Raf

Meanwhile WordWolf knows I know the answer. I love it.

Crazy People

Ok, seriously, everyone who was there for the original Mike wars, is this what I looked and sounded like? Wow.

So glorious to witness a Mike War and not be IN the damned thing. Some passing thoughts, most if not all of which I have already expressed elsewhere. 1. The Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible is not "a" book. It's a collection of writings. As such, it lacks the cohesion and self-awareness to call itself "The Word of God." It never makes the claim. It's not even an "it"; it is a "they." Every time the Bible mentions the Word of God, it is quite clearly not referring to itself. 2. PFAL can only be "God-breathed" if PFAL is wrong about what "God-breathed" means. 3. Declaring that something has "stood the test of time," whether that thing is PFAL or the Bible, is a joke. It's only stood the test of time because "you" ignore that it has not. The more closely you look at the Bible, the more it falls apart as science, history, morality, etc. 4. There really IS a hidden message in PFAL, one I've raised numerous times. It's not that PFAL is God-breathed. It's that Wierwille concocted his entire scheme AFTER concluding that the Bible was all bunk. He no longer believed the words Holy or Bible on the cover. It was all a grift from there on out. I tell you, the more I look at his life, the more that makes total sense. :)

Not very good news. It means the storm sits still for hours and hours, weakening, yes, but starting as a major hurricane and pounding away until it's out of energy. It would be one thing if it moved, like Wilma did, bang-pow-out-of-town. But this one is just going to sit there for hours upon hours until it's out of steam. That's no relief to anyone except those who WOULD be in its path if it kept moving forward (Georgia and South Carolina are projected to get a Tropical Storm out of this).

I hate to say this (and end up agreeing with Mike), but I totally agree. I think the concept of the "absent Christ" is much ado about nothing. If he's not absent, why y'all looking forward to his return? The problem I see with the "absent Christ" is that it's not a Biblical term. The Word never claims to take the place of the absent Christ. Rather, the Word IS Christ, and it is how he maintains his presence while we await his bodily return. One thing I remain proud of is my effort, those many years ago, to distinguish between what I thought Wierwille got right and what he got wrong, using the Bible as a measuring stick. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong, but I never rejected something just because VPW said it. I'm not trying to give people whiplash here, and I apologize if that's the result. Take my comment with all the salt you need. My point is that the absent Christ, in context, wasn't the outrage ex-Way critics made it out to be. At worst it was a poorly worded attempt to magnify the Word of God. In my humble opinion.

So at this point it looks like I'm on the outskirts of this storm. It won't be great for us, but it could be a whole lot worse. I'm on the southeast coast of Florida, and this storm (Hermine? Ian?) Is headeded up the west coast of the state. That means a lot of wind and rain, but hurricane conditions? Ok, maybe...

By the way (no pun intended), if you had told me in 2002 that 20 years from now I would be an atheist and oldiesman would be a Catholic, I'd have said you were insane.

It was late August of 2012 when I confronted myself about my wavering faith. I was coming to terms with my sister's impending death (from ALS) and my son's autism diagnosis. A lot of people don't believe me, but those two issues did not lead me to doubt God. Rather, they exposed the doubt that was already in my heart. How? I remember asking people to pray for my sister, but I don't remember asking to pray for her healing. And not once did I pray for my son's deliverance from autism. Just for strategies and help coping. That's how I remember it, anyway. I could be mistaken. But I do know at some point in both those experiences, the notion of a miracle was not seriously entertained. I think one of the things people don't understand about losing faith is that it's not a decision. It's never one thing. It's a realization. Over a great deal of time I realized I was not praying the way I used to. Years of asking for something and getting nothing taught me to ask for nothing. The long, slow realization about the nature of the Bible could not be overcome. And, as a straw that broke the camel's back, my search for evidence that first century believers in a position to know for a fact that Jesus was raised went to their deaths rather than renounce that faith... turned up not a solitary shred of supporting evidence. I finally realized there was no longer any belief that I held that could qualify me as a Christian. I had to sort through my thoughts and feelings. Reject God outright? No, I would have to know EVERYTHING to know that (spoiler alert: that's bulls#!t). So I told myself I was agnostic. Then I realized that being agnostic is not incompatible with being atheist. One is a "lack of knowledge" claim. The other is a "lack of belief" claim. You could be both. Most atheists are. I eventually came to the conclusion that the agnostic/atheist dichotomy was not a discussion worth having. Most people don't subscribe to it, and you end up sounding defensive for no reason. When it comes to the existence of any god worth discussing, I am an atheist. Period. When it comes to the existence of some abstract concept of gotchagod, I'm agnostic, but only to the extent that such a god defies definition and testable attributes. Why am I not agnostic? Because Yawheh is a fictional character whose attributes changed over time according to what his creators needed for storytelling purposes, much like Superman and Captain America. He had a wife once. Israel went from recognizing many gods, of whom Yahweh was fiercely jealous, to acknowledging only one, which mad His jealousy wildly irrational. All those other gods? Oh, they didn't exist. Or they were demonstrations of Satan's power. Except Satan is an imaginary character too, whose attributes are comically vague. He bad. No good things. Accuser. Needs Yahweh's permission to murder Job's family. And Yahweh GRANTS IT. What the bloody... Anyway, back from THAT tangent. So now it's been 10 years. Now and then I feel an urge to explore some facet of what I once believed. Not often. For example, I believe the 12 are largely fictional characters. Not all of them. Peter, James and John were real. Judas was a fake. Paul (who certainly existed) refers to Jesus being seen of "the 12" not because Judas was still alive after the crucifixion, but because the story of his betrayal had not been made up yet. But they're just mental exercises at this point. My main concern with religion is that government stays out of its way and that it stays out of government's way. I guess we can say it's not a phase.

Great idea, George. We can all post map screencaps when storms emerge, but this is a great way to keep us posted all the time

You haven't read the site. Your assessment of its content and purpose is without value.

It's honestly bullshit, Bolshevik. It's holding posters accountable for what dishonest people did with their posts. Posting on Waydale was no different than posting on GSC, which you would know if you READ THE DAMN SITE, but you won't do that because your lie depends on maintaining a false narrative of what happened there. The nerve. To go on a website patterned after Waydale, that is in many ways Waydale's legacy, and act as if Waydale was just as much a cult as TWI? I'm not gonna say what you can do with yourself, but you do have my permission to use a cucumber wrapped in barbed wire to do it.

I'm done with your BS, dude.

The truth doesn't bother me but your lies do. f-you right back, bro.

Bolshevik, you are seriously out of line with these accusations. Someone fed you a line about Waydale and you're repeating b.s. as history. Respectfully, you haven't the slightest f'ing idea what you're talking about.

Could not

Dupe

That's a ... pity.

Even Nicolas Cage looks like he has no flipping idea what he's doing in this movie, which scored upon release exactly one positive review out of 50 collected by Rotten Tomatoes. Kirk Cameron starred in the original as TV journalist Buck Williams (the character was a news magazine or paper reporter in the books. I forget which). Cage plays the airline pilot [mixed metaphor: airplanes don't have a helm] whose daughter Williams eventually marries in the books. In the upcoming sequel "Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist," Cage's role is being taken over by (wait for it) Kevin Sorbo (late of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and God's Not Dead: Christian Efforts to Misrepresent Just About Everything).

I think they trained us to be jerks by example, but I think it could have been avoided. I did not agree with everything everyone taught, but I respected the hell out of a lot of these Corps trained "jerks."

Ah, the faith blasters. One of the most blatant examples of plagiarism in the TWI canon. The hilarious thing is that outside of the context of this particular teaching, you never really heard Wierwille talking about faith blasters. The faith blasters first pop up in the Q&A section of JE Stiles' book "The Gift of the Holy Spirit," in which he posts a Q about Christians receiving false tongues or a false spirit when seeking God's gift. Stiles wrot "When people ask that question, we know that they have somewhere come in contact with one of the "faith blasters" who go about making statements which have no foundation in Scripture." Not to be confused with Wierwille's Q&A on the same topic in Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, when he answers the same question with: "When I am asked that question, I know that person has come into contact with those whom I term 'faith blasters,' who go about making statements which have no foundation in Scripture." Gotta love them faith blasters.

My plan is working perfectly... Just kidding. I strongly recommend each of you exercise prayer for guidance and wisdom as you explore these issues, because in my experience the observations you're making are A. absolutely accurate, and B. part of a progression that can but need not lead to a loss of faith. I said after the great S.I.T. arguments that one need not abandon Christianity to agree that something was Biblically wrong with how Wierwille taught it and how we practiced it. Some of you agreed with me. Some did not. I'm not aware of anyone having a crisis of faith over it. Same with the observation that the Bible is not the Word of God. It's just not. It never says it is. It is not even aware of its existence as a collection of documents. Why would it be? No matter how you parse inspiration, you can't seriously believe Paul knew we would be reading his thoughts on slavery 2,000 years after he wrote a the Philemon letter. Scripture? This goes in the same collection as Leviticus? Dude, I wasn't even sober! Ok, just kidding again. Once you realize that the Bible is not the revealed Word and Will of God, some things fall into place rather easily. First and foremost, contradictions and errors no longer need to be explained. Whew! What a load off! "Given by inspiration of God" no longer has to mean "God-breathed" in the manner we were taught, but rather in the manner defined right there in the verse: profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness. That's the point of reading scripture. It's not without error. It's not without contradiction. It is for doctrine, of which reproof and correction are subsets. It is very easy to reach that point in understanding and take it a step further, from the position that it has no authority to it has no inspiration at all. I did not arrive at that conclusion (through that process). Neither should you. My rejection of the authority of Scripture did not lead to atheism. Rather, my atheism led to a rejection of the authority of scripture. I guess the relationship is symbiotic, but bear with me. For me, the progression was not "scripture has no authority, therefore Yahweh does not exist." It was the other way around: "I no longer believe Yahweh exists. As a consequence of this belief, scripture no longer has authority to me." YOU do NOT need to go down that path. You can have an entire denomination with a hundreds of millions of followers, let's call it "Catholicism," without believing that the Bible is a perfect book that is error free. The Bible is not the Word of God, but what is IS depends on where you stand. Even as I was writing this post I came to an amusing realization: If one were to accept the proposition that Weirwille WAS wrong about what it means for the Bible to be God-breathed, then you could conclude that the PFAL writings are God-breathed without suddenly having to explain dozens of actual errors and contradictions in the canon. In any event, that the Bible is not what the Bible is talking about when it talks about The Word of God should have been self evident to all of us years ago.

Chronologically, in the order the books and letters of the Bible were written, the Christ who was begotten before the foundation of the world preceded the one whose existence appears to have begun when he was born of Mary. You would think it would be the other way around. Why weren't the earthly biographies/gospels first, leading to later embellishments that ultimately led to the gospel of John and the otherworldly Jesus of Paul? That's what you would expect if Wierwille were right about Jesus being "just" a man.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Billy Preston was the Fifth Beatle. Not to be confused with Bill S. Preston, Esq, who is not a lawyer. I assume it was Keanu Reeves who worried about being remembered mostly for this movie, and Alex Winter who was.