Tzaia

I'm sad that we weren't grown up enough to be self-moderating all the time. It's a hard job to stay unbiased, particularly when it comes to something that was such a big part of many people's lives, but I think you all did a fine job.

OFF TOPIC

I haven't been here in a while. 3 of my grandkids moved into our house in July, and I'm doing full-time parenting again for children who are significantly delayed. By the end of August, it was clear that I didn't have time to host websites and police my own LISTSERV that had been going for 15 years. I shut it down and moved my web sites to other servers. I wondered if I would miss it, but I'm too busy most days to miss anything about my old life.

Good luck you all on your new endeavors.

Perhaps Jeff's departure was because he was at a logical stopping point. All the major damage has been done. What is left to do?

They've just disappeared into oblivion, which is not a bad thing.

It's got to hurt, tho.

Well STFI ain't perfect, but they are doing a lot of good. IMHO.

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.

And no doubt he blamed it on everyone else's unbelief canceling his stellar believing. He was the master teacher after all.

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

lol i love you my dear dear t

and taz and waysider good points !

ps. what's the little voting thing about on here where you can earn points ? lol

Lower right - above the reply button in the post.

In my mind, that makes it even more intriguing they would dodge the issue.

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?

strange that Lakeland and Princeton won't return my emails inquiring about particular classes. I mean, come on the man has been dead since 1985. releasing the info without his permission is moot and unnecessary at best, and sounds like a cover-up so not to embarress the institutions' reputations. John Juddess, can you find out more info? Inquiring minds want to know the truth.

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'm sorry -- kind of skipped over some posts

i just know at one time i was thinking about the kitchen,or ohmygod the living room, and now i'm thing about the outhouse :);):)

:(

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.

Did the Israelites believe in an afterlife?

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.

Maybe he was "clipped and curled".

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.

I heard VeePee talk about his father beating him behind the wood shed, maybe his dad beat that kind a anger in him, learned behavior?

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.

I also remember that when I asked about it, I was told it was a "modern" thing for married couples to sleep alone. I was given the example that "Uncle Horndog" Howard slept in a one room house with his aunt and uncle, who would have sex there in the same room as the kids. This (I was told) was actually more normal and healthy than having people separate.

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

does anyone remember the certificate that used to be put on display in the auditorium? anyone remember what it was for?

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

You've got to be kidding me. I've seen it all now. Again, I say, it's a buncha double-talk.

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

Married couples sharing rooms is a huge sign that TWI had too many people than they could handle.

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.

I could go on and on...but really, has anybody met the invisable Jesus?

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).

I heard from a coworker today that she is giving her oldest daughter who has behavioral problems to a Christian home to be raised for a year - she will get counselling and help to overcome a lot of difficulties in her life from her mom's two failed marriages and being rejected by her father. It broke my heart. She won't be able to even have a phone conversation with her mom for 30 days. As a parent, this would kill me.

Maybe it's because I was separated from my family for so long (even though I was an adult, it was horrible)... I can't imagine being separated from my child like that! I suppose a lot of my concern in this category is caused by my experience in TWI. Maybe I will become too clingy to my kids in response. I hope not.

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.