Broken Arrow

I think because the vicster exuded *something* that disarmed us. To the extent people watched him in the motor home, the coming and goings of women and the like, and merely disregarded it.. that the obvious just could not be..

maybe the words "entranced", "bewitched" or "fascinated" apply here. And they still apply, to some I've met.

I personally think there is more to it than a character having an excess of personality or something.

perhaps he worked for some rather dark forces..

consider how he could easily sell conspiracy theories and the like.. and people lapped it up like there was no tomorrow..

stuff that could logically disregarded with little thought or confrontation..

Well for one thing he surrounded himself with a bunch of kids. When I was first "in", you were old if you were 25. Don't you think we would have seen right through the bs if we had been in our 40's or 50's? TWI would have fallen apart eventually imo because we were getting older and starting to ask questions.

One more thing about his "charm": Someone once said that when a person is very evil they come off like someone who is very confident. Yet, it isn't really that they are confident at all, it's that they are completely selfish and don't give a rip about people and they very truly do not care what others think. They only give a pretense of caring about others with the goal of using them for their own selfish purposes. Like when Marie Antoinette, Queen of France said, "Let them eat cake" when thousands of French commoners were starving.

How long ago was this first said? Any idea what year?

Probably plagarized.

I bet that was a sight for sore eyes...

What got really scary one time in the men's shower was when the entire group started singing "He Touched Me"! I believe the line started moving a lot faster at that point.

I huntin wadies, hehehe.

So be weely weely quiet.

Personally, I always thought waking anyone up with anything at 6 am when they were on a so-called vacation was sin.

WG

Oh, I dunno WG. It would have been nice if just once we woke up to the sounds of Hendrix's version of the Star Bangled Banner. Would have been a nice diversion from Beautiful Ohio.

on the other hand --if anyone ever ever wakes me up with Beautiful Ohio blaring at 6 am ever again you best leave the planet

Beautiful Ohio!! Oh geez! I never saw the "greatness" of that even when I was at the peak of my brainwashedness. It embarrassed me, quite frankly.

Yeah....break-your-neck slaving for twi, alright.

Go witnessing.....renew your mind.....abs 15% to twi - - - same agenda, different delivery.

How is it different? Rhetorical question.

wonder how they would view Hillsongs(Darlene Zchevchk and Ruben Morgan), Chris Tomlin, Don Moen, Toby Mac, Brian Donerksen, David Crowder, Brenton Brown, Lincoln Brewster, Rebecca St. James, Casting Crowns, delirious?, Sonic Flood, Paul and Rita Balooche, Newsboys, etc.). Any comments, pro/positive or con/negative? I know, we have had this discussion before.

If they viewed them at all, they would have considered them idolatrous Trinitarians and ignored them. More likely, since we were encouraged to never listen to the media much less Christian radio, we probably would not have heard of them. That, by the way, would have probably been just fine with the above artists you mentioned.

But why do middle-aged people of varied backgrounds who no longer fellowship with twi remain attached to pathetic piece of dirt in Ohio?

The key word here is "middle-aged". Why do so many Vietnam War Vets want to travel to that country to visit old battlefields? Possibly because they feel they left a part of themselves over there when they returned to the USA. Maybe they think albeit subconciously they'll find a missing part of themselves at the location where they were traumatized.

A lot of ex-Wayfers spent their entire youth at TWI. Maybe they think they'll recover a part of it if they return to the scene of the crime. Then again, maybe they're just looking for a restroom and they got lost and ended up on Wierwille Rd. It's not all that far from I-75 you know.

no crappy brown blotters for me you kwazy skwiwwel!.....had my own orange sunshine on little sugar tabs custom made by a friend who was getting his master's from columbia in, what else?????.........CHEMISTRY!..........LOL!..........i still don't get the pic on my screen........dunno why........don't care............i'm thinking about the saturdsay night of woodstock which began with CANNED HEAT in front of a setting sun!!!!!!...........it just got better from there..........ending with the jefferson airplane at dawn!!!!!!.........man........i'm havin' a flashback!.........LOL!.............peace.

Perhaps you have a filter that won't let you see horrific images, or porn.

There were only two "successful" African Americans in twi that I can think of: L*nnel J8hnson and Claudette. I think L8nnel was ordained by vic.. don't know about claudette.

That's two out of.. how many.. hundreds? Maybe there were a few others..

as far as liberty lobby and spotlight is concerned.. isn't it intriguing that the guy who said NEWSPAPERS were so darn "negative".. stories about murder, accidents, suicide, death.. were so "bad" for believing- which is a straw man to begin with- adopted different kind of "negatives"- stories of government takeover, murder, and intrigue?

maybe vic should have put his newspapers and periodicals down for a while, and read the bible..

Ham,

If you'll recall Lnnl fell out of grace with VPW. When he was Corp Coordinator he allowed a picnic to start prior to VP's arrival. VP compared it to when Saul began sacrifices prior to Samuel's arrival. He dismissed Lnn8l and said he would never rise to the point he once could have spiritually. What a crock!

FLO was a two year, in-res. program that was the brain child of E.B^rt*n, the first Ohio limb leader.

It ran on the TWI year,not the calender year. (ex.: August,1974-August,1976 =FLO3)

We (the 50 or so FLO) lived communal style in an off-site apartment complex about a half hour away from limb HQ.

The program, itself, was based at the limb HQ in rural Ohio, about an hour and a half drive from Int. HQ..

The property (5 or 6 acres?) had an old "party/banquet house" that we called the BRC. This is where we had our FLO meetings, held classes and ate dinner each night as a group. There was also a farm house that served as home to the limb leader and family. In addition, we worked a rather large "garden" on the back potion of the property. This served to provide the 49 or 50 of us with quite a bit of our fresh food supply. B^rt*n was in charge during FLO1, FLO2 and the first year of FLO3 (1974). There was also a coordinator for the men and a coordinator for the women who were chosen from amongst our ranks. It was E.B. who recruited me with the concept of spending two years of study in the Book of Acts with a view toward returning to our home areas as better prepared leaders. In 1975, the last year of FLO3/first year of FLO4, E.B. went back to Int. HQ and was replaced by H@w!e Y, who was called back to Int. HQ after one year. At the end of that year (all years started in August, right after The Rock)H.Y. was replaced by J!m M!ln3 who was in charge of the last year of FLO4 and both years of FLO5. (FLO4=8/1975-8/1977//FLO5=8/1976-8/1978) After that, I think Pat and Donna S. became limb leaders but I am not certain of that. Things got especially "intense" during the last year of FLO4 and during FLO5. Is that enough information to answer the question?

edit:

There was a guy who posted here a couple years ago (LNM) who said he was FLO1. He said it was a one year commitment and more like a Way Home, which is an entirely different animal.

Yes! Thank you!

Can't remember who, but I seem to recall one of our posters has personal ties to someone involved in the logistics of bringing the bodies home.

This was shared at Advanced Class '79. A tenth Corps guy who was also a LEAD instructor. He claimed to have been former special forces, I believe the Army Rangers. He said he was involved in the clean-up after Jonestown. I dunno, the guy really did share this stuff I heard it with my own ears.

you know Ham . . . I don't know.

What job at HQ served any purpose?

When I was at Emporia, my job for one block was to walk around in all the buildings and look for burned out light bulbs. That job was purposeful. Yessiree, I felt reeeealy useful! Good thing I had a college education or I might have accidentally put a 40-Watt where there should have been a 60-Watt. I mean, there were no directions or anything, one just had to instinctively know. I had to make sure I utilized CP #1 too. I mean, what if there were a burned out bulb in a hallway in Kenyon for more than a day? That could have been the one impediment that would rupture the entire fabric of the universe. Lord knows there weren't very many lights on at HQ. They never replaced me after I moved on to bigger things, like painting coffee cans red so they could be used for discarding cigarette butts (smoking was allowed back then). You know, it took a crew of 7 of us to paint those butt cans?

So, Bolshevik, do you need any more proof of just how purposeful every, and I mean every, job was in The Way International?

Almost forgot.

Every Wednesday night was a scream-fest and humiliation session in Fellow Laborers.

We were never "good enough" to please the MOG.

I spent most of my time in Ohio, so I would be interested to know if this was pretty much the case with the FLO program regardless of the "MOG" during the years, say, 1974 through say 1978. There was one leader we all thought "walked on water" so to speak. I'm not sure which FLO class you were in.

Correct, we were warned....

When I took the class they encouraged us to get a concordance and look things up.....so I did. I had a problem with what the class was saying about the word "receive". When I took the concordance and showed them and said, what is being taught is not correct look at the concordance. They said to me, Well, you have not researched the word like VP has. He has gone back to the originals and yada yada yada....What do you say to that? I could say nothing and I concluded that no matter what a resource says, if it didn't agree with what was being taught, it was wrong and the teaching was right. Right then, I decided I didn't know anything about the bible and He knew it all. A mistake I will never make again!

Another way of responding when one suspected VPW of error was, "After you've given 40 years of your life to researching the Word, THEN MAYBE you have have a right to question the Man of God...MAYBE!" Research ministry? Please!

Now that I read a lot of this stuff on here I wonder was this something encouraged from HQ.. or was he really a total foot or picked up on the jerkiness of the head leaders and copied it... Don't get me wrong a bad person is going to be bad but it seems like leadership gave people a free ticket to be mean and disrespectful to people not to mention encouraged them to torture and abuse.

When I was at Emporia Pat Lynn "reproved" the corpse. Apparentally so many of us were going into local restaurants and not leaving tips, only ordering drinks, and then leaving a mess for the waitress to clean up. So, no, it wasn't something that was "taught". It sounds like the those guys were jerks in their own right in or out of TWI. But I agree with Waysider when he says that TWI promoted a "better than you" attitude that opened the way to act out attitudes like this. Also, there was a poverty mentality in The Way where people would do cheap little things like I mentioned earlier.

Well, they have to fulfill that old "prophesy" (cough), that the "word" will live as long as there are members of the Wierwille family "standing". (whatever that means.)

Ugh! How sickening...but you're probably correct.

Or perhaps old puke from last night's bad drunk. It's still fun to make fun of memories of them worshiping over the porcelain god and speaking in liquid screams.

Shot 'o Drambuie anyone?

I would so love to hear you expand on this if you feel so inclined. The mind picture of it all just raises so many questions.

You might be a TWI tool if you save all year, quit your job to drive three days in the summer heat to spend two weeks in sweltering humidity in a tent with a few hundred other people in "scenic" Northern Ohio where the water tastes like.... All this so you can have the "blessing" of "volunteering" to do a menial job and to have the privilege to sit all day in another tent listening to men of God wannabees spouting their pseudo wisdom.

You also might be a TWI tool if when you return home from said event, you talk about what a blessing it was to attend when your non-twi neighbor comes over to show you pictures of their trip to Disney World, or Cancun.

You are definitely a tool of TWI if when you look at these pictures of folks having fun while swimming in crystal blue water by lovely waterfalls you think, "What a waste of time! I spent my vacation serving God!!"

Past the pre-PFAL believing for the guy to show up on the door step, I didn't practice believing. I didn't see much in the way of "signs and miracles," so I didn't put a lot of faith in it.

I saw a lot of people do stupid things to test their believing and counsel people to do stupid things.

You mean, like, say, for example, sending very young, naive girls hitch-hiking across the country, riding with God knows who and telling them that, "if they got raped it was their fault"? Yeah, put a bunch of kids in grave danger and call it "training". God knows we couldn't have had a bus take people to LEAD. Ya think this fed Wierwille's fantasy life?

Crazy stuff!

That's what I'm looking for.

Like the time I worked for a company that knowingly required me to handle known carcinogens and I didn't blow the whistle because I could use believing to keep them from hurting me. Cancer is just a devil spirit, anyhow, so renewed mind believing and SIT will keep the trap door shut.---GRRRRRRR!!

So...did everything turn out ok? If it's okay to ask, that is?

I was in the Corps and I developed some symptoms that were of concern. I let it go for three years, even made jokes about it. One day I said something to my Branch Leader and asked him to pray for it. He was very emphatic that I should get it checked and when I did, it turned out that I was in stage 2 of a cancerous condition. At the time the common thinking was that cancer was a devil spirit. I sank very deeply into shame and self-condemnation. In all fairness I will say that the BOT helped me a little with some bills. Also, I am the one responsible for the actions I took. However, the fear of having to face the fact that I was "Corps" (as if that meant anything) and couldn't believe my way out of my situation led to my hesitation in seeking medical attention. Secondly, I hesitated seeking medical attention because I didn't have any health insurance and that definitely was because I was gallavanting around the country "moving the Word", washing windows, and working at McDonald's, even though I was a college graduate in my late 20's. I finally landed a job with health benefits and that's when I finally got enough courage to seek help. The doctor said if I had let things go another year my condition would have been irreversible. By the way, I am clean.

So, the Law of Beleving as taught in the Way about killed me. At least as far as the "believing action" crap that came down. Again, in all fairness, TWI leadership was kind and encouraging once it was diagnosed I had the condition. Even still, it was the doctrine that in large part caused damage.

It's been a blessing to read this thread and see some of the miracles God did for some of you guys.

The real "miraculous" in my life happened about six years ago..

I went back to school..

who would have thought a profitable business would be driven into the ground by an absolutely asinine employer.. but somehow I saw this coming eight years ago.

so I went ahead and started planning. I really don't want to open another shop, Nor did I want to end up working for a similar "numbnuts" employer. The choice at the time- part time education.. I was in a chemistry curriculum at a community college. Then I came to be in a position scholarships and Pell grants did not apply anymore. The labs for the chemistry classes were only one credit of education, but the "technology fees" were just too horrendous to consider continuing.

So I gathered up my credits, and went to another university, a four year college.. and entered the math curriculum.

all the while, the amount of business continued, probably to the chagrin of the employer, to justify keeping the shop open. Until this year.

So.. in celebration of the inauguration of the new president, and *possible* new taxes.. he finally axed the electronics repair department. Fine. I continue school and graduate.. but nobody is hiring tv repair people at the moment..

Now.. I have barely enough unemployment payments to get me through until the fall. And in the fall.. I begin the graduate program. They are actually willing to PAY to teach me how to teach kids algebra..

and provide graduate level classes besides..

and I haven't even sat down for any kind of formal interview.

So if I don't find suitable employment by then.. I have suitable employment..

and in two years, god willing.. I'll have a masters degree in math, if not in applied mathematics. Along with teaching skills..

And with *possible* returning veterans seeking better employment than what the market has to have without some kind of degree.. they will return to school..

where will they start.. ah. Community colleges. And who will be in great demand to teach Algebra, Discrete math, calculus.. differential equations..

I just hope I live long enough.. it should be fun..

That's great, Ham! Hats off to you!

You know, Wordwolf, this is a little "hokey", but there is at least one other person I can think of that employed the same strategy of eliciting adulation and that was Richard Nixon. He used to have his lieutenants talk about his intelligence and other traits he wished he actually had. He even gave them the words to say. This has been documented by Henry Kissinger. There must be a manual somewhere of how to elicit worship. Anyway, Wierwille picked it up too.

I went to HQ in '74 and I heard Ted Ferrell sing, "Thanks to Calvary". When he got to the end of the song he would start adding different things to "Thanks to..." and he sang, "Thanks to the Man of God Who taught us all these things Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille!" and the audience would erupt into a loud cheer (including me, sadly). That was the first time I heard it. Also, in Advanced Class '79 Wierwille said that you could have the Word living in you so mightily that "you could tell someone to go get you a bucket of water and it would be the will of God." The implication being, of course, that the Word lived in him so mightily that whatever he said was the Will of God.

In any event, Tzai, it was definitely not hyperbole.