Mike
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Everything posted by Mike
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I know him as a great teacher because of the fruit in my life from his teaching.
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There is, hopefully, a WayGB agent that reads this page.
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I had written: In a move, dishonest IMO, waysider, you quoted me like that with no bold fonting on that word "relatively" and eliminating all context, and the following icon: */*/*/* So I bold fonted the word "relatively" and will supply the context you wanted to hide. Here is the context of the comment that I feel was deliberately distorted: ...our disagreement here and now over which set of facts about VPW's life are most important to us each, respectively. The fruit I look at are not the second and third hand reports of this or that situation with VPW, which occupied much attention here at GSC. Even first hand reports about VPW are of relatively unimportant to me. I look at the ZERO-hand reports from me, to me, about my own spiritual development and growth in the Bible and good Christian living. I look at the fruit in my life, and am thankful for what I was taught.
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Hi Charlene, I don't think we have ever met here. I love the Internet Archive, and their lending library. Unfortunately, just 2 weeks ago they lost a lawsuit from some publisher's conglomerate, or something like that. I don't know any of the details, but this lending arrangement is under fire at the moment and may disappear. With respect to your hunch on why TWI has dropped WLIL from their bookstore, I think you are totally correct about the reason. TWI has always had a phobia about having any kind of spotlight on people no longer standing with the ministry. That policy was in place in 1976-78 when I worked at Tape Duplicating. We were occasionally told to pull out of circulation any back date issues of the SNT tapes featuring a leader who just leave the ministry. I am relatively sure the crazy "old wineskins" policy they had there of suppressing old issues of the Way Magazine were similarly motivated. This deletion of past people and events is on my list of things to discuss with my contacts within TWI-4. It really must end. I have begun telling them that if they don't get more honest about documenting in writing ALL the events in TWI's past they the job will be done without them, and without their input. I am thinking of contacting Elena Whiteside about her book and see if she sees any future printings or editions in the future, and how she feels about having the original book scanned into a PDF file.
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I'm not seeking revenge, but simply explaining why I place a MUCH higher priority on a different set of facts than the set of facts you focus on. I'm explaining why I put such a low priority and importance on what you think is of paramount importance. If it were the case that you and I were on a church board trying to decide if we should hire VPW as a pastor, then I would have a totally different positon and agree with you. If that were the context, then I think I'd be totally on your side in properly rejecting VPW's application, as per common sense, and the scriptures like Timothy that specify the necessary qualifications for a pastor. But that is decidedly NOT the context of our disagreement here and now over which set of facts about VPW's life are most important to us each, respectively. The fruit I look at are not the second and third hand reports of this or that situation with VPW, which occupie much attention here at GSC. Even first hand reports about VPW are of relatively unimportant to me. I look at the ZERO-hand reports from me, to me, about my own spiritual development and growth in the Bible and good Christian living. I look at the fruit in my life, and am thankful for what I was taught. So, unlike the contextual setting of hiring VPW as a local church pastor, in this context I see that the new-man nature of VPW prevailed in his teaching to me. Unlike our agreement in rejecting VPW for the local pastor role, I myself accept him in the role of personal teacher to me for opening up the Bible for understanding and application. Had all these GSC reports been in the wind long ago, before I learned God's Word from VPW, then I don't know how I would have handled that. I am thankful I did not have to make such a relatively uninformed decision.
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You are accurately describing my time here at GSC. But that is because Paul is not under attack here at GSC. In Churchianity Paul is often systematically minimized. New Age religions that like Jesus are almost always anti-Paul. Modern secular Academia hate Paul. You have no idea how I proportion my time elsewhere, do you! Maybe you think I only have time for GSC? For one thing, it is never VPW that I talk about with others, except rarely with a few grads. A decade or two I did more VPW talk with grads, but far less nowadays. All through the 1970s I witnessed the green card to Christians outside TWI. This includes trinitarians, as I have reported here. I would go to neighboring churches and meet people and had extensive Bible conversations. They often called me a Paul idolator, or a more polite term for the same idea.
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I do try to say so, but sometimes it gets lost in the race to post. What is at the heart of my criticisms of the Corps is very similar to the bulk of your post here. Yes, I believe the program had fundamental flaws and it hamstrung some of the troops in various ways. Though I was not in the program, I was very able to witness their behavior on the field and how it deteriorated as the the 1980s progressed. The program had major flaws, the top leadership were overwhelmed by the adversary, and the loud leadership on the field spread the misery. It is interesting that IN SPITE of all that, many Corps people learned extremely good things of the Word, and applied them well on the field. The reason for this is the extremely rich amount of the accurate Word that saturated TWI. The reason so many bad ideas and spirits were attracted to TWI is because they had to damp down that rich amount of the Word that was there. Why would the devil persistently attack the weak believers and churches of Churchianity? He went after those places that threatened his kingdoms the most, and TWI-1 was a major challenge.
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You got that right about my image of VPW, but not the “real man” part. You and many here focus on the old man nature of VPW, because your perspective is saturated with sin, frustration, anger, etc. Your image of VPW is not the real man, but it could be the factual man, after removing the obvious distortions and gross exaggerations reflecting revenge motivation. I prefer to build my image of VPW based on his new man nature, and I do that by what I said earlier: how much better I understand the Bible due to him is appreciated and respected much. But more asccurately, you really should be accusing me of idolatry of the Apostle Paul. It is by Paul's revelations that I know to separate the two natures within VPW. It is by Paul’s revelation that I can recognize the new man in VPW. The more my image of VPW is of him helping me understand, then the more I can respect Paul. Other Christians observing us at TWI notice the great emphasis on Paul, and accused us often in the past of Paul worship. If you want to get a little more accurate (still off the beam, though) please do yourself a favor and call me a Paul idolator. That way you may be able to shake this anti-idol that rules your perspectives. */*/* Yes that term “snapper” is a pejorative, but it is aimed (in my mind) not at the people who suffer from it, but at the procedure they use in making commitments. It is too emotional to be trusted. It explains how people throw away the baby in their zeal to throw away the bathwater, due to being too impulsive. Too much zeal, too early in the process of making a commitment, cause regretful re-actions. Those re-actions are similarly saturated with too much emotion and too little careful thought. Snapping into a full commitment in a short time is a BAD strategy for making commitments that backfires on people. If a bad decision is made this way (like idolizing VPW in the early days) then the eventual correction is often made the same way. This snap over to making VPW an anti-idol is inappropriate and extreme, and subject to the same kinds of inaccuracies as the snap decision to idolize him in the early days.
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God’s Budget and Double Doors .... On the Scarcity of Miracles
Mike replied to Mike's topic in Doctrinal: Exploring the Bible
I totally agree !!! Just in case you are interested, what I have tossed out for consideration is NOT a scheme to blame God if we don't see a needed miracle, thinking He has closed the door, or felt the budget could not handle it. Just the opposite, I am interested in this thread's theme because encourages me to hang in there patiently, trusting that God knows what He is doing, and deliverance could happen at any second. My Minimalistic Free Will theory points to the same theme: persistence produces a change in determinism. -
I was paraphrasing because I think an other gospel has it differently. The principle refers to VERY CLOSE FOR A LONG TIME, and the apostles were relative newcomers to his life. I think it is also in the OT in various ways....
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I apologize for not including the caveat that I was learning to include at Twinky's request. I do acknowledge here and will try to remember in the future vilification of the Corps to mention that I mean mostly the top leaders, and some very assertive lower henchmen that grew in number as the 1980s progressed. I never mean ALL the members of the Corps in my Villain Reports. I also recognize and appreciate the work and study that many in the Corps did for years. Not all, but many did.
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Not his public persona. Not dreamed up, either. If you follow the ups and downs I gave a timeline for, you can see what I did was try things this way, then try things that way, and several times. It was not his on stage public persona that I was sifting back and forth, shaking up and down. It was the words he taught on SNTs back then mostly (not the collaterals), and how his teachings opened up more Bible to me and more Bible applications. The collaterals were heavy in my life only for the early 70. Then again in 1998. I was careful in my evaluating VPW those years to NOT imitate the snappers I saw that jumped on the wierwille bandwagon way too fast for my comfort. I took 11 years to go WoW. I was careful in those years to DELETE his on stage showmanship (which was mostly corny) his humor (which was either too subtle or lame) and to delete many of the times I was with him in person from my evaluations, outside what Bible he taught me face to face. I deleted his inventing and winding up the Corps without proper restraints. I deleted what reports I heard about him from family and GreaseSpotters, and the live version of GreaseSpot I attended in 1967 with Ralph D. My sifting through produced a very un-romanticized appreciation of VPW based solely of how I can handle my Bible. It represents the backbone in my Bible understanding, with plenty of contributions from many other grads, and from other ministries. */*/*/* Here is (again) that back and forth and up and down timeline that describes my careful manufacture of a paradigm the most effectively throws out the bathwater. Maybe you got a sense that I knew him from the fact that I too was searching EVERYWHERE, so I can relate well to him there. I asked questions of all sorts of people when I was checking out the hooky pook fields before PFAL, and I tried to punch holes in clouds with my mind and talk to plants with polygraphs. I could write an entertaining book of my crazy searching, and serious searching. After PFAL I asked all sorts people questions in TWI both about Bible and ministry history. My landlord edited the PFAL book for Dr and I spent MANY hours drilling him with questions about that. What kind of interactions did VPW have in the editing were often my focus. I asked these same kinds of questions about editing VPW of my friend at HQ, David Craley, who edited the Way Mag then. So, as I learned VPW's history from WLIL and MANY other places like "Light Began to Dawn," I built a timeline in my head of his life. I build timelines all the time that way, and I do it on paper, and I now do it digitally. I have timelines of things I am thankful for in my life. I have timelines of all the Jr High top 40s songs I loved as a teen and the months they were on the charts and radio. I just slowly built one of VPW’s life, the things that mattered to me in his search and then his reaching out. I just figured in the 1940s his searching was all over the map, like mine. When he found SIT, he dropped all the irons he had cooking in the fire, and concentrated on that. I did exactly the same thing in my life. Yeah, in that sense I knew him. Oddly, when I started work at HQ in 1976, that principle {{a prophet is not without honor except around the ones close to him}} set in and my admiration and trust of him went down. There are lots of reasons that is in the Word, and it surely happened to me. (I only spotted this in hindsight years later.) Then, when I left HQ in 1978 my respect for him went up again. Then in late 1982, I could hear on the SNTs that he had a stroke from his drawn out letter "s" pronunciations. And I figured he was over the hill and freshly installed LCM was going to be my admired leader from then on. Respect for VPW and his current ‘82 teachings went down. Then in 1983 to 85 my respect for VPW went up again as I listened to a few his tapes and also saw the Corps fast developing Nazi like attitudes and tactics (like "Follow me or you are doomed.") and LCM was getting pretty intense. Then in July 1987 it went down, way down, when I saw the John Schoenheit paper for the first time, and respect for the Board of Trustees along with VPW went to near zero for trying to suppress that much needed paper. Then in 1988 my respect went up a little for VPW a few notches, or at least for his pre-1968 ministry that produced the film class. This was in the days before I latched onto the collaterals, which was 10 years later. But in 1988 I thought the collaterals were more like mere souvenirs of the film class. The reason for this 1988 climb in respect is I started seeing from the bootleg film class that John Lynn was dead wrong in saying the class dissociated the power of believing from the written promises of God in His Word. I found MANY places where VPW specifically mentioned that believing really only works for written Bible promises or direct revelation. Then the next 10 years my respect drifted all about this way and that, but I got a transcript of the class and was able to find things in it VERY FAST for the first time. I slowly started checking my memory and other people’s memory of the class and found out we were VERY deficient. My humility slowly went up, and my respect for VPW slowly went up. Then in 1998 someone showed me some things I missed in the collaterals and things changed rapidly as I reviewed the thrilling introduction to the Bible they gave me in the early 1970s. */*/* So, with all these ups and downs, I was constantly RE-EVALUATING what I knew about him, and from many perspectives, sometimes great respect and sometimes disgust, and all the shades (and colors) in between. I think most of you folks went through the VERY EXCITING ride up to respect VPW, and then coasted horizontal and boring for a while like an on a carnival ride, and then SNAPPING downward to crash on the ground of zero respect, and continuing on, burrowing through the Earth to levels of anti-idol disrespect. I think I got to know him MUCH better, so I can see why you say that part. I suspect that you suspect that I was nearly always up high on that same carnival ride you were on, but no. I was on the up and down roller coaster that had many cycles, but never a ground penetrating crash. Yeah, I think I did get to know him, but it was not as an idol at all. I still think he blew it on lots of things in my maturity now. After 1998 things got very simple and I studied the collaterals ONLY until 2018. My respect for VPW was never the creepy type you probably suspect. It was fine-tuned and tempered to be balanced and with careful weighing of facts from all sides and directions, and many times.
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I saw how, especially certain members of the Corps started behaving towards us non-Corps. Plus I read a lot about the Corps abuses, especially in TWI-1, and TWI-2 here at GreaseSpot from people who were in, and even some who participated in the abuses. You forgot to include that.
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You evidently do not read my posts to others, or maybe you have some kind of strong distraction going. Have you ever noticed how often I have said the Corps was a big mistake? Have you ever noticed how often I have used the phrase "Wierwille's Folly" to describe the Corps? Where you been, man? Get up to speed, a little bit at least, by doing a simple word search on "folly" and please get back to me with your apology.
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You are forgetting the focus here. We are investigating T-Bone's investigation, remember? I think it was shoddy and proved NOTHING, because he pretty much assumed what he ended up proving to himself, and to some others who applied zero critical thinking skills in trying to bust one sentence in WLIL.
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Please read my posts a little more carefully. I did actually include that possibility, but I used the word "borrow." I know in my searching days, little transgressions like this were very possible. I was a gumshoe on a shoestring budget. But I never went so far as to kick a holy roller in the a$$.
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I wish you could have put that a little differently. I felt insulted a little, but I'll try to work with the kernel of what you seem to be asking ,and think no evil. My impression of VPW’s Moody stuff is that it came early in his career, like in the 1940s, before he knew enough to SIT in 1953. The guy was searching EVERYWHERE, and I have several reasons for thinking that. After 1953 he was on a roll and teaching others and that had to compete with than searching. My impression is that Moody did not teach SIT except that it ceased. Maybe you got a sense that I knew him from the fact that I too was searching EVERYWHERE, so I can relate well to him there. I asked questions of all sorts of people when I was checking out the hooky pook fields before PFAL, and I tried to punch holes in clouds with my mind and talk to plants with polygraphs. I could write an entertaining book of my crazy searching, and serious searching. After PFAL I asked all sorts people questions in TWI both about Bible and ministry history. My landlord edited the PFAL book for Dr and I spent MANY hours drilling him with questions about that. What kind of interactions did VPW have in the editing were often my focus. I asked these same kinds of questions about editing VPW of my friend at HQ, David Craley, who edited the Way Mag then. So, as I learned VPW's history from WLIL and MANY other places like "Light Began to Dawn," I built a timeline in my head of his life. I build timelines all the time that way, and I do it on paper, and I now do it digitally. I have timelines of things I am thankful for in my life. I have timelines of all the Jr High top 40s songs I loved as a teen and the months they were on the charts and radio. I just slowly built one of VPW’s life, the things that mattered to me in his search and then his reaching out. I just figured in the 1940s his searching was all over the map, like mine. When he found SIT, he dropped all the irons he had cooking in the fire, and concentrated on that. I did exactly the same thing in my life. Yeah, in that sense I knew him. Oddly, when I started work at HQ in 1976, that principle {{a prophet is not without honor except around the ones close to him}} set in and my admiration and trust of him went down. There are lots of reasons that is in the Word, and it surely happened to me. (I only spotted this in hindsight years later.) Then, when I left HQ in 1978 my respect for him went up again. Then in late 1982, I could hear on the SNTs that he had a stroke from his drawn out letter "s" pronunciations. And I figured he was over the hill and freshly installed LCM was going to be my admired leader from then on. Respect for VPW and his current ‘82 teachings went down. Then in 1983 to 85 my respect for VPW went up again as I listened to a few his tapes and also saw the Corps fast developing Nazi like attitudes and tactics (like "Follow me or you are doomed.") and LCM was getting pretty intense. Then in July 1987 it went down, way down, when I saw the John Schoenheit paper for the first time, and respect for the Board of Trustees along with VPW went to near zero for trying to suppress that much needed paper. Then in 1988 my respect went up a little for VPW a few notches, or at least for his pre-1968 ministry that produced the film class. This was in the days before I latched onto the collaterals, which was 10 years later. But in 1988 I thought the collaterals were more like mere souvenirs of the film class. The reason for this 1988 climb in respect is I started seeing from the bootleg film class that John Lynn was dead wrong in saying the class dissociated the power of believing from the written promises of God in His Word. I found MANY places where VPW specifically mentioned that believing really only works for written Bible promises or direct revelation. Then the next 10 years my respect drifted all about this way and that, but I got a transcript of the class and was able to find things in it VERY FAST for the first time. I slowly started checking my memory and other people’s memory of the class and found out we were VERY deficient. My humility slowly went up, and my respect for VPW slowly went up. Then in 1998 someone showed me some things I missed in the collaterals and things changed rapidly as I reviewed the thrilling introduction to the Bible they gave me in the early 1970s. */*/* So, with all these ups and downs, I was constantly RE-EVALUATING what I knew about him, and from many perspectives, sometimes great respect and sometimes disgust, and all the shades (and colors) in between. I think most of you folks went through the VERY EXCITING ride up to respect VPW, and then coasted horizontal and boring for a while like an on a carnival ride, and then SNAPPING downward to crash on the ground of zero respect, and continuing on, burrowing through the Earth to levels of anti-idol disrespect. I think I got to know him MUCH better, so I can see why you say that part. I suspect that you suspect that I was nearly always up high on that same carnival ride you were on, but no. I was on the up and down roller coaster that had many cycles, but never a ground penetrating crash. Yeah, I think I did get to know him, but it was not as an idol at all. I still think he blew it on lots of things in my maturity now. After 1998 things got very simple and I studied the collaterals ONLY until 2018. My respect for VPW was never the creepy type you probably suspect. It was fine-tuned and tempered to be balanced and with careful weighing of facts from all sides and directions, and many times.
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"I took everything I could take at the Moody Bible Institute too, through their correspondence courses." How are we to interpret the word "could" here? I can think of two. 1 - All the classes Moody offered 2 - All the classes he had time for Yeah.... Does the word "could" refer to the Moody ability to send classes. Or does the word "could" refer to VPW's ability to make time for classes?
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You are missing something here. He could have purchased some courses, then got from them everything he could learn or wanted to learn, or even finished the work, but never sent the work in for credit. I can't see him caring much to get the credit or being graded. I think he wanted the learning, and that is the context of his words in WLIL.
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I'd like to feed that Moody investigation into ChatGPT and see if can come up with more interpretations of the sentence of VPW's under investigation. I already did ask ChatGPT the mirror riddle one day and it spit out the normal bland incomplete answer, that happens to be the most popular, short, simple answer on the internet. The next day I asked it if it remembered our conversation the day before about mirrors and it said yes, and went on to summarize what we talked about. Every point and every sentence bore zero resemblance to anything we said. It was a total confabulation.
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You didn't to mention that I am agin it.
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Any particular reason for merely quoting me and not commenting? Or did I miss the comment somewhere. I've seen you do this before. Do you do this with others? Raf was curious also why you did it once.
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You have lots of confidence in your investigation, but you seem to be overlooking something. First, though, I want to ask you how many proPFAL people from the old days did you show your investigation to? Any at all? I mean where they would really give you their best proPFAL of proTWI opinion on the soundness of your investigation. I mean face friends who were still friendly with in your days between leaving and GreaseSpot. Have Oldiesman or Johniam given you a run for the money here on this investigation? In other words did you only show this to people who were already sympathetic with your conclusion that he lied in WLIL? Just wondering. Let’s go back to the beginning of your investigation. “I took everything I could take at the Moody Bible Institute too, through their correspondence courses.” What does that phrase mean to you: “took everything I could take” mean to you? It could mean several things to me. 1 – He registered and completed every class. 2 - He registered and completed every class he had the time to take. 3 – He registered and completed every class he had the money to take. 4 – He registered for some classes but did not complete them. 5 – He borrowed someone else’s class materials and learned from them. 6 – I could go on and on here with all the permutations of the above possibilities in combinations. and maybe another parameter with which to permute. In your investigation were you able to determine which one it was, or a set of several it could be? Which ones were they? */*/*/* Just a reminder of some crucial evidence: June 29, 1987 To whom it may concern, This is to verify that Victor Wierwille did not complete a course with us. This is not to say that he didn’t purchase a course from us but that he did not complete one. We do not keep records for courses that are not complete for more than 10 years.
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God’s Budget and Double Doors .... On the Scarcity of Miracles
Mike replied to Mike's topic in Doctrinal: Exploring the Bible
I know for sure on several occasions he said that he could possibly terminate the Corps, but NOT the WoW program. I never heard the version you wrote above. -
All the news is abuzz these days about A.I. and ChatGPT, and bots. I was wondering if anyone noticed that I predicted this buzz in the first chapter of my theory in this thread. I wish I had polished that chapter before posting it, because I recently went through it with a major edit. Please pardon my haste if you want to read my predictions at the beginning and the end of that first chapter. Here is it's location: Here is the last section of the predictions: Why talk about Free Will and consciousness? It’s because it’s an emergency! This topic that I’m analyzing, free will, is not a normal one. This topic has been in hot debate for thousands of years, but instead of clearing up over the centuries, it has gotten even more out of hand in recent decades. For 25 years I’ve been anticipating the days we are living in right now with Artificial Intelligence all around us and growing fast. It’s just a short time away and children will be asking adults if robots have feelings or free will. Adults will not know the answers any better than the kids, though. Sermons will be preached on whether God can hear the prayers of a robot… or not. People will feel cheated if they think they are talking to a human, and it turns out to be a robot. This can even lead to violent situations, if you consider the cognitive dissonance I mentioned earlier. We are heading for a cultural crunch that will be very confusing to everyone. Even Robots’ Rights may become a real political force at some point. I am personally against this, but it looks like many could want it. In addition to these unique scientific advancements in machinery, is the strange situation that EVEN SCIENTISTS have pretty much no idea what is really going on in the area of free will, neither in humans, nor in animals, nor in machines. The top intellectuals of our culture have no firm consensus on whether we even have any such freedom. The best they can offer is that classical FW does not actually exist. They analyze endlessly on whether we should (or should not) assign credit or blame in human behavior, if we are all automatons like robots.