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If anyone wants to read my first-hand account of being on staff at HQ and talking with John right after he was fired, it's in Undertow, Chapter 54: Clampdown. I got his permission to use his real name in my book.

We have addressed these issues before, but I did so in a way that was confrontational and not constructive. I hope to reverse that this time and do so in a way that addresses the issue from an angle I'm not sure we covered directly last time. One of the criticisms we (who do not believe in gods/God) face is that in the absence of God, we have no foundation for objective morality. I'll allow Christian apologist William Lane Craig to frame the issue. Objective moral values do exist, and we can justify the existence of such values because God exists. Objective moral values cannot exist unless God does. Now, I am oversimplifying his point and I invite you to read his work on this for yourself, but I do so with a cautionary note: I believe Craig (I will abbreviate to WLC to avoid confusion with that other Craig of our common experience) uses a LOT of words to obscure the fact that his argument is ultimately circular. That is, one has to presume objective moral values exist in the first place and you must assume there is a causative relationship between those values and the existence of a God in order to reach the conclusion that God provides the foundation for objective moral values. As I will demonstrate in either this post or a future one, the problem with the assumption that God is the foundation of objective moral values is, it leaves us with no mechanism to evaluate the morality of the actions committed by or ordered by that God. Of necessity, anything that God says or does has to be morally good, even if we know they're not. For the unbeliever, this is a serious problem, because we need to evaluate the moral value system of multiple gods who disagree with each other, with each religion telling us we have no right to question the morality of their God. We cannot question Allah or Jesus or Yahweh. A Christian sure can evaluate Allah, but only against Christianity. And the Muslim has no responsibility to accept a Christian's criticism because to the Muslim, the Christian is using a false moral foundation. Simply put, Christians believe Yahweh/Jesus is/are always right, and if your morality conflicts with theirs, you are wrong and better get with the program. Muslims think Allah/Muhammad are always right and if your morality conflicts with theirs, you are wrong and better get with the program. The problem is, they cannot BOTH be right, and there can't simply be no way to evaluate the morality of a god's actions or orders. The problem is in the premise. The problem with the whole construct lies right at the beginning, with the premise that objective moral values exist. They don't. Repeat, objective moral values do not exist. In fact, if you think about it, objective moral values are oxymoronic. We need to first distinguish between types of values. Some values are objective. Say, measurements. Five feet is taller than three feet. Six feet is taller than two feet. But is six feet objectively "tall"? Well, it can be. It can also not be. If you're a horse jockey, six feet is real tall. Perhaps prohibitively so. However, if you're a basketball player, six feet is tiny. Same six feet. Tall against one standard, short against another. The objective value is feet and inches. Or centimeters, for anyone reading on the rest of the planet. So when we talk about values, we can't assume we're talking about something objective, especially when human evaluation against ANOTHER standard comes into play. And THAT is the problem with morality. Morality is an attempt at a coherent system of value judgements, but such judgments are subjective BY DEFINITION. One cannot say an action is objectively moral, objectively right or wrong, anymore than one can say something is audibly green or chromatically loud. Actions merely ARE. They do not become moral or immoral, right or wrong, good or evil until they are measured against something else. What does this mean? On social media, a believer writes: "If atheism were true sin wouldn’t be real. It would be a social construct. So really if you murdered, raped or genocide a village, then that wouldn’t be wrong. So even your worst evils aren’t evil if atheism is true." But this believer is mistaken. Badly. The first mistake is to assume that subjective morality is somehow inadequate to evaluate the goodness or evil of an action. Not only is subjective morality adequate to the task, it is the ONLY tool we have to accomplish the task! That's hard for people to process because it requires saying things like "rape is not objectively wrong; murder is not objectively wrong; genocide is not objectively wrong." Here's the thing, though: "Not objectively wrong" is not a synonym for "right, acceptable, good," or even "neutral." Good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral are all subjective value judgments. Always. (This doesn't change just because one subjugates his own moral value system for God's and calls it "objective." God's moral value system is HIS subjective value system, and all people are entitled to evaluate it to decide whether it is adequate. Rape is not objectively wrong. But it is subjectively wrong and that is an adequate basis to condemn it. Murder is not objectively wrong. But it is subjectively wrong and that is an adequate basis to condemn it. Genocide is not objectively wrong. But it is subjectively wrong and that is an adequate basis to condemn it. On what basis does one evaluate the rightness or wrongness of an action? Well, I submit you hold it against a standard that IS objective. While it is not written in stone, one can build a predictable and useful subjective value system around the premise that all actions have the potential of helping people or hurting them, contributing to our benefit or contributing to suffering. If you commit an act that contributes to the greater good without exacerbating suffering, we can generally evaluate your action to be "good" or at least "neutral." And we can test that standard against any other. Ditch the parts that don't work and improve the parts that do. This is what humanity has always done. It is why slavery was tolerated for centuries. It is why punishment for criminal activity has become less barbaric over time. It is why we look back at a movie like Reefer Madness as a virtual comedy rather than a solemn warning. It is why Amos and Andy were hilarious in their day and offensive now. Our morality evolves. Biblical morality does not. Quranic morality does not. Objective morality cannot change, by definition, because if it's objectively moral in 2025 then it must have been objectively moral in 2025 BC. If you argue "but it was a different time," then you concede, of necessity, that morality changes when times change, which is the OPPOSITE of "these actions are objectively wrong." This is how I answered the social media Christian (I will repeat his post so you don't have to scroll back up for it: "If atheism were true, sin wouldn’t be real. It would be a social construct. So really if you murdered, raped or genocide a village, then that wouldn’t be wrong. So even your worst evils aren’t evil if atheism is true." My reply: 1. Sin is not real. 2. It is a religious construct. 3. Rape, murder and genocide are wrong, which is a SUBJECTIVE determination with a rational basis in the amount of avoidable and unnecessary harm that is caused. 4. Evil is a subjective value judgment, so as long as there are people, those acts will contribute to avoidable human suffering therefore determined subjectively to be evil. 5. Subjective morality is an adequate basis to condemn evil. 6. Objective morality is an oxymoron. It does not and CAN not exist. Stopping here to allow others to weigh in and ask questions.

I was going out WOW and on our way to Amarillo I flipped into a manic psychotic episode and they put me on a bus. I got off the bus in Oklahoma City and was acting crazy and the police picked me up and put me in jail. A warden took it upon herself to look into my purse and fortunately my parents’ address and phone number were in it. (They had moved) and she contacted my dad who flew to OKC and took me home. Without these “fortunate” occurrences God only knows what would have become of me. It’s only because God took care of me not TWI. By the way, I didn’t really want to go WOW in the first place but was pressured into it by my twig leader. I’m bipolar but was undiagnosed at the time.

Does anyone know TWI's current position on this issue? How do they explain the firing of John Schoenheit for rightly dividing the word on adultery? Surely, they don't dispute the thesis of his paper. EDIT: JuniorCorps wasn't alone in leaving over this issue. How does TWI defend against this legitimate reason. They must be prepared. After all, those postcards about "coming home" were sent to former dupes they must know left because for this very reason.

This was the catalyst to us finally deciding to leave. I was young but I remember thinking "I didn't know we needed this research paper? That's kinda crazy. How is this not the most obvious thing in the world?"

It seems very unlikely that Mrs. Wierwille was present at that pj party. "He played a porn video followed by a talk on how a Christian can so renew their mind that this stuff wouldn't bother them, the spiritually mature can handle anything and that anything done in the love of God is okay." I've heard that he would tell a victim that she was chosen because she was spiritually mature enough to be with him. And then, in order to keep his abuse secret, he would also say to keep what happened between them in a lock box because there were others who were not spiritually mature enough to handle knowing about it. OMG, Holy ...., and twi today still honors this evil man as the founder of their ministry.