Oakspear

OK, serious question.

How does the Bible thing work in court?

(".....so help me God.")

edit. Never mind. My friend, Mr. Google, says they don't do the Bible thing anymore.

We as a nation continue to be contradictory about what we mean by not establishing a religion. Public schools cannot have teacher-led prayer, but Congress has a chaplain.

how did we get to sonic screwdrivers ?! wtf ??

Looks like an analogy to me

Well gee by golly there Oakspear,if you are an athiest then I would logically expect you do not believe in the devil either.

A lot of people equate "not believing in God" with folowing or worshipping the Devil

No, I realize by personal experience that a good percentage of athiests practice good morals but on the average, athiests do tend to be less moral than God fearing folk - yes, many God fearing folk are also immoral.

Mileage may vary...I have seen though my own personal experience that religious people in general tend to be less moral than non-religious people, including atheists

I have stated there are no (few) athiests in fox holes; listen my athiest friend, it is true/correct that many soldiers, etc. tend to look to God when their lives are in danger of the exit door. Folks want to cover their bases - it's human.

The folks from "Atheists in Foxholes" (see link on previous post) would disagree. I think the people who reflexively jump to praying when in danger are not atheists (although some might be) but folks who are not habitually religious.

So, tell me athiests, if you believed prior (accepted Jesus Christ) and you now no longer believe then you don't believe in the eternal seed of God placed in you, I got it. Have by chance, in the event you are wrong, what would you say to Jesus at the Bema - now that's the ultimate hypothetical question.

Sounds like a side bet to Pascal's Wager. In the event that you are wrong, what would you say to Allah at the end of time? Or to the Norse gods in Valhalla?

I'm not an atheist, but I like to take their side in discussions :evilshades:/>

Atheists in Foxholes

I always hated starting threads that no one responded to! It damaged my self-esteem!

There are certainly a lot of misconceptions about atheists, a poll taken around the time of the last presidential election (or maybe the one before that) indicated that Americans were less likely to vote for an atheist than someone in any other group

Atheists are assumed to be without morals, to have nothing to live for, that atheism is a "belief" or a religion, that they are unhappy, that they are angry with or rebelling against God, and that there are "no atheists in foxholes", that atheists cannot be patriotic or that they worship the devil.

After reading some threads on faking "the nine" and related topics, it occurs to me that a lot of what God was supposedly telling leadership to have us do was pretty dangerous and sometimes life threatening!

The toe amputation after LEAD was one that stood out. How about the hitchhiking-across-the-country-with-almost-no-money? How about some of the WOW assignments?

During my WOW year Wierwille got some "revelation" to send the WOWs and a bunch of other volunteers to the home town of a Corps guy who was in the hands of some deprogrammers to do...well, it wasn't clear what we were supposed to do, but I had a shotgun pointed at my face during the experience!

Good points about Wierwille's mixing up parts of speech...

My reaction whenever anyone said to me that "believing connotes action" was to think: "No it doesn't" - believing can be passive, or you can act on whatever it is you believe (Wierwille probably didn't know what "connote" meant either!)

After a while I also got a bit confused as to Wierwille's dogmatic separation of the words "faith" and "believing" in the bible, even after we all could clearly see that they were translated from the same root word: faith is a noun, belief is a noun, to believe is a verb...

The definition of "the manifestation of believing" also seemed pretty contrived and based on a lot of nothing; maybe because of a a garbled understanding of "manifestations of the spirit" as nine special magical powers

The whole concept of "believing for" something owes more to magical thinking advocates like Florence Scovall Shinn than the bible. Someone tells you something, you either believe it or you don't; something is written in the bible, you either believe it or you don't - I guess I don't see anywhere in the bible where gritting your teeth and picturing something real clearly brings it to pass...

But the result was never MORE people. It got to the point where we were told to split a six person twig to give the next incoming stump coordinator his own. No kidding. He took over my twig, told HQ he split it in just two months, and gave me half back. Instant growth!! :rolleyes:/> He kicked someone out during that time so we were actually back to six. The funny thing is TWI then recorded us as a growing area and he eventually got promoted to limb coordinator!!!!

JT

Oh yeah...fake growth! An outgoing Limb Coordinator had us split five anemic twigs into ten that were on life support and called it a branch and a "twig area". The incoming Coordinator thought he was coming to take over a thriving, growing area...surprise! With the people leaving to go WOW, into the Corps or back to wherever they came from before going WOW, we were back down to three or four twigs in short order. This was in the eighties.

Then in the early 2000's we had to maintain two twigs in town that had barely enough adults for one because Martindale mandated that all Way Corps on the field had to be "leaders of tens" which he interpreted to mean two or more twigs.

I want to scream, "Haven't we all been deceived?"

Yup...we have

"Mainstream" Christians mock the Mormons for their so-called crazy beliefs and practices, but don't seriously look at their own

My Catholic family shook their heads at my "cult" involvement while explaining away the flaws in their own church

Everybody else's religion is just nuts...not the truth that we have!

..and why assume that "for our learning" necessarily excludes "written to us?

Here's another answer from the non-target audience!

I believed in the Trinity because that's what my church told me to believe.

I stopped believing in the Trinity because Wierwille did a good job of undermining the credibility of mainstream churches and played a swift shell game with bible verses

Similar to Raf, I now think that no matter which position you take you have to explain away verses that contradict your position. My position now is that "The Bible" doesn't teach that Jesus is God or that he isn't, but writers of some books taught that he is God and some didn't and we are left trying to make disparate agendas "fit like a hand in a glove".

Sorry, I have no memories of something like that. I left in mid 80's and I was a joyful Noise lover as well as Country Caravan and Good Seed lover. There's no comparison! Of course this is my opinion, and my preference ONLY. Others are definitely free to have their own opinion and preferences as well.

No matter what the ones musical taste, the music in the 70's and early 80's was better NOT because of a specific genre, but because there wasn't as much central control over the content and musicians had more opportunity to sing and play from the heart.

It was when I applied the "outsider test" to what I believed that I moved on from Christianity.

I started by questioning what Martindale was peddling in WayAP; comparing what he was saying to existing Way doctrine

That led me to questioning what Wierwille taught; comparing what he taught to his own "keys to the Word's interpretation

That led me to look at the various offshoots, all teaching different things, all based supposedly on the same "keys"

That led me to question whether there even could be a right dividing of the bible

Which led me to ask myself why I thought there was a good reason to believe that the bible was any truer than anything else

For a long time I maintained an agnostic position about the bible, reasoning that it might be true, but did not see any evidence to support that position

Eventually I came to believe that it definitely wasn't handed down by any deity and that it contained a lot of factual errors

More recently I have formed the opinion that the bible is not only not God-inspired, but on the whole is a pretty immoral book (especially the OT)

This all took years...

On Bart Ehrman's facebook page today Ehrman addresses a critic:

If a text says precisely what you think it could not have said, then all you need to do is claim that originally it must have said something else.

Didn't we get a lot of this in The Way?

(Ehrman isn't saying to do this, he is mocking someone who does do it

I got involved due to a series of events:

My cousin, with whom I was very close, worked in the same office as the guy who was the local Twig Leader. He witnessed to her and invited her to Twig meetings. In retrospect, I believe it was a "date & switch" situation.

At Christmastime that year I was in my cousin's house (she lived upstairs from me in a two-family house) and her mother showed me a Christmas card which was signed "God loves you and I do too". My Aunt asked me to attend some of these Twig meetings to keep an eye on my cousin

At the time I was beginning to question my family's religion and was investigating other religions, as well as having been exposed to other faiths in college.

What I heard at my first Twig interested me intellectually and I was intrigued enough to continue attending. At some point I visited my church's clergyman and asked him to clarify some of the differences between what my church and The Way taught. His answers were flip and unsatisfying, I signed up for PFAL that night

Within 2 years I was going WOW, far from home

There were titles in the New Testament:

diakonos/deacon = one who ministers or serves

pretty humble title, for sure

but there was also

presbuteros/presbyter = elder

and

episkopos/bishop = overseer

these two don't really seem like "servant" titles to me

I was a NYer who got involved in the late 70's - Mr. Fallon and I were in the same Foundational Class together - although I never went back after leaving to "go WOW" in 1980.

It always seemed to be growing those first few years before I moved. There were a couple of branches in each of the counties on Long Island (3 for a time in Queens) and a small Spanish language branch as well. There were regular classes and Twigs scattered over a pretty wide area. The Way Home that I lived in used to pack 'em in for our Sunday 10:00 Fellowship (which we perversely had at 10PM! But, and here's the big but...few or no Way Corps grads.

The Area (later called a Territory) was run by an interim Corps couple and later Corps grads, but all 8 or 9 branches were run by non-Corps, and in at least one case, by a non-Advanced Class grad. Can't say much about what happened after, but rumors reached me out West that it just wasn't the same when more control from above in the form of Way Corps started taking over the branches and later the twigs

...BUt I would argue that TWI was a bit more clever than what you're describing. I think they did a fantastic job of teaching critical thinking skills, as long as those skills were directed elsewhere. Spotting the flaws in other people's positions and arguments was something they did exceptionally well. They (we) just couldn't apply the same discerning eye to themselves (ourselves) in terms of what TWI taught.

That was what I saw (in hindsight of course)

TWI did teach us to question, to analyze, to think, but only outward, never at what TWI was teaching

The only people who I ever observed living the "abundant life" (defined from a physical/financial perspective) were those who had mad etheir pile before getting involved in TWI, or inherited wealth.

Our local Twig Fuehrer inherited the fully paid-for house that he lived in when his parents died in a horrible car crash and then lectured the rest of us on how easy it was to own your own home without going into debt. Another guy owned a bunch of rental properties and then sold them all off when he took the PFAL class. The rest of us didn't see too much abundance.

While I'm far from rich right now, I've seen more "abundance" since I left TWI in 2001

What they should do (and have done) is NOT celebrate Christmas AT ALL. Not come up with their own version of it. They should get honest like the Jehovah Witnesses if they don't agree with any of it. Instead, they have to "improve" on the holiday because they are such Know-It-Alls and know so much better than everyone else the best way to clebrate Happy Household Holiday. TWI always had be BETTER and DIFFERENT because they are God's Chosen Household and superior to all the rest of humanity.

I agree with you.

It never made sense to me why we were "celebrating" Christmas without calling it Christmas

I can still recite John 10:10 in Spanish...

Christmas in The Way

If we weren't to be observers of days or seasons

and Jesus wasn't born in December

why did we do anything for December 25th?

ummmm...getting reamed because during a game of social volleyball my wife dived for a ball in front of me...showed the mog very clearly that she led the marriage and I needed to 'man up' ...yepppp :biglaugh:/>

Ah...spiritualizing sports, always a good one, especially if the mini-MOG was in an y way athleticly inclined.

Got screamed at during a game of kickball because I questioned an illegal move

I understood not celebrating Christ's birth in December when he was (according to Wierwille) born in September

I understood not perpetuating the pagan obsrrvances

I understood that we were not be obsrrvers of days of seasons

but...

The Way pretty much did everything everyone else did except calling it "Household Holiday", all the while hectoring people who said "Merry Christmas" and mocking "inaccurate" Nativity scenes. Way people often had trees and decorations, gave gifts and took the day off from work.

What about it was a "household" holiday?

And "Happy Ho-Ho" just sounded stupid

The use of the term "ABS" annoys me even more than the term "Abundant Sharing" in that it is using not only the made-up Way Int'l term, but the blue financial form abbreviation. But that's just me.

I stopped handing my money over to The Way Int'l when I was kicked out in 2001. I immediately began to see my finances improve. In fact I eventually stopped believing that the Bible was in any way divinely inspired and continued to see my finances improve.

Not only was tithing and going beyond tithing mandatory if one wanted to remain in good odor within The Way Int'l, but during the Martindale years there was frequent pressure to increase the percentage of "sharing".

Our Way Corps leader was leaning on me at one time to jack up my percentage - I didn't do it - he thought I did and I didn't correct him. My wife and I bought a car and he gushed about how we had been "blessed" due to my increased giving. I corrected him and told him that I had not in fact increased my percentage of giving. He sarcastically said "So you were able to afford the car merely by savings and budgeting?" As if there were something wrong with that