Catcup

What would be the right thing to do if they gave a formal apology? The right thing for them to do would be to close their doors, liquidate their assets, and redistribute their funds to everyone who ever gave money to them. That is the only, ONLY "right thing to do" for The Way International. Would I "let it go?" Only if they admitted their guilt, liquidated their assets, and redistributed them to everyone who ever gave money to them. Would I stop posting on Greasespot cafe about TWI? Probably not, EVEN IF they closed the doors. Why? Because the day we forget what they did, the day we stop telling what they did even after they are dead and gone, is the day they get away with it, the day their deeds are buried in the fertile ground of ignorance and enables an evil seed to spring into action and birth the system anew. Never, never forget. Never again.

I agree. In my opinion, all this will do is attract people who are not thinking back into the same organization that sucked them dry to begin with. There is no redeeming the organization itself. It was wrong from the beginning, and should be relegated to the scrap heap of history along with other evil institutions and their rationalizations. Trying to rehab The Way International because of "a few good folks still in there" and "all the good things we learned" and "all the good things that happened" is like trying to rehabilitate the institution of slavery because there were a few good Massas, and you know, so many of dem darkies really was happy. We know dat because dey all sang so much o de time-- and after all, Aunt Sally, the Missus is de one dat larned her how to make dem good biscuits... Dangerous myths based on false premises. One more evil and destructive institution which should be forever abolished. Just my opinion, your mileage may vary.

I only have enough time to tell you this and scoot out because I am in the midst of finals, but here is the "latest" information I have on what's going on at HQ. Maybe someone else still in can confirm. I can't, but have it on fairly good authority: At a recent STS at TWI, a teacher supposedly (and I don't know who) stood at the auditorium podium and taught about forgiveness and said they all should apologize for how some of US who have left the ministry have been treated by THEM. Supposedly this person brought everyone in the auditorium to tears with his teaching. This resulted in an "innie" family member contacting an "outie" family member and relating the whys and wherefores of his unusual warmup after being previously so cold. My own personal take? Their coffers are getting dusty. Also noted: Apparently it is the basic Way follower who is doing the apologizing for their OWN behavior toward their friends and family former members, NOT The Way International itself. That of course, absolves TWI of any legal liability, since their followers are apologizing for their own behavior and the institution itself isn't making the apology. If they did that, they'd be admitting guilt and liability. What better way to solve all their problems than to lay the responsibility AND the blame on their followers and have THEM clean up the mess they made of people's lives. How conVEEEEEEEEEEEENient...... The Way International itself AND it's board of trustees need to publicly and in writing admit to their own culpability in promulgating a devilish and destructive doctrine which encouraged their followers on pain of excommunication to end relationships, end marriages, and in some cases end their lives. Hell will freeze over before that happens because it will be the death knell of the organization. Please forgive me if this subject has already been brought up and discussed to death.... don't have time to check to see what is current anymore. At least this is what I just found out and you've at least got MY opinion on it....

Greetings and welcome, Freud, from a kindred spirit. I don't often get here because I carry an extremely heavy schedule, but I got a private note to check out the thread. Your training serves you well. You are correct here. But there are actually a constellation of problems. I, too, have seen this "broken man" routine personally, face to face, in a Chicago hotel suite, back in 1987 some time during his first major "difficulty" commonly known as the big split. He was then exactly as you describe him now. You should know he was definitely suicidal back then. However he quickly rallied when he got enough people helping him and encouraging him and backing him up. Unfortunately, as you might suspect, he went headlong back into the same habit patterns commonly seen with that disorder. Regretably, he went on to hurt many more people than before, and was more vicious than ever. Maybe. One could only hope. I just wish I could be half as optimistic. That's precisely what my spouse and I thought back in 1987. However, after enjoying a brief period of time (several years, in fact) in which it looked like he was recovering well, all hell broke loose and he ended up being twofold the "child of hell" he was to begin with. If you involve yourself and your spouse with this man, you should know that you do so to your own peril and should go in with your eyes wide open. My advice to you, would be to revisit your original conclusion: Be warned: the problems this man has is bigger than the two of you can handle alone. His humility and "timidity" masks the leviathon just under the surface of those waters. Precisely. Listen to your gut. LISTEN TO YOUR GUT and revisit your orginal conclusion. Consider yourself warned. My best regards. Now I must get back to the groves of academe.

The whole point of a "con" job, is the offenders have your confidence and your trust; you trust them implicitly and that is HOW they get away with what they do. If you DIDN'T trust them, they COULDN'T con you. Good job, Peelers.

How about this one I got when I rejected a kiss some dorkh$ad tried to force on me at HQ after walking me home from the BRC: "What's the matter? Don't you want to share your heart with me?"

Wierwille was no Solomon, nor did he live in that geographical area or time period. But he loved to pretend he did.

That my dear, is my opinion, to which I am entitled, and your mileage may vary. Which brings us full circle back to the original purpose of the thread. In light of that statement and Wierwille's track record, I do not believe Victor Paul Wierwille has a moral or ethical leg to stand on.

Oh, yeah-- We keep rehearsing the evils of what Hitler did in the hopes that no one ever does that to anyone else again. So no one forgets. So no one forgets what circumstances brought him to power, how he abused his power, and the consequences of obedience to unchecked evil and tyranny upon masses of people, and what it took to eliminate the threat of the evil that was ensconced in Germany. To this day, there are people still willing to take up Hitler's cause. To keep the history out there, helps suppress the evil that is still willing to rise again. It takes vigilance and diligence to keep the stories out there. Especially since the elderly survivors and warriors are dropping like flies, and we now have heads of state like the leader of Iran, claiming the Holocaust never happened, and voicing his intent to blow Israel off the map. it is even more important that we continue to remember, so we do not forget. Never Again. What we do on this website is perform one of the functions of recording history: to record the lessons, both good and bad, so we can hopefully avoid previous pitfalls. And we identify those still willing to impose their tyranny upon others. Those of us who post here about what happened to us at the hands of The Way International may not have numbers tattooed on our forearms, but many of us here bear the scars and fingerprints of that organization in our very souls, and we will not be silenced. To be silent, is to acquiesce to the evil, allow it to hide, and eventually flourish again. Never Again.

Yeah, I guess it's a real shame how people speak ill of the dead: the accusations against his character, all the people he supposedly hurt, comparing old wounds. How can you prove he did all the nasty things of which people constantly accuse him? For that matter, maybe what he did was exaggerated, or perhaps maybe never even happened at all. For that matter, maybe he actually did some good. But oh, well, he's dead now. I guess I'll have to stop teaching about the atrocities of Adolf Hitler when I get to WWII.

And I found it disgusting the way he bashed around my living sister... with more than accusations.

Absolutely. There is not a perfect person on the face of the earth. Everyone makes mistakes. However, as Maya Angelou frequently says... "When you know better, you do better." It is knowing better, yet continuing to perform in a perverse manner and attempting to scripturally justify it, that sets this man and his teachings apart as unworthy of being held up as models of Christian behavior and ethics.

I know there are those of us who met some good people and learned some good things in TWI. But clinging to every shred of doctrine that ever fell out of this man's mouth like it came from the very lips of God Almighty will tend toward a warped ethical outlook. If you toss it out and re evaluate your life, if you re evaluate what you believed, if you re examine the scriptures from other points of view, I belive what was true will come back to you. You will be better off for having taken out the trash.

For that very reason --that a person with no moral compass will not lead anyone to the truth, but eventually lead to a warped ethical basis for life-- hanging on to the teachings of Victor Paul Wierwille is not "holding to the good." It is clinging to the vestiges of a man without a moral compass. We are not talking here about a man with simple minor flaws that bear overlooking. We are talking about a man who admittedly knew better, and then chose to do evil anyway, repeatedly. Despite the consequences to others. It is no surprise his ethics led to doctrines that permitted gutstripping innocent people, using them, and then tossing them away like so much trash. There is no baby, toss out that dirty soup, clean the inside of those dirty pots and pans and start from scratch, folks.

Thinking about The Way International’s uncanny ability to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, this morning I was contemplating the incident in the Gospels where Jesus heals a group of lepers and only one returned to thank him. Both Victor Paul Wierwille and L. Craig Martindale capitalized on that record as showing the importance of expressing your gratitude to the teacher, and elevated that quality in the incident above all others that may have been there for the appreciation. Certainly after hearing that record, you would assuredly desire to be like the one, the special, the elite (of course) person who after receiving such a great gift from God, would appropriately and abundantly express your gratitude to the man who used God's power to change your life. I was thinking, that just maybe there is more to the story that God was trying to get across to us. Perhaps a very important message is, if you are looking for a profession in which you get a lot of recognition, if you are a person who is very needy when it comes to external validation, if you are looking for people to throw garlands at your feet and worship you for every little thing you do for them… Then perhaps being a true servant of the Gospel is not a profession for which you are well suited. Another thought. In my Ethics class, I ran across an interesting comment in the text by Oliver A. Johnson that I thought I would share with you all regarding the necessity of moral insight in a true ethicist ... especially in light of Victor Paul Wierwille’s so-called “Prolegomenon on Christian Ethics:” “…it is the moral choices and evaluations that we make in everyday practical living that furnish the data on which ethicists construct theories and against which they finally test them. If ethicists are deficient in moral insight or have warped insights, it seems inevitable that, as a result, their theories will wander from the truth.” Well, then, there you have it. Now, I must return to Plato's Republic.

Oh, my God, Mexie, and I was trying to eat DINNER!!!!! OOAAAAAAAAARRGGLPHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's been fun the past several weeks being able to read and post as much as I want, and to read all you wonderful folks again. However, school and work starts up again tomorrow morning bright and early, so as my habit is, I am probably going to disappear again and not come up for air until the end of the semester. I may have a spare second or two to read, but won't have time for posting. Have fun, stay cool, be good, and I'll see yas round

I must not be doing something right. When I click on Live Chat, there's never anybody in the room!!!!

Really, and truly, think about it. Is waiting for bad leadership to die off YOUR ONLY OPTION? LEAVE while you still have some sanity...

And seriously, yes, the Wierwille children have and do come here to read. What pain they have been through, no one here will ever know or possibly begin to understand. It is painful enough for them to have to have lived through what they did without inuendo and falsehoods. What needs to be posted here, are first hand accounts. [delete] And if someone gives you a first hand account, you need to take it for exactly that. But, it has been pretty much an unspoken rule here, if not actually spoken by some, to have the decency to leave the Wierwille kids out of our discussions. [delete] Let's leave it at that.

Sorry, but no stinger here, just the facts, ma'am: My 17 year old sister was out WOW Ambassador and when VPW was touring the state, came to see her family, then invited her to "tour" the motor coach. He made a move on her and she resisted. So she was asked to leave the WOW program. I was in residence at the time, and my folks were brand new PFAL Grads. They called me up to tell me they had to go pick up my sister and bring her home. She wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and wouldn't talk to them about what had happened to her. Just stayed curled up in bed in the fetal position, crying all the time. No one had ever seen my sister in this state before. My parents had just been to visit my sister over Thanksgiving, not 3 weeks before, and she was just fine. Her family was just fine. They treated my folks warmly. Next thing they know, they get a call to drive out there and pick her up asap. This is not a cross town trip, mind you, this is a trip from the midwest to the east coast. No explanation, just "come get her right now!" and that's the end of it. When my parents got there, no one would speak to them and tell them what happened. My sister refused to tell them what happened. She refused to tell anyone what happened. She just sank into this state no one could understand. So when my parents called me and asked me what happened and what to do for her, I told them I would talk to VPW since he was slated to come visit the Campus in the next few days. So I wrote a note that would be waiting for him when he arrived, asking if he could tell me what happened to her, since she had been dismissed right after his visit. I got a phone call from VPW that was very gruff, abrupt, and intimidating. When I asked him what had happened to her, he said "She just couldn't hack the WOW program!" That's it. Nothing more to it. The entire thing was a big mystery to me and my folks. She left TWI, while my parents and I remained in another TWENTY YEARS. She never told me what happened to her until AFTER I was safely out of the organization. Why? Because she was afraid if she said anything to us, she would have lost the only family she had, and would have been forever isolated from us. And you know what's really sad? She was right. I would have written her off as possessed. There is more to everything you are seeing on this site. Behind every comment, there is a story, and behind every story there are REAL, SUFFERING HUMAN BEINGS who were devastated by Victor Paul Wierwille and his ilk. I don't pretend to speak for others, but what I post here is not flip. This is real. And this is my own personal commitment to what I say here: http://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/index.ph...=0entry191018

Hang in there Hooner. I agree with Belle about contacting your insurance company to see who is on your plan. Then interview therapists until you find one that you feel comfortable with. If you don't feel comfortable with the first one, try another. The best fit is someone you make a connection with. You'll know it when you get there, so don't try one and give up. And yes, this, too will pass.

And there you have it. Thank you, Bagpipes. Coffee? C[_] And have a cinnamon roll on me @

What a sick, sick organization we all were a part of....

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