Rocky

And would allowing him to claim a moral victory harm you or anyone else in any tangible way? Might that in some way incentivize him to stop with the endless nonsensical posting?

My dear Mike. I suspect there are subconscious reasons why you've posted the same s*** so doggone many times over the last two decades. My view is if you had any writing skill lending itself to credible persuasion, you'd have made your point LONG ago. In like manner, I suspect those with whom you now so vociferously bicker (I hesitate to call what you do or what those who take your bait do as argumentation) also have some reasons hidden from consciousness. MOST of what both sides post is nigh on undecipherable. If they have any desire to persuade you, they are as delusional as you are. Do ANY of you have ANY self-awareness or ability to reflect on what you're doing, i.e. accomplishing nothing except for possibly feeding those subconscious concerns you harbor and act out? I don't have access to any GSC traffic data to analyze and draw inferences on your influence. But I can't help but figure it all has the ring of tin. Obviously, I have to look inward also and wonder if I have made any positive impact or influence on any GSC reader's life. Nevertheless, this is why at this moment, I look for gems that might help people. Bickering ain't gonna get that job done. Oh, and WHO effin' cares at this point how worthy the vicster may have been to have been considered/called a doctor? He called himself Dr. Wierwille. The vast majority of those who bought his classes, if they are still upright and above ground, have forsaken the entire concept. How many of them, after having "left the household," suffered imminent calamities? How many went on to live meaningful lives? Those seem to me to be far more salient questions than the subject of this thread. Selah. Peace.

This website should be subtitled, "the wor(l)d according to Mike." I have to wonder why anyone falls into his trap of bickering about minutia. It gives him an aura of validity that is, IMO, most unearned, unreasonable, and perhaps inadvertently lends credibility to the charlatan Victor Wierwille.

I had NO idea about this until I started reading UnCULTured. The author, Daniella Mastaynek Young alludes to having been raped at age 6 but does describe in more detail the "flirty fishing" and other aspects of sexualizing young children. It's horrifying. Not wanting to take one person's claim, I started searching the internet about the COG cult. Ms. Young's experience was not isolated and very much corroborates what the gal in Megyn Kelly's interview had to say. I first came into contact with twi (not as a result of a female wow but rather a fellow Airman), 48 years ago (Halloween 1974) at the Lajes Field base chapel... at age 19. In the ensuing years, I've lost a LOT of my naivete and learned plenty about the ways of the flesh... and sinister, sometimes subtle (sometimes not) exercise of power and influence in organizations. Notably, religious organizations established with authoritarian social structures. Long ago, probably within the last 20 to 25 years, I realized churches were no different than the culture of Hollywood. Young wannabe starlets seeking opportunity approached powerful movie producers who had deep pockets and access to large bank accounts. The starlets wanted opportunity to make block buster movies. Some young cult converts wanted access to the power leaders of cults. I doubt I need to rehash the stories of Victor and his motor coach. In his way corpse letters, I even recall him mentioning the lockbox concept. The lockbox was eerily similar to the secrecy practices among the COG. Anyway, It would surprised me NOT AT ALL if Victor had met and compared notes with David Berg. Shortly after filming the PFLAP class, commandeering The Way East and The Way West. Or at least reading about Berg's exploits. Further, when Berg died, the new WOG in COG instituted changes likely as a result of counsel from lawyers to partially tamp down child sexual abuse. Nevertheless, IMO both The Family International (successor to Children of God) and TWI remain cultic organizations from which MANY people escape and take years to recover from. Again, the all powerful cult leader figures out a way to have sexual access to young, beautiful neophytes.

There are humongous parallels between TWI and the COG, David Berg's Children of God cult. The differences are ONLY a matter of degrees. Literally and figuratively. Berg has substantially less education than Wierwille. Berg has a LOT more audaciousness regarding sex and sexual interaction. We KNOW women and girls in TWI used flirtatiousness to sell the class. We KNOW Vic had unabashed appetites, regarding sex and alcohol. Berg very likely wouldn't have gotten away with preaching sexuality the way he did if he had stayed in the US. It's astounding we still have people like Mike who push Vic's classes, "writings" (which were largely written by others), and doctrine. Wierwille's motivations for establishing he subculture can only be inferred, but the practices were and still are FAR from biblical or godly.

I have to wonder if Vic ever had the opportunity to compare notes with David Berg, founder of Children of God (the one which re-organized after Berg's death as The Family International). TWI was, by far, not the only pseudo-Christian cult started by a twisted American. UnCULTured, by Daniella Mestyanek Young is a memoir written by a COG survivor, having been born and raised in the cult. From Ms Young's book and this video, it's clear there were several parallels between TWI and COG... the difference largely a matter of degrees.

My point is: all of your efforts to frame what Wierwille taught and what he did are stories that YOU give your preferred meaning/interpretation to. I believe everything about TWI was horse pucky. I do not expect you to believe it because I say it. If I did so expect, it would be unrealistic. I believe it would take something as dramatic for you as what was read in the Book of Acts about how Paul changed his entire belief system in the wink of an eye.

At some point Mike, whether you ever come to realize that your hero was charlatan or not, you still could benefit from thinking through what the social climate was like when this happened. Elsewhere on GSC, I have recently mentioned the book, UnCULTured, which I am reading now. It's a memoir by a survivor of the Children of God cult, Daniella Mestyanek Young published in 2022. The epigraph in the book states, "The first rule of cults is you are never in a cult." I was in a cult. Specifically in the 9th WC, when Jonestown went down. I remember Loy being VERY concerned that WE were going to be labelled a cult. Of course, he was right. The connection of Ms Young's childhood with your story about picking up three 14 year old girls who happened to be in twi... Joker star Joaquin Phoenix had an unconventional early childhood, living in Venezuela, Florida, and eventually Hollywood with his peripatetic parents and siblings Summer, Liberty, Rain, and late fellow actor River. But until Phoenix was around three years old in 1977, the family were followers of the Children of God, a cult helmed by a rogue preacher called David Berg that would later become notorious amid allegations of child sexual abuse. And he’s not the only celebrity who spent some of their early years in the group—Rose McGowan also spent part of her childhood in the cult. Here’s what you need to know. This excerpt is from an Esquire magazine story in 2019. Berg’s church melded worship of Jesus Christ with ’60s-era free love, and preached a fairly standard cult leader prophecy—the apocalypse was coming, and soon. This doomsday predication encouraged his followers to live hand-to-mouth rather than making long-term plans; ex-members later told The Guardian of begging for alms and subsisting off of donated food. The cult earned notoriety for its sexual practices, which included what Berg dubbed “flirty fishing,” and which found him ordering female followers to have sex with men in order to bring them into the cult. In 1979, he reported that “flirty fishers” had added 19,000 members to the group’s ranks. "It was religious prostitution," one of Berg's daughters told Timeline in 2017. Joaquin Phoenix told Vanity Fair that the introduction of the "flirty fishing" policy drove his parents to leave the group. "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that," he said, "and they were like, '.... this, we’re outta here.’" His mother, Heart Phoenix, told the magazine that "it took several years to get over our pain and loneliness" after leaving the group. Rose McGowan’s family also escaped the cult during her childhood. I'm NOT suggesting you did anything inappropriate with those hitchhikers. I AM suggesting it was odd (but I know from being a kid at that time it was certainly in the realm of possibility) that 14 year old girls would hitchhike. There are obvious parallels between twi and Berg's cult. The difference is perhaps in degrees. The cult leader sets himself up to be beyond challenge internal in the group. He then gets to establish the group mores and rationalize it however he can. The practices look less like a Biblical construct than a manifestation of the desires of the cult leader.

Mekia Cox

The lovely (and gorgeous) lady in this clip plays a seriously badass detective in The Rookie.

The post/comment immediately prior to Chockfull's just a moment ago was just shy of 19 years ago. 19 years FROM NOW will be 2041. I hope all (or most... given the constraints of aging) will still be upright at that time. I will then be about 87 years old. Take care as best you can for your health and wellbeing, fellow greasespotters.

Mike, Mike, Mike... How often do you change minds by telling people to whom you reply that they are wrong? If you want to find out, perhaps you can commission a scientific poll. Claiming to have done an informal poll two decades ago really sounds the same as "I'm making up a story for which I have no authoritative back up to my claim."

IMO, the title, The Joy of Serving, was completely subterfuge. Joy is joy. Wanna know what gives me great joy? My grandchildren. Serving in Victor's cult was mostly drudgery. But renaming drudgery as joy may have psyched some people into feeling guilty for not devoting all of their time to selling PFLAP and taking orders from Loy Martindale. No thank you.

Merry Christmas, Mike.

Jumping to contusions sounds better than jumping to concussions. Just sayin'

Steamed live and recorded in October 2022.

Also from page 22 of UnCULTured: So, without being able to peer inside the mind and heart of Victor Wierwille, WE can look at his PFLAP indoctrination with new insight from the recollections of others subjected to cult indoctrination. Again, it doesn't "establish" his motivation, but it does suggest he was setting up BRAINWASHING of vulnerable and susceptible (mostly) young people. And it DOES show the antidote for any and everyone who chooses not to be thus constrained about "how far they can go."

I just read this in UnCULTured: a memoir, by Daniella Mestyanek Young [pgs 21 and 22]who is a survivor of the Children of God cult:

Speaking of the longevity of cult organization, I just started reading UnCULTured: a memoir written by a survivor of the Children of God cult. It's notable (to me anyway) how a common thread (perhaps a RED thread) among all fundamentalist Christian cult survivors' stories is that the founders find ways to rationalize and self-justify sexual abuse of increasingly young women. Twi is no different in that regard.

Are you sure that was me?

Rather than sexual predation being "the core" of cults and religion, I believe sexual predation is an inherent risk/danger of any group or institution in which substantive power imbalance exists without adequate "guardrails" in the written/unwritten mores of the group or institution.