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"I think having that information that the "profit" that founded the Way and was in my eyes close to faultless as a person can be, was not as Christ like as they played themselves to be will be a final blow to deconstructing all of my beliefs. " This is easy to find around here. What can I say, briefly? According to his own words, vpw chose between 3 professions, 1 of which was ministry, 1 was business, 1 was music. So, it wasn't a calling, but a vocation. Besides, the other 2 would have been more work. vpw plagiarized his way through his early years as a minister, and in his first year, he REPEATEDLY considered giving up- in his own words! How would he have treated any twi'er who even CONSIDERED giving up twice in a year? When he set up the way corps, he did so with no experience in ANY form of training program whatsoever, and the only official rule for determining if someone was ready was what he said to lcm- "YOU CAN STAY AS LONG AS YOUR MONEY HOLDS!" vpw dismissed an entire early group of corps abruptly. He went to each one later, and offered them a "second chance" -if they were willing to swear an oath of loyalty to him PERSONALLY. Not all of them accepted, but most apparently did. vpw's claim to fame was the pfal class- all 3 levels of it. Nearly the entire contents of them were plagiarized from BG Leonard, EW Bullinger, JE Stiles or EW Kenyon. Early versions of the White Book (RTHST) mentioned him meeting a man who put the subject together like a hand in a glove- that was JE Stiles- but by the 3rd edition, this mention was dropped completely. The White Book's 1st edition was largely Stiles' book "Gifts of the Spirit" just retyped with a few words moved around. If you have your copy still, you can prove it right now. Flip to the FAQ. There's a question where the answer is phrased that vpw calls some type of people "FAITH BLASTERS." vpw NEVER called ANYONE "faith blasters"- that was Stiles. According to vpw's own claims, he should have called them a "believing-blaster" if anything- but he ripped the FAQ off of Stiles. BTW, if you move the words around and rip off the content but rephrased, that's still plagiarism. If you remove from the pfal classes everything that came straight from Stiles, Bullinger and Leonard, you have less than a session of the foundational, and something like that for the others. Keep in mind that vpw never said that pfal was a compilation of the works of others. A few times he made off-hand comments about SOME content. If you have the book-length advertisement for twi, "The Way- Living in Love," about 200 pages in, vpw said that nothing he did was original except for the way he put it together. Apologists for vpw like to claim that one passing reference, buried in the book, qualifies as him saying pfal was a compilation and not original. It falls far, far short of either. BTW, the very first pfal class was Leonard's class on "Receiving the Holy Spirit Today" that vpw sat through 1 1/2 times. vpw retaught Leonard's content entirely. (People who were grads of Leonard's class were considered automatically to be grads of vpw's class.) vpw rarely mentioned Leonard because the plagiarism there was blatant and too obvious if one looks closely. Not long after that, vpw ran across Stiles, then got Stiles' book and retyped it into the White Book. If you actually caught vpw doing that, he occasionally would claim he worked all the error out of the works of others- but he did not. He seemed not to understand their work, and copied it over with errors intact. So, Bullinger's errors got included (like the difference between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God) and Leonard's errors got included (like the definitions of the manifestations), and so on. He moved some words around to make plagiarism less obvious, and made some things wordier, but did not improve upon their substance. Most people would claim that the sheer dishonesty involved with all that would disqualify vpw as a leader of anything. But that's only part of things, since it leaves out the molestation, the rapes, the drugging, and so on.

In my humble opinion, the so-called Idiom of Permission as an explanation for Yahweh's behavior in the Old Testament does not survive Occam's Razor, which is "the answer that requires the fewest assumptions is usually the correct one." The Old Testament writers told us who Yahweh was. His character changed over time. Different writers gave him different attributes, depending on the point they were making for the story they were telling. When God needed to be limited, he was. When he needed to be omni-everything, he was. When an explanation was needed for why Israel did not prevail in a military conflict, God had a problem seeing through lead overcoming chariots of iron. The Idiom of Permission provides a way to explain away that which was never intended to be dismissed in the first place. God sent the Flood. He didn't allow it to be sent. Genesis is clear. He did it. The angel of death in Egypt (which, it must be said, never happened)? That was Yahweh too. Exodus is explicit. But He's LOVE! He couldn't have! So we invent an explanation to retroactively absolve him of responsibility for that which he explicitly wanted credit! What happened? This is not hard. The people worshipping God changed. Their values changed. Their God (who cannot change) changed with them. Suddenly he never would have done any such thing. But he said he did? Hmmm. It was a figure of speech! Get it? Anyway, that's my nickel. I know, it's supposed to be two cents. But inflation's a bitch.

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No politics, Allan.

Hi there, so glad you found Undertow helpful. Thanks for reading it and passing it along. Cheers! For more of my work, check out blogs on the cult topic and on fundamentalism that are stored on my website: Cults Archives | Page 11 of 11 | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com) Fundamentalism Archives | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)