|
In Reply to: Failed prophecy posted by Perry on March 06, 2006 at 19:29:55:
Excerpts from James Penn’s article No Regrets regarding the use of “prophecy” to control members:
http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/No_Regrets
The new wine doctrines became progressively more bizarre. Jesus told us about things never mentioned in the Bible, and Mo rambled on for hours. Genghis Khan, Marilyn, Mao Tsetung (who is the worst mass murderer in recorded history), River Phoenix, Jerry Garcia, and a host of others spoke freely. The poor girls who died in the 1995 Austin accident spoke out. Maria and Peter had the nerve to send prophecies to the man who had lost his wife in that accident. The prophecies were from his dead wife, saying, in effect, "Please don't sue the Family." Unbelievable. Art Linkleter spoke from the grave about children to a member of Maria and Peter's staff. It was embarrassing when they discovered that Art was still alive. Oops.
I soon discovered the truth of the adage, "You can run, but you cannot hide." I could not hide from the new wine. In early 1997, Maria and Peter published a number of GNs about doubts, saying that whoever doubted one teensy bit of the new wine was in dire straits and would eventually doubt all the Letters, the Bible, Jesus, and God. These GNs depressed and frustrated me. In the past I had sincerely tried to "believe it all;" but Maria and Peter would then send some wild, offensive, non-sensical whiz-banger down the pipeline. To believe it all would involve becoming a mindless zombie and suspending all common sense, wisdom, discernment, and Scriptural concept of right and wrong. I couldn't do that. The past had shown that such a mindset bore terrible fruit. Besides, I was capable of rejecting one bizarre prophecy without doubting the Bible and God’s existence. Given all that I had experienced, I thought that some scepticism was pretty healthy, an essential skill to surviving in the Family!
The Gospel According to Trudgy and Zippy: Galatians 1:6
However, and I know I'm getting sidetracked here; maybe this is why so many young people who leave the Family discard all their faith. They have been taught that to doubt one prophecy is to doubt everything, so they toss God out, along with the false prophecies. Apollos once wrote me about this, articulating what he felt were the effects of much of the new wine on Family young people. He's convinced, as I am, that the new wine has unnecessarily stumbled and caused countless young people to forsake their faith, due to confusion and disillusionment. Here's how he expressed it:
I feel that telling young impressionable kids that "this is the voice of God, this is Jesus talking to us, thru this nice little spirit story, thru the gospel according to Trudgy & Zippy, thru these "revelations by all these Casper the friendly ghosts who like to channel with us & dispense their heavenly wisdom & counsel, etc.," takes a very heavy toll on a lot of precious people's lives. When those young people begin to wake up & realize that so much of it is not so, you wind up with a whole bunch of very disillusioned & spiritually stunted kids, who frequently reject the GOOD, the "sincere milk of the Word," the real stuff, the good stuff they've heard, because the foolishness has been exalted to the same stature as the true Word of God. So many kids get fed up & chuck out the whole caboodle once they are old & mature (& I might add courageous) enough to see thru some of the crap.
Disillusionment causes them to forsake ALL their faith, & they toss out Jesus & the Bible along with all the "helpers" & cute little heavenly homilies presented in volumes of so-called spirit stories. "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but will heap to themselves teachers having itching ears, & they shall turn away their ears from the truth, & shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things..." (2Tim.4: 3-5). "But thou, O man of God, flee these things, & follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness. Fight the good fight of faith. ... Avoiding profane & vain babblings, which some professing have erred concerning the faith" (1Tim.6:11, 20-21).
Prophetic Zigging and Zagging
The new wine regularly intruded into every aspect of our pubs work at FCF. Maria and Peter often sent contradictory prophecies to guide us. Apollos and I joked that receiving instructions from Maria and Peter was like an airline pilot being told by flight control to fly from Los Angeles to London. Halfway through the trip, the flight control tells the pilot to alter course and go to Cuba instead, and then rebukes the pilot for not being sensitive enough to "the whispers" to figure it out himself.
On one occasion, in early 1997, Maria and Peter sent Apollos some completely mind-bending whiz-banger prophecies concerning a booklet that he was preparing. After reading the prophecies, I recall looking out the window and saying to myself, "Our days are numbered."
About a year later, we were preparing a poster for use in Africa. Maria and Peter sent us a prophecy saying that Jesus should be depicted as a black African. Apollos and I disagreed with them, and decided to survey some Family Members in Africa about it. They responded that in their opinion, it would be best to portray Jesus as Middle Eastern. We informed Maria and Peter, and they replied with a prophecy saying, "Yeah, good idea, proceed, God agrees too." It was a trial.
Jac Sailor lived in the same WS Home as us, illustrating the GNs. One day he got a cheery note from the GN editor, along with a prophecy saying that Jac was yielded to the devil because the art on one GN was not right. What an edifying comment for someone who had spent most of his adult life in WS, illustrating the GNs.
In the advance copy of a GN, the ghost of Mo said, "As I've always said, 'Money is the root of all evil.'" Well, anyone who knew Mo knew that he never said that. He always emphasised, as does the Bible, that, "The love of money is the root of all evil." Big difference.
When I was editing the Mountain Streams, I worked via email with some of the editors at Research. They would regularly suggest or reject a word change, saying, "I prayed about it, and Mo told me to make that change." Apparently when Mo was not tracking down junk food junkies and gossips, he moonlighted as a copy editor.
This is just some of the foolishness that we endured. At times, it seemed that Maria and Peter had gone through the closet into Narnia, and couldn't figure out how to get back to the real world. The comparison is all the more humorous when you recall that Peter, one of the children in the story, becomes a general and "King Peter the Magnificent" in Narnia. No doubt it was more exciting than the real world!
For me, the ultimate example of this idiocy came six days after I emailed my letter of resignation to Maria and Peter, bluntly explaining everything. It was my birthday, and a member of Maria and Peter's staff, who I knew well, sent me a file containing a birthday prophecy from Mo. It said in part.
DAD SPEAKING:
Hi there son! Happy birthday once again & many happy returns on the day of your birth, just wait till we can have your birthdays Up Here in Heaven! Whew! What shindigs they will be!!
...Well son, you’re on the edge of a new year, a new start & a new vision & I pray for you that you can dig more deeply into the Words of life & that they will lead you & guide down the path you’re on. It’s a straight path & a narrow one, serving the Lord, & you really need a bright light or you can stumble so easily, so keep the light held high & let it light your way
I love you & am praying for you, son. I know it isn’t easy for you. I know you’ve had some hard times, but I also know you’re a mighty man of David, you’re one of my mighty warriors of the Word & you won’t let me down. I love you son, & I’ve been watching out for you & will keep doing so, & keep trying to steer you in the directions you need to go in, so just keep following in the footsteps of the whispers, of the leading of the spirit & your feet will fall right where the Lord wants them, OK?
Well, I just wanted to drop in & wish you a Happy Birthday & pray for you for the new year. ...Amen, son, I love you!! Have a happy birthday. Love, Dad.
Honestly, if Mo was really speaking to Maria and Peter several times a day, surely he would have read my letter! Maria and Peter certainly had. They had received it six days earlier, and I already had their reply in hand. And surely, given Mo's low tolerance for criticism, he would have taken offence at the extremely uncharitable things I had said about him. If he really were alive in some way, he would have viewed me as a heretic. After all, I had dared to say that he, the Emperor, and Maria, the Empress, had no clothes. With all this in mind, would he really be speaking through this staff member with a "business as usual" greeting to me? Of course, this staff member knew nothing about my heresy. If she had, I'm sure the prophecy would have been very different. The scary thing is, these are the prophets who dish out the policy-making prophecies that appear in GNs and effect Family Members the world over.
Maria and Peter have debased the wonderful gift of prophecy. They have twisted and manipulated it to serve their own ends and control the Family, so that it is difficult to believe any of their prophecies. It is similar to taking a stable currency like the Swiss franc, and destroying its value by printing too much, so that it eventually becomes worthless. Their prophecies have become cheap, worthless, fiat spiritual currency, not worth the paper they are printed on.
So that was my take on Maria and Peter's new wine, and their aberrant prophecies. The only way I could deal with the issue was to laugh about it. If I had taken any of it too seriously, I would have probably gone crazy. But even though I discarded it personally, I grew increasingly resentful at how Maria and Peter bullied people into submission with the cudgel of prophecy. My day of reckoning was clearly coming, so I mentally and spiritually prepared for a future outside the Family.
