Nathan_Jr

Damn, you're good WordWolf! Thanks. The He/Him referred to by Micobe is victor??

"He received a Master of a theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He later went on to get a doctorate degree." (But NOT from Princeton Theological Seminary, rather, from a mail-order degree mill.) These are linguistic sleight of hand tricks designed to deceive, distract, obfuscate. A mind dulled by "repetitive rubbing" believes the trick. An obedient mind is not alert to this sleight of hand. Yum

Brilliant!

I thought Victor taught those who reject his teachings won’t got to hell or eternal torment, they’ll just go to sleep for the 2nd and final time. No passing GO. No crowns. Just unbelieving sleep forever. I’m probably misremembering. It’s hard to keep up with all the bull$hit dogmatic doctrine. I need to renew my mind to remember accurately. Surely, someone can correct me, as one might correct a dog

Yep. Mel Brooks’ main target in Blazing Saddles is bigotry/racism; a perennial target in American comedy going back at least to Mark Twain. Comedy is a courageous window to truth, an unflinching mirror to ourselves. It seems to me the best comedy is only concerned with these things - concessions to the audience risk indenturing the comic to whoredom. The audience will get it, or not. (See Norm Macdonald.) When Dave Chappelle was in the midst of defending a cancel attack last year, he was unrelenting and said Americans’ "ears had become brittle.” Some consider him the GOAT.

"Where da white women at?" (Mel Brooks is a genius. If he made Blazing Saddles today, he'd be cancelled.)

Thanks, OldSkool! Well done! Wow, even RICO charges. I mean, the raping is a mundane old hat straight off the top VPW's head, but the civil conspiracy and RICO counts - they go to the heart of what it is to be a cult. Does anyone know if the Allens are still married?

I first encountered Ehrenreich in Harper's many years ago. She's an excellent essayist. Great post, Rocky! "It's all your fault, because of your faulty believing." This is a form of gaslighting. The abuse is so nuanced and subtle. One must have eyes, one must be aware - sharply, vigorously aware. My local fellowship leader, father in tha werd, uncle-in-law did not lead a very active life. He sat around and read books, watched TV, visited his neighbors uninvited and unannounced to witness and hold forth. There was very little action in his life. The window of opportunity for a happening of any kind, positive or negative, was tiny. His exposure to life, to the world, was slight, because he rarely left his house. If anything (late mail) ever happened to him that was perceived as less than perfect (normal, real), it could only be the adversary's doing. It could never be because that's just the way things are or because he was mistaken or $hit just happens. But if anything in my full, active, work/family life happened, it was because I was out of fellowship - because I didn't know how (H-O-W) to beleeeve. Anything good that happened, like a job promotion, was because of HIS believing for me.

Aha! Yep. That's it. That's what I remember seeing. Nice work, OldSkool!

Yes, I read that wiki page. I'm aware aware enough of the methodologies of biblical criticism and critical textual analysis to know that attempts to harmonize require lots of fudging, logical leaps and textual manipulation. (The PERCEIVED errors become problematic ONLY to the inerrantist trying to MAKE them fit.) Smashing the four canonical gospels together into one big gospel in order to add two robbers and two malefactors together to make four is not how it works - at least from an honest historical-critical perspective. And four crucified is an historical claim, requiring historical-critical analysis. Even some, not all, of his literary analysis around syntax doesn't add up. Especially, in his four crucified bit. It seems to me it is exactly his dogmatic systematic theology that gets in his own way. Indeed, he misses the forest for the trees, as did victor. There are some technical things he handles very well, I'm sure. But it's not enough to persuade me to waste my time with him, especially in light of the four crucified and flat earth and hyper dispensational silliness.

Well, with a mouth full of crow, I readily admit to the misuse of dilettante as a cheap ad hominem. It's perhaps a hard-dying childish reflex to want to grab someone by the lapel and shake some sense into them. Misguided scholar is nicer. Inaccurate, misguided scholar is more precise. Again, errors are ONLY a problem for inerrantists. I'm not sure why four crucified has been on my brain lately. It really does require either willful ignorance or astonishing naïveté to accept this deeply flawed argument. It's enough error for me to chuck all of Bullinger's work in the discard pile. If he was so egregiously wrong about that, what else was he wrong about? I won't waste my time with him. He's not the only Bible scholar to have ever brushed paper with ink. I would never call you a dilettante. The moniker has negative implications. The dilettante is more than a dabbler - he is a pretentious know-it-all, one who knows just enough to fake it, like victor; one who knows something, and based on this pretends to know everything. It's closely related to poseur. Dilettantes hate to be questioned, lest they're found out. I'm also well aware of his support for the flat-earthers. For me, this is another reason to find him incredulous.

Damn, T-Bone. Flashback trigger. My aunt and uncle and cousins were in Amway. This was their life. Relentless driving hundreds of miles through the night while listening to propaganda tapes. All the driving. The classes. The meetings. The speakers. The teachers. The books. The tapes. The coffee. The phony love bombing. The prosperity gospel. The pressure to sign people up. The fantasy. So many parallels to TWI and victor's scheme. Of course, Amway is a cult just like TWI. They always referred to it as "The Business." NEVER Amway. Much like TWI zombies call it "The Ministry." These parallels may have been evident to me in the past, but your description of the cult prosperity grind vividly brought it into my present awareness.

Bolshevik, I'm trying to understand what you are talking about. What are some of the evils of Waydale to be documented? Wasn't Waydale critical of TWI? I thought I once actually found the Waydale site pages in a deep web archive search. I didn't book mark it and now can't find it. Maybe I'm misremembering. What is going on? What happened?

Amen. It's not that it's not true - it's not EVEN true. It's bull$hit! Frankfurt goes on to explain bull$hit is never concerned with the truth - it is concerned with PERSUASION. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. Like the four crucified counterfeit. Bullinger's logic, hermeneutics and textual analysis are all fallacious.* The conclusion of four crucified is based on flawed, phony premises, flawed assumptions and methodology (how it's made). It is a claim of historic fact but shrugs off a historical-critical approach in favor of an odious ride on a carousel of excrement - in favor of bull$hit methodology in order to persuade, to impress, to obscure, to zombify. Only the immature can buy the premises and conclusion. The "logic" of four crucified is similar to the logic used by flat-earthers: Truth and fact and evidence shall not get in the way of two grown men playing in the feces of another. It's not that four crucified is not true - it's not EVEN true! It's phony. It's bull$hit. * Bullinger on the surface seems impressive. And in a few ways, he is. HOWEVER, Bullinger was a dilettante. There are better lexicons and better commentaries without all the pretense and sleight of hand.

Inappropriate cultural appropriation? Redundant? Isn't cultural appropriation inherently or definitively inappropriate? Not arguing. Just seeking mathematical precision and scientific exactness. Good call. Perhaps worthy of its own thread.

A recap. The "infallible doctrine" of VPW as a con artist and only a con artist is a glove that won't fit the hand, because he was also: shallow (spiritually and five senses) immature (spiritually and five senses) insecure hook shot inventor dog beater bull$hitter whiner hater dilettante simonist unabashed plagiarist sexual predator (if you know Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, you know VPW - same seed.) malignant narcissist megalomaniac pathological liar poseur a harmful and controlling cult-leader a voracious wolf in sheep’s clothing a mean-drunk-Drambuie-guzzler with delusions of grandeur A man with a lot of issues

Well done, T-Bone! I read all of it through tears of laughter brought on by the excerpt above. The 'ol swtcheroo. That's it. All the time. Brilliant. Bull$hit wouldn't be bull$hit without it - intellectually and spiritually. I may tackle this one sentence for extra credit. But, Gawd, what a logical and linguistic mess! First, I need to dry the tears of laughter from my eyes and change my pants.

Thanks, WW. I'll do a search for the accounts of animal abuse. But I get your point. The book recommends abuse, victor champions the book as a guide to best practices; so, one could infer that victor abused his dogs. Simple logic. In light of the mountains of evidence already against vic, I'll accept the inference. It seems Hunt Close! was the precursor to the Tedd Tripp book so love by TWI and other fundamentalist-evangelical Christian zealots. And, yes, indeed. I was aware of the incredulity of those books even before I knew victor recommended them. It doesn't take much to discredit them - a mere, half-awake whisper of understanding demolishes the counterfeit structure of hay on which those books are based. It requires willful ignorance or stupidity or spiritual wickedness to recommend those books - to even mention them without condemnation.

One can abuse their dogs, yet remain uninvolved in their raising, right? Sorry, it almost sounds like you are disputing the dog abuse by not acknowledging it. Just want to be clear. Was the book Hunt Close! recommended reading in addition to The Thirteenth Tribe and The Myth of the Six Million? Was Hunt Close! in the TWI bookstore?

What a farce! A dark, dark comedy of wickedness. What a real piece of trash this little charlatan was. Clearly, NOT a man of God.

Are you serious? Seriously. Are you?

If one knows by observation or revelation (the second time establishes it) that VPW was a con artist, what else matters? What else is left to cling to? That he was a skilled rapist? An prolific plagiarist? An inept teacher? He was a thief come to steal, kill, and destroy. What could possibly blot that out? What? He pet his dogs? So what? And there was never a doctrine, infallible or otherwise, about VPW the con artist. Everything is not doctrine. Some things are simply there to be seen, if one has eyes to see.

Rocky, this thread touched me profoundly. Thank you for your courage and grace. I, too, have experienced parental alienation, which is not only a cruelty against the parent, it is child abuse. Literally. Actually. Child abuse. Your words, and those of Cain and Hayes, triggered me into deep contemplation and solitude. And from this, arose, among many things, a remembrance of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke "Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.” On Rilke's desk was a little piece of paper or card with a solitary inscription: "Today." The only day you will ever write your memoir.

Let them resist. Massively. They are free to resist as we are free to criticize. But I get it it’s not easy. In Russia, China, North Korea and TWI, the powers and principalities do not resist criticism, they swiftly dispatch the criticizer to prison or exile or death.

Some years ago, Skyrider wrote something like: To find out who controls you, look to those whom you can’t criticize. Someone else may have said it originally…. Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Alduous Huxley, George Orwell… But it was a brilliant observation by Sky relating it to the wicked cult of VPW. Public officials from the local police to the president of the U.S. are not above the law and are accountable. The First Amendment protects those seeking to criticize them and hold them accountable.