Oakspear

Apparently there is at least one reference to eternal punishment:

Acknowledging that some Corps folks had actual honest-to-dog leadership and management ability, the conceit that by just being a Corps grad gave one the ability to run a business or manage a department, or anything else for that matter, was laughable. I saw resumes similar to this from people who ran two-twig "branches" and only previously had "real" jobs in the realm of convenience store clerk or window washer. Even while mostly waybrained I was somewhat insulted, as someone who had built my own resume in management over several decades, to hear these nitwits brag about how they were going to get sweet management gigs.

And that questioning leads us all to different places One thing that I have seen (your mileage may vary) is that no matter what ones position on Jesus is/isn't God; Trinitarian/Unitarian, you have to explain away or ignore verses that contradict each other. I doubt I'll have time to fully document that, but that's where questioning & examining have led me.

Wierwille would have been proud! Tinkering wit puncuation to make it say what he wants!Regarding the Lord = God contention, some Trinitarians rely on the fact that when the NT quotes the OT, Yahweh/Jehovah is usually translated into Greek as kurios (lord)

Calling him just "doctor" was just annoying back when I was in, hearing people do it now is just plain creepy

I don't have a one liner, but due to the tendency within TWI to question mainstream Christianity, I started habitually questioning everything. Eventually that questioning outlook led me to question Martindale, which led me to question Wierwille...

Plagiarism does not depend on whether the plagiarized work is by a living person. If you pass of another's words as your own then it's plagiarism Are "we" passing off the words from the bible as our own? That's where the line is It's prett clear that in some instances Wierwille publsihed things under his own name that were word-for-word taken from another's work What do you mean by that? Not you, apparently, but many of us do No...I don't think that you do... This is the logical fallacy of the red herring

I wonder what the percentage was of people in Session Twelve of PFAL (or the equivalent point in Martindale's WayAP class) that did not speak in tongues. That's a rhetorical question, since we'll never know that number, since "nobody gets misssed" right? And records surely were not kept and if they were, we surely won't get to see them! Over the years I participated in only a limited number of PFAL classes; I can recall for sure only three people who did not speak in tongues at Session Twelve and did not thereafter. One was a guy who was very intellectual about the whole thing, never got into the emotional uproar that takes place at that key point of the session; he always said he was waiting for something to happen that never happened. The second was a lady in her late seventies who loved the social aspect of twig and was like a grandma to all of us, but she never seemed to understand what was being taught, or even make the effort. The third was one of my sons, who was in his early teens. He dug in his heels and just refused to do it - said it didn't make sense. My two older sons were just as non-questioning as their mother and I were, but Oakspear Junior questioned everything and was not at all impressed with what he heard. Looking back at my own SIT experiences, I didn't think I was faking it back then, and I don't think that I did so intentionally, but it was so easy to get swept up in the emotion and the groupthink

I don't think there was as much anger about the suggestion that monotheists were all worshipping the same god twenty years ago...before 9/11; today there seems to be a more visceral loathing of Islam by most Christians, even non-fundamentalists who would have had no problem with the concept back then. The first time I ever heard anyone suggest in my hearing that Allah wasn't Yahweh was at a Word in Business, or maybe the Rock of Ages and it was Martindale's foam-at-the-mouth delivery of "Da Truth". The highlighted (by me) portion of your comment makes sense to me and is a good way to put it, but when you come down to it, isn't every Christian worshipping different gods? I say this because, despite what creeds and doctrinal positions put out there, most people have their own view of the biblical god that may or not be the same as the person sitting next to them at church. One thing that I think that most Christians believe, even those who believe that the Islamic version of God is a different entity than their god, is that the god of the Jews is the same as the god of the New Testament

Even what he thinks is evidence to him (outside of any need to prove it to anyone else), even if the poles really were (or appeared to be) there to guide him home and were later disappeared (or were never really there) is only evidence that something apparently unexplainable happened. Even if "normal" evidence (witnesses, photos, Edward Snowden) were provided, who says that it was God? Or UFOs? Or Magick?

I disagree, the question isn't absurd; it's an accusation that is often made against atheists, that it's a "religion" Who do you imagine believes something that they don't believe? That sounds a bit like Wierwille's nonsensical rant about atheists not being possible Who do you imagine is riding a fence? I assume you mean paradox...how so? How do you figure those who do not believe are parasitic upon those who believe?

You made my day with that remark

Recently at Wheaton College a professor was suspended for, among other things, making a statement asserting that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same god. Since then I have seen quite a few vehement denials that they are the same deity by a variety of Christians. This past week, President Obama's visit to a mosque occassioned more angry denials that the gods of the Quran and of the New Testament were the same. Most of those who claimed that they were different entities cited differences between how the New Testament and the Quran described God. My position is that, despite differences in attributes between the descriptions in the two "holy" books, Muslims and Christians are each referring to the same god. Even if one approaches the argument from the point of view that Christians, and their view of God, are correct, the fact that Muslims view him differently does not necessrily mean that these deities are actually different. If one is to take the position that difference in methods of worship, and difference in attributes as written in "scripture" mean that we're describing two entities, then to remain consistant, one would have to also view the god of the Old Testament as a different god than the one described in the New Testament. Marcion took this very same position - founding a Christian sect that viewed the Old Testament god as an evil "god of this world". The purpose of this thread is not to debate the actual existance of God, or whether Christianity or Islam is true

Maybe. But I don't think we're talking about the same thing. In your example, assuming that the State Department of Roads or the telephone company hadn't for some reason taken down all the poles in the intervening few days, something out of the ordinary had happened, but the percentage of stories purporting to indicate supernatural occurences that contain no elements that are anything more than mundale approaches 100%. (In my experience - your mileage may vary) Even in your hypothetical, the Christian would credit God; the UFO enthusiast, aliens; and Gardnerians, magick. All citing the fact of the missing poles as "evidence" of God, aliens or magick.

Okay, got it. I read into your comment something that wasn't there, my bad! Hmmm...I'm not sure there's anything between the lines to read Ha! Yes, he's not all that popular here! That's not to say that something the Vicster said was necessarily wrong, but he is certainly not considered a reliable source I don't know if it's rubbish or not - I was just questioning select parts of what you said - and anyway, you have every right to post your opinions here, even if nobody agrees

Same here. Wierwille and Bullinger each contorted their takes on the bible in order to make it fit their number theories. What? Was the supposed "Christ" administration 1-3 years?

Interesting comment, why would there be any call to "be afraid", let alone think there might be "lumps" for posting in the "wrong" forum? Is there soemwhere in the bible where they are called gift ministries? Are you quoting Wierwille, or is this your own conclusion? Where is this definition given in the bible? I always thought that this phrase was Wierwille's way of getting people to view him as an apostle, since he certainly wasn't bringing any "new light"

I thought that you let me in even though I came out as a pagan.

Yup...good luck. I didn't write a book, but sent a ten page, single-spaced letter to John Reynolds, then on the Board of Trustees, breaking down everything that I could find wrong with Martindale's class. I got a call from Reynolds, but was thrown out of TWI shortly thereafter

hah! the filter gotcha!

I think you'll find, if we took a roll call, that the GSC regulars, old guard, veterans, what-have-you, are a mixed bunch. There are a couple of posters here who I know for sure were at the "top" and had visible leadership roles, others were WOWs, some were in Fellow Laborers, some were never involved in a "program" and were never leaders of any sort. There are GSC posters who were involved in TWI for 30 years, others were barely in for a cup of (lukewarm, served in a reused stryo cup) coffee. Some of the regulars still hold onto some TWI doctrine, some are or were involved in spinoffs, some are active in mainstream churches, some are adherents of others faiths, some are atheists or agnostics. We're hardly a pack...sometimes it seems that way, but often it's just a pack of two or three!

Worth repeating!

Steve: Perhaps the translation "given by inspiration of God" isn't a bad translation I believe that Wierwille's pseudo-intellectual and shallow understanding of biblical languages often (usually?) led him to wrong conclusions about what words really meant. A common TWI methodology was to look at the root word and assume that its derivative retained the exact meaning. While the two elements of theopneustos do indeed come from the words for "God" and "breath", pneustos, in the form pneuma that we are familiar with of course is usually translated "spirit" - and has more than one meaning. My opinion about the bible is that at best it is the musings and thoughts of men who were inspired to write down what their subjective experience of God was. Not very rigorous, but perhaps that will give you an idea (btw - while I'm not an atheist, I have long given up the belief that the bible contains "the truth" or that it has any divine origins - I find that scholars like Bart Ehrman articulate my opinions about the bible pretty well)

Or accepting evidence...

There's a number of books of the bible that are pseudonymous, there's many reasons, among them the style of writing differing from I Peter, the date it was written etc that lead most scholars to conclude that II Peter was not written by the Apostle Peter. Tacking the name of a famous person onto an epistle was pretty commonplace. Sincerely Peter the Apostle