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Politics and TWI


chockfull
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Ok so before this gets banned out of the gate let me set the framework.  In the US of A, sometimes otherwise referred to as ‘Murica, we have a two party political system.  Some other free republics also have this construct.

I personally would prefer a four viable party system so that we have more options and aren’t restricted to a Tweedledee vs Tweedledum choice in geriatric medicine like we are currently.

However, while I was in TWI I totally noticed a complete affiliation that was unspoken to a single political party.  This was all done hush-hush and never from a stage or teaching platform.   Why?  Political affiliations would ruin a non-profit tax status and be grounds to disqualify TWI.

I remember being on staff at TWI and the undercurrent of “suggestion” which is ever present was to get out and vote for our preferred political party.  

Why does TWI present a complete falsehood to our government that they are politically unbiased?  How can they get away with it without losing tax exempt status?

Mods this isn’t a political discussion so consider merits before ban hammering it.  It is not presenting a one party opinion but discussing the attachments politically of a cult.

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I'm not American but there seems to be a lot of higher up "Christian" ministers who have publicly spoke of their preferred candidate and based it on scripture.  I wonder how they get away with it.

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10 hours ago, Charity said:

I wonder how they get away with it.

Peer pressure most likely. Belonging is not unique to cultic or religious organizations.

 

Although the importance of social relationships, cultural identity, and — especially for indigenous people — place have long been apparent in research across multiple disciplines (e.g., ; ; Carter et al., 2017; ; ; Vaillant, 2012), the year 2020 — with massive bushfires in Australia and elsewhere destroying ancient lands, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., amongst other events — brought the importance of belonging to the forefront of public attention. Belonging can be defined as a subjective feeling that one is an integral part of their surrounding systems, including family, friends, school, work environments, communities, cultural groups, and physical places (). Most people have a deep need to feel a sense of belonging, characterized as a positive but often fluid and ephemeral connection with other people, places, or experiences ().

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In twi,  things like that went on because vpw wanted it (as long as he was in charge), since he'd set up twi to have the Head Cheese wield autocratic power without checks or balances.  (The same, obviously, applies to his successors, who also enjoy power limited only by the now-pitiful reach of twi.)

So, vpw wanted it.  The question then becomes....why did vpw want it?  vpw was all about power- the wielding of power, and the appearance of prestige and influence.  (It's why he got his doctorate at a degree mill and then INSISTED on being called "Doctor."  I'm three times the fake doctor he was, and you don't see me insisting on "doctor.")    

So, some of it was to try to make twi seem influential, which made vpw seem influential.  Another part of it was something different.  Other than vpw's abilities to con people, he was actually pretty stupid.   He always cut corners on his education, and never learned if he could plagiarize instead, and tried not to bother with anything else.  When it came to other types of con, vpw fell for them.  If you had a fake supernatural con, vpw would swallow it and teach the Advanced Class it was real and NOT a sleight-of-hand trick.  (I believe there's real stuff, but it's a lot rarer than the cons, and conflating the two is wrong no matter what.)   

One of vpw's sources for conning was the John Birch Society, a bunch of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.  He had a hotline to all their pet weird ideas. He would listen to them, then announce all of their stuff and pretend he was getting Divine Revelation about all of it.  Rock and roll being of the devil? Yeah, the JBS and all their cronies.   So, if the JBS endorsed candidates, vpw went along and endorsed them also.  Stupid of him?  Yes.  It makes about as much sense as a news-anchor reading ANYTHING off the teleprompter, even if it made no sense or was inappropriate.  But the same thing in the sense that it was mindless parroting of something from someone else.   twi was actually pretty effective at teaching all sorts of people to do mindless parroting of all sorts of things.   Society has LOTS of people who do that, but twi made a policy of it, and we're here discussing them, of course.

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The idea of separating religion from politics is, in historical terms, a fairly recent phenomenon. The church has been intertwined with the state ever since there was a state (or a church). If the Bible is to be believed, it is impossible to separate the nation of Israel from the worship of the God of Israel.

That doesn't change because the First Amendment exists. Belief in God remains a political asset to be appreciated, expected, and yes, exploited. The left invoked faith to campaign against slavery, the right to campaign against abortion. I would hardly expect TWI to be any different. The Jehovah's Witnesses are rather unique in their resolve to divorce the religion from the politics of this world. The Catholic Church openly embraces political causes, if not parties. Some of the literature I've seen would suggest they care more about opposition to abortion than they do about opposition to the death penalty, but their stances on each of those issues are otherwise equally strong.

I am confident that if you find a church that doesn't try to tell you one way or another how to vote, you have found the exception rather than the rule.

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Ironic, I just get a very stern message from Modcat warning me of no more POLITICAL POSTS on this forum...log on and HELLO...politics politics politics...

well at least this might LIVEN up the place hahahahahmmnnn

As to the original posters question of whether Murica should adopt 'multi party' elections....Please Don't...it has been the bane of democracy here in Australia and New Zealand...Imagine a 'crooked' party doing backroom deals with an equally crooked party to get majority coalition. It's corrupt over there NOW without giving the regime in charge even more tools to weaponize.

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Actually, Allan, yours was the most "political"  of posts on this thread so far.  It's a discussion of how politics was used in twi.  Nobody has had to post any politics, just what happened in twi, and how vpw pushed certain agendas.    Other than a single sentence in the first thread, this thread has been " about"  politics without containing politics. 

(BTW, chockfull, my experience has been the opposite of Allan's, which is not terribly surprising because we don't live in the same country. Around here, a more-than-two-parties system increases the chance the public's actually represented, and fringe groups don't hijack a major party.)

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10 hours ago, waysider said:

TWI made an attempt to inject its influence into a political campaign in Maine in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It didn't go well.

vpw always inflated the importance of any public figure- in order to claim twi was significant because it contained vip's.   So, ONE NFL player and vpw went crazy.  One COACH for tennis and even lcm dropped her name.  So, small wonder vpw wanted in when someone ostensibly IN twi was running for public office. No, it did not go well for or with H@yes G@h@g@n of Maine.

https://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/topic/22444-hayes-gahagan/#comment-527243

 

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14 hours ago, Allan said:

Ironic, I just get a very stern message from Modcat warning me of no more POLITICAL POSTS on this forum...log on and HELLO...politics politics politics...

well at least this might LIVEN up the place hahahahahmmnnn

As to the original posters question of whether Murica should adopt 'multi party' elections....Please Don't...it has been the bane of democracy here in Australia and New Zealand...Imagine a 'crooked' party doing backroom deals with an equally crooked party to get majority coalition. It's corrupt over there NOW without giving the regime in charge even more tools to weaponize.

Thx for the note from an experienced perspective.  Maybe it’s a phenomenon with the grass being greener on the other side and the lack of options we have here that’s influencing my feelings on that front.  

I guess our choices are crooked party backroom deals and insurrection.

Politics is messy.  Thx mods for bending rhe rules to accommodate a civil conversation that discusses government and politics as related to TWI.

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“…question of whether Murica should adopt 'multi party' elections....Please Don't...it has been the bane of democracy here in Australia and New Zealand...Imagine a 'crooked' party doing backroom deals with an equally crooked party to get majority coalition. It's corrupt over there NOW without giving the regime in charge even more tools to weaponize.”

 

This is not difficult to imagine at all. To presume this isn’t already going on is, well, presumptuous and a failure of imagination.

And we already have multi-party elections. 

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TWI pushed some really bizarre political views, but he didn't really have any knowledge (IMO) of what the party/ies were about.  They certainly didn't have any wider perspective.

I can't comment on VPW personally, only from what I've heard of old teachings and what other people said he said - he was dead shortly before I got involved.

I can speak to what LCM said, and some of that was very odd (but then, he was odd himself).  Not being American, I let most of it wash over me.  But I did resent his comments on the EU and the nations of Europe having a common border.  He was over the top in his remarks, so I kinda whitewashed them.  Ite was clear he had no idea of non-US politics, of collaboration, of wanting something bigger than themselves.  Stupid man.  The EU with all its countries is still not as big as the USA with all its states - did he think, then, that the States should all secede and become completely independent of each other and of pan-continental legislation?  Each State to its own - in everything?

And his lack of knowledge of European political history, and why the EU (formerly EEC) came about - if he'd had an iota of background he'd've thought rather differently.  

My thoughts?  Get your hands off what you know nothing about!  You stick to preaching the gospel.  Leave politics, and particularly European politics, well alone!!!

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Having said that, hey, Christianity is very counter-cultural - and thus political. 

But don't line up with "party" ideas. 

Line up with what the Bible says, the best you understand it.  Read and think thoroughly.  Do NOT take your pseudo-minister's word for it. 

Above all, choose with compassion.  

You probably shouldn't even take any political party's word for what they say they're going to do.  Read their manifesto; get the small print.  But even then, any govt minister will weasel out from manifesto commitments by saying that circumstances have changed / there isn't the budget / this latest emergency takes precedence.  Whatever.

 

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On 3/24/2024 at 3:49 PM, Charity said:

I'm not American but there seems to be a lot of higher up "Christian" ministers who have publicly spoke of their preferred candidate and based it on scripture.  I wonder how they get away with it.

Yes, especially in the USA.  Thankfully, that doesn't happen in churches in the UK.  Not any that I'm aware of, anyway.  Likely if any church minister here said, Vote for Candidate X, or Vote for Party Y, they'd get roundly roasted by the PCC and many members of the congregation.

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What I found in TWI is that so much was governed by unspoken rules so that people had to know these unspoken rules or face consequences.  The politics side of that is one of those scenarios.  You have little lemmings pulling up to little voting boxes and all pulling the same levers because that’s what good lemmings do.  There was no diversity of opinion or thought.  This is the biggest travesty - environments for producing Stepford robots with no propensity for freedom of thought or opinion.

That describes the Ways vision of Christianity.  Not a worldwide body of Christ composed of members in particular with different ideas and talents, but rather a uniform stamped copy of the perfect “believer” not Christian because that’s a bad word.  They all vote the same way, hold the same opinions and it is all masked under what they call being “likeminded”.  It is a mental hold on people starting with “the class” and driving towards “likemindedness”

And all of it is unspoken from stages to avoid the threat of paying taxes on earnings.

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2 hours ago, chockfull said:

What I found in TWI is that so much was governed by unspoken rules so that people had to know these unspoken rules or face consequences.  The politics side of that is one of those scenarios.  You have little lemmings pulling up to little voting boxes and all pulling the same levers because that’s what good lemmings do.  There was no diversity of opinion or thought.  This is the biggest travesty - environments for producing Stepford robots with no propensity for freedom of thought or opinion.

“I’ll tell you what to think.” - L. Craig Martindale

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2 hours ago, Junior Corps Surviver said:

This post got me thinking about something that's baffled me for decades. I often think about TWi when Chritians are so strongly pro-life. Other than The Way, are there any fundamentalist groups who are openly pro choice?  

This is not a post meant to debate abortion. 

At the risk of veering off into a political debate (but hoping not to do so), I understand TWI/Wierwille to have developed a position that was much more about the morality of ministry leaders justifying adultery and providing an escape clause, as it were, when a pregnancy occurred outside of a normal marriage.

 

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15 minutes ago, Rocky said:

At the risk of veering off into a political debate (but hoping not to do so), I understand TWI/Wierwille to have developed a position that was much more about the morality of ministry leaders justifying adultery and providing an escape clause, as it were, when a pregnancy occurred outside of a normal marriage.

 

I would agree with this.  I would also point out that vpw was doing his best to be seen as "counter-cultural" and "cool" to the young folk.   Part of doing that was to say "down" when traditional Christianity said "up."   If you look at both twi and ex-twi, a LOT of time is spent on how wrong most of Christianity is on specific things, and often making the same points decades later about going directly to God and so on, that was surprising when the hippies said it, but is old news decades later.    (Does this mean they're stuck in the 60s and 70s? Probably. They're definitely in a rut.) 

So, if traditional Christianity was for a healthy family and against abortion, vpw was ANTI-FAMILY ("I have no friends when it comes to God's Word!"- said while cutting ties to family at twi's recommendation)  and for abortion.   As was said, the pro-abortion thing had the advantage of being what vpw wanted to say, as it promoted getting rid of children that could interfere with A) sending money to twi     B) blindly following twi      C) keeping it secret that vpw and other leaders were outside their marriages, doing things that could/did result in children. 

If you want to know what the Bible says about some of the related ideas, I started a thread for that here...

https://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/topic/24071-when-is-it-a-person-when-is-it-alive/

 

A related thread meandered a lot, but here it is also.....

https://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/topic/14337-holy-thing/

 

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