WordWolf

I think part of this is just the idea of even EXAMINING this stuff is either heretical or simply ALIEN to a lot of people. Thus, you get people who have no practice nor experience trying to articulate what they're feeling rather than examining what they're thinking. I think that's why we're getting claims that contradict each other (It can't be understood ever-except when I understood it that time) and complaints that contradict each other (you shouldn't be using outside sources to research at all, and you're not doing enough of it, how dare you). On top of that, lots of insults. It's not a healthy process of discussion, it's an attempt to silence the opposition by throwing everything against the wall and seeing if anything sticks. However, in the case of this subject, that backfired horrendously before, because that's when we really began to break down the process of "free vocalization" and how it would account for all the occurrences in the twi/vpw system of practices. You wouldn't have found the phrase AT ALL, and if not for weeks of that sort of "fog the issue" thinking, I wouldn't have seen the contrast so sharply, and I might have remained undecided on the issue rather than concluding that I WANTED one side to be right but there was no way they COULD be. I'm not the only one who changed their mind during the discussion, for that natter.

Try to view things outside the straitjacket of the vpw/twi system. I never called it mumbo-jumbo. It's pretty clear it's different from the speaking in languages of Acts. It's pretty clear to me that humans can choose to do it without anything supernatural. That means it's not what we were told- but it doesn't mean it is useless for EVERYTHING. If someone was convinced they bought a car and they had bought a bicycle, finding out what it really was wouldn't mean it was useless AS A BICYCLE just because it wasn't a car. You made some really fundamental errors about that language, despite supposedly having had considerable exposure to it. I would NOT brag about that if I were you, and it really doesn't speak well of your comprehension of what you "know by experience." Well, you discounted it accidentally despite all that, You said the language was "Cook Island"-which, as we both agree now, is neither the name of the place- the "Cook Islands", nor the name of a SPECIFIC language since it's a multilingual group of islands. Since you're aware that there's dialects there plus the full languages, that's a pretty egregious mistake YOU'RE REFUSING TO ADMIT YOU MADE. Hey- I didn't make a mistake and refuse to admit it. I didn't respond to being caught at it by mudslinging and calling names to those who caught it. Since you brought them up, let's review the various words you just used: 1) misguided- trying to hold to contra-Biblical methods of viewing Biblical things because you're used to them is misguided, comparing Biblical beliefs to the Bible is not misguided 2) smug 3) conceited- Once we had examined this subject, I changed my position to one approximately opposite that which I originally held. I did so RATHER PUBLICLY because all the evidence pointed one-way, rather dramatically. If I was smug and conceited, I would have been UNABLE to do so, especially publicly. 3) VERY IGNORANT- uninformed, uneducated? By examining what others said on a subject, and what experts said in their areas of expertise? Aren't you the same guy who objected to "world wisdom" about a day ago and now you're claiming I wasn't doing it enough? You're all over the map again. A few days ago, you were doing that with your position on tongues with Raf- when you were telling Raf both that it would be impossible to be understood while telling him that you recognized the (understandable) languages used at least once. I'm sure you're feeling better by calling us all sorts of things, but, really, that's not reflecting reality or what's happened on this thread. If you want others to think we're in error, then provide some SUBSTANCE rather than INSULTS. The complete INability of anybody with your position to do that- and RELIANCE on fogging issues and using insults- is why I abandoned that position. Frankly, you're probably convincing other people you're wrong about this with each new post on this thread. So, in other words, keep it up, you're making my side of the discussion look better by contrast. :)

Practicing to further perfect something that arrived perfect is senseless. If we were practicing something IMperfect, some construct of humans, like free vocalization, well, then it makes plenty of sense. Practice would make it easier and improve our ability to do it and string together the sounds as if they were languages. It would increase our "fluency"-which is something we were told to work on in excellor's sessions. If God gives the utterance, then TRYING to start with specific sounds is DEFYING GOD ALMIGHTY. It is either trying to FORCE GOD to give the utterance in conformity with OUR wills ("My will be done"), or deciding to do utterances with the letter whether or not God Almighty wants to provide it. It's that simple- once you look at it. As we discussed long ago, translations between languages OFTEN are quite different in size. Anyone can test this by comparing written instructions for a device or appliance- in all the languages the instructions manual includes. One episode of "I Love Lucy" demonstrated it in detail-translating from French to German to Spanish to English and back, back and forth in quick succession. It was obvious the French was a LOT longer than the German, for example, for the same phrases, which stretched out again in Spanish. vpw was big on outsiders NOT experiencing twi stuff. Considering how much of vpw's stuff was ripped off from other people, I think part of it was so he wouldn't be caught plagiarizing. Another reason, of course, was so that outsiders couldn't examine twi practices and expose them to a cold, rational light. What little outsiders heard was error-ridden and incomplete, which is why they complained about petty, inaccurate things when there were much bigger things to complain about.

Once it gets down to the main objections to something being "it's man's wisdom", I know the opposing side REALLY had nothing to say to oppose it. "How dare you think sensibly and logically here while I'm being religious!" is really a cop-out, an attempt to DUCK A SUBJECT, than anything else. We actually HAVE a book written in words meant to be understood. The thing at Pentecost, the Speaking In Languages, that was done then, that was miraculous and made perfect sense as languages. Those speaking spoke, in clear languages "the wonderful works of God" despite not knowing the languages in which they were speaking. The other incidents in Acts likewise had those who Spoke In Languages actually do exactly that- they SPOKE IN LANGUAGES. The thing you're claiming is the same is not demonstrating to be any such thing. And the entire justification seems a misunderstanding of a few words in I Corinthians 13. I Corinthians 13:1-3 (NASB) 13 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. This section is to contrast love with all the dramatic displays of things of every kind. In each instance, it uses hyperbole, a legitimate figure of speech which is not literally true to fact, to make that point. Without love, it's nothing even if I know ALL The Answers and have ALL The Knowledge. (Is it possible to LITERALLY know ALL The Answers and have ALL The Knowledge? Obviously not.) Without love, it's nothing even if I have a faith or believing that can move mountains at will. (Is it possible to LITERALLY have faith to move an entire mountain? Obviously not- through all the centuries where someone's claimed that was LITERALLY possible, none of the billions of people have LITERALLY done it. And many people would have loved to-and it would have made a fantastic commercial for God Almighty to see it demonstrated. It certainly would have closed a lot of discussions on the subject of God.) Giving 100% my possessions to feed others and my physical body (the one thing left me) for burning-is it LITERALLY going to happen? Not by any SANE Christian, so OBVIOUSLY Paul wasn't trying to start you off on a project or give you a goal to shoot for. Each instance included actions-and took them to an absurd level to make a point about how love was much more important no matter what. So, we started with the example of languages. All accounts before this showed a demonstration of languages that someone recognized, and someone present understood- which made them not only human languages, but CURRENT languages spoken LOCALLY by SOMEONE if not many people. So, speaking in languages of men and angels- was Paul saying it was possible to speak in languages OF ANGELS? Look at the construction of the sentences- in each case, there was an absurd exaggeration. In I Corinthians 13:1, the absurd exaggeration was someone who was able to Speak In Languages to the degree they could communicate beyond all human language and Speak In Angelese.

I'll say it- and I will be clear so that misrepresenting me will be obvious and dishonest. I say that if you're hearing a message that is supposedly of God, and the speaker is speaking in a melange of languages mashed together, that the person's simply doing exactly what it looks like- they're mashing words together from languages here and there. "A bunch of words from a bunch of languages rolled into one sentence" is nobody's definition of a tongue of men or "a tongue of an angel." Frankly, I think you're strengthening the case that the person MEANT to speak from God but the actual practice was a content-free jumble, either with bits from things heard here or there, or bits of things cobbled together, but all from either the hearing or the construction of the speaker. We discussed this all at great length for months. Really, if you read it over, you'd find some fascinating stuff. As Raf pointed out, you didn't "name" a language. "Cook Island" isn't a language, nor would be "that language they speak on Cook Island." That's because A) There's no "Cook Island", it's "the Cook Islands" and there's 15 of them B) on the Cook Islands, they speak several languages, and counting dialects, there's over 10 of them. If you think it's insignificant to count dialects, I challenge you to carry on a conversation between English speakers where each has a different dialect- the Boston brahmin, New Zealander, Cockney, and a Scottish brogue. I guarantee you, you'll get left behind when at least some of them speak, and that's not even all the English dialects. Other languages can vary more widely- the differences between Spanish of different countries has been the subject of many discussion. You may have heard someone from one of the Cook Islands speak in A language, but if you've never studied them (and obviously you haven't when you know neither the name of the place nor the name of the language/dialect), but you're unqualified to identify the speaker as having spoken real sentences in it. Again, you've supported the case otherwise- your suppossed evidence FOR a language consists of an anecdote of someone mixing together some words here and there of a few languages, and not A language at all. The person was not even speaking A language they knew. Personally, I haven't decided to NEVER use it- I'm just candid with myself, if I use it, as to exactly what I'm doing (and not doing). If your private prayer life edifies you, it's your private prayer life and it's working. God Almighty is aware of your heart and knows the limits of communication. He can read your heart more easily than you can read my typed words.

Of course. He put work into ministering when it was something theatrical he could fake (copy from someone else) or when it was some teaching or book or research he could fake (copy from someone else.) vpw was a fake and a conman, and he fooled a lot of people, some of whom proudly remain conned to this day.

Demolition Man Rob Schneider Home Alone 2-Lost in New York

"Pure Imagination."

Right, I had the first one but not the second. So, let's take a guess here.... "The Neverending Story of Us"???

That's it. Arguably Meat Loaf's biggest hit.

When it comes to holidays, it's always what the holiday means TO YOU. With my family, Thanksgiving was the FAMILY holiday to get together, with Christmas being more for children and I've seen New Years may mean more to young singles. (Halloween is changing a lot in the US, so it may mean something to children, or adults, both or neither.) You can designate a holiday to mean something, then it will actually mean something TO YOU. =================== In other news, if you and your friends buy webcams, you can use any of several free programs to audio-chat or video-chat (with video and sound). You might consider that, with friends spread so far apart.

He was ALSO an opportunist. Whenever possible, he was LAZY and cut corners. That's why he had a supply of teachings from real Christian ministers locked away were only a few saw them (I spoke with one ex-top twi'er who did) and used those as references after claiming he threw away all such reading material. He was skillful at fooling people, which is why he succeeded. Since he was also a diehard Narcissist, it all had to be about HIM. He was not going to FULLY share his skills with ANYONE. (He MIGHT have if he had a son who had worshipped him completely and seen that as a legacy, but otherwise it would draw attention and praise away from vpw. lcm was never told lcm was a conman and a fraud- and part of the time, vpw himself believed he was genuine as well. During his final hours of life, he wondered aloud for some time what he could have done wrong that he wasn't getting miraculously healed- and was supposedly unable to think of anything wrong across his life. If that was all just an act, he spent a lot of time on it in his last 2 days of life rather than relaxing or getting entertainment. Even so, he had succeeded in manipulating people to the degree that when lcm stopped worshipping vpw, he still was able to go to cgeer and get worship, and ramble on in a way that cgeer wrote up 'Passing of a Patriarch' from it- and people took it very seriously despite it being full of nonsense and failed predictions. To this day, there's people who get hostile when you suggest his error-ridden doctrines actually have error, when you claim Christians not from his system can be as good or better than theirs, etc. Considering there's a 2nd generation or more of sycophantic vpw worshippers more than 20 years after he dropped dead in contradiction of his own teachings about healing, I'd say he was an amazing success at manipulating people. And a blight on Christianity and humanity.

I consider everybody who survived twi, then visited the GSC for a time without becoming members of twi again or members of splinter groups formed and run by ex-twi leaders to be GSC SUCCESS STORIES. We don't hear from most of them, but that doesn't take away from their success at making and living their lives without twi in major or minor forms. So, congratulations.

Who is not a Frankenstein. He's not from Europe, in fact, he's from another galaxy.

It was actually an incomplete list of props, but yes. I included a few callbacks as well. One character, draped over and straddling a bannister, shouts about everyone being lucky, and the audience replies the bannister is lucky. The ponderous narrator starts slowly, and the audience rushes him along until he gets that sentence completed. You have it.

"Some days I pray for silence. Some days I pray for soul. Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock 'n' roll. Some nights I lose the feeling. Some nights I lose control. Some nights I just lose it all when I watch you dance and the thunder rolls. Maybe I'm lonely, that's all I'm qualified to be That's just one and only, the one and only promise I can keep. As long as the wheels are turning. As long as the fires are burning. As long as your prayers are coming true. You'd better believe it!" I have traveled across the universe through the years to find her. Sometimes going all the way is just a start.

"I would like" (oh, you would, would you?) "if I may" (You may!) "to take you on a strange journey." "You're lucky, he's lucky, I'm lucky, we're all lucky! Ha ha ha..." (The bannister is lucky!) Rice, newspaper, squirt gun, confetti, toast, keys or a bell, cards- I'm all set!

"If only we were amongst friends... or sane persons!" "Great Scott!" "A toast!" " I would like.....if I may.....to take you on a strange journey." "Oh, lucky him." "You're lucky, he's lucky, I'm lucky, we're all lucky! Ha ha ha..." " It was strange the way it happened. Suddenly... you get a break! All of the pieces seem to fit into place. What a sucker you've been, what a fool. The answer was there all the time. It took a small accident to make it happen. AN ACCIDENT! And that is how I discovered the secret. That elusive ingredient, that... spark that is the breath of life... yes I have that knowledge! I hold the key to life... ITSELF! " "A night out... it was a night out they were going to remember for a very long time." "I wonder if you might help us. You see, our car broke down a few miles up the road. Do you have a phone we might use?"

"I would like" (oh, you would, would you?) "if I may" (You may!) "to take you on a strange journey." "You're lucky, he's lucky, I'm lucky, we're all lucky! Ha ha ha..." (The bannister is lucky!)

"Some days I pray for silence. Some days I pray for soul. Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock 'n' roll. Some nights I lose the feeling. Some nights I lose control. Some nights I just lose it all when I watch you dance and the thunder rolls. Maybe I'm lonely, that's all I'm qualified to be That's just one and only, the one and only promise I can keep."

No version of "Frankenstein" (as such, anyway, there's nobody and nothing named "Frankenstein" in it.) And it's in color.

You've really got to stop GUESSING about the things of God- the stakes are too high, and you're treating them glibly, flippantly, rather than as life-or-death issues. You're using a fallacy of a False Equivalency, and it's silly. The claim is that the supposed modern practice is the same as the Biblical practice that actually produced LANGUAGES. That claim was challenged- that is, it's challenged that THAT claim is invalid, and the modern practice is not the same thing and thus never produces A LANGUAGE. How is that proven? Very simply. If you can speak in a LANGUAGE, then speak in a LANGUAGE in front of a linguistics expert. They can confirm, with a sufficient sample, whether or not something is an actual language whether or not they understand the language or can recognize it. That's something YOU can do NOW, WHENEVER YOU WANT. As to the historical proofs of someone we don't have in front of us now, that's proven or disproven in a historical fashion because it's not something that can be demonstrated now like the supposed "speaking in tongues" is. The supposed tongues, they're supposedly here, now, for us to hear- and thus, for us to examine. Doing so in front of a linguistics expert for an evaluation is definitely possible now (during the week, at least.) You, supposedly, can do it. So, rather than making casual dismissals of discussing it, go ahead and do it. It certainly would strengthen your case once the expert comes up and says "I've never heard this language before, but it is definitely a discrete language."

With the word "unknown" in ITALICS, the word you're relying on was added by a translator. Even vpw said you could discount what the translator added. (Then skipped that when it suited him.) In a number of accounts in Acts, there were people present who understood them. Unless Scripture is unreliable-which means you can't trust it at all and we shouldn't try to understand it- then your understanding of the Corintians verses obviously are in error, since they'd BLATANTLY contradict MULTIPLE accounts in Acts. The whole doctrine of "tongues of angels" upon which almost all of the modern practice seems to hinge upon (all of it I've ever seen or heard, live or recorded) is centered around ONE VERSE. Whenever vpw taught an entire doctrine around one verse, you should go back and check if you were being hosed, because I've found it was common that he contradicted the rest of the Bible with his single-verse doctrines. The one reference was hyperbole, a legitimate figure of speech. We discussed this years ago and I'll lay it out again simply when I have time. I'll say it- and I will be clear so that misrepresenting me will be obvious and dishonest. I say that if you're hearing a message that is supposedly of God, and the speaker is speaking in a melange of languages mashed together, that the person's simply doing exactly what it looks like- they're mashing words together from languages here and there. "A bunch of words from a bunch of languages rolled into one sentence" is nobody's definition of a tongue of men or "a tongue of an angel." Frankly, I think you're strengthening the case that the person MEANT to speak from God but the actual practice was a content-free jumble, either with bits from things heard here or there, or bits of things cobbled together, but all from either the hearing or the construction of the speaker. We discussed this all at great length for months. Really, if you read it over, you'd find some fascinating stuff. You care what SOMEBODY thinks because you're replying.

"If only we were amongst friends... or sane persons!" "Great Scott!" "A toast!" " I would like.....if I may.....to take you on a strange journey." "Oh, lucky him." "You're lucky, he's lucky, I'm lucky, we're all lucky! Ha ha ha..." " It was strange the way it happened. Suddenly... you get a break! All of the pieces seem to fit into place. What a sucker you've been, what a fool. The answer was there all the time. It took a small accident to make it happen. AN ACCIDENT! And that is how I discovered the secret. That elusive ingredient, that... spark that is the breath of life... yes I have that knowledge! I hold the key to life... ITSELF! "

So, the next one. It's better-known. "Some days I pray for silence. Some days I pray for soul. Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock 'n' roll. Some nights I lose the feeling. Some nights I lose control. Some nights I just lose it all when I watch you dance and the thunder rolls."