WordWolf

Bumped because the new people haven't read this thread yet. It's the thread based on the book "the way:Living in Love."

If I can back this up a little, to give the context.... vpw was fond of the odd and bizarre, and that OFTEN meant lots of conspiracy theories. I don't know if he fully believed them, or if he just used them as grist, but either way, he passed them along. vpw had a number of information links to "the Liberty Lobby"- he subscribed to their magazine, and he listened to their phone "hotline" a lot, in secret. (Remember, this was before the internet- so phone, television, radio, and mail communication were the most efficient ways to pass along what you considered "news.") So, vpw would go away, then come back, and announce some conspiracy was afoot, and only the combined prayers of the twi'ers could prevent disaster. Once someone commented about the San Andreas Fault not having had any catastrophic earthquakes of late. vpm replied that he should remove all the twi people from the area of the fault and THEN see what happened. The Mother Lode of the twi conspiracies under vpw was 1976 and the attempted takeover of the USA by subversive elements. (The Mother Lode of the twi conspiracies under lcm was the Y2K panic, and the complete breakdown of both technology and society when the machines stopped working, but that's another subject.) So, getting back to the MAL packs.... twi'ers at some levels were instructed to put together their MAL packs before the 1976 USA takeover took place, so they had vital supplies on hand so they could flee for their lives with what they needed. Among the supplies was those "sea sponges", supposedly a usable substitute for one of the supplies women would be unable to buy in pharmacies while running for their lives or hiding from the thought police or whatever other fool thing they were supposed to be doing at the time.

The earliest reference to this sort of thing that I found offhand was in Numbers, in that incident when Aaron and Miriam got in trouble for murmuring against Moses. Numbers 12:5-8 (King James Version) 5And the LORD came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood in the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam: and they both came forth. 6And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. 7My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. 8With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? Seems to me that God's restating a standard policy here about prophets: He'll speak to them in visions and dreams. ======================================== I think the verses you wanted weren't in Psalms, they were in Job. Job 33:14-16 (King James Version) 14For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. 15In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; 16Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, ====================================== There's been a number of books on the subject. I read one, and I'll recommend it: Exploring the World of Dreams (A Scriptural Guide to Hearing from God in the Night Season) by Benny Thomas, Whitaker House Publishing http://www.flipkart.com/exploring-world-dreams-ben-thomas-book-0883682788 http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=0883682133 If you want to spend some time online on the subject first, you might want to look over this site: http://www.hannahscupboard.com/dreams-index.html

The 90s were an "exciting" time in twi. (As in the old curse, "May you be cursed to live in interesting times.") vpw knew he himself was a fraud- and knew how far to push his audiences, which audiences to push, and so on. When the cameras were on, he was SUCH a nice guy.... When he was yelling and lacking self-control, it was in private. lcm thought vpw was the real deal, and thus whatever vpw did was fine with God. lcm didn't know there were limits to pushing an audience-he didn't know it was all a fraud. So, the yelling vpw did in private, lcm did in public. The cursing vpw did in private, lcm did in public. He didn't even cover his adultery tracks as well as vpw did. Other things he adapted was vpw demanding an oath of loyalty. vpw pushed 2 groups of early Corps, and one was required to give vpw an oath of loyalty. lcm took that private practice, and made it public- requiring all twi'ers to do so to him. About 1993, things got REALLY weird. That's when lcm finished going completely around the bend, and began issuing truly bizarre doctrine, senseless practice, and so on. lcm announced "The Word is over The World", put the Corps as full-time salaried employees, and cancelled the ROA.

Pretty much, yeah. They get people to redefine their abuse as normal and acceptable. Once they manage that, the whole thing's easy. In vpw's case, he had an entire inner circle of twi to cover his tracks. People like Bob and Dottie "Moneyhands" were used to watch anyone who'd been particularly abused (raped by vpw or drugged then raped by vpw), to redirect them away from telling the authorities. Those who seemed likely to tell were rushed off grounds, put on a slow bus home, and while they travelled, vpw had their reputation ruined on grounds and back home, calling them "possessed" and other things. So, when they got home, few would listen to them at all. Brutally efficient system, the sign of someone who KNOWS fully well what they're doing, and are determined to do it effectively no matter how many people get crushed along the way. Ah, some people who met him when he was a student in the corps and thereabouts have said he was an actual human being back then. If he fit ANY stereotype, it was the "dumb jock". That made it a lot easier for vpw to con him completely. As time progressed, he was less and less a nice, approachable guy and slowly transformed (across the 70s) into the guy you knew. In some of the SNTs, he didn't yell AT ALL, and in others, he yelled and apologized about it and said some things got him that angry. (That was the early and mid 80s, respectively.) By 1990, lcm was confirmed on his current course, and any redeeming qualities he'd pretty much ditched the previous year when he demanded an oath of allegiance from the twi'ers, and expected them to "blindly follow him" no matter WHAT. (As far as he was concerned, that was the EXPECTED STATE of the Corps and Staff, and later of everyone in twi.)

Possibly. Eyewitness reports said Old Man Wierwille was an angry, aggressive man who dished it out in every direction. One POSSIBLE reason young vic kept wandering away from his chores on the farm was to get away from him- but that's mostly speculation on my part, nobody around at the time even SUGGESTED it. But yes, many unhealed abuse victims become abusers themselves, abusing others by exerting power over them and abusing it. (Abusing THEM in the process.) Well, vpw really got GOOD at abuse. He selected 2 different personas- one nice and one abusive. He selected the targets for the abusive one- those who he could get away with it with- and the people to play "nice guy" with- the ones who'd get him in trouble fast. For all his bluster and swagger, he never stood up to any guy who could have knocked him on his posterior- unless you count when he designated some twi'ers as bully boys to have THEM confront others. (Not to mention having attack dogs raised, which he then used to intimidate others. We have eyewitness accounts of that...)

*snicker* I love that line. That's all from "ARTHUR." At least, the Dudley Moore version. We don't know if the new version will have that scene. In all, I think the first 5-10 minutes or so of "Arthur" is the funniest part of the movie- all the way up to the next morning, when Hobson's offering the aspirin and so on. The movie just wouldn't be the same without it.

Remember, vpw, from the beginning, knew that he himself was a fraud. He was always looking for things to pull the fraud. That's why he he accumulated a library of "original works" of other Christians to plagiarize and basically present as his own work. It's also why vpw, in public, would be such a nice guy, but turn around once the cameras were all off and would terrorize everyone around him. He KNEW he was scamming his audience, and managed a public persona for all the people who only knew him from stage and video. (That's why we still get clueless people who never saw vpw when he wasn't on stage, and think he was in reality the public persona he pretended to be.) So, in private, vpw would yell and tear into people, people he liked, people he was in charge of, and he would make all sorts of excuses as to why it was a good idea. "I yell because you can take it!" Things like that. lcm was often in the room when vpw was doing that. lcm was convinced vpw was the real deal, so, hot out of college, all lcm did was try to copy vpw as best he could. So, lcm learned to yell at people and rationalize it as "right." In fact, for a time, lcm wasn't pleased at himself when he yelled at the SNT Sunday Night Services. That was as late as 1982. What a difference a few years made! By 1989, lcm was perfectly happy to yell at great length on tape and in people's faces. All through the 1990s, lcm yelled at people at every opportunity. He copied vpw as best he could. lcm didn't know vpw was a fraud, and so he didn't know he HIMSELF was a fraud! He's STILL a fraud, and he STILL doesn't know it!

lcm going into lengthy, elaborate tirades attacking Catholics for making statues and other graven images, then having both a big statue and smaller statues of vpw being made, and advertised. Actually, I consider twi WORSE than wiccans, because wiccans leave you alone, and don't dictate to you how to live your life or do anything. Their Golden Rule? Don't harm anyone. (A little like the Hippocratic Oath.) Furthermore, I consider twi WORSE than SATANISTS LIKE ANTON LE VEY, since he was right up-front and honest about who and what you were dealing with. With him, you knew he'd do whatever he'd want to do, and that's all there was to it. With twi, there's this disconnect- they'd claim to do one thing in public, then do the opposite when the cameras were off.

I'm a bit surprised you're depicting twi's heads as "masters." They're normally working UNOPPOSED- as the only sources of information and authority for people. The idea of work involving THINKING, PERSUASION, or things along those lines would, at best, have them RUSTY, and at worst, incompetent. Any EXPERIENCED conman can outperform them. I guess that's why ex-twi splinters keep getting snowed by better conmen.

I can see yours, but not mine. I think that prevents people from boosting their own posts. I've wondered if a few people did that to their own posts in the past...

I don't think they're DUMB so much as GULLIBLE. twi big wigs lie to them all the time, and they just BUY it. The idea that they'd be lied to by the bigwigs is slow to occur to them. And then the bigwigs say "suspecting me of lying just because I told you outrageous hogswill is 'thinking evil', which we don't do." So the twi'er says "Duh, that's right" and goes back to sleep. Until they get sick and tired of being sick and tired and really wake up.

"I'll have what she's having!"

I refuse to answer this. At least until you mention Rhode Island.

More threads on the same topic, "Have you seen the video on the twi website?" "TWI commercial posted on their site" This was a different subject. It was never on The Daily Show. E!'s show "The Soup" sometimes includes things found online. In that case, they showed a clip from the twi website of some awkward song-and-dance number twi posted to their own site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VPcPCwK_G0

You ARE better off downloading Firefoz, but I've run IE8 on XP in more than one place... In those cases, the PCs were running XP Pro. I don't know about XP Home.

I've never had any problems with any registry cleaner. IMHO, once you skip the "nag screen", Eusing Free Registry Cleaner can't harm the PC. RegScrubXP is fine, but you have to remember to just let the program find problems. I knew someone who selected the option to identify problems himself. So, it showed him the full contents of his PC's hard drive, which he promptly deleted. Personally, I don't think that was the program's fault, since it did exactly what he told it to. However, you can't make that mistake with Eusing.

"Midnight Cowboy", I think. I know it's Dustin Hoffman, but it's hard to keep track of which of his quotes are from which of his movies, sometimes.

Well, if you must, go ahead. It's better to give the answer THEN move along. You might get people curious about the original movie and get them to see it. But hey, whatever moves this along...

I can't speak to programs, but if I wanted to host a 30-minute video, I'd skip YouTube and start with sites like Megavideo.

The OFFICIAL reason, or the REAL reason? The OFFICIAL reason was that, around or during the 1994 ROA, lcm said it was about rampant homosexuality, and about rampant heterosexual sex among the teens. http://www.greasespotcafe.com/main2/waydale/waydale-corps-notes/corps-notes-from-09-14-94.html He couldn't just make up ONE lie and stick to it- he was all over the map there. The idea that people were having sex in twi and lcm being offended about it is either funny in a sad way, or hypocritical as all hell. It's like the organization was his PERSONAL harem, and having the teens do what he had been doing for over a decade was offensive. Notice that he says there's no verses of Scripture that address pre-marital sex. That was the President of a purported Biblical research ministry who said the closest you could get was Ephesians 6:1 "Obey your parents". This, of course, gets back to the previous decade, and the shocker that Adultery and Fornication are considered Bad Things in the Bible-and that this was news to the twi higher-ups. For fun, go ahead and read what lcm said- he seems to have no idea what goes into anything. He mentions wanting to shut the ROA down- and to burn all the tents down. Of course, if he did that, then twi would have to pay for the Big Top, and any other of the tents they used for ROA but didn't OWN. ================================== The common thinking is that the REAL reason the ROA was canceled was lcm's recent decision to put the entire corps on salary. Why did that change the ROA? Well, before, the preparations for the ROA were done by the corps. People used up what little vacation time they'd accrued at work, then came to hq and WORKED FOR FREE, setting up the ROA. Then they stayed through ROA, using up their remaining accrued vacation time, and WORKED FOR FREE, putting on the ROA. So, twi had a slave labor force for both weeks, setting things up and doing the "grunt work". (Of course, there were also other volunteers who walked in and worked for free during ROA- twi was always great at inspiring "free" labor.) lcm never had any appreciation for the amount of effort that took, nor the amount of personal sacrifice that was. He was not original- vpw himself had no appreciation for it either. In "vp and me", lcm documented how vpw was offended how some corps used up all their vacation time to show up for Corps Week, perform unpaid labor, then went home without staying for the ROA. It comes as less of a shock that neither appreciated such things when one realizes that neither man ever worked a day's labor in his life. Both men went straight from school into "the ministry", and lived on other people's money the entire time. Anyway, what that had to do with ROA '94..... lcm put the corps all on salary without finding out if it was economically feasible. His thinking (if you can call it that) was that this move would be self-supporting, since the full-time corps would be able to promote that inferior ripoff class that lcm made of pfal, and that people would actually pay to take it (when already people had to twist arms to get people to take it), and that people would all suddenly start paying for it, and all suddenly stick around twi, paying 10%, 15%, 20% of their income, swelling the coffers of twi and paying the expense of the full-time corps everywhere. What resulted was that nobody could "polish a turd", so having 1 person or 100 people try to push lcm's stupid class made little difference- almost nobody took it, and even fewer stuck around after finishing it. So, lcm's decision meant twi was paying out a lot more money and taking in no more money to make up for it. This became a LOT more obvious when Corps Week and ROA came around. Where the non-salaried corps normally had to pay their own way through both weeks, NOW twi had to pay out salary for both weeks AND the cost for the entire salaried corps to make it to both- since the "salaries" were pretty meager and there wasn't any money left over to pay their OWN way to ROA. So, ROA now became a cash sink for twi. Worse, the people who did show up got to compare notes every year, see how much smaller twi got every year, discuss who wasn't there anymore, and compare notes on everything twi tried to hide.

*checks* I'm not getting warnings over the site. I'd recommend "graduating" from AVG to Avast! Free or to Avira Antivir, both of which are a bit less user friendly, but more effective in security. I'd also recommend "graduating" from IE to Firefox, and adding various "Add-Ons" to boost security. (NoScript, Ghostery, AdblockPlus, BetterPrivacy, Flashblock.)

IIRC, first they made a big, ugly bronze statue of vpw for the auditorium. THEN they made smaller versions for people to buy for their homes. On the one hand, the obvious contradiction between twi pushing that idolatry is wrong, images are wrong, blah blah blah, lcm running off at the mouth about it- then they put these out. My sense of right and wrong was offended pretty fast. On the other hand, I couldn't get VERY angry because the things were so freaking ugly, I thought being in the presence of one of those would be its own punishment. I'm pretty sure that was the only thing like that-unless you count the photos of the bod for displaying at home. For that matter, that was pretty creepy, too....

I didn't hear any stories until I got here, and there were some very interesting stories.... For the curious, the original post continues that third story, but you'll have to click on the link to read it... I have a limit to what I'll repost... The "backwards arrow" is the link I mean...

Exactly! Look- people who work for the unjust mammon, people among the rank unbelievers, people who have no spiritual connection with each other, people whose connections are just money and business, THOSE people would let their co-workers eat hamburgerS (plural) if they were hungry, so long as they were on-break or before or after work. (They can spare the food, just don't eat on company time.) So, among the family of God, it should have been MUCH more so. If you were obviously there for the event (not just sneaking in for food), there should have been no question about you eating. If the person you spoke to flat out couldn't show that much mercy on behalf of people who could certainly spare it (the food arrived in bulk, the labor was free, the payment was retail or nearly so), then they should have shown the maturity to put in the money THEMSELF and say to go ahead. That anyone could have said "no" when even the unbelievers would have said "yes" shows they were trained to squeeze every last penny from the "believers" and give it to the organization. That's no big surprise- that's what lcm learned when HE was in the corps, and apparently, those who taught him that passed it down further, and he passed it down when he was in charge a few years later (FAR too soon to handle such responsibility.)