Oakspear

Part of the problem with the Corps application process was that the program itself was thrown together on the fly by Wierwille. He had no experience in developing training programs and didn't bring anyone on board who did.

Well said Rascal

"Face melting" could even happen because leadership was led to believe that they had the authority to interfere and the insight to have the right answers. When the "good" ones did it, it was merely annoying, when the bad ones did, it could be ugly.

Yet more testimonies regarding how Martindale got the way he was.

Whay are religious institutions tax-free in the first place?

Someone once threatened to delete my cookies...

I can't function well with a messy desk, but I'll never try to change someone who has one, or criticize them. I've seen people with wobbly piles of paper covering virtually every square inch of surface reach into a pile and pull out just what they need. Or maybe they just say that's what they needed <_<

Proverbial?

Anything by Pratchett is good..."Hogfather" deals specifically with his version of Father Christmas though

For extra credit reading I recommend "Hogfather" by Terry Pratchett

(kinda - following up on something from two pages ago ) Some folks like their house neat, clean and orderly and look down their noses at those whose homes aren't. Other folks like their home comfortably messy, and shake their heads sadly at those who insist on neatness. For some of those who have the comfortable messes, the effort of keeping things neat isn't worth the effort, since it takes away from more important matters, such as raising their kids! For some of those who seem obsessive about order, it can be disorienting and uncomfortable to be constantly surrounded by disorder. And it may be difficult for those couples where one is an "Oscar" and the other is a "Felix". Some kind of balance has to be reached (I suppose maintaining a island of neatness out in the mobile home is a balance ) Bottom line though, no one from outside the family should be telling anyone how to keep their house. Everybody gets to set their own priorities.

Now the Santa Claus/God analogy may strike some as insulting, and some may bring up as Suda did, that you couldn't find a mentally competant adult who still believed in Santa. That's the point of that kind of analogy, to jar you into thinking, to point out that if you want to believe in one kind of "person" whose existance cannot be objectively verified, i.e. God, then why not believe in another, i.e. Santa Claus? More on subjectivity. One of TWI's teachings was the Law of Believing (you know, the one that worked for "saint & sinner" alike?) which you'll find in similar forms in all kinds of literature, including non-Christian. Some of those folks claim similar results to those claimed by Christians when they pray to God (or Jesus). So when a Christian prays, is (1) God (or Jesus) answering the prayer or (2) Is the "Law of Believing" or Magick or some other impersonal force kicking in or (3) Is some other god, who doesn't care what you call him or her, answering the prayer? Or when the non-Christian prays or casts a spell or "believes" and gets the desired results is it (2) or (3) from above or is God or Jesus answering the prayer, not really caring whether they are recognized as supreme being or not? Taken together logically, it comes back to one deciding, either in advance or in hindsight, what the framework will be and hanging their individual subjective experiences on it.

Ah, the "voice of reason" is such a lonely job :P The analogy of Santa Claus vs. God, like all analogies is not exact, there isn't identity on all points, just some. Some of the differences are that few, if any, adults believe in Santa Claus. It is something that they teach their children to believe in with absolutely no expectation that the belief will endure into adolescence, let alone adulthood. A similarity is that, like Santa Claus, God is something that people will believe in without any objective evidence. Other differences, in my opinion are cultural. When a child questions the existance of Santa, at first a parent may be uncomfortable bursting the bubble, but will eventually confirm the truth that the child has already intuited. If that same child questioned the existance of God, most parents would fight tooth and nail to maintain the child's belief in God, even an adult who questions the existance of God is up against societal and cultural pressure to conform (at least in many situations). When an atheist compares a belief in God to a belief in Santa Claus, the comparison is to two characters that the atheist sees no objective evidence for the existance of. The child believes in Santa because people that he trusts has told him that Santa exists and the existance of Santa seems to fit the facts as he knows them, or at least doesn't contradict his view of reality. Usually someone believes in God because someone that they trust has told them that God exists and the existance of a God seems to be consistant with how they view the world. Belief of God is maintained as the believer fits and interprets experiences in light of the God paradigm. To get away from the analogy for a bit, in my observation, belief in God is completely subjective. It all comes down to what one personally, deep inside, feels and experiences. If you talk with God, or have a relationship with Jesus, that experience, that relationship cannot be shown to another person. If I have a relationship with my family, you can take photos of us together, copy our emails, listen to our phone conversations - that part of it is objective, anyone can see it. The subjective part is that you can't discern, except by guessing and making assumptions, how I really feel about that person, if I really love that person. A relationship with God is like the second part, all subjective. I don't believe that subjective is necessarily any less real than objective, just that all that we have is someone's word that it exists, you can't point to it and say, "See! There's God!". Being that "knowing" God is subjective, it is also my observation that people interpret things in ways that make the most sense to them. The same experience may be interpreted by Suda as God, by my friend Scott as space aliens, by Bramble as the Goddess, by a Hindu as Ganesh, by an atheist as a manifestation of chance, or a natural occurence. There's no objective reason to accept that anything unexplained is God, or aliens or anything else. A theist will insert his god or other metaphysical explanation, an atheist will not. From an atheist point of view, believing in a god is equivalent to believing in Santa Claus, there's no objective evidence for either. I would imagine that a Christian would have trouble with this analogy, since they are convinced that God does exist, but from an atheist point of view, it makes good sense. More later :B)

It's all relative Raf

Since Texas beat Nebraska last week the borders are closed and anyone wanting to go to Texas from here is shipped to Guantanamo after "thoroughly" (or is it "throughly") undergoing a cavity search. :unsure: So I thought I'd stay home. <_<

El#n@ Wh!it#s!de mentions that in The Way: Living in Love. Where you in one of the early Corps?

Martindale, in his advanced class repudiated the ptractical application of "reaching into Daddy's cookie jar", saying that we could not expect to get "revelation on demand". However he claimed, not that Wierwille got it wrong, but that we all misunderstood it.

I'm not an atheists, but I'm going to answer anyway. Actually yes. When I came to the conclusion that I had no good reason to continue believing in him. That wasn't what I did. I no longer believed that he was in there, so I didn't need to kick him out. Good call, probably not. You're apparently equating "easily" and "lightly". I thought long and hard about my decision, but it was easy once I made up my mind. By coming to the conclusion that the biblical Jesus didn't exist as the bible seems to describe him Thumbs up! If I believe that he doesn't exist, then I don't believe either that he died for me or that he is a fool

John, I agree with your last post. That brings us back to the morals of an atheist vs. the morals of a Christian. An atheist could easily have morals indistinguishable from a Christian's. From what I can see from what you've written so far, the belief that one's morals are backed up by a deity give them more weight, amke them more likely to be obeyed, yet that doesn't appear to be the case.

Despite not naming the psoter in most cases, I recognize the atheist Sunday school teacher as Sudo. Perhaps you could ask him <_<

Thank you Suda My "mission" in these discussions is to put forth the view that anyone's view on God/spirituality/the supernatural/religion is as valid anyone else's. Usually when I get into debate mode it's to counter someone who is sure that their POV is the only legitimate one. I am a great admirer of how some people have turned their lives around with the help of Christianity, but get greatly irritated when someone suggests that my beliefs need changing when they have no evidence that my life is deficient in any way. In my opinion, their is plenty of room for a diversity of opinions about the world and spirituality.

While I acknowledge that there are some atheists and other non-Christians out there who get their jollies out of gratuitously bashing the bible and its God, usually Garth, P-Mosh, George and others point out apparent atrocities in the OT only as counter to a Christian's claim that the bible embodies a superior morality than one that is man-made. From what I can tell the non-Christians on this board know the bible as well as the Christians, they just come to different conclusions about it. From a plain reading of many sections of the OT God is telling his people to slaughter, unprovoked, whole cities, whole peoples. The recurrent answer that I see is that it really wasn't immoral because God said it was okay, and since God is God then he can't do anything evil. You know that that's circular reasoning, right?

My favorite nametag was the Nebraska WOWvet Way Home program nametag. It was red on white and shaped like Nebraska.

I vaguely remember Martindale saying something like that, tied to the folks in Hebrews who "died in faith/believing". Couldn't tell you how he backed it up.

Right. there was no ego back then <_<