Mike

You can't un-confess his sins either, and you can in no way have ANY idea what went on between him and God. I place no stock in anonymous rumors of his last words on his last days. */*/*/*/* We were not a regular church in any way. We were more like an army on a mission deep inside the devil's territory, planting collateral printings all over the world, with thousands of appreciative grads putting that material in their minds. There were also all kinds of inefficiencies like the TVTs that slowed the project at times and at places, and sin abd collateral damage that set back individuals' walks. But the job got done. The 1942 promise was fulfilled by mid 1985. */*/*/*/* God will be the one to cover VPW's debt and calculate his rewards. I found an interesting google passage: Philemon owed a debt to Paul, his salvation. Philemon was a man to whom Onesimus owed a debt, but Philemon owed a debt as well. Philemon's debt was greater than Onesimus' debt – his was an eternal debt to God. He also owed a debt to Paul for sharing the gospel with him, so Philemon had a double debt. If you need an accountant to figure all that out, so do I. But I know that God will balance all the books and wipe away every tear soon.

No doubt in my mind that TWI-2 stood a better chance at success had VPW been the man he knew to be. But in spite of that, lots of us benefited from his TWI-1, and some benefited with TWI-2. When he walked with God, God was able to bless us big time. Whenever he walked in fellowship, VPW had that same boost holy spirit provides all of us, even when we are "not walking so well lately." I'm thankful that God allowed him back in fellowship faithfully, just like He does us every time we simply admit that we have sinned. First John Chapter 1 promises this clearly. Of course, then the repenting that follows helps us stay in fellowship longer, and with greater richness. God gave us an example of His extreme grace and mercy with Paul, and I think He did the same thing, and even greater with VPW. Are the two demonstrations identical? Nope! Are they extreme in giving glory to God? Yes. I think it is comforting for us to know that no matter how bad we blow it, we can ALWAYS come to ourselves and remember to return to our loving Father and resume our relationship with Him. If you think you can do this better than VPW, that is great! Do it! Do it again tomorrow! There is no end to God's grace and mercy with us, especially when we turn our attention to His business of caring for His family.

I just wanted you to know that I have finished all my backlog of responses, but have two left that I want to think more on how to answer. Here they are, just in case you want to add to them or edit for greater clarity. */*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*//*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/* Hi, my name is Oldskool and you now know someone who is an advocate of critical thinking skills and I know just what to do when the test is passed...It results in faith when applied to scripture. It never means its above question -- faith and inquiry are not mutually exclusive. Truth is truth...it should stand to questions at any point without folding, getting defensive, or whatever. Problem is when you apply critical thinking to wierwille and compare it with scripture (not wierwilles' version of scripture) wierwille usually doesnt stand as true. Sure, he has some truth...but a little leaven leaveneth the entire lump...not my words...but I have no problem repeating them in this context. */*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*//*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/* OldSkool wrote: Im not so sure I would call it an absolute truth. There is so much I don't understand on the topic that I refuse to close my mind off to other possibilities...for me it's a faith issue based on my limited understanding of scripture. There's God saying that man will die once he sins. Why would there be a need for resurections and all that stuff if everyone is alive already. I have faith in God's Word that dead=lack of consciousness or existance. Does that mean I understand everything on the subject or what actually happens when a person dies? No. So with that said, there's much to be understood that I simply don't know.

40 years ago the Deadheads had a reputation of being maximum irresponsible, and very spaced out. I was surprised to see the modern ones looking and acting so different than what I saw long ago.

Yes, I was being warped by the RC school system in my preteen youth, and at the same time conducted studies in Comparative Religions 101 with my Protestant playmates.

I know for sure that all the Romans spoke with a perfect British accent in those olden days.

The modern Deadheads have matured and most of the psychedelics are gone, at least from sight. Every several months some one person is obviously tripping, but it is nothing like the college scene in the 70s. I hear of someone doing it once a year occasionally, but it is not the focus at all like it used to be. There are doctors, lawyers, accountants, and chiropractors in the Deadhead community now, and 3 generations on the dance floors. They are gentle and kind, and the remnants of the peace and love hippies. They call the weekly Dead cover band shows "church."

Are you telling me right now, in modern 2022, that in the Olden Days they never spoke this way ? (...but that if they did, it would have been captured at least twice in the Gospels ???...)

I have posted a little on this before. It is a big story. Before I crystalized on the collaterals in 1998, I had a totally different theory that started in 1987, which was the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Lots of TV documentaries and magazine articles were pumping the history of the hippies. I was stewing over the collapse of the ministry that started a year prior, and continued to get even worse. The media nostalgia all around was constantly reminding me of the good old hippie days in TWI-1, years earlier with its Woodstock continuation every August. I wondered in those early, already wobbly days of TWI-2 in 1987, what was that magical hippie element in the Seventies that made the ministry wonderful? As I thought on this, and recorded TV shows and clipped newspaper and magazine articles on the Sixties, it seemed like VPW tried to get the PFAL teaching out of Ohio for years, unsuccessfully. He went to other States, to England, India, Samoa, and I think South America to teach the class live, but nothing much stuck. Then he films the class, and immediately afterward went to San Francisco to meet the hippies, and maybe teach the class, or a fraction of it LIVE to hippies. The film class had only just arrived at HQ from the developers days before his departure. He only watched the first half hour and was off to see the hippies. It was from that time on that the ministry started exploding out of Ohio. It looked to me that adding the hippie element to the PFAL teachings made it all zing just right, and the hippies moved the Word out of Ohio finally. Look at johniam’s “Cheerfulness Report” and how it grew and grew, and then declined and declined. Simultaneous with the cheerfulness decline, was the sterilizing of the hippie element out of the ministry, its attitudes, and its music. I felt like Archimedes in his tub shouting Eureka that day in 1987! PFAL + hippie = cheerful loving ministry PFAL - hippie = meltdown ministry The math told me to investigate the hippie element and I did. It went something like this: Kesey --> Pranksters --> [ Heefner & Doop with Jesus Freaks ] So, in 1987 I started studying the mystery Hippie Element that made the ministry zing so well in the early days. Early in this research I saw it was right to zero in on Kesey. It was in his later writings that I found him admitting to this secret Christian influence he was attempting in the Sixties. I verified what I had found when someone told me that Kesey was in the White Pages. So in the early 1990s I called him a bunch of times. His wife answered most of the times, but she proved very helpful in filling in gaps for my research. Finally Ken answered and I got to just say thanks for his work, because his wife had acted as his secretary in earlier calls. He was a trip, and a major influencer of the 20th century. When LSD was legal, Kesey hired the Grateful Dead for their very first gig to play at his acid parties. They were his house band for a while circa 1966.

Yes, he wrote that and the book started the hippie thing. The book is a trojan horse for the 4 Gospels. Jack Nicholson played Jesus. The Cliff Notes veryify this.

The Deadhead community reminds me of TWI-1 in the 1979s. They maintain the peace and love of the late Sixties. But most of them totally missed the origins if the Dead in Ken Kesey and his experiments in primitive Christianity. The hippies moving PFAL out of Ohio was a part of Kesey's huge cultural experiment. My mission is to show them the Kesey Christian influence.

Oh, I expect that lots of Christians are that type, but how many have a goal of serving others with all nine all the time? How many of them are capable of receiving and acting on a revelation from the Author that will pit them against all the leadership of their denomination and ruin their careers. Hows many of them would have the fight in them to win such a skirmish?

One of the crazy things I learned with the Dead cover bands is dance to the Garcia diddling they do so well. Somehow I learned I could dance to the lead guitarists by "playing the air guitar" with my feet. So far I only fell once!

I'm getting caught up on old responses. */*/*/*/***/**/*/*/*/* Nathan_Jr wrote: Confirmation bias is a result of automatic, unintentional strategies rather than deliberate deception.[8][9] Confirmation bias cannot be avoided or eliminated, but only managed by improving education and critical thinking skills. Ok so what is the opposite of critical thinking? Coachable, meek learning? Catholics have a Confirmation ceremony for those who had “arrived.” Once a seeker finds the truth on some one thing, the seeker is incorporate that truth element into his life and perspective, and teach it to others. */*/*/*/*/*/*//* I had written: NOW, we can move on to the other discussion of how can we know for sure that there is no consciousness immediately after death. I mean hours after last breath. As in Luke 23:43? The criminal would be unconscious in paradise with the master? No, that verse doesn’t teach it. That verse just got its comma moved to reflect it.. But plenty of other verses do teach it.

chockful, Thanks for your background story earlier on Christmas Day. - You wrote: “Forge your own path and be free.” -I am doing that, in a couple of independent ways. I get to minister to the valley of human need in odd ways. One way is in my dance adventures, going strong for ten years now. I’ve become an entertainer of sorts, networking with older retired musicians inland where I live, and with the younger Deadhead community down at the hippie beach.

Earlier on this thread I had written: What I experienced in PFAL and my early twig years was liberating and showed me how the Bible fits for my life. I saw how unsupervised, uneducated, young people with holy spirit could form a local extension of the Body of Christ. I got a relationship with the Father and with the Son out of the deal. All of that is intact, and thriving to this day. I finally did see savage wolves start to move into TWI-1 slowly a few years later, and in 15 years they had ruined the ministry that had set me free. I am still free because I latched onto the Bible and the part of the ministry that was good, and avoided the parts that were not best. OldSkool wrote: …Except you can't see that the savage wolves cobbed together the savage doctrines they savagely teach and the end result is people are led away from Christ. I think that the savage doctrines were entirely in the TVTs and perpetuated by a minority subset, that is, only SOME the Corps, a slim minority. This nasty toughness grew during the 1980s, and johniam has documented the decline in cheerfulness that happened simultaneously. And I agree that these influences within the ministry did lead SOME away from Christ, but that too was a slim minority. As the 1980s chugged by less and less good was happening. It was different in the 1970s for me.

No. INITIALLY I was thrown for a loop by the term "critical" , but then I got myself edumacated and learnt it up to be the scholars criticizing or RATING the veracity of various ancient manuscripts, usually fragments. That made sense to me then. They were rating things like the way archeologists rate items on various parameters. The term "critic" never bothered me again after that. But what did bother me was how few other grads knew it, once I knew it.

And let's not forget to pound out a hearty keyboard "hello" to all the historians hailing from the mid-2000s reading this, and behind them the cyber-archeologists piecing together their competing "Critical Grease Texts" and wondering what a food fight is.

LoL. You will, however, waste your time by explaining that you wont waste your time. You should consider the folks at home read-only-ing this. They might be willing to learn.

Yeah, I am only recently becoming aware of it's use in serious circles, and still learning about how GreaseSpot posters are using it. Is there is a bias against the notion of "confirmation bias" in the sense that it cannot be used in a constructive and useful way? I'm asking, because I am new to the term. I think I first started hearing "confirmation bias" being used to analyze why crazy conspiracy theories proliferate. This was long ago, 80s & 90s Art Bell late night radio kind of talk. It didn't seem to be a part of normal news media and conversation back then. I didn't hear "confirmation bias" used seriously until the recent decade when conspiracy theories entered the political realm. */*/*/*/*/*/** But critical thinking skills I knew of since Jr. High. I was a Sherlock Holmes fan and read every adventure, twice. In my teen age stereo electronics experiments, I had to apply critical thinking skills properly, or suffer the consequences of getting jolted with 110 volts of house electricity. Getting shocked a couple times was all I needed to get real critical and suspicious of any exposed electronics in sight. In college Physics classes these same skills had to be fine tuned to get the right numerical answers (plus show all my work how those numbers were arrived at) on final exams. But I think it is ironic and even funny, that people think the application of critical thinking skills (CTS ?) is required at all times and for all topics. This strikes me as cartoonish, or like an exaggerated SNL sketch… like the Church Lady. There are proper times and places to lighten up on the intense application of these CTS. Moses was the meekest man on Earth at one time. But "meek" got demoted in modern language. Moses, it looks to me, knew how to switch off (click) his CTS, and get meek to take it in with no resistance or suspicion of error. Oh, I am sure Moses had to turn his CTS back on (click) after learning and receiving time was over. Everyone knows that not having CTS on most of the time out in public, makes one an easy target, known in NYC as a sucka. Both meekness and gullibility in modern language can describe the INAPPROPRIATE turning off (clunk) of CTS. But what gallant, noble sounding nomenclature do we have for the appropriate switching off (click) of CTS, like Moses did when he was meekest or coach-able-est? The word “coachable” was worked some in the 80s TWI-2 to describe good meekness, or Moses Meekness. Can we do better than that? Doesn't some game manufacturer like Parker Brothers have a board game where players have to make up new words? Maybe there is one. We could play it HERE !!!

I don't understand the nomenclature phobia that persists here. It is necessity, not grandiosity, that drives the evolution of language.

Like I said in an earlier post today, the 5- senses working of the texts is a scholarly effort to match wits with the devil. We were taught in the AC that working the 5-senses angle the best we can is important, and textual analysis has its place. However, the tipping of scales over the devil's skillful scrambling comes NOT via 5-senses research techniques, but by revelation from the Author. The only way we can get an upper hand on knowing the Word and will of God is by God Himself intervening and giving us this most necessary help. Scholars eschew final absolute knowledge this way. They may acknowledge that the Biblical writers had access to the Author, but not us. That kind of guidance died with the Apostles is the best attitude they can muster, as far as I have seen.

How so? It was the just terminology that I was unfamiliar with. That a bias could hinder critical thinking is totally obvious, even if it were to lack a name. What I am searching for is a good name for the opposite of critical thinking. You see, critical thinking is a bias itself. it is a bias against error and fraud and sloppiness. It is a suspicion the error may lurk within an idea, so the idea under suspicion must be poked and prodded in every which way to see how it stands up to critical scrutiny. That suspicion is a good bias to have UNTIL the goal of truth is reached when all the critical thinking strategies are exhausted. Once an element of truth has passed all the critical thinking tests, it can be regarded as relatively free of error and fraud and sloppiness. The proper way to then approach this element of truth is to embrace it with a positive bias and incorporate it deep into mind and life's activities. I thought that this second, positive bias was called "confirmation bias" but I was mistaken. So now I am searching for the technical term that describes this appropriate positive bias that truths deserve, AFTER they pass all the critical thinking tests. But alas and alack, this notion of finally finishing the critical thinking tests is rarely considered in academia. What are we to call this process of driving a element of truth deep into mind after it has passed the critical thinking tests? IF there is no term, I guess we will have to make one up.