SIT, TIP, Prophecy and Confession

[Raf]

Wierwille and TWI defined and explained the three manifestations in terms that invited, nurtured and rewarded fakery.

[Ham]

But.. but.. but..

they could label their brand of fakery, unlike other brands, not possessed..

[OldSkool]

Even more damning than hearing the same other people do TIP and Prophesy time after time after time is hearing yourself do it again and again and again and again. I don't think you get that sort of experience just hanging out with the local twig a couple times a week.

We had to do manifestations every day as way disciple, not part of the program per se, but a over-zealous household coordinator insisted. It was interesting to note that nearly the same "messages" was given nearly every day. Explanation? It's what we needed to hear. And yes I objected to the redundancy only to be told we were going to do it anyway.

[Ham]

Another brand of fakery

Interesting, no?

[Raf]

Old Skool:

Make it once or twice a week instead of once or twice a day.

Make the hearers primed to receive a comforting or encouraging word instead of weary at the vain repetition.

I come into a meeting, eager to hear words of exhortation and comfort from God. You go into the same meeting, eager to be called as the vessel through which these words of exhortation and comfort will be shared. You're called, and you bring forth the message that's in your heart. Maybe you thought it out beforehand, but you're clever enough that you don't always need to do that. You just speak, and your mind supplies you with memories of similar comforting messages and the tiny or vast Biblical knowledge stored in your brain. The message you speak, which you WANT to contain exhortation and comfort, SURPRISE! consists of exhortation and comfort. I, primed to hear such a message, am exhorted and comforted! SURPRISE! Then we reverse roles when I'm the one called. It's God!

Poppycock. Horse manure.

I don't know what to make of Steve's accounts. From a skeptical standpoint, one could say that we're bound to hit on some stunning prophecies over the course of decades of operating the manifestation that will result in people responding in the way the Bible predicts (which, did you ever notice, rarely happened?). A broken clock is right twice a day, right? Or maybe Steve is absolutely correct in attributing those rare instances to God's intervention. Who am I to dispute it? Steve offers it as personal experience and belief, not as "proof." And he's entitled to that, as we all are.

On the other hand, prophesying to a bedridden cancer patient that death will come calling shortly doesn't strike me as all that much of a miracle. I predicted my sister's death in August. That wasn't God cluing me in on anything. She was approaching the fifth anniversary of an ALS diagnosis. While longer survival rates are not uncommon, they are certainly the exception. Now and then you get a bizarrely lengthy survival rate, like Stephen Hawking. But that's exceedingly rare. ALS patients don't go on to live 40 years after diagnosis, as a rule. As an exception? Yes. As a rule, no. And I suppose we can't attribute Hawking's longevity to his faith: he's about as atheist as they come.

I have no reason to believe Steve's wife was exercising a divine manifestation when she told a cancer patient the end was near. But I certainly have no Biblical reason to discount the possibility. For all I know, maybe THAT was what this poor woman needed to hear.

I deeply appreciate the honesty with which everyone on this thread, including those who think I'm dead wrong, have addressed this subject. Thank you all.

Edited October 10, 2012 by Raf

[Raf]

Another brand of fakery

Interesting, no?

Yes.

There's a saying:

The difference between a cult and a false religion is that in a cult, there's someone at the top who knows this is all a scam. In a false religion, that person's dead.

[excathedra]

SIT, TIP, Prophecy and Confession

the above -- it's just too much for my head

no worries anyway because i'm done

[Raf]

No worries, excy. Make of all of this what you will. It's easy for anyone to dismiss my view as my projecting my admission onto other people. If I'm wrong, that's the obvious explanation for why.

[Ham]

I faced my aloneness and wrongness alone once.. it's nice to be able to do that in terms of a community..

:)

when my "wrongness" looked me square in the eye.. I still had the logic of mathematics to keep (at least the logical or practical side of) me going..

true story.

well.. true. at least as far as one could take it as true..

[OperaBuff]

Threads like this are the reason why 90% of former TWI members avoid GSC like the plague.

I hate this thread with a deep hatred.

[Raf]

Thanks for sharing that.

[waysider]

Yeah, the "mannies" are sort of like a fulcrum for ex-Way people. Such a huge part of our identity was based on them being real. It's like the ultimate deal breaker for some people. A house of cards. If they're not real, what's left?

I don't know. You could start with the golden rule, treat other people with respect, treat them the way you would want them to treat you. That ought to keep a person busy enough for a lifetime.

Edited October 12, 2012 by waysider

[Raf]

Hate with a deep hatred, not the one who sold you the lie, but the one who suggests you got cheated and deserve a refund.

[geisha779]

Hate with a deep hatred, not the one who sold you the lie, but the one who suggests you got cheated and deserve a refund.

To be fair, Opera Buff didn't say he hated you, it is the thread that he hates with a deep hatred. I would really like to know the reasons why. That is an extreme response and those often cover a myriad of underlying reasons. It would be interesting to know why this thread has evoked such a visceral response.

I don't know 5 percent of ex-way let alone all 90 % that don't come here and neither does Opera Buff. He is just projecting his feelings onto a diverse group of people once in TWI. It seems like an extension of "group think" and finding security and support for our opinions in the safety of numbers. That comment about the 90 % does have an accusatory edge. Those of us who posted in this thread take a hit by extension.

This thread has no power or authority to change anything we don't want to change, it may prompt us to consider, but isn't that what we initially missed? Questioning? We were in an ugly cult. What if we were wrong? That is not outside the realm of possibilities. Is that something we want to continue on in while we believe we are honoring the Lord? Just saying.....it sounds like some of those Corinthians may have had it so confused they might have been calling Jesus accursed.

Opera Buff's response does seem rather paradoxical. I hope he elaborates just a bit. It does come off as a bit petulant..... to pop in....essentially imply some hated evil and not explain. But, nothing shocks me in ex-way world anymore.

Edited October 12, 2012 by geisha779

[geisha779]

Hate with a deep hatred, not the one who sold you the lie, but the one who suggests you got cheated and deserve a refund.

Oh, I get it, you meant the thread, not you personally. Scratch what I said earlier!

[Pete]

Raf

I don't dispute what you personally experienced and I commend you on your courage to speak up about it.

But you should know that they connected a guy up with sensors on his brain to check him out when he was SIT's.

What they found was consistent with his claim that he was genuinely SIT's and not making it up as he went along.

This is because the areas of brain activity that they witnessed during the tests were not the areas that would have been active if he had been making up the words. This fits exactly with what genuine SIT's claims to be: speaking without reference to the words spoken. So whereas this couldn't prove that SITs is spiritually genuine, it does prove that what the man claimed to experience was consistent with the results of the test.

Personally, I didn't agree with the methods used by the Way in their excellors sessions. In my opinion, those methods are a really good way of learning to introduce your own made up utterances into what you speak. Also you're right that under the pressure put on them in the class it is possible that some made up their own words as they thought that this was what was expected of them. I don't dispute this, nor do I dispute what you personally experienced.

But once you introduce your own utterances into tongues due to wrong counselling, you are more prone to do the same with the other manifestations as well. The Way actually taught something along the same lines, even though they contradicted it in practice. Just because the Way took someone else's teaching material and taught it doesn't make it automatically wrong.

If you actually want to do genuine tongues, I'm sure that there is a way of going forward with this. Do you want to?

[OldSkool]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZbQBajYnEc

Is this the video?

[Raf]

Geisha, your first interpretation of my post was fair but incorrect. I am solely responsible for the miscue, for which I am sorry. I know I was not being attacked on any personal level. Your second interpretation of my post was correct: the thread was attacked, and that is what I meant to convey.

Pete,

There is a fatal flaw in the brain wave studies, which did indeed show that the language centers of the brain were not active in the tongues speakers. The problem is that they picked the wrong control group.

They compared someone speaking in tongues to that same person (or other people) speaking with their understanding. That there would be a difference is not surprising.

But "speaking with the understanding" should not have been the control group.

The brain waves of someone speaking in tongues should have been compared against the brain waves of someone engaging in free vocalization, someone knowingly doing what I and others admit we did for years. To make it a double-blind study, the person administering the test should not know whether his subject believes himself to be genuinely speaking in tongues or is knowingly faking the experience. If brain waves of two speakers are compared within those parameters, I would be confident that my thesis would be borne out.

Then again, even that's not necessarily true: if the machines reading the brain activity can pick up differences in intent, we would have no real way of knowing that. Do the brain waves of someone who really believes what he's doing is SIT look any different from the brain waves of someone who is knowingly engaging in free vocalization? That would change the game. So even then, we can't really find much in the way of "proof" in brain wave studies.

What those studies tell us is that when someone is engaging in SIT, they are not using the language centers of the brain.

Earlier in this thread, I posited that this is still consistent with free vocalization (I hadn't encountered that term yet, so I used different words). If I began speaking in tongues, I would expect the brain wave activity to show exactly what it showed. If, on the other hand, I deliberately set out to make certain, specific sounds (say, for example, I wanted to specifically recall and say "semanto rela feno shinistima kana lochanta coloprionday"), then the language centers of my brain would likely activate precisely because I'm not making it up as I go along.

I hope I'm being clear: the reason the study is flawed, in my opinion, is that it does not establish what "making it up as you go along" looks like. You're making the mistake of equating "speaking with the understanding" and "making it up as you go along." I contend that those brain waves would look markedly different from each other. But the study never considered that question.

To answer your final question: at this point I have elected to keep my prayer life to myself.

Edited October 12, 2012 by Raf

[Raf]

Threads like this are the reason why 90% of former TWI members avoid GSC like the plague.

I hate this thread with a deep hatred.

Piggybacking (plagiarizing?) on what geisha said earlier:

This post bothered me a great deal, but a little shift in perspective helped bring me down from my high horse.

Let's get something straight: I neither know nor care why 90% of former TWI members avoid GSC. A decent percentage of former TWI members still believe Wierwille was some unique man of God and are doing everything they can to preserve his legacy. A decent percentage don't spend a lot of time on the Internet, and certainly not in forums and chat rooms. A decent percentage are perfectly fine without GSC. A small percentage think Wierwille's written works are a Newer Testament.

I don't view it as my responsibility, or GSC's, to recruit as many former TWI followers as possible. GSC is here for them, not the other way around.

To hate this thread with a deep hatred takes one of two things: a contempt for being "tempted away" from an experience you genuinely believe to be godly (aka, truly righteous indignation), or the touching of a raw nerve. Maybe it's a combination of the two. I don't know.

But I suspect I've touched a nerve, and I've done it in a way that is logically consistent and deeply troubling for a lot of people.

Those who believe their experience is genuine need not be troubled by my thesis. After all, I'm wrong. Does the presence of Islam in the world fill you with a deep hatred? Hinduism? Shintoism? No. But the existence of an argument that dares to suggest a practice that does not appear to produce what the Bible says it's supposed to produce might not actually be genuine? Hatred.

I submit that the hatred is inappropriate and wrongly directed. This thread, and my argument within it, are not worthy of hate. Agree with it. Disagree with it. Argue with it. Ignore it. Debate it. Dismiss it.

But hating this thread means you not only hate my position -- you hate the very presence of the discussion.

How do I put this? Boo. Hoo.

We were under the thumb of an oppressive regime that squelched debate and squashed free thought and inquiry as ungodly. What was the first mistake Eve made? She considered it. And ever since then we were taught it was a divine virtue not to even consider that the claptrap we were being fed might, gasp, be flipping WRONG.

You know what I hate? I hate the lie.

[waysider]

Whatever it is that's going on when someone speaks in tongues, I think we can pretty much rule out that it's a "language", at least by the typically accepted definition of language. If it is a language, in the accepted sense, its structure should be mathematically graphable.

[waysider]

I can't speak for opera buff but, maybe it's just his way of saying he wishes more people would give serious consideration to the sort of subjects that are discussed on GreaseSpot instead of dismissing them so easily. I'll have to wait for his clarification.

[Raf]

I would be pleasantly surprised if that turned out to be correct, Waysider. ;)

[WordWolf]

I'm not sure where it fits in.

On the one hand, I can freely say that I never MEANT to fake it in twi,

but I did because the people around me did.

On the other hand, I'm convinced that at least SOME of the messages that

came via "prophecy" or whatever were legit-

largely ones that were radically different from the stock "messages" we

got every week. At least once I was planning for one thing, got the

opposite, and was visibly puzzled as to what happened.

(It made sense a few minutes later, but at the time I was genuinely

surprised.)

[Raf]

So if I had included an option in the poll:

I faked it plenty of times, but not always

The poll results might be a little different?

[chockfull]

Removed.... It wasn't that funny.

Edited October 13, 2012 by chockfull