Tzaia

They've just disappeared into oblivion, which is not a bad thing. It's got to hurt, tho.

Could you elaborate?

"You can't offend a dead man." The most miserable and elitist excuse I've ever heard.

That's what envelopes with people's names on them are for. All the kids at the church I grew up in got envelopes with their names on them at the beginning of the year so we could give and get it counted towards us. I never knew how the cash was dealt with in TWI. My first time I brought a dollar in pennies for a "love offering" - it was all I had. I got a couple of strange looks. Looking back I now wonder at the audacity of it all - invite me to something and expect me to pay, but it did serve a purpose of sorts.

That' makes me special. That I was able to out unbelieve his believing.

Lower right - above the reply button in the post.

Perhaps it's not an issue or a dodge. Neither organization is under any obligation to provide anything other than "directory" information about students who attended. Haven't they done that?

Perhaps they have old brochures in their library that outline what classes were necessary for a particular degree program. Or maybe they don't know what was required 50+ years ago. I sincerely doubt if Princeton is worried about its reputation - the guy did the work to get his graduate degree or Princeton wouldn't have conferred the degree. Princeton is known for its critical/historical approach. It's no Moody Bible College.

I proudly and unapologetically used to state to people who brought up that kitchen crap that I'd be in the outhouse. I didn't care and still don't.

No. Many of them still don't. They do believe in a bodily resurrection and therefore do not cremate. However, if someone does manage to get cremated, they believe that God will resurrect from any ash that's left over. This may not be true of some of the more mystical sects.

I think you're over-thinking things. Apparently someone had figured out that one could go just so far and therefore avoid being caught. Nemo decided to test that limit and he found out (the hard way) that it was true. Do we need to find out everything the hard way? I hope not.

Somehow I doubt that. We got a lot of crap from fellow wayfers about my husband's impending vasectomy and how bad it was for a guy to do that - like tubal ligations and abortions are problem-free.

Maybe - but if that's the case, he didn't take his own advice about leaving that stuff behind. My experience with that kind of person is that they can dish it out, but they can't take it. They also pick (on) people who won't confront the bad behavior. It tends to reinforce and normalize the behavior.

TWI simply didn't do it "right" when trying to gain legitimacy by courting the famous. Now Scientology did it well by those standards. Is Scientology any more legit because of it? BTW, famous Scientologists don't mucky-muck with the general rank and file.

I guess you could count all those people falling all over themselves to help VP and his entourage whenever they hit town - or any leadership for that matter. Then there was the subsequent near forced labor of everyone else in order to make the local leaders look like they were on top of their game in front of the higher-ups. With VP (all the while) insisting that no one should go out of his/her way - after all he was just a normal MOGOTW.

God gave us emotions. If we are to believe the Bible, then we can see that God has emotions. While I don't think it's necessarily good to be led by emotions, I do think it's wise to take them into consideration when confronted with something. TWI's need to discount emotions should be seen for the red flag that it is. There is no spiritual gain without a certain amount of pain and suffering. TWI's practices were designed to get people to deny pain and suffering while doing things that caused it.

I was raised in a new age environment. I knew back that that what we got in TWI that it was the same stuff with a different name. But just try pointing that out to someone. I did and it wasn't well received. What made TWI particularly insidious is not that this stuff was taught, but that people were not supposed to question or to study and come to one's own conclusions, despite the talk against spoon-feeding a person his/her faith. Not that TWI is much different than any other fundamentalist religion in that aspect. TWI did not advertise itself as being strict fundamentalist.

Now I can't decide if they were acting out or inbred perverts.

It was for faithfully washing his hands after going pee-pee.

Double talk. It's a lie. It's pretty arrogant - if you ask me.

No, it was a huge sign that it had no respect or reverence for the husband/wife relationship, and it taught that to the married people. I mean, is it really normal to house married people long-term in bunk rooms in the US? Is it really normal to force married people to abstain, sneak, or pretty much resort to openly copulating? We have only shared a room with another couple (ex-corp) once in our entire marriage, and it was mostly to help them out. I said never again.

No, and for years I beat myself up over that one. As I have gone back and read over what Jesus said and did, the more I think that he was brilliant - and what many of us would commonly think of as a lunatic. Do I think that he's invisible? Not really. The more I apply logic to the whole thing, the more it falls apart for me. If you can keep logic, mathematical precision, and fitting like a hand in a glove out of the whole thing, it becomes doable (for me, anyway).

Maybe her results will be different. My cousin did that after her daughter was raped at 14 and became pregnant and gave up the baby. The daughter became difficult to deal with, so she was sent to live with another family. Tragically, my cousin's daughter was found dead of asphyxiation. She had put a plastic bag over her head.

Oh it's even better than that. They even had a process for what they did in the name of "God" to people. The prophecy team (or whatever they call(ed) themselves) sat around like a council and compared prophecies. Like it was something actually legitimate. Like they were somehow immune to suggestion. Then when these "findings" were presented to the person being "helped", the name of the person (or people) who "saw" all these things was not revealed. How convenient.

Parents subsidizing? It wouldn't be the first time.