johniam

I hope those photos were over 25 years ago. If they weren't he'd have to have been exhumed. quote: This is weird. Since I was in college I've complained (not too seriously) that only misogyny and misanthropy were in my dictionary, and I thought that something like misandry should be allowed. So maybe I sometimes make sense. Saying "feminism" means hatred of men does not. It's like black racism. Everybody knows it's there, but we're not supposed to bring it up. The media sure won't. Saying that feminism equals hatred of men is like those bumper stickers anti abortion people used to have that said "legalize life". Life is literally quite legal and there are feminists who don't literally hate men. Hyperbole, perhaps? I don't believe that women are inferior to men by creation. I just think today's culture, at least in the USA, has more impactive double standards that favor women and penalize men. The only double standard that still penalizes women is the time honored one in which if a man goes out and screws around, he's a "stud", he's "sewing wild oats", but if a woman does it, she's a "slut". That IS an unfair double standard; if it's wrong for women to do it, then it should also be wrong for men to do it, but THAT double standard applies to people who are between relationships. The double standards that penalize men are capable of sabotaging existing relationships. For example, if a woman disagrees with a man, she's "assertive", but if a man disagrees with a woman, he's being "prideful". If a woman complains about a man's behavior, she is again "assertive", but if a man complains about a woman's behavior, he's a "wuss", needs a "thicker skin". If a woman is confrontational to a man, she is again "assertive", but if a man is confrontational to a woman, he's now a "bully". At least us men are versatile. Plus, every TV show drama, whether it's a cop show, lawyer show, or hospital show, whatever it is, the women are always the voices of reason. There's always a key scene where a woman coerces the male lead character into doing something against his better judgement, and somehow she's ALWAYS right. That's BS. And a lot of men apparently buy into this crap. I know full well that 50 years ago it was the other way around. There really were a lot of men who thought they should have full access sexually to any woman who caught their eye. Much hurt happened because of this. The main reason it's not that way now is because enough women had the guts to speak up. That's what it's going to take for men to overcome things like unfair bias in divorce/custody/family court type stuff.

Sounds like God has blessed you a lot. Cool.

Thanks, Socks. I saw the Dead in 2004. It was OK, but Jerry's presence is hard to replace. They don't do space anymore, apparently. Hey, on their website I see references to a venue in SF called the Fillmore. Is that possibly referring to the Market and Van Ness location again? I remember that during closing week of Fillmore West at that address Bill Graham kept saying that a Howard Johnson's motel would be built there, but the next year (1972) there were shows there and they called it the 'Ressurection'. You live kinda in the bay area now don't you? Just curious.

Thanks, all. That's too bad about him not liking 'Signs' anymore. That song was an anthem in some of my circle of friends. Came out in '71, which may have been the peak of anti hippy sentiment. That line about long haired freaky people need not apply. Our generation sure scared some of the adults, eh?

Wow. I didn't know all that about him. Cool. Yeah, I remember he had written a poetry book and we could buy it if we wanted. He seemed like he had a sensitive side. Once he gave us the assignment of giving a short speech about a political event. So on Saturday before it was due I walked all the way to the SF public library downtown to read up on something and give the speech. About a block away from the library I saw a crowd gathered. It was a political demonstration. But I started to walk away because I had this assignment to do and I shouldn't be wasting time with...(JOHN, THAT IS A POLITICAL EVENT). All I remember about it was it was anti Nixon. This guy had a Nixon head and torso mask with its hands giving the V sign. Then this other guy says, "Wait a minute! He's OK". Then he hits him in the face with a whiffle ball bat. That's all I remember, but, hey, I had my speech. What does this have to do with the topic? This topic has life of its own. First it was VP as a good man, VP as evil man, VP as sexual predator, VP as bad bible teacher...these asides can spawn from anything, seems like. Prof. Beloof WAS a professor, and he DID say what I said he said. That was 1973. My dictionaries post date that year. Interesting that the wikipedia link has a guy who says that bigotry against women is sexism, but bigotry against men is called humor. Even today, while the word misandry technically exists, and has before 1973, you never hear it used in public speech or in the media. Not so misogynist. BTW, did anybody read the REST of my email? I made my point well enough to get it printed. The point being that we live in a male bashing culture, that there are double standards that penalize men and favor women, and that Martha Burke was operating under a double standard. quote: Do you see a discrepancy here, John? In post 43, you display an obvious disdain for higher education. Yet, in post 93, you extol the importance of this man's opinion. ************************** Apples and oranges.

I won first prize in a talent contest few months back. There's this Methodist church few blocks from my house which had a sign on its marquis that said 'Talent show' with a phone number. After seeing the sign every day for a month I called the number. Said I wanted to play 2 Beatle songs. Lady said oh, good, we don't have anybody like that. Cost me $5 to enter. I played 'I will' and 'Here, there, and everywhere'. Ran the 2 songs into each other; still took less than 5 minutes. The prizes were for children and adults. The first prize for children was won by an 11 year old who danced to Michael Jackson's song 'Billie Jean'. Didn't wear a glove, but wore a hat and did the moonwalk. He definitely sparked the crowd. Children's 2nd was a 16 year old girl who danced to Irish jig music. If there wasn't a separate prize for adults I would have come in third, I think. I'm not a pro musician; never have been. Socks and Suneisis could play circles around me in their sleep while multitasking. So could a lot of you I'm sure, but Richard Thomas wants me to have 2 or 3 songs ready every time we do a big fellowship. I play songs by Dean Ellenwood, Dave Lutz, and others. I'm happy to do that, but it's nice to play the old non ministry stuff, too. It's not as evil as we once thought. What blessed me the most was that my whole family came to watch me. I wasn't really sure ANY of them would be interested. My daughter even switched with somebody at work so she could be there. One time I was watching a Grateful Dead DVD and she walked in during 'Uncle John's Band'. On the part where they say "how does the song go", she stands up and says, "How does the song go? They've been singing it for 5 minutes. They must still be on drugs" then storms out. Yeah, she can be a tough sell on music I like sometimes, but she showed support that night. My first prize was $25, 2 restaurant coupons, and a 8x11 sheet of white paper with a blue ribbon on it saying first prize. 'I will' was on the white album sung by Paul if anybody doesn't recognize the title. If you never heard of 'here there and everywhere' then jeez you must've been in a cult or something. Oh, sorry.

quote: You can verify this by looking in any credible dictionary. Obviously you neglected not to use one when you wrote that editoral. Nor did you use one prior to posting it here on GSC. I'm sorry, but you throw your credibility into question right in the first sentence. I find it hard to believe an actual professor would make such an obvious error, but stranger things have happened. It wasn't a "professor" from TWI was it? ******************************** ANY credible dictionary, huh? No, the professor was not a "twi professor", whatever that is. His name is Robert Beloof. He taught English at U CA Berkeley. I was, in the fall of 1973, a student at the Music and Arts Institute of San Francisco, 2622 Jackson St. San Fran Cal. I heard that 8th grade students in CA used the same textbook that I used in 12th grade government class in MI, so the standards were different, so I had to take "bonehead English" from Prof. Beloof if I was to continue as a student at Music and Arts Inst. It was in that class that I was treated to that statement. This guy was a prehistoric metrosexual stooge as far as I could tell. After he made the above posted statement, he said that the simple fact that there was no word meaning one who hates men, that this constituted discrimination against women. What a butthead! I think it's the other way around. If someone hates men, so what? Men are pigs, men are scum. It's perfectly natural to hate men. We don't need to invent a word to identify this. But if someone hates WOMEN????? Wait just a minute. This is SICK!!!! We'd better tag and label this sick person who hates women, hadn't we? Yeah! MISOGYNIST! That's what HE is! Yep! We got him. Uh huh! As for the "credible dictionary" issue, I have 2 dictionaries in my house: 1979 Webster's unabridged 2nd edition, and 1998 illustrated Oxford dictionary. Neither one contains the word 'misandrist'. The closest they come is 'misanthrope', a hater of mankind.

Just one more bit of gasoline to throw on the fire. No, VP being a man doesn't excuse him for violating someone's consent, but we do live in a male bashing culture. Any unscrupulous woman can falsely accuse any man of sexual harassment and have fair odds of getting away with it. Perhaps she does it to steal his job; perhaps to get her kicks or some other reason. Happens every day. The following is an email I sent to the St. Louis Post Dispatch. They printed it on April 12, 2003. That would be the day of the final round of the Masters Golf Tournament that year. That would be the same Master's Golf Tournament which Martha Burke tried to hijack. It didn't appear in the regular editorial section; it was in the sports section editorials called SOUND OFF. There were 4 emails in that day's edition about this topic. Three of them, including mine, were against Martha Burke. One was for her. Here it is... Long ago a professor taught me that a misogynist is one who hates women. He further stated that there was no corresponding English word meaning one who hates men. Recently I supposed the reason feminists picketed outside Promisekeepers meetings was that they had problems with their beliefs. No such thing! They simply know how much mileage they themselves (feminists) have gotten by getting together and comparing notes without any men around, and are most threatened by the idea of men doing the same. Let me get this straight. If women want to assemble without men around, it's "liberation", but if men want to assemble without women around, it's "bigotry". OK, I think I've got it. While I find it both appalling and annoying that these fanatical women are actually being allowed to disrupt and sabotage the Master's Golf Tournament, I see one positive thing here. There is now definitely an English word which means one who hates men. It is the word 'feminist'.

Wordwolf: We've debated before. You are what baseball people call a "tough out". But I don't recall ever seeing you in total defense mode like this. I think you DID start this thread to call me out. You can't literally read emotion. You can read anyone's posts over time and register a personality, even a profile, but emotion is a judgement call...a 'left side of the brain' kind of thing. I've been directly told by moderators to "cool it" when I really wasn't amped up at the time, although I didn't argue the point. IMO I have stated my case as thoroughly as I can. I owe you nothing. If anything, WW, I have verified to you whatever point you claim you were trying to make with the first post in the thread. Why all the verbiage? Ultimately, as I have already said, you are a member in particular of the one body of Christ. You will be gathered together when the fulness of time is come back, as will everybody else here. If the last enemy to be destroyed is death, then certainly strife and bitterness will be destroyed before that, huh? One can only hope.

Waysider: I've posted many good things he did on this thread alone. He taught many people God's word. People were able to make sense out of the bible for the first time. They no longer had to wonder if they had eternal life. They could read the bible for themselves instead of being spoonfed by a minister once a week. He showed the difference between Christianity and religion. He showed that God didn't make people sick. He showed how we have the ministry of reconciliation. He sent wows out to reach people with God's word. His ministry was a safe haven for people. Thousands of people still value their twi experience. Their lives count, too. If you no longer value it, then you don't. That reminds me of a funny story. Two weeks before I came to my first twig fellowship I was at a friend's house. This friend is a jazz musician, an atheist, never got high, never drank. Weird combination to be sure. But he was cool about drugs. While I was there a wow was door to door witnessing and knocked on his door. Me and the guy whose house it was were in the kitchen so he answers the door and let the guy come in and sit down on his couch. Then while the wow was witnessing to him I lit up a joint and came in and sat down and just stared at the guy. The funny part didn't actually unfold until 4 months later, but I've gone door to door before. I NEVER got invited in anybody's house and got to sit down on the couch. This doesn't happen. They may talk to you while you're on their porch or maybe even let you stand in the entrance, but not in the living room. So this wow must've thought that God was opening a door for him. The jazz musician, although an atheist, was willing to talk to people intellectually, but he wasn't going to believe anything. I could tell from the look on the wow's face that he thought the devil sent me in there to quench his witness. Then 4 months later I met the wow formally at my orientation session for my first pfal class. Boy, did he give me a weird look at first. Maybe you just had to be there.

Broken arrow: The first paragraph was a lead in to the next two; that we basically live in a male bashing culture now and men are treated worse than women, especially in sex situations. As far as boys being hurt by adult women forcing themselves on them. Never happened to me, but as a young teen I was a paper boy. Part of my route included a hospital. Several doctors lived close to the hospital and their houses were also part of my route. Some of their wives were, uh, nice looking. I used to fantasize about them a lot. If one of them were to have actually tried to seduce me, I probably would have gotten nervous and not been able to get an erection, but it's just different with a guy. I dunno. I saw a TV interview once with Danny Bonaduce of the Partridge Family. He said when he was 13 an older girl came to the studio looking for David Cassidy, which was very common. But he wasn't there, so the girl looked at Danny and said "COME HERE!" Danny's words were "She made a man out of me. I don't know where you are, but I love you." I don't know what his life as an adult was like. I heard he was a DJ in Chicago and that one day he talked a caller out of killing herself. Also heard he had drug issues. Perhaps he was scarred and was just saying what he thought the interviewer wanted to hear.

Why do so many of you keep repeating that I think VP was a ggod man? quote:No. I've said that VP did good things, not that he was a good man. There's a difference. Nobody is a good man. In our culture sometimes people are called a good person in a specific context if they have a track record of being trustworthy, but we all have the same sin nature we got from Adam. That's why we die; that's why God had to send Jesus. This says it as well as I can say it.

quote: Nietzsche was into survival of the fittest and National Socialisism (Nazi's) incorporated much of his philosophy. Nietzsche said that the weak weaken the strong and therefore a society. The weak, in Nietzsche's opinion, should be allowed to die if they could not sustain themselves. Society should not expend energy in helping the weak. I think it can get to that point. This reminds me of a line from the Stones song '19th nervous breakdown' - I really tried to rearrange your mind - but after awhile I realized it was disarranging mine. But what twi did in 1994 was a fire sale. First they gave way corps 6 months to get out of debt, then they cancelled the wow program for 'homo infestation', then they got rid of unproductive people in twigs. Per Nietzsche's comment, who decides who's too weak? Nice.

I wasn't even going to mention this, but recently I became angry about something traceable to GSC. A believer friend of mine has been divorced now for 4 years or so. This guy attends a fellowship run by a man who was a corps coordinator at a root location back in the day. That man was accused several years ago here of being a pedophile. Two different posters did it. I got on there, said my then 11 year old daughter had been at one of his family camps and said nothing even remotely suggested this was going on, then I said that the guy lived right across the river from me and that was a serious thing to lightly accuse someone of. One of the 2 posters then admitted it was hearsay. The other one did as well, but believed it anyway trusting who told her about it. The divorced man's ex wife used to post here regularly. What does 2 & 2 equal? I haven't had the nerve to ask either of the men about this, but they probably know. The ex wife had to have read about the accusation, confronted her husband, didn't get the response she wanted and now they're divorced. Nice. The words of a talebearer are as wounds. Collateral damage? Sure, everybody is somebody's collateral damage. The first time an older sibling bossed you around. Or a younger sibling got you blamed for something they did. We've all been collateral damage. But I got to be fair. I posted yesterday that I believe we will be rewarded for the good we've done, both in twi and at GSC. What rewards could come from Here? How about words fitly spoken. How many times has that happened? A merry heart does good like a medicine. How many times has one of us injected 10ccs of merry heart into many posters at the same time? Probably in the thousands. Lot of anger here, but a lot of good as well.

No. I've said that VP did good things, not that he was a good man. There's a difference. Nobody is a good man. In our culture sometimes people are called a good person in a specific context if they have a track record of being trustworthy, but we all have the same sin nature we got from Adam. That's why we die; that's why God had to send Jesus. quote: If I heard Charles Manson make an insightful comment about Scripture, I'd thank God for the insight, but I certainly would not seek to join Manson's group. Well, I have to admit that I have not once hitched in Canada since that day in '74. Canada struck me as a cleaner country than the US physically, but I have no plans to go back there. quote: F) I believe the truths of Scripture stood before vpw was born, and they abide since his death, and vpw has nothing to do with that. If Scripture contains Truth, then it is good to learn it and try to understand and apply it when possible. The truths of scripture stood before Paul was born; before Martin Luther was born, but their ministries didn't teach ME the word of God, VPs did. I have a friend who was very close to suicide, but he asked God to help him. Few days later he was witnessed to by wows in a bar. The Catholic church didn't send those wows. Alcoholics anonymous didn't send those wows. The NOW didn't send those wows. The gay and lesbian assoc of St. Louis didn't send them. The Christian church still condemns witnessing in bars. Well, so do the 'no solicitation' signs, heh heh. But that's how he got his deliverance. Wows sent by VP. Good man? Not always. Did good things? Yes. quote: You've posted some things that elevated vpw past reasonable expectations. I think that's wrong, and I think that's sad, and I think holding onto those allows vpw to still hold unwarranted power over you decades after he died (not that he was warranted to hold it over you when alive.) That IS moral superiority. He's telling me what I can and can't value. He started this thread to 'call me out' which the rules forbid. Well, here I am.

I'm glad VP in pfal brought up the point about Adam and Eve's children who did they marry. About 20 years ago I went to the house of one of my HS friends. His sister was there and when she found out I was Christian she asked me who Adam and Eve's children married. She tried to sound as discreet and unassuming as she could, but I knew she was just trying to make me squirm. Typical behavior of today's college educated religion bigots; anything to belittle God's word. She figured I would never say they married their siblings cause that would be incest, gasp! I calmly told her they married their siblings, that there was no one else around and that incest wasn't a biblical issue until 2000 years later when a man named Lot was incestually raped by each of his 2 daughters. Then she flashed the too much information look so I stopped and boy did they change the subject in record time. But it got me thinking. God is the one who put the appetite for sexual desire in all of us from creation. Abraham and Sarah were half brother and half sister. Issac and Rebecca were 1st cousins, ditto Jacob and his wives, Leah and Rachel. Amram, Moses' father married his own aunt. But now in the enlightened age we have all these rules. Not one person EVER who lived to be an adolescent has not had desire for someone they couldn't possibly have an open relationship with. Our culture allows for homosexual relationships, which God condemns. If an older woman wants sex with a younger man she's called a 'cougar' and the spin is always yippee, it's a cougar, aren't they great? But if a man wants sex with younger women, then he's a lecher, a pervert, a dirty old man. A 46 year old middle school math teacher recently confessed to 11 counts of statutory sodomy at my kids' middle school. She would tell 12 and 13 year old boys that they needed to come with her to a building owned by the school district but abandoned. She'd drive them there and do oral sex on them. She didn't get ratted out by any of the boys; she said something in passing to another teacher who suspected something and started asking questions and one thing led to another and she got busted. Never did hear what she was sentenced to. If she'd been a male teacher and did that it'd been all over the media. Nice. Lot of anger here.

quote: johniam.....this is a discussion forum and wordwolf, respectfully, refuted your points in a thoughtful manner. Yet, you are making this personal. I do not see ww's post as 'very angry'....nor this 'moral superiority' that you reference ******************************* WW did exactly what I said he did; he called me out. Rationalize it all the way to Pluto and back if you must. If you don't see the anger and moral superiority, then you don't want to.

Wow. That was a very angry post, WW. You don't like it when anybody questions your 'moral superiority', do you? You haven't said anything outright OR simple; especially concerning the following... We all still have eternal life, access to God, peace in our hearts, all that stuff is real! We will be at the gathering together; this hope is still there. That stuff is needful, not your stupid laundry list of VPs sins, or anyone else's. Christ paid for all that. Even for VP. We are the body of Christ. The mystery. Not just a body of people, a body of time as well. Everybody who gets born again from the day of Pentecost until the return is part of the one body and members in particular. We will be rewarded for all the good we've done, both in twi AND here at GSC. That's gospel, good news. You have nothing but bad news, vanity of vanities, hubris, irrelevant. The way you misrepresent people you could make Jesus into the moral equivalent of a serial rapist if you felt like it. I don't know what you do for spiritual nurture and growth these days, but it's always warm in the body of Christ. One more thing. Excathedra can answer my post which is addressed to her all by herself if she feels like it. There was no anger in what I said to her. Give her some space.

Wordwolf: •Do not talk negatively about a fellow poster in a thread where he or she is not participating or start a new thread to "call out" that person. Less than 2 weeks to go; what do you care, right? But I will engage you anyway. I never called VP a good man. I've never called myself a good man. I don't recall that you or any other poster called themselves a good man. Even Jesus didn't like being called a good man (Mark 10:18). Paul wrote that we live in a present evil world (Gal 1:4). Also wrote the good he would he doesn't do, but the evil he wouldn't do that's what he does (Rom 7:19). Who is fit to judge that VP won't get credit for what he did good? Excathedra: OK, no scripture. I said VP was part of an entire generation of men. This doesn't mean that EVERY man in his generation was like that; just thicker in some places than others. In 1974 I hitched to Maine and back from Michigan where I lived at the time. Twenty four hours after I left I found myself in downtown Montreal, not speaking French and looking like the American white trash hippie freak I was. Got some dirty looks from the locals. Took me 6 hours to walk over the St. Lawrence seaway (2 bridges) and start hitching again. Got a ride from a guy at least 50. He drove me to the freeway, then drove a mile past the freeway during which time he started masturbating, turned to me and asked me to "help him". I said no. He said you never did this? Oh, you don't know what you're missing. Then he let me out. Next ride was also from a guy at least 50 accompanied by a 12 year old boy. I haven't slept much since leaving MI. He gives me beer, says I can rest up at his place just off the freeway. Turns out to be 20 miles off the freeway down a lot of dirt roads. Foreign country. Foreign language. He said I could sleep in a single bed near the entrance door. Next thing I know the guy's in bed with me feeling on me kissing me. I froze. The 12 year old boy is right in the next room. My life was never in danger but in my mind I'm freaking out. I jump up and weakly demand that he take me back to the highway. He taunts me, says aren't you afraid someone might rape you? But he takes me back. The next day I'm in Maine having been picked up by a thirty something woman. I didn't tell her what happened the day before; just that I came through Canada. She starts venting about those "damned French Canadian men who just rape everybody". Thicker in some places than others. The reason I bring this up (I posted about this before) is because I'm certain that neither man who gave me those rides in Quebec thought they did anything ethically wrong. They were fully entitled to take whatever they found. Same generation. My analogy is not a 100% match, but did VP think he didn't do anything ethically wrong? Or did he do what he thought he could get away with and just didn't care? Either way, of course I think it's horrible, but I can't simply delete something that continues to work for me 34 years and counting. We all still have eternal life, access to God, peace in our hearts, all that stuff is real! We will be at the gathering together; this hope is still there. No offense, but I'm not going to spend the time I have left doubting all that. I'm sorry you were hurt. I agree that what VP did to you and others was f'd up, but he's dead. He can't do that to anyone else and he won't be judged by a manmade court of law. God promises to wipe away all tears from our eyes (Rev 21:4) OK, THERE'S a scripture. ******************************** General: The men I hang with now get together a lot, just the men. Sometimes we drink. None of those guys talks disrespectfully about their wives or women in general. That stuff seems to be off limits. When it became imminent that Jean and I would marry, I told her I required 2 things. I wanted 3 kids and I thought ABS was VERY important. That's just me; nothing one size fits all about it. Well, we have 3 kids and we still abundantly share and God still blesses us. Take your best shot.

quote: The simple fact being stressed here is that VPW took John 10:10 out of context, misinterpreted it and misrepresented its meaning for the furtherance of his own agendas, which were dishonest, at best. ************************************ That's your opinion. quote: And you still don't underatand the seriousness of plagiarism? *********************************** If it's God's word, then plagiarism is irrelevant. No matter what may happen in a manmade court of law, God does not share your outrage. Even if a court decides music is plagiarized, there may be a financial settlement, but all copies of the plagiarized music are still legal to enjoy. Led Zeppelin was sued by Willie Dixon for 'Whole lotta love'. They used 2 of his songs on the 1st album giving him credit, but Dixon proved in court that Whole lotta love was stolen from one of his songs. It was called House full of love or something like that; it had many of the same lyrical hooks like you need schoolin' and gonna give you every inch of my love and such. Dixon won a large cash settlement over this, but how many rock fans have boycotted LZ? How many radio stations have? How many people even care? VP reached thousands of people with pfal that never would've been reached by the people he supposedly stole from and the so called marketing that he did was why? He never said that God's people shouldn't adapt their methods to the conditions and the times. You really think God is going to have a problem with that? I don't. quote: Regarding the exposition of organized religion: TWI, itself, was/is an organized religion. **************************** Reread my post. I didn't say pfal exposed organized religion; Jesus did organized religion. He sent them out 2 by 2, the 12 and the 70. That's organized. I said pfal exposed the scam of denominational religion at that time. Here it is... quote: PFAL exposed the scam of denominational religion. Calling themselves Christian, yet promoting a god who wants people to be sick and poor, who wants people to go to church their whole lives never knowing if they're going to heaven or not, or if their departed loved ones are in heaven or not, whose will is for every bad thing possible to happen to His people to make them humble. That's the god that pfal delivered many from. That's the god who kept many people away from Jesus Christ and his accomplished works. PFAL exposed all that. So they ganged up on him and called him a cult. Organized religion is no different than organized anything. It can do good or evil. I'm not saying VP is innocent; I'm saying he did good things, too.

Wow. There's a lot of angry people here. Actually, Shaz, I've been posting since 2000. Waydale closed down not long after that deposition where LCM got the boot; Sept. I think. GSC had already been operating. I took 3 years off and resumed posting a little over a month ago. Isaiah 8:12 - ...neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. I'm not afraid of your accusations that I don't love, or that SIT isn't SIT, or that God's word has to be filtered into "intellectual property". You're the ones who don't get it. You're the ones who've been tampered with. PFAL exposed the scam of denominational religion. Calling themselves Christian, yet promoting a god who wants people to be sick and poor, who wants people to go to church their whole lives never knowing if they're going to heaven or not, or if their departed loved ones are in heaven or not, whose will is for every bad thing possible to happen to His people to make them humble. That's the god that pfal delivered many from. That's the god who kept many people away from Jesus Christ and his accomplished works. PFAL exposed all that. So they ganged up on him and called him a cult. Did you know that more Christians have been killed by other Christians than by all the gladiators and Roman emperors put together? Cain killed Abel, too. The adversary likes sewing discord among bretheren. You find out that somebody's a "cult" from 2 places: church media, where the issue is doctrinal, like JCING, and mainstream media, where the issue is "mind control". But the mainstream media thinks ALL Christianity is mind control. They're not ready to admit that just yet, but they're happy to repeat the accusations of stooge Christians who accuse other Christians of wrongdoing just to protect their OWN assets. Did you notice that twi is not high on the cult lists now that they've splintered? What a coincidence. Waysider, are you not bothered that US history includes running Indians off land they had occupied? That we made slaves of black people? That it took this long for women to be allowed to make certain contributions to society? Yet, you're still an American, right? You have no plans to expatriate to anywhere? You know that you had no say or control in how the above mentioned things happened, or how our tax money is being used today, right? Well, if your conscience allows you to still be an American in spite of the black eyes in our history, then my conscience allows me to still be thankful that I crossed paths with twi.

Brain: God wants you to be happy; to feel good about yourself. It's not pretend. It doesn't matter how you feel or what you just did; you can always ask God for His help. You're his TREASURE! Way & Sky: God's power is not a scam. Having holy spirit inside, being able to pray perfectly and with the understanding, knowing that you're going to heaven. All that stuff is real. Who cares how it is marketed?

quote: i don't understand this. are you saying that he might have thought that the "least" was financial abundance and the "much" was spiritual abundance? or is this something that you think? either way it sets up the idea that if you do not have financial abundance then you surely cannot have spiritual abundance, and that is what the way international put into action. Quote VP was talking about people who didn't even have their needs met. People who thought it was God's will for them to be poor and sick. VP attacked that religious idea a LOT. so maybe it's a good idea to consider the opposite? i mean really, the path he led people down destroyed him and them more often than not. **************************************************************************************** He didn't destroy me. I remember reading the section on twi in that stupid 'Mindbenders' book. The guy says, "if VP sells his class for 100 dollars to ten thousand people, then he makes 1 million dollars" or something like that. Whoopie, the guy knows how to use a calculator! Like I said, everybody uses money. If that guy sells his Mindbenders book for 5 dollars to 200,000 people, then HE makes a million dollars, too. So what. So you think God DOES want people to be poor and sick? No, I won't even consider that.

I think I AM being honest. Everybody uses money; not just the "suckers".

Quote: I don't think that most people that go to sites like "E" and others aren't looking for anything outside of making fun of other people. As an agnostic/atheist, I don't feel that Christians are loosers. I have a hard time thinking in terms of "the world" this or "the world" that. I think there are plenty of good people around if your take the risk of putting your real self out there. That is a risk though because there certainly are plenty of jacka$$es out there too. It's a risk we have to take to find who are the good ones. I think there's more than we realize. Plenty of families to join and people to welcome. The comment made by 'chris' was an overview. If he wanted to comment on the TWI dancing he probably would have said it's lame, but it appears that the only reason he was motivated to comment at all was to address the anger he inferred from the comments by GSers and TWIers. He wasn't just trying to make fun of people, it was an overview, just like your post was to my last paragraph. Nothing wrong with an overview. The phrase 'the world' definitely put people in a box, yet it's a big box. It's everybody. For God so loved 'the world'. Non biblical sources say 'society' when they want to put large numbers of people in the same box. It serves its purpose.