of the boxes, then lets the female build the actual nest while he guards the site. The drawn-out decision process has reached its conclusion. Do bluebirds have free will? Francis Crick, the British co-discoverer of DNA, proposed in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis that human free will resides in a very specific brain area: the anterior cingulate cortex. But humans are not the only species with this area, and we have good evidence that it also helps rats make decisions. Yet despite the signs that animals make choices every day, we refuse to grant that they have free will. Their choices are constrained by past experiences and inborn preferences, we argue, and animals lack the ability to fully review all the options in front of them. Never mind that the same argument has been applied to great effect against free will in our own species, which is why some of history’s greatest minds—Plato, Spinoza, Darwin—doubted its existence. Free will just doesn’t fit the prevailing materialist worldview, as noted in 1884 by the prominent German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel: The will of the animal, as well as that of man, is never free. The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether untenable. Every physiologist who scientifically investigates the activity of the will in man and animals, must of necessity arrive at the conviction that in reality the will is never free, but is always determined by external or internal influences. De Waal, Frans . Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (pgs. 221-223). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Seriously? That seems to equate to trolling. Not related to a discussion of a genuine issue and concern.

This also brings to mind how interpretations of things going on in the broader society. For example, someone somewhere decided microwave oven cooked food had all the live somehow removed from it. Consider the adage about how quickly lies can spread... lies, conspiracy theories and the like can travel around the world before the truth even gets out of bed. The corpse was likely a somewhat unwitting experiment in that kind of control. Especially the Family corpses. But I attribute problems I had (not FC) later to this kind of control I had experienced. I still deal with the ramifications of it in family relationships... More than 35 years after I left the cult.

Why do you NOT do what you think you intend to do?

Sounds like Ms Thomas is probably familiar with GSC.

I might disagree with you on whether or to what degree Victor indirectly or DIRECTLY promoted it on that very basis. He had long before us devised a con game (see threads and comments about The Book of Charlie, and long prior to said comments) when astute observers identified what he did in the PFLAP class to develop his "identity" (or, in modern marketing lingo, his "brand") as MOGFODAT, built a subculture around it, co-opted The Way East and The Way West and began getting non-profit rich. Victor had archetypes on which to model his scheme. And it wasn't the guy he stole the PFLAP class from. PFLAP was the indoctrination. Mike still models his life after this entire confidence game. In that regard, a case could be made that those TALES about the race track and black/white hearts was, in fact BRAINWASHING. To a degree, I fell for it. Evidenced by how clearly I remember those tales. I also remember walking around the campus in Emporia (which I think was where I attended the advanced class on PFLAP, even that isn't as clear as the brainwashing/programming) trying to receive revelation, including discerning of spirts. First thought, y'all! It was the same summer I first remember hearing detractors claiming we were brainwashed. Of course, none of us believed them. That was more than 4 decades ago.

Oh, okay. Was there a consensus? If so, what is your assessment of said consensus? Sometimes, so many replies add up to TL;DR. But I'm thankful there was lively discussion.

Intriguing discussion of Victor Wierwille's private interpretation teachings on cancer and devil spirits. Anyone have any idea how that relates at all to whether or not we have freedom of will? Perhaps someone could explore the question of whether "stream of consciousness" posting is contrary to freedom of will? Just sayin'.