41 minutes ago, Rocky said:

Really? You seemingly admit you didn't understand my response to you, but then indicate a particular judgment about my intention? I posed questions. That's what one reasonably does when seeking clarification(s). Isn't that what discussion forums are inherently about?

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. iykyk

 

Well... anyway, I had simply posed questions. I had not at all indicated a particular judgment about your intention. Sorry if my first reply was a bit harsh.  

7 hours ago, penworks said:

In my view, the answer can be "Yes and No." Just saying "no" is a sweeping generalization, which I think disregards the individual journeys that many of us were on in our quest to know, love, and serve God. Yes, certainly VPW made himself the authority on the bible and the center of the organization, and yes, the Way Tree organization grew into a hierarchy of mostly men giving commands and expecting obedience, but there are other things to remember, at least about some of us who were searching for a way to fulfill our part in the body of Christ and for "truth." This was real for me and for a lot of other people throughout the years.

From my experience in 1970 when I was recruited to The Way at the East Carolina Univ. fellowship, it sure looked to me as if there was "some hype and commitment to the underlying Word of God ..." as Rocky put it. Not sure what the "underlying Word of God" means, but for me, I got hooked on the bible teachings presented as "the accurate Word of God" and the chance to make a commitment to a life pleasing to God, living according to teachings aimed at "building virtue," (again, something Rocky wrote) for instance axioms found in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and in Proverbs, and in the N.T.

Exquisitely elegant reply. 

I think you've hit on something(s) Penworks that goes to the power of cults. 

1) Hierarchy. Frans de Waal mentions the word repeatedly in Mama's Last Hug. 

Human hierarchies can be quite apparent, but we don’t always recognize them as such, and academics often act as if they don’t exist. I have sat through entire conferences on adolescent human behavior without ever hearing the words power and sex, even though to me they are what teen life is all about.

De Waal, Frans . Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (p. 31). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

2) As I used the expression, "commitment to the underlying Word of God" would be whether those who articulated expressions like "the Word of God is the Will of God" walked the walk instead of just talking the talk. Perhaps it's an artifact of the exponential growth of psychological and spiritual research, knowledge and understanding in the 50+ years since the rapid growth of Victor Wierwille's organization that we can identify inconsistencies so readily in our experience of the subculture itself.

3) Many of us who were drawn into The Way were primed for it by "virtue" of our childhood religious education and culture. IIRC, Penworks, you were raised in the Catholic Church. As was I, at least for me my first 13 years. It was interrupted for me when I moved with my mother and siblings to Arizona. After a less than robust couple of years religiously, at the end of high school, typical spiritual longings and curiosity began again to arise. After one semester of college, I dropped out and signed a delayed enlistment contract with the USAF. During the six month interim, a close HS friend invited me to his (Pentecostal/charismatic) church. 

During tech school in Mississippi, I connected with a charismatic fellowship off base. So, when I went overseas at age 19, it was natural for me to gravitate to a fellowship at the base chapel.

Anyway, the two things that hooked me was, as you noted for yourself, longing for God; and the obvious need to build a social network on the small military base in a foreign land.

The Way tapped ALL the right keys.

It wasn't for a few years afterward that I engaged with what I now know to have been a highly corrupt (or at least dysfunctional) hierarchy.

3 hours ago, chockfull said:

Rocky seemed to be picking at a portion of my earlier more lengthy post and trying to make it say something I did not intend.  So I didn’t feel the need to expand upon the answer.

Really? You seemingly admit you didn't understand my response to you, but then indicate a particular judgment about my intention? I posed questions. That's what one reasonably does when seeking clarification(s). Isn't that what discussion forums are inherently about?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. iykyk

10 hours ago, chockfull said:

No.

That's what I figured. 

42 minutes ago, chockfull said:

All the hype and commitment is to the organization and none of it is to the underlying Word of God, the overall body of Christ, or anything related to building virtue - it is all compliance exercises - complying with people who do not speak for God in any sense of the word.

Do you mean at some point there WAS some hype and commitment to the underlying Word of God, the overall body of Christ, or anything [at all] related to building virtue?  Has The Way Corporation ever given any commitment to living godly lives, or concern for the overall body of Christ? I suppose the answers are or would be subjective. 

From the Daily Stoic website:

In stark contrast to the cult notion of whether you're being protected by God or whether God will even "spit in your direction."

This Timeless Adage Will Determine Your Destiny

This is not another note about memento mori.

It’s about a different immutable, inescapable law of human existence that comes to us from the Stoics through Heraclitus (one of Marcus Aurelius’ favorites): Character is fate.

After death and taxes, this is a timeless adage that the Stoics believed will determine our destiny whether we like it or not. And just a quick glimpse around the world and across history confirms it: Liars and cheats eventually destroy themselves. The corrupt overreach. The ignorant make fatal, self-inflicted mistakes. The egotistical ignore the data that challenges them and the warnings that could save them. The selfish end up isolated and alone, even if they’re surrounded by fame and fortune. The “robbers, perverts, killers and tyrants” Marcus Aurelius wrote about always end up in a hell of their own making. It’s a law as true as gravity.

Bad character might drive someone into a position of leadership—because of their ambition, their ruthlessness, their shamelessness—but eventually, inevitably, this supposed “strength” becomes an Achilles’ heel when it comes time to actually do the job. Who trusts them? Who actually wants to work with them? What kind of culture develops around them? How can they learn? How can they know where the landmines are?

If you want to know why things are the way they are right now—on Wall Street, in politics, in Silicon Valley, on college campuses, [in corporate leadership of nascent religions] everywhere—it’s because character is fate. And for too long we have ignored the predictive—no, *prophetic—*power of character. When you make excuses for liars and cheats and egomaniacs because they agree with you, or they might benefit your business or help your cause in the short term, not only do you do so at your own long term peril, but you are exhibiting bad character yourself.

And that is what will come back to bite you. That is what is biting us right now, on every continent, in every corner of culture, at nearly every turn. Because character is fate. Always has been. Always will be.

****

When I think of Ecclesiastes and the truth of no new thing under the sun, I don't see it as a limit on technology or exploration, even of the heavens. But I do see it as that the ancients had enough experience with human nature to recognize that character is fate.

1 hour ago, Rocky said:

hat happened to the cognitive dissonance in your mind? Did you chalk it up to having made a free will decision to decide your questions were no longer relevant?

 

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs 2%3A1-5&version=NIV

Quote

The final message, though, is simple. Precisely how something is presented to you matters a great deal. And you can be certain that the confidence man knows exactly how to engineer any game so that the odds are stacked against you. That is the art of the rope. -- page 162, Maria Konnikova.  The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for it EVERYTIME.

Taking this insight back to how people on GSC have described the conduct of TWI's foundational class (often) by young people without sophisticated education/training, for those who have gone through such classes, can (for those open to recognizing) have the lightbulb of understanding come on.

You say you had questions about something in the PFLAP class when it didn't sit right when you first heard it? You were told to hold your questions until the end of the last session. Instead of a class coordinator reading the questions and cogently explaining logical, rational answers, what happened?

Rarely, if ever, was anything done except gloss over the elephant in the room (said questions) hoping nobody would notice the silence... or the glossolalia (a cacophony of chaos) with everybody excitedly uttering "words" they didn't understand. 

What happened to the cognitive dissonance in your mind? Did you chalk it up to having made a free will decision to decide your questions were no longer relevant?

Did you forget about Hilary (only one L)?

41 minutes ago, chockfull said:

No aspect of that goes to publishers, editors, etc.

They OWN American Christian Press still?

17 minutes ago, Nathan_Jr said:

Signed in just to upvote this.

Express yourself, good buddy!

6 hours ago, Charity said:

If the will is never free, then nobody would be guilty of anything.

The state of mind of someone charged with a crime is always a factor when determining whether they're fit to stand trial and the kind of defense the attorney will decide on for their client.  It also comes into play when deliberating a verdict and deciding on a sentence if the person is found guilty.  

The degree of external or internal influences are mitigating factors but the fact that a trial and verdict were still necessary proves that at some point, the defendant chose to act on certain negative influences over positive influences and therefore should be held accountable for their choice.

I totally agree. The quotes Prof de Waal includes are primarily philosophers rather than neuroscientists. The philosophers, I suspect (I'm NOT an academic  and didn't take any philosophy classes in college) are considering not what happens between one's ears but a more macro view of how society (environment(s) outside of the mind) do or do not relate to choices any person makes.

Further, the deterministic view -- the range of our available choices in any given situation are essentially nil -- seems bizarre to me too. Yet, when someone says, you're not what you eat, but who you meet, I can see how that might be at least partially true. 

Some food for thought.

In Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton felt that the fallen angels had too much time on their hands, so he sought to occupy them with a discussion topic. He chose free will. We all have the impression that we possess free will, although it lacks a clear definition and may be a total illusion. As Isaac Bashevis Singer once put it, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.” It is the perfect topic for eternal debate.

This debate relates to the emotions, because free will is often conceived as their opposite. Making a free rational choice requires us to deny or suppress our first impulses. In fact, the whole idea goes back to the debate over how much our mind is shaped by our body. Those who believe in free will argue that we can simply set aside the body and its nonvolitional desires and emotions and rise above them; humans—and humans alone—can fully control their choices and their destiny. The opposite is a person without self-control, which philosophers have dubbed a wanton. A wanton follows whichever impulse hits first, whichever urge is most pressing and satisfying, and never looks back. Regret isn’t something you’ll find in a wanton. Young children and all animals are said to fall into this category.

We may capitalize Free Will to convey our reverence for a concept so central to human responsibility, morality, and the law, but if we can’t measure it, how will we ever agree on it? Some say that free will boils down to making choices, but even bacteria make choices, and certainly all animals with brains have to decide between approach and avoidance, which prey to single out from the flock, or whether to travel north or south, and so on. The squirrels in my neighborhood decide whether to cross the road. Sometimes they do so right in front of my car, making me nervous. They run halfway, then quickly return, unable to make up their minds. Pairs of bluebirds in my backyard, getting ready to build their nest, visit every empty nestbox, hopping in and out multiple times, the male alternating with the female. They’d make excellent subjects for a House Hunters episode. After weeks of scouting, the male puts a few branches or grass stems into one of the boxes, then lets the female build the actual nest while he guards the site. The drawn-out decision process has reached its conclusion. Do bluebirds have free will?

Francis Crick, the British co-discoverer of DNA, proposed in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis that human free will resides in a very specific brain area: the anterior cingulate cortex. But humans are not the only species with this area, and we have good evidence that it also helps rats make decisions. Yet despite the signs that animals make choices every day, we refuse to grant that they have free will. Their choices are constrained by past experiences and inborn preferences, we argue, and animals lack the ability to fully review all the options in front of them.

Never mind that the same argument has been applied to great effect against free will in our own species, which is why some of history’s greatest minds—Plato, Spinoza, Darwin—doubted its existence. Free will just doesn’t fit the prevailing materialist worldview, as noted in 1884 by the prominent German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel:

The will of the animal, as well as that of man, is never free. The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether untenable. Every physiologist who scientifically investigates the activity of the will in man and animals, must of necessity arrive at the conviction that in reality the will is never free, but is always determined by external or internal influences.

De Waal, Frans . Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (pgs. 221-223). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

1 hour ago, OldSkool said:

 

Seriously? That seems to equate to trolling. Not related to a discussion of a genuine issue and concern.

4 hours ago, penworks said:

I think we know by now here at GSC that Way-promoted practices of all sorts depended on your geographical location in The Way org., who your local leader was, what teachings were circulating (there never was a "quality control" process to monitor in what ways things were taught), the time period during which you were involved in The Way, and your own personal decisions. 

This also brings to mind how interpretations of things going on in the broader society. For example, someone somewhere decided microwave oven cooked food had all the live somehow removed from it. 

Consider the adage about how quickly lies can spread... lies, conspiracy theories and the like can travel around the world before the truth even gets out of bed.    

3 hours ago, chockfull said:

I know few to no children raised in this cult who have done anything other than seeking the first exit door available to them.

All of this was driven by the Stanford Prison Experiment type behavior with leaders and followers.  The Corps was a experiment of control like this.  There was communal use of corporate punishment with rovers beating kids.  

The leaders thought of none of these repercussions but doubled down on their spirituality and “God told me” types of answers in the face of legitimate concerns and criticism.

If you were a kid raised in TWI I will pray for you.

The corpse was likely a somewhat unwitting experiment in that kind of control. Especially the Family corpses. But I attribute problems I had (not FC) later to this kind of control I had experienced. I still deal with the ramifications of it in family relationships... More than 35 years after I left the cult. 

Why do you NOT do what you think you intend to do?

3 hours ago, penworks said:

Another survivor testimony, this one from a 2nd gen. Way org. then offshoot survivor:

https://m.soundcloud.com/indoctrinationshow/mark-avoid-w-em-thomas?ref=clipboard&p=i&c=0&si=10E753EC055A4873A9843355FD563C52

 

Sounds like Ms Thomas is probably familiar with GSC. 

5 hours ago, Nathan_Jr said:

Wierwille indirectly promoted this by his tales of trips to the race track to pick winners and his supposed ability to see black hearts for seed of the serpent  and white hearts for holy spirit. (actual quote from waysider)

I might disagree with you on whether or to what degree Victor indirectly or DIRECTLY promoted it on that very basis.

He had long before us devised a con game (see threads and comments about The Book of Charlie, and long prior to said comments) when astute observers identified what he did in the PFLAP class to develop his "identity" (or, in modern marketing lingo, his "brand") as MOGFODAT, built a subculture around it, co-opted The Way East and The Way West and began getting non-profit rich.

Victor had archetypes on which to model his scheme. And it wasn't the guy he stole the PFLAP class from.

PFLAP was the indoctrination. Mike still models his life after this entire confidence game.

In that regard, a case could be made that those TALES about the race track and black/white hearts was, in fact BRAINWASHING. To a degree, I fell for it. Evidenced by how clearly I remember those tales.

I also remember walking around the campus in Emporia (which I think was where I attended the advanced class on PFLAP, even that isn't as clear as the brainwashing/programming) trying to receive revelation, including discerning of spirts. First thought, y'all!

It was the same summer I first remember hearing detractors claiming we were brainwashed. Of course, none of us believed them. 

That was more than 4 decades ago.