Leaderboard

That teaching tape is from March 1985.....the last Sunday teaching of victor paul wierwille. He died two months later. Wierwille always took to the podium near March 17th....in honor of his older brother, Harry Ernst Wierwille's birthday. In fact, twi made a tradition of it after H.E. died in the Fall of 1977 when vpw instigated the "Burn the Chaff" [travel light] weekends in 1978 and onward. If I recall correctly......this teaching "The Hope" was sent out as a *tape of the month* and long-standing wayfers treasured it for its significance of being wierwille's "last teaching." And, then....it was doubly significant, because he taught "The Hope" and died two months later. So, JJ.........you have in your possession one of the most special, treasured, spiritually-significant, super-duper tapes OF ALL TIME.

We saw the Epicureans and the Stoics in Acts briefly- where the Epicureans felt the key to happiness was to indulge freely, and the Stoics thought the key to enlightenment was to deny the flesh and all worldly pleasures. We were never told to follow EITHER as an example, or that EITHER was recommended or even a good idea. However, it seems like some people will always think the key to spirituality will be to completely deny the flesh. It hasn't worked yet in all of history, so I doubt it's going to start working now.

Some years ago, I read a news story about Afghanistan. There's some super-repressive sub-culture there that doesn't allow pre-marital sex, but it also doesn't allow flirting or, apparently, even MEETING the opposite sex. It seemed obvious that they were attempting to prevent pre-marital sex, but in the process, they disallowed even conversation or being in the vicinity of each other. One side-effect was unexpected, at least by me. With a complete vacuum of women in any manner whatsoever in their lives, some of the men were paying some adolescent (teen) boys to dress up as women and, basically, pretend to be women. The boys got attention and got gifts. They also got molested. Rather than provoke outrage, it seemed like their society was used to it and didn't see any problems with it. I'm not saying this EXACT thing happens whenever ALL sex is disallowed and marriage is not allowed (de facto like in Afghanistan or de jure like the RCC clergy), but there certainly seems to be correlations between people doing stuff like this and marriage and every single form of sex is disallowed.

More or less, that's what I said (I used more words, not less. ;) )