Mike

Not true! Many of us grads heard about all those teachers from VPW. He merely did it informally, but he made those names known to us, and in a number of settings.

I share your chagrin there. That is one of the points I will be discussing with HQ people. I saw another on on another thread that I think that I should look into with my TWI-4 friends. It was the numerology letter from Vern Edwards that you examined in your thread "Make It Make Sense." I have always had issues with the way numbers in scripture are handled. At best, I think it is like tying a ribbon with a bow in on a FINISHED piece of work. But to DERIVE any meaning from the numbers themselves is like a stage magic act at best, and on the slippery slope of hooky pookery.

So sorry if I fooled you into thinking I was going to copyright Raf's post for my own. LoL Has this been a problem for you just recently, or does it go back into your past a bit? How do you handle April 1st each year?

Ohhh! You’re breaking my heart for those poor victims! Men of God that are robbed blind of the just rewards for their writing and teaching efforts. Booo hoooo~ They will have to wait all the way to the Return of Christ to be paid back! What do they do during the interim??? Oh! But WAIT! I haven’t mentioned this in YEARS to the broken hearts here, sobbing uncontrollably for the victims of VPW stealing their soul from them. Have you calculated how much FREE ADVERTISING that Kenyon, Stiles, BG Leonard, and all the others got from VPW’s efforts? You were sensitive enough earlier on this thread, to recognize the free advertising that the SNL tapes were for TWI. Those “free advertising” brain circuits should still be warm, and able to recognize how VPW was a major advertising agent for Kenyon, Stiles, etc. I would imagine that all those ministries got quite a shot in the arm from all the PFAL grads who bought their books, because they were impressed at how VPW endorsed them. I know I am an example of someone who contributed to them, because of VPW. Has anyone done any research into this? I doubt it. Why would anyone here WANT to find such evidence? It would be anti-blasphemy against the anti-idol….. Oops! wait a minute…. Maybe that should be straight-up blasphemy? or anti-blasphemy? Gotta be careful to avoid the glitches Bizzarro Superman often runs into.

I was testing your sense of humor; you failed. That was a joke too. Did you fail again? I can help you. Just send me $100 plus a tape of you telling your best jokes, and then you can send me your free evaluation. You too can be a famous comedian, by signing up for the Famous Comedians School! (The Firesign Theater loaned me this blurb.)

Good question. From what I heard VPW's attitude was much like that statement from the Coffee With Jesus website I linked and quoted above. He eschewed the idea that it should be hoarded. I once heard an old SNT tape where he talked about “seeds being scattered” according to God’s purposes. People were lamenting the grads who took the class and then took off. He said they were like seeds scattering God’s blessings in ways other than TWI. I think he felt similarly with "his" material. VPW never copyrighted the SNT tapes in his lifetime. Those old SNTs are now public domain. TWI tried to squelch this with their lawyers, and totally failed. I know the lawyer who stood them down, by inviting them to take the case to court. I was the branch AV man from 1972 to about 75 in my first branch. I never saw a copyright notice on the film or on the videos of the class. I cleaned the films at HQ 1976-78, and never saw a copyright notice. After 1982 I noticed a copyright notice on the videos. I think the lawyers were able to get through to Craig, where VPW had resisted them. The SNTs were then copyrighted also. There is some use of the copyright in these matters. It can protect the “property” from alterations. It can prevent some other person from copyrighting it, and effectively stealing it, and preventing the author from using it.

Sounds to me like a deliberate mis-characterization, then.

Very telling in deed. Was your gross misrepresentation accidental, or on purpose? Here is how you mis-characterized it: "God is not preoccupied with silly things like earthly ownership? Here is what I wrote: "God ... not preoccupied with silly things like earthly ownership of intellectual property that came from God." Why did you cut off the crucial second half of my sentence?

Yes. God loaned the info to them so that they could prepare it for VPW borrowing it. Now it's been loaned to us, so that we can loan it to others. God and his workers are not preoccupied with silly things like earthly ownership of intellectual property that came from God. We do not worship intellectual originality, as if the human brain were to be praised for it. God owns His words and he freely gives them to us all to use. */*/*/* Here are some workers with the right idea, that human ownership of ideas intended to bless God's people is a trivial thing that will fade with time. If BG Leonard were to be upset that VPW blessed us with "BG owned material" then BG was out of fellowship, and forgot the attitude that God had when He inspired him in the first place. Look at the attitude of these people for their copyrights !! It is gentle and simply asks to be mentioned... if convenient. http://www.radiofreebabylon.com/coffeewithjesus "You're free to share these comics. Yes, that includes in sermon notes, church bulletins, doctoral theses, on your website and as graffiti in subway stations. Just don't forget where you got them, don't alter them, and try to give credit and maybe a link."

Can you narrow that down to a chapter or three?

Here is the logic: I post that VPW claimed PFAL God-breathed. Others post that he did not claim that. I post 20 such claims. Then I post that the others' knowledge of PFAL is insufficient to criticize PFAL because they all missed the 20 claims due to (1) forgetting (2) not absorbing all of it when they heard it. Meanwhile everyone thinks I am trying to prove that PFAL is God-breathed, when I feel it can only be proved to be true by living it. There are some subtle things here. I'll keep trying to clearly describe them.

I believe that it is God-breathed, but I don't think that is a provable thing.

I'm not following what you mean there.

God limits Himself, and for various reasons. One big one is to protect us.

I like them and listen to them, but they were not put into that final written form the others have, which involved other people with holy spirit (even prior to VPW's working), and lots of editing time, and lots of prayer. I see VPW as just one player in the collaterals, while in LV and UoL he is central. I feel that in all the classes there was that open possibility for passages being "almost straight prophesy" or "God-breathed" or "special." I first started thinking in the early 1970s of the film class in that way. HOWEVER, it is hard to say where each such passage begins and ends. */*/*/*/*/* I rarely got this far with detail on this 20 years ago. Too much fur was flying. Another thing to note, 20 years ago I said there was no way I could logically prove that the collaterals being God-breathed. This was heard by very few. Eventually I would dodge challenges to prove this, because it was impossible. Many thought I was constantly engaged in it, but that was not the case. What I, however, WAS constantly engaged in was posting that VPW often claimed to be a spokesman for God, and in many different ways. People would post that VPW was rolling in his grave when I posted that way about him, because he taught just the opposite. People said that VPW could NEVER have said that. So the big debate, as far as I was concerned, was that everyone who was criticizing what we were taught, did not understand what they criticizing. I claimed that VPW claimed it. I did not claim I could prove it true; I just simply believed what he claimed. MANY said I was in error and I didn’t know what I was defending. So I slowly posted about 20 places where VPW claimed SOMETHING special about the collaterals, and prominently one such place was PFAL page 83. Of all the “thus saith the lord” claims of VPW’s, page 83 is the corker. I first saw it in the late 1970s, and a few hard core friends of mine saw it too in the film class, where it is nearly identical. So the big debate morphed again, from the 20 places where VPW claimed against all others, to just page 83. “Mike, your grammar is crazy on page 83” was what 49 out of 50 people would tell me here, and in splinter groups. But a few grammar experts would agree with me over the years on this page 83 debate, so I pressed on with it, even though no one believed me here…. until Nathan_Jr showed up late one night and reluctantly agreed with me, last September. So I never debated that the collaterals were “God-breathed.” just that VPW claimed it. “No he didn’t” was thrown at me, and my comeback was “He did it 20 times” with one big enchilada in the film class and page 83 right under everyone’s noses. I argued that all those claims of “thus saith the lord” by VPW eluded us for decades (me too except for page 83) and that we are not in a good position to criticize them because we ALL (1) forgot much of the material and (2) were not able to absorb it all. My solution to this for me, when I saw it, was to follow VPW’s final instructions and come back to PFAL to master the class and master the collaterals the best I could. It was a good review I had for a good 20 years. I’m still learning from them. I am thankful to God for what He did for me, and I look forward to someday thanking Brother Jesus PERSONALLY for all he did to reconcile me to the Father.

Oops! Double post.

You need to put fuzzy fonts on the word "is" up there. And use pencil for all the other fonts. And use fuzzy fonts on Way Mag Not sure about JCNG, JCOP, JCPS It's an open topic for me. This is similar to the early committees working in the century before 425 A.D. on the NT canon. */*/*/*/*/* And that's another reason Academia is low in my approval ratings: they dumped B.C. and A.D. designations on HisStory's Timeline.

Well put. I could endorse almost all of that. At the end with the GP, I think the need is on our side. We can hear richer, more detailed things, and not have any fear. Without spirit, the communication is not so clear or detailed, might involve fear, and dreams may be necessary, murky as they are. When we get spirit that need on our part is met and God is not limited to our limitations so much.

....looks like we've come full circle and completed this thread. We can all go home now.

I just remembered that my father did something a little similar. When I was 11 years old he would ask me to help him balance his check book. I think he was really trying to give me real world practice with number crunching, and detailed inventories. He first had me order the cancelled checks by check number, then we'd compare what the bank saw with what he saw in his records. He would tell me how mom might forget to record a check at times and the associated detective work. We would double check his subtractions if it didn't balance yet, to make sure they were accurate. If the balance was off, but pretty close he "do a delta" which is Engineering terms for recording the difference and seeing what happened the next month. The delta stuff was really mystifying, but all through the many steps involved in this I was TOTALLY in the dark as to what we were doing and why. I just focused on each step and dad's instructions. After a couple years I understood some of it. Years later, when I got my first checking account, the deltas suddenly made sense! All the steps we took made total sense when I was ready to use it. I was not a toddler, though. However, some people insist the balancing a checkbook is harder than calculus.

In VPW's last, last teaching he tells us (twice) to master the foundational and the intermediate classes, and the written materials that come with them. That is one clue to the PFAL canon. I take it to include Way Mag articles because a subscription came with the class. I took it as very significant that this most important teaching completely fell thru the cracks. I was 15 years late in seeing it. I did an informal poll that told me 99% of all non-Corps grads had no idea it existed. I regard the extremely poor handling of this teaching to be a colossal top leadership failure, and I see it as the most clear example of a total failure by the top leadership. I regard this teaching as THE smoking gun to tell us what went wrong. So the rough handling of this teaching is a good indication to me that it's contents are very significant. This looks like it might be another variation on this thread's theme. */*/*/* The PFAL canon has other anomalies, but I have not had time to work on them much. It is an open subject for me. I have recently mentioned this here before.

I can trust God with that kind of future planning, but I'm not sure that plan of yours will work all that well. But the integers may be a good place to start with toddlers.

Yes. And thanks for the opportunity to again INCLUDE MYSELF in all 3. I definitely forgot some, was not mature enough for some, and was not paying attention for some. I found this out when I went back to study the collaterals in 1998. Then a few years later I could see it happened to all of us, when I came here.

Possibly, but I like better the possibility that God was supplying the information early, knowing it would help later in life, even though we weren't mature enough for it at the time.

I usually cite (1) forgotten or (2) not ready to fully absorb, but leave out (3) weren't paying attention. Dale Carnegie inspired me to omit (3).