WordWolf

Didn't Jesus himself select a physician, Luke, as one of his disciples? I don't recall any incident recorded where Jesus told him it was a rubbish field. Does anyone recall such an incident? I do know that a number of sound medical principles are recorded in the Mosaic Law, and were eventually adopted by the medical profession. I notice the people at the top of twi never seemed to refuse medical attention in favor of prayer or some alternative method. vpw himself wore glasses the entire time all of us had heard of him, yet he was supposedly the standard of believing and got all sorts of results. Years to operate, and he never got 20/20 vision back- and lost an eye to disease. (He didn't refuse medical attention for that, either.) According to his own account, vpw claimed he never got sick A DAY IN HIS LIFE, and never TOOK AN ASPIRIN A DAY IN HIS LIFE. Me, I figure he was saying a tremendous lie both times. Everything we COULD measure showed he was just another guy who got sick, got hurt, got old, etc, just like everyone else, and was unable to use his "believing" to prevent any of it.

Any unbeliever who has even a basic understanding of health would tell someone who was recovering from food poisoning to do the following, which work for most situations that don't require more serious medical care or specialized care: A) REST B) stay warm C) stay clean D) get nutrition Those promote the body's natural healing systems. (Rest allows the body time to work, staying warm ensures infections won't set in, staying clean will keep away opportunistic infections, and good nutrition gives the body the building blocks to rebuild its health. Of course, twi promoted- and probably still promotes- avoiding rest because you can't slave for them while you're resting. Last I heard, the food at hq for most people was inadequate in both amount and nutritional requirements, too. But it's what twi could get cheaply, so there you go.

Is there a reason to consider that a "healing" other than your desire to shoehorn it into a discussion it does not relate to? The verses say nothing about that being a "healing." Chapter and verse, please... Naaman was healed after washing in the Jordan 7 times. Jesus healed a man's eyes with spit, clay and prayer. Nothing indicates any of these is any sort of "rule." They also have nothing to do with twi insisting that going back to work promotes healing. Which relates to twi saying going back to work promites healing HOW? AFTER a muscle has been healed (a disease removed, damage removed), a professional will often recommend using the muscle again, in slow increments that increase, because that's how a muscle gets strong. Few people have difficulty telling the difference between exercise AFTER healing with a requirement to exercise FOR healing. I'm glad we agree on something. Correlation does not equal causation. Presuming we were even TOLD THE TRUTH (when it comes to twi, that's a big leap), then Howard was left alone for long periods, and eventually his wits returned. Since he was left alone in his office, you're assuming that the office has anything to do with the recovery. If he'd rested in bed, he probably would have recovered exactly the same. (Personally, I think some minimum exposure to input was beneficial, but that could easily be done anywhere.) A lab experiment showed birds were fed randomly, and they began "religiously" performing "superstitious" behavior. The reason was that they were connecting what they had done at the moment the food was given with the food being given. So, they kept repeating those actions to get the food to return. Of course, the actions had nothing to do with the food arriving-that was a complete coincidence. Likewise, correlation does not equal causation. Just because 2 events happen together does not mean one caused the other. More people get frostbite when sales of hot chocolate go up. Does the hot chocolate cause the frostbite? No, the hot chocolate sales go up when the weather gets cold.... Confusing correlation with causation is sloppy thinking. BTW, I could swear twi credited some sort of amazing recovery for Howard to some kind of beet juice or molasses or something. Is that the same incident, or was the man prone to all sorts of mysterious illnesses and recoveries?

I've never SEEN "Scent of a Woman", and I might have gotten it from a few clips I have seen... either a reference to one character being blind (there was something about not needing the OTHER character to grab him), or any of several well-known quotes from the "trial" towards the end. As to the current one, I'll take another guess on a movie I haven't seen... "BLOW"?

I'm almost certain this is not any Marx Brothers movie. (This is coming from a fan who owns most of their movies.) I'm thinking this is either Abbott and Costello, or Laurel and Hardy. I'll take a wild swing (I don't know this from one line) and say "March of the Wooden Soldiers" (aka "Babes in Toyland" starring L & H).

You SHOULD have recognized that song, if you knew about recent events in my life... Some of you never read my thread in Soap Opera, apparently... Ok, people, FREE POST!

the Karate Kid (the original) Ralph Macchio My Cousin Vinny

"Well, I just heard the news today. It seems my life is going to change. I close my eyes, begin to pray Then tears of joy stream down my face" "Well I don't know if I'm ready To be the man I have to be. I'll take a breath, I'll take her by my side. We stand in awe, we've created life." "Welcome to this place, I'll show you everything." "Now everything has changed. I'll show you love, I'll show you everything." "If I had just one wish, Only one demand, I hope he's not like me- I hope he understands That he can take this life And hold it by the hand And he can greet the world..."

"Well I don't know if I'm ready To be the man I have to be. I'll take a breath, I'll take her by my side. We stand in awe, we've created life" "If I had just one wish, Only one demand, I hope he's not like me- I hope he understands That he can take this life And hold it by the hand And he can greet the world..."

"If I had just one wish, Only one demand, I hope he's not like me- I hope he understands That he can take this life And hold it by the hand And he can greet the world..."

I think twi should pay us a maintenance fee. Since their website is as interesting as dry toast, and as informative as a bubble-gum wrapper, nobody ever visits it- even current twi members and staff do not visit it. So, the only way they get information and updates on their own website is by visiting the far more interesting GSC- which is to say, US. So, since we provide them with a valuable service, they should pay us. It's the American way!

Your guess is correct! The 2nd movie began with a new baby joining the family-"Pubert." Your turn!

"The Ballad of Rocky Raccoon," the Lads from Liverpool.

"Isn't he a lady-killer?" Acquited!" "Now, one of you will be the drowning victim and the other one gets to be our lifesaver." "I'll be the victim!" "All your life." "We don't hug." "Oh, they're just shy." "We're not shy." "We're contagious." "Children, why do you hate the baby?" We don't hate him. We just wanna play with him." "Especially his head." "You'll meet someone. Someone very special. Someone who won't press charges." "Would you die for me?" "Yes." "Promise?"

"Isn't he a lady-killer?" Acquited!" "Now, one of you will be the drowning victim and the other one gets to be our lifesaver." "I'll be the victim!" "All your life."

Let's see.... Hero pretending to be a villain... If I remember my television correctly, that was the premise of "The Green Hornet". That had a movie last year. (No Bruce Lee, sadly, but otherwise...) So, is it THE GREEN HORNET?

A) When one is "talking down" to the audience, one sounds superior to them. (Me, I like to presume everyone else is about as smart as I am- but may need me to use less "high-faluting" words when making a case for something....and it's reasonable to think I should "make a case" for any claim I'm making. B) Please remember that JAL's audience is not "the general public." The general public has no reason to take him seriously- and does not. JAL's audience is "ex-twi'ers." Ex-twi'ers have the common history of twi, where many or most learned to shut off their thinking processes and just accept what the teacher was teaching-some still do that, with a veneer of a LITTLE thinking, and thinking A LITTLE thinking is ENOUGH thinking. So, JAL expects that a LITTLE study is enough for the ex-twi crowd. In other words, JAL thinks that you're still stupid enough to fall for light study and patronizing talk as the pinnacle of Bible education. He also thinks you're stupid enough that he can have a long history of teaching one thing, then turn around and teach AGAINST it, and do so with no apologies- and you'll just say "OK" with no explanation from him, or even an APOLOGY. There's no humility, no "I was once foolish enough to teach this, but I know better NOW" or anything else that shows he admits he ever was wrong and thinks he has IMPROVED. He exists at the "the teacher is always right" level, and thinks you're feeble enough that he can keep you as an audience member while he does that.

In twi and ex-twi circles, the idea you mentioned is called "the idiom of permission", and is where the active voice is switched for the passive voice. In doing a search for that, all I found were ex-twi posts or ex-twi sites. (The use of twi-specific terms like "the adversary", insistence on the KJV, and so on, are obvious flags, especially when they're all grouped together.) Since it ONLY comes up on ex-twi sites, all by itself that raises a few "red flags" for me. Anything that nobody's ever heard of EXCEPT ex-twi'ers? Can it possibly be accurate? Anyroad, so I looked around, and found what I think were the most intelligent pages on the subject. I found 2 of them. A quick skim will show that they are the same page (the contents are more than 95A% the same, down to the same words on the same spots) and are probably cut-and-pastes. I do not know if one is a cut-and-paste of the other. I do not know if both are cut-and-pastes of yet a third page. However, what I DO know is that they are the same article, and both pages clearly give credit to someone-and those are 2 different people in both cases. So, ex-twi and plagiarism seem to be co-inciding again. Unlike in vpw's day, it can be caught a LOT more easily now- a few clicks of a mouse versus research in a library. So, having said all that, and having given what I consider are prudent caveats, here are the links to those pages: http://thefaithofjesus.blogspot.com/2007/08/did-jesus-raise-himself-from-dead.html http://www.bibletopics.com/BibleStudy/177.htm Although this is not an article itself focused on that subject, it uses it clearly and with illustrations. So, IF the idiom of permission is correct, I would use this to help explain it. However, I still have unanswered questions concerning the entire subject, as you can see.

(bumping up to the top)

Osama bin Laden was met at The Pearly Gates by George Washington, who slapped him across the face and yelled, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!" Patrick Henry approached, punched him in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed." James Madison followed, kicked him in the groin and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!" Thomas Jefferson was next, he beat Osama with a long cane and snarled, "It was evil men like you who inspired me to write the Declaration of Independence." The beatings and thrashings continued as George Mason, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans unleashed their anger on the terrorist leader. As Osama was dragged to his final, flaming reward, he saw an angel. Bin Laden shouted, "This is not what you promised me!" The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in Heaven. What did you think I said?"

I'll keep it lifted. As well as your sleep-schedule. :) Oh, and congratulations!!!!!

[some highlights from the article above..] Waco, Texas (CNN) -- Sheila Martin's children burned alive. God, she says, wanted it that way. "I don't expect you to understand," she says, Her calm, over those days, came when she heard his voice, talking to a negotiator, on the loudspeaker. "Now, do you know what the name Koresh means?" the voice boomed. "It means death." "We didn't have a plan for death," Martin says. "I wondered: Did someone change the plan without telling me?" David Koresh told his followers years before the men in uniforms arrived that a great apocalyptic battle with Babylon was coming and there would be destruction and fire and deaths. So, Martin says, David was right. "David is the messiah, and he's coming back," she explains, inspecting a bush that's beginning to produce sweet peppers. "Now we just wait for the kingdom." Doyle sits in his cluttered living room, detective paperbacks, tomes on theology and Laurel & Hardy videos crammed on bookshelves. The only item that has room to breathe is a photograph of his 18-year-old daughter, Shari. She was one of Koresh's "wives." In the photo, Shari is flaxen haired, flushed and smiling, hugging the family dog. That Koresh bedded his daughter makes Doyle shift in his seat, and when he speaks of it, his jaw tightens. Doyle says his daughter started having sex with Koresh when she was 14. Koresh fathered at least 13 children with sect followers and engaged in sexual acts with underage Davidian girls, according to the Justice Department, numerous affidavits of Davidians and interviews CNN conducted with survivors. Davidian Kiri Jewel testified during 1995 congressional hearings on the siege that Koresh slept in a bed with women and children, and she believed that he had impregnated a 14-year-old. Koresh, she said, often talked about how the young girls at the compound pleased him sexually. Jewel described in graphic detail how Koresh sexually assaulted her. She testified that she wasn't afraid of getting pregnant; she was too young, she explained. She'd not even started menstruating yet. Doyle insists that his daughter Shari, even at a young age, was capable of deciding whether to have sex with Koresh. There is silence for a moment. Doyle knows that trying to justify Koresh having sex with underage girls incites nothing but outrage from nonbelievers. And, initially, when David began preaching a message that his holy seed must be spread to any girl he preferred, married or in pigtails, Doyle admits he was bothered by it. "I wondered, I asked, 'Is this God or is this horny old David?' " But Doyle's concern didn't last long. "I couldn't argue because he'd show you where it was in the Bible." Sheila Martin, too, condones Koresh having sex with underage girls. "In the Bible, if a girl is old enough to menstruate, then she can be a wife," she insists. There are three crucial points to understanding the Branch Davidian brand of religion. First, God can appear in the flesh as a man. Second, that man doesn't have to be a good person. Third, if you question whether that man is God, then you are questioning God. In other words, the devil is responsible for your doubt. "Now," Doyle asks, "are you going to give the devil control?" [Who's like first crack at breaking this down?]

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/04/14/waco.koresh.believers/index.html?hpt=C2 Waco, Texas (CNN) -- Sheila Martin's children burned alive. God, she says, wanted it that way. "I don't expect you to understand," she says, leaning her bird-tiny frame against a full shopping cart in the nursery aisle at a Super Walmart. Her pink shirt, flats and purse match the lilies, hydrangeas and clusters of jasmine she's buying. "Oh, look, they have forget-me-nots!" She caresses the blue petals and, like a child, puts her nose in the plant and inhales. "These will be perfect for the memorial." On Tuesday, Martin and a handful of other surviving Branch Davidians will gather at a hotel off a freeway in this dusty Central Texas town to remember the federal siege on their religious compound, an event that has become synonymous with the word Waco. On that day in 1993, a 51-day standoff between the armed Davidians and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended in a fire and the deaths of at least 76 people. Among them were Martin's husband and four of her children. In the garden center, Martin nervously picks up her pace, examining each plant, smelling and touching their blooms, kneading the soil. The memories have sharpened each year, not dulled as she had hoped. "I just don't like to go back," she says. For days on end, grenades went flash-bang, she says, hurting her ears like nails shot into her temples. The kids were screaming, running down the hallway outside their bedrooms when the first shots were fired on February 28. Bullets hit the walls. They went through the walls. One shattered her bedroom window and zinged over her 6-year-old Daniel's head. She looked up. His face was bleeding, cut from flying shards of glass. Her 4-year-old, Kimi, was crying. The roar of the helicopters over the building sounded to her like war. She touches her chest. She still feels the vibration in her ribs from that blaring, awful music the FBI pumped on loud speakers, trying to drive them out. Her calm, over those days, came when she heard his voice, talking to a negotiator, on the loudspeaker. "Now, do you know what the name Koresh means?" the voice boomed. "It means death." "We didn't have a plan for death," Martin says. "I wondered: Did someone change the plan without telling me?" On March 21, she walked out of the Davidian complex, one of 21 adults and 14 children who took the chance to leave over those weeks. Three of her seven children were led out. Four kids stayed behind with their dad. On April 19, in a Salvation Army shelter where female followers were kept, she saw it on the news: A great fire. It was so big. "I said, 'Oh, please God, save them. Save them.' But my head knew they were gone." Martin doesn't visit the pauper's field in Waco where they are buried. "I'm not going to roll around on the dirt crying," she says. "We don't do that." Branch Davidians believe that when people die, they are simply "unconscious," waiting to be resurrected so they can travel to a kingdom cut off to nonbelievers. Lisa, 13; Sheila,15; Anita,18; Wayne Jr., 20; and Wayne Sr. -- they are just unconscious. They are just waiting. David Koresh told his followers years before the men in uniforms arrived that a great apocalyptic battle with Babylon was coming and there would be destruction and fire and deaths. So, Martin says, David was right. "David is the messiah, and he's coming back," she explains, inspecting a bush that's beginning to produce sweet peppers. "Now we just wait for the kingdom." True believers For more than a decade on every Saturday, the Branch Davidian Sabbath, Sheila Martin and Clive Doyle have gotten together to pray and discuss the Bible. They affirm to each other that David Koresh was God in the flesh. Then, they usually go to lunch or run errands. They aren't stockpiling machine guns, the chief reason the ATF raided the compound. Between them, Doyle and Martin don't even own a rifle. While they lived communally on the compound, Doyle and Martin now live in modest homes a few streets apart in Waco. He works at a thrift store. She works at a Christian day care center. Their bosses have asked them to leave their religion at home; otherwise, they've been treated kindly at work and by people in Waco who know about their pasts. The crank calls Doyle used to get have waned the past few years. When reporters call about doing stories on Koresh "true believers," they don't participate without talking it over with each other. "We've come to expect that a lot of people are going to make us look nuthouse crazy," Doyle said, his voice changing to a spooky tone, his face dead-pan. "So, we always like it if we just seem a little crazy -- it's an improvement." Tooling around Waco in Doyle's beat-up Town & Country minivan, the pair make an odd couple. She is from Boston and in her 60s, but looks, dresses and moves like a teenager. Doyle is a dark-humored Australian who wears thick bifocals and declared at 9-years-old to his amused mother, an Adventist, that he was officially a "servant of God." "I'm 70," he jokes. "I would like to know where this kingdom is already." Doyle's legs and arms are a quilt of skin grafts, wounds he says he suffered from jumping through a fiery hole in the burning compound to escape. The scars are ugly, he says, but nothing compared with the year he spent in prison before going to trial, along with other Davidians, on murder, conspiracy and a string of lesser charges. Along with the Davidians, four people with ATF were killed during the siege. Doyle was acquitted. Evidence that the government gathered, including recordings from bugs planted inside the compound before the FBI's final raid, showed Koresh ordered his followers to set the blaze. So did they? Doyle is asked. "Let's say the government created circumstances that led to the fire," he replied. While Martin and Doyle can be cagey, they are always polite and patient despite people constantly challenging their religious beliefs --- or dismissing them as crazy. "What am I going to do, argue with everyone?" Doyle says. "When people ask why we still believe in David and what he preached, after everything, I think they are asking because they really do want to understand. What gets lost --- what got lost years ago and resulted in the deaths of many people -- is that none of us were looking to convert the masses. If you joined us, then fine, but if you didn't, then go on with your life. "You don't have to believe as I do." Doyle sits in his cluttered living room, detective paperbacks, tomes on theology and Laurel & Hardy videos crammed on bookshelves. The only item that has room to breathe is a photograph of his 18-year-old daughter, Shari. She was one of Koresh's "wives." In the photo, Shari is flaxen haired, flushed and smiling, hugging the family dog. That Koresh bedded his daughter makes Doyle shift in his seat, and when he speaks of it, his jaw tightens. Doyle says his daughter started having sex with Koresh when she was 14. Koresh fathered at least 13 children with sect followers and engaged in sexual acts with underage Davidian girls, according to the Justice Department, numerous affidavits of Davidians and interviews CNN conducted with survivors. Davidian Kiri Jewel testified during 1995 congressional hearings on the siege that Koresh slept in a bed with women and children, and she believed that he had impregnated a 14-year-old. Koresh, she said, often talked about how the young girls at the compound pleased him sexually. Jewel described in graphic detail how Koresh sexually assaulted her. She testified that she wasn't afraid of getting pregnant; she was too young, she explained. She'd not even started menstruating yet. Doyle insists that his daughter Shari, even at a young age, was capable of deciding whether to have sex with Koresh. The teen was also clearheaded, he says, when she chose to remain inside the compound despite having the chance to leave. "She wanted to be with David and to hear and follow the message," her father says. There is silence for a moment. Doyle knows that trying to justify Koresh having sex with underage girls incites nothing but outrage from nonbelievers. And, initially, when David began preaching a message that his holy seed must be spread to any girl he preferred, married or in pigtails, Doyle admits he was bothered by it. "I wondered, I asked, 'Is this God or is this horny old David?' " But Doyle's concern didn't last long. "I couldn't argue because he'd show you where it was in the Bible." Sheila Martin, too, condones Koresh having sex with underage girls. "In the Bible, if a girl is old enough to menstruate, then she can be a wife," she insists. There are three crucial points to understanding the Branch Davidian brand of religion. First, God can appear in the flesh as a man. Second, that man doesn't have to be a good person. Third, if you question whether that man is God, then you are questioning God. In other words, the devil is responsible for your doubt. "Now," Doyle asks, "are you going to give the devil control?" Mount Carmel's new residents Last Sunday, Martin, Doyle, and Doyle's roommate, Ron Goins -- also a Branch Davidian but not a Waco survivor -- packed into Doyle's van and sped down a country road toward Mount Carmel, the property where the compound once stood. Its acreage is lush with wildflowers, and Martin is soon out of the car, traipsing through prairie grass, picking yellow primrose and butterfly weed. At the entrance now is a gate --- something Koresh and other members of his inner circle darkly joked they should have built before the raid, Doyle says. The gate is flanked by several mailboxes. At least three Davidians live on the property, including Charlie Pace, an early Branch member who Martin and Doyle say never got along with Koresh. They say church elders asked him to leave the compound. "Now Charlie is back to claim what he believes is his," said Doyle. Pace told CNN that he is "enlightened" and that God chose him to look for fresh believers. Down a dirt road on the property is a chapel that Branch Davidian supporters built in 1999. On this day, the doors stood open and sheet music and tambourines sat on dusty chairs. A large photograph of a bushy-haired Koresh mugging like Jim Morrison hangs near the door. The chapel reminds Sheila Martin of the first time this messiah, a high-school dropout in blue jeans, persuaded her to follow him. It was 1986. She and her husband, Wayne, a Harvard-trained lawyer, were going through a tough time. They were both Adventists and living in New York. They'd met at an Adventist function; he wooed her with his piano playing. The births of their first five children had gone smoothly, but their faith was being tested with their sixth, Jamie. He had contracted potentially deadly meningitis, an illness that would cripple him for life. "I prayed all the time, and I told Wayne that because his faith wasn't as strong as mine -- he'd started to drift into the secular world too much -- that our baby was dying," she recalled. When Jamie wailed in her arms, with a suffering she was incapable of relieving, Martin thought about her first date with her husband. They went to a performance of Handel's Messiah, the retelling of Christ's victory over sin and death. "My husband, he heard about what was happening in Waco," she said. The couple spent hours on the phone talking to the Branch Davidians there. They were always eager to listen, especially a guy who'd recently joined the group, David Koresh. Koresh mailed the parents a videotape of him preaching. "The scriptures just flowed out of his mouth. He had the spirit of God in him," Sheila says. Wayne Martin, the pianist, liked that Koresh played the guitar. The church was hurting for a leader with a youthful air. And their son needed all the in-person prayer he could get. The couple moved to Waco. Within days, the Martins were sure they'd made the right choice. When Jamie cried during prayer gatherings, and the others flinched, Koresh went right to the baby. "He would just pick him up and hold him real tight until he got quiet," Sheila recalled. Koresh told the Martins that their child needed more healing. Jamie and two of Sheila Martin's other children survived the fire at Waco. Kimi and Daniel spent the time after the siege with relatives while federal authorities questioned their mother. Now 22 and 24, Kimi and Daniel now live with their mother in Waco. They didn't want to be interviewed. Martin says they have rejected the Davidian faith and won't go to any religious events with her. This does not upset her, she says, because she knows that God will eventually change their minds. "I think they'll realize someday everything is under his order, and they'll understand that it's not really a choice." Jamie Martin spent his life severely handicapped. He died in 1998. One day Sheila Martin likes to paraphrase this scripture: "If you are allowed to drink from the cup of woe, of disappointment, remember it's a loving God who is holding the cup to your lips," she says. With this, she takes a sip through a straw of chocolate milk after lunch. "People want life to be sweet, but life isn't sweet and easy," she says. "Not here, not now, but it will be in the kingdom." What will the kingdom look like? It will be a physical place, Doyle and Martin say, probably in another country, maybe in Israel. Other than that, they don't know. "One day, we will have a better experience," Martin says. "We're not going to have to see everyone die." She imagines it will be like what Diana Ross sang about in the Wiz. Do you know the lyrics, she asks. Soon as I get home, soon as I get home In a different place, in a different time Different people around me I would like to know of that different world And how different they find me "Diana Ross is singing those words and I'm thinking about Mount Carmel and the way the light would reflect off the snow, and how the snow made everything look clean there," Martin says. "What she's singing about is being alone after a great storm that God created and she can't get out of her circumstance. "I'm going to keep praying, and wishing for that place, for me and Clive."

Mine was the videotaped pfal class. I was the first one in, in my family. I was a newly-minted Christian who had been raised with inadequate answers from my local church, so when I needed answers, it was obvious they were making it up as they went along. So, I discarded all of Christianity, thinking NONE of it would have the answers I needed. I spent about 3 years as a teenager sampling all manner of foolish talk. It was only after someone spoke some real Bible to me that anything really made sense. (It's true that if the truth is on the lips of anyone, it is still truth. The person who spoke it to me was an awful Christian-but they were probably the only one who was willing to dirty their white gloves and "meet me where I was." The locals in my area were better Christians than I'd known in church, so I wanted to learn all I could-which, of course, meant I signed up for "the class" as soon as I could scrape together the money. Locally, we were pretty good. I wasn't inside THAT long, and didn't get THAT close. The higher the twi tree you got, the more suspicious things got-but I wasn't there. It was when lcm started spazzing out publicly and demanding an oath of allegiance that I really saw any problems. I poked around the next ROA-which was after most of my locals had left to join the new geerite faction lcm had inadvertently started. By the end of the ROA, I clearly had seen enough to convince me that any accuracy I had seen even a year before was GONE- as were the people speaking it. twi was now all politics and religion, with a Bible disguise. Of course, as time progressed, the geerite faction was more evidently sliding off into error, also. So, I left everybody and just stayed unaffiliated. Technically, I still am- although I have associated with Christians in different groups informally. Looking back, of course there are a few warning signs in the taped class. At the time, I was still new and in "learn everything" mode, and missed them. However, if things had stayed the same, I would have begun figuring things out soon-I already had some complaints about how vpw defined some manifestations like "word of knowledge."

If you want to see what vpw valued, look at what he focused on. Example 1: A program of commitment to learn about God for 4 years. The curriculum was hazy, much of it was simple exercise or manual labor for free, and when ANYTHING professional was added, it was to teach the Bible students how to SELL-the Dale Carnegie stuff. The rest of the time, the people lived in large closets and ate disgusting, cheap food. Which they paid for. In hindsight, it's obvious the whole program was sort of slapped together at the last minute. Example 2: vpw wanted women to molest, rape, etc. First, he had all the women who would be on-grounds for a few years (in the corps program) write an autobiography. Out of those, he separated out those with a history that included sexual abuse, since it's known that women who have been victimized sexually in their past are easier to victimize in the present or future-since their sense of what is normal and acceptable has been damaged. So, he now had a "pool" of names of women who might be easier targets. From those, he weeds out those who are well-connected with lots of family in twi, and those with tough husbands who might beat the ca-ca out of him if he laid a hand on their wife. He now had a much shorter list of his most viable targets. Then, he had a number of places which he had prepared where he could be alone and undisturbed with a woman, that also contained some sort of bed or couch (a cushy office, an RV reserved for him, etc.) He enlisted his NETWORK of criminal accomplices, who arranged-when he asked- for one of the women to be told to meet him at one of those at a specific place and time. When they arrived (thinking only the most noble things about why they could possibly be called to speak to vpw), he then contrived to have alcohol on-hand and to talk them into sharing it with him (which would reduce their inhibitions.) Once it took effect, he would spin a tale about how his wife was physically unable to satisfy him, and how he needed (not "wanted", "needed") their help to cheat on his wife, who didn't mind, and how God didn't mind either and wanted vpw's so-called "need" met, and how "if you're able to take it", God doesn't mind adultery and you can ignore all the verses that clearly say so.... Some women balked- which is why at times, he resorted to drugging them unconscious. In each case, right after the women left his presence, he would then have-by arrangement- one or more of his criminal cadre follow them around, and "exit-counsel" them about how vpw was right and reinforce his lies. They also monitored the woman for signs she might tell someone about vpw committing a felony- and vpw immediately had those women kicked out of twi, sent home on a slow bus, and immediately savaged their reputations back home so that no one would believe them even if they could bring themselves to speak about it after having been treated so horribly. And he did it all while keeping up a public persona of a man who would never consider doing such a thing- so tales of his crimes could easily be disbelieved. That took a LOT of planning and a LOT of work. vpw cared A LOT about victimizing women and feeding his lusts for sex, alcohol and tobacco. vpw cared A LITTLE about the way corps. vpw was not sent to jail because he covered his tracks FAR too well. In regards to sex crimes, he was a criminal mastermind.