Oakspear

About the only situation that I see where the so-called trauma bonding would make sense would be in a "persecution" situation. There were times during my TWI days when there was opposition united against the local wayfers for one reason or another. The first half of my own WOW year was a good example of this. A local pastor got people in a froth against us; loudly confronting us in the streets, radio programs against us, community meetings with us as the subject, even to the point of rock throwing and at least one incident involving someone trying to run us down with their car. It was us versus the world it seemed to the four of us. All of this only served to cement the idea that it was the true believers of TWI standing up to the Satan-inspired world. In my opinion though, the rose-colored glasses view some folks' time in TWI is more a function of belonging to something in our youth that at the time we thought was worthwhile.

Ummm...I'm not offended

I thought that this deserved its own thread: For a "research ministry" it seemed like a lot of "leaders" fell into this category. Not that a spiritual minister has to be a big intellectual, but for a group that emphasized the study and research end of things, I ran into a large number of people who could barely put together a coherent English sentence, let alone parse Greek and Hebrew grammar. Yet often these people were the ones telling us how to study.

Huh. Recently one of my WOW sisters and I made connection via Facebook also(my other WOW sister found each other through GreaseSpot cafe!)She is out of TWI as well, and has been for quite a while. My conversations with her and her husband (who had been my best man at my first wedding) did not go as well as yours. Although no longer with TWI, they, especially the husband, were very judgmental about my current religious beliefs and very arrogant about their own.

I don't know that there was every a time when the "fellowship" was ever as real as a genuine friendship or for that matter a good family relationship. Sure there were times when I had good times with some of those people, and there were people who would give me the shirt off their backs, there were people who were unconditional givers, and there were people who were just plain loving. But never, ever, did I see any of that extend past the TWI circle. Even without taking into account when my ties to TWI the organization were severed, there were several times when people in my area seemed to be good friends, but made no effort to maintain contact once they had moved on to their next Corps assignment, went WOW or just plain moved to another city. The friendships, if they can be called that, were situational and conditional. An old friend of mine, our friendship pre-dating TWI recently made contact with me. She is involved in TWI; she maintains that she and her husband don't believe everything that TWI teaches and "think for themselves", but really love the people in their fellowship. I wonder if that love would survive if my old friend and her husband told their twig coordinator that they would start attending a local church, but still wanted to see everyone in the twig: go out for coffee, go out to dinner together, i.e. maintain their relationship, their "fellowship". I think you can guess what the answer would be.

Do I assume correctly that "I've been attending the Way" means that you participate in their home fellowships? Have you completed their Way of Abundance and Power class? Can you elaborate on the "greater understanding" has been arrived at?

carry on

I think most if not all of us who have been through TWI have "a need to feel liberated from all the crappy people that oppressed us." - how we deal with that will vary enormously. I imagine that the rationale for identifying as a non-Christian exists, I can also imagine that some others go whole-hog into fundamentalist/orthodox/evangelical/mainstream Christianity for the same reason. For me, I have gone in the direction that I have post-TWI because it makes more sense and works better for me than Christianity does. Not that it's superior to Christianity, just that it's a better fit for me.

Geisha: Are you posting in the right thread? don't see where you got that from brainfixed's post. It looks like you're arguing with George Aar!

The question is not addressed to me...but as a non-Christian...no, this does not apply in my case.

...and you can really see the difference among the 3 major types of "writing". Even with the transcribing, sometimes they tried to clean up his syntax and vocabulary, sometimes not.

Yes we are. In the last several months several ex-Way folks that I had not seen or heard from in 20 years made contact with me. One is still with TWI, although she claims that she doesn't believe everything that they teach and several others associate with offshoots. A pattern that I have noticed (not only with these folks but with other offshooters) is that they are all insisting that they have rejected anything "off the Word" that was taught in TWI, and retained what was "truth". They all insist that they have found the perfect balance of what to reject and what to retain, and are just as obnoxious about it as any dyed-in-the-wool wayfer ever was. One of the problems that we ex-wayfers have to deal with is that any actual biblical studying or "research" that we do is going to be tainted with Waythink assumptions unless we take a lot of time and effort to throw out the bathwater, the baby, the tub, gut the bathroom and burn down the house, including that bony fish. So much of our research in TWI was based on Wierwille's faulty assumptions; we looked for things to fit with what we had been taught before, we based interpretations on phony translations of Greek & Hebrew words, we accepted the existence of texts that nobody had ever seen, and wove all of these things into our subconscious and into our basic premises so that our conclusions were bound to be skewed.

Ya gotta love those literal translations: which you have lifted up vertically...is it possible to lift something up horizontally?

86% of statistics are made up

I'm not. I think that there are true things, but no one single system of belief and/or practice that can even be called the truth. I seek every day to become a better person.

I would be extremely surprised if this was never covered here before, but I'm going to say it again anyway Was he saying that God can't give something to a person if that person doesn't know that it's available? What happened to "exceeding abundantly above all that we could ask or think"? God isn't big enough to give you something in a manner that you won't know how to accept it? <_< Hey, people screw up gifts, whether from God or man all the time, what's the evidence that God doesn't give because his gift won't be utilized properly? Forget the obvious grammatical silliness; are we to suppose that God can't give to you beyond your need? Oooookay...but why do we have to know this?

Hmmmm...lessee...I'm afraid of wealth, happiness and long life...therefore...

Whoa! I never thought of that before!

Fear doesn't seem to me to be "believing" of any sort. More like you suspect that something bad is going to happen no matter what you do! It looks to me like people who are afraid, in fear, of something are praying pretty hard for it not to happen. Wierwille used the verse in Job (3:25?) to "prove" that fear brings on what you were afraid of. Correlation does not prove causation. Just because Job feared it and it happened does not mean that the fear caused it to happen.

Soul Searcher: Bullinger wanted to make all aspects of the bible fit together, he often compared sections of scripture that appeared to be referring to the same event and picked out what he saw as inconsistencies or contradictions. For instance, regarding the number of men crucified with Jesus, he pointed out that that in one gospel one of the two reviled him, while in another, both did. That, along with other details, were contradictions that a biblical literalist would want to reconcile so that scriptures would fit together. The same with his view that there were six denials; there are enough differences in the circumstances in each gospel, that the literalist is confronted with inconsistencies that must be resolved. Someone who is not so concerned with making it all fit together wouldn't be concerned about the contradictions; I am unaware how biblical literalists other than Bullinger reconcile these sections of the bible. But common sense would indicate that since each mention of the crucifixion only mentions two and each mention of the betrayals only mentions three, then there were two others crucified and three denials. I have a hard time seeing an omnipotent god who authored the scriptures playing those kind of numbers games. Other apparently parallel sections he just decides are talking about different events altogether. Where did Bullinger "get it from? I don't think he got it from anywhere other than his own desire to make sense of the many contradictions. Even though he was a clergyman in a major denomination (Church of England) he came to conclusions very different from mainstream Christianity. Personally I don't think you can eliminate all contradictions and inconsistencies because the bible was written by men and not God. Different viewpoints, theologies, opinions and agendas go into the bible, trying to make them fit together is like trying to harmonize different secular authors writing on the same subject.

Excellent question. In my opinion Bullinger was at his best as a "statistician" and a "linguist". I think he did a good job pointing out inconsistencies between the English translation and the Greek or Hebrew text and was a whiz at digging up quotes of other books of the bible in scripture, figures of speech, etc. I believe that he tried to hard to make everything fit into an outline or structure that wasn't necessarily there, bending his interpretation to fit with a preconceived idea. That being said, it's apparent that he put a lot more work into his research than Wierwille ever did Regarding threads being "long dead", I think the examples that I give in the initial post show how Wierwille certainly didn't come up with some of his stuff independently of Bullinger, if he did he wouldn't have come to conclusions that were unsupported by his premises.

The flip side of the LOB's "taking God out of the equation" is that it takes the blame off God when bad things happen...got run over by a truck? It must be your believing; it wasn't God's fault! Don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of the LOB or its implications within TWI, it was a blame game, full of condemnation, but the position that we have nothing to do with what happens and it's 100% God assumes a capricious and arbitrary God who might bless one person "beyond what they could ask or think", while another sinks in poverty; might miraculously turn away a hurricane one day while the next a tsunami kills thousands. The reason that the LOB appealed to me back when I first took PFAL was that it tried to explain why it wasn't God's fault when things went awry.

Like so many things, I just don't think that there's any evidence that the Law of Believing, believing God's promises or whatever you want to call it, works. Even if you're a believer in the innerrancy of the bible, if something doesn't work, maybe you just are reading it wrong, jumping to the wrong conclusions, misunderstanding. You can prove anything if you pick the right combination of verses, but if it's true, there should definitely be real world confirmation of it, wouldn't you think? For all the anecdotes about people receiving what they "believed for", the percentage of believing that really did, honest to God, 100% equal receiving, was not very high, was it? If the bible is God's Word and if it clearly says that what you believe you will receive, then you will receive what you believe; there wouldn't be any of this hedging, explaining, blaming etc that accompanied lack of receiving.

Huh? Have "we all" called you an idiot before?

You can get past a dog...but nobody f*cks with a lion!