Oakspear

Digi: I am always available to give kazoo lessons. Tom Strange: I am humbled, sir.

Rascal: I accept deputization as paper products czar. Paper and/or styro plates and bowls Napkins Paper towels Plastic cups Toilet paper Trash bags Plastic forks, knives, spoons etc Can transport pretty easily. I just changed vehicles...got a Cutlass Fake Wood-Sided Station Wagon...christened it "Big Woody".I doubt I will be camping, much prefer the great indoors for sleeping. I have access to two thirty-cup pots. Somebody else better supply the coffee though, mine wasn't too popular :(--> I'm also available for car-pooling. Can meet anyone from north or west in Nebraska, or pick someone up along the way. Last year I cut across Missouri from KC to St. Louis and down through southern Illinois. With this paper products job, do I get an ordination or something? I don't need compensation, but a title is good for me :D--> There will be high-class laminated Weenie Roast Doctorates this year too. Something to look forward to. Did I mention kazoos?

Wonder if I can get enough kazoos for everyone?

Seemed to me about the same as in the general population.

Music...did somebody say KAZOOS? Hey rascal...you ARE the BD...after all, who else got a doctorate last year? :D--> And who better than you to sweet-talk local law enforcement into not busting us? I'm planning on being there...as far as paper plates and bowls and such-like...I work in a grocery store!...prolly can score some free or d*mn cheap stuff. Put me on the plastic & styrofoam committee...and oh yeah...30 cup coffee pots, I can score a few o' them too.

This is a slight derailment, but only slight, so I won't go to h#ll, just purgatory :P--> Talking about cars. We were about six months from paying off a car loan when the "no debt" ruling came down. We were fellowship coordinators and were allowed to continue to run it since we were so close to being out of debt. The problem was the car, even though it was in good shape, was not large enough for my family (6 kids) so we decided that we would get a second car. The plan was to get a big station wagon for $500 at the local car lot and save up to buy a decent car in about a year. This car was the butt-ugliest car you ever saw! But we weren't in debt! We figured that we were "doing the Word", staying out of debt, stewarding our money, yada, yada, yada. But the branch and state leadership started bugging us to fix up the car. Our plan was to spend as little as possible on the ol' bomb, so that we would have enough to buy a newer one as quickly as possible. They wanted us to paint it (it had fake wood sides and LOTS of rust). Then they started bugging me to at least put hub caps on it. So I took two hubcaps off my other car and put them on the passenger side of the car so that he would see them when I parked in front of his house.

Like all things Martindalean, the "no debt" ruling was not very well thought through. Most things in the bible are there for a reason. God didn't just come up with random rules to make people jump through hoops for his amusement. In the Old Testament there are guidelines for borrowing...if it was evil, why the guidelines? Then there's the verse in Proverbs about the borrower being servant (or slave says Martindale) to the lender. IMHO the reason God frowned on debt in some situations was that possibility of being literally enslaved to the lender, like the woman in Kings (?) whose husband died before paying off his creditors, and the creditors wanted the woman's sons as payment. I rent right now. I, in effect, "borrow" my apartment in exchange for a fee, rent. Am I any less a servant or slave to my landlord than someone who is buying his home by way of a mortgage loan? No way! What about car loans? How many of us drove "WOWmobiles" to avoid debt, and ended up spending more on rtepairs than we ever would have on interest payments? So in exchange for not being servants to lenders, we became servants to our landlords and our mechanics.

Grizzy: The way you phrased it made it look like it was signed over personally to Loy, Don & Howard, which is not the case. None of the directors "own" the property, although they have control over it while they hold office. In other words, Rosalie cannot will the property to her son.

What? Wierwille and his furniture peddling brother deeded the property to the embryonic Way, Incorporated back in the fifties. Wouldn't that include any structures on the property? Why would the property be signed over to three individuals when the organization already owned it; thus jeopardizing tax-free "church status?And there's more than "durn curiosity" involved here; asking questions that might cause "innies" to think and the BOD to squirm is worth for those reasons alone.

What I heard taught about revs getting de-revved was that "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" and that the de-revved one still had his "gift minsitry", but was choosing not to exercise it.

Anyone coming from west or north is welcome to car-pool with me.

Martindale's version of "The Face of The Deep": He keys off of Job 38:30 The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. comparing it to Genesis 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep... From this he makes the assumption that "the earth was without form, and void" is the adversary going to "the face of the deep" and freezing it. Since the Devil is without light, and therefore without heat, naturally his presence would cause the waters that surround the universe to freeze. Somehow that makes the earth without form and void. --> For extra credit he throws in Job 38:29 Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? He decides that the use of the term "womb" must mean that the water surrounding the universe is a salt water solution. But wait! There's more! He uses this verse to show how the waters from the deep caused Noah's Flood: Job 38:8 Or [who] shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, [as if] it had issued out of the womb? A few logical points that The Brow misses: Job 38:30 says that the Face of The Deep IS frozen, not WAS frozen. Job 38:8 figuratively uses a womb to describe water gushing forth, not to describe saltiness Job 38:9 is making the point that the ice DIDN'T come out of a womb - and how come he passed up the figurative use of "gendered"? Thought he'd not walk by an opportunity to talk about a penis. The problem with Martindale's whole theory, aside from his silly leaps of illogic, is that he ignores II Peter 3:5-6 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: - some say this refers to Noah's Flood, but Wierwille in PFAL says that this section refers to the three heavens and earths. Another tidbit is that the word "frozen" doesn't have to be translated that way. It could be "stopped", "restrained" or "immobilized". That would fit into God's promise to Noah that he would not allow the earth to be flooded like that again. His whole frozen deep scenario does not fit into even a literalist reading of the bible.

Wierwille at least had some grounding in mainstream Christianity and actually earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees; Martindale was grounded in nothing but Wayspeak, so what's the surprise that he made no sense as an earlier poster noted? Martindale either tried to bury us in b*ll...., making claims about nonexistant textual variations or definitions of words; or he would act like fairly ordinary sections of scripture, or word usages were of earth shaking importance.

I disagree that only ones that want us to move on are TWI and its supporters. It is possible for a well meaning ex-Way person to believe that our discussion of TWI is unhealthy without being a TWI supporter. While pjr's questions sometimes remind me of tabloid headlines, that doesn't take away the legitimacy of the questions themselves. While most of us here are convinced of TWI's less-than-godliness, there's always innies, and potential TWI recruits, to educate. ...and dartanian...nice to see that you have a sense of humor :P-->

After leaving the Yardbirds because *gasp* they were persuing commercial success and soft-pedalling the blues, Clapton joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers.

Everyone other than Shatner on the original Star Trek- or all, including Shatner...T.J.Hooker shouldn't count ;)-->

Watered Garden: There is no chapter and verse on "all the women in the kingdom belong to the king" because...well...um...it ain't in the bible! No one is saying that there is anything in the bible to back it up. Those of us who believe that Wierwille inserted this perversion into his teachings to take advantage know it, and the Wierwille & PFAL apologists don't want to talk about it, although I daresay Mike would go with PFAL over the bible anyway. (It's not in the bible? Tattered remnants! See that proves it) Wierwille was actually referring to a medievel practice called droit de seigneur (sp?). This was a theory that the lord had the power of life and death over all his subjects or vassals, and was sometimes manifested in the lord bedding a new bride on her wedding day. There is an example of this in the movie The Postman where the warlord demands the services of a local woman, joking that he missed the wedding day and would make up for it then. He kills the husband who objects.

I can't remember ever agreeing with dartanian, and I don't now, but pjr, is that your standard response to disagreement? Accusations of standing with the BOT? You did it on your lawsuit thread.

The whole "Word Over the World" concept was parellel to all Asia hearing the word in about two years. Funny thing, Wierwille touted "all Asia" as the "known world", even though he also said that Asia referred to what we call Asia Minor, or modern Turkey. It's not even that. Asia was a province that included Ephesus and was a small part of what we know as Asia Minor.

TWI didn't force us to be abusers, but it taught us as surely as an abusive parent teaches the children he or she abuses to be abusers themselves. Sure, on some level we all, or most of us anyway, figured it out and became model citizens :D-->, but what vestiges remained? I have to make a conscious effort every day to not lead as the TWI leaders did, by yelling and intimidation. I don't wake up in the morning and say "Gee, I'm going to verbally abuse and coerce my employees into doing my will", I know that doing things that way is wrong,a nd certainly counterproductive, but the habit is still there to be overcome, the instinct is still there to be reasoned away. I don't recall anyone ever sitting me down and overtly teaching me that abusing people at any level was the good and godly way to treat the "believers", but the example that was set taught the lesson just as clearly. What about the "good ol' days" of the so-called TWI-1? I see at least one poster here learned well the lesson of "blame the victim" that was around even before the spit 'n' slobber of "The Brow" Martindale's reign. There was good in PFAL, there was even good things taught during the Martindale era, but there were teachings seeded throughout that class that were the groundwork for future abuses.

I'm in

The claim that anyone in TWI raised someone from the dead. This one was tossed about from time to time, sometimes it was Wierwille who was the "raiser", sometimes others. But I have yet to hear someone say "Yes, it was me, and here are the circumstances". And I'm not talking about somebody being unconscious, or they stopped breathing temporaily, or anything like that either Not saying it couldn't be done...

Okay...so that's one that's not a myth :D-->

Well, at least when there is no moonshine involved :D-->

okay, but what about people who were offered ordination but turned it down? Did they have "gift ministries" too? Or did the GM's come with the ortdination. Howard Allen said that he turned down the offer of ordination because "reverends have to bury people". Joe Coulter reportedly turned down ordination for years until being convinced by LCM to accept it when he was on the cabinet.