This link may have already been posted by someone else, but I thought it was important enough to post again (translation: I'm too lazy to look through all the posts to see if it was).

It links to an article titled "Forget About Forgiving Your Narcissist/ Psychopath: Here's Why".

[www.perpetuaneo.com]

richard m,
methinks you, as onion, a shining diamond. your posts - eloquent, insightful, personal and thoughtful. i cannot help but wonder, as perhaps many that only read and others this post, the degree of your suffering regarding your children. i so wish it could be/have been different for you. it is hard for me to imagine how difficult all these years must have been you, knowing your children were being subjugated to an extremely false narrative which might potentially determine who they were to become. my heart goes out to you if for no other reason that my own heart would be broken were i to be separated from my children as you have. and adding insult to injury, your separation from them was the result of a false narrative which you understood, early on, was poppycock. do please keep shining on.

i spoke on the phone today with nancyb and we spoke of family and how the lw and its congregants were like family to us. the most difficult part of my leaving lw/shiloh was not my fear of being absent of god's blessings, favor or protection; the difficult part was removing myself from a second family, which was only second to my birth family - mother, father and siblings. when i moved to iowa in 1972 i knew no one here, not a single person. hence, lw/shiloh became my 2nd family, my friends and my community - with shared values, belief systems and even needs. that went well for several years until, for me, the proverbial straw that broke this camel's back, violent intercession (you should be grateful, richard, that you were long gone before that "phenomenon").

now i wonder, for those that remain in lw/shiloh grasp, what becomes their straw? for many, seems obvious, as it did/does to nancyb, this is family, this is community and leave it, where does that leave one? i do wonder for them does it come to the choice of the comfort of the familiar or the the courage of facing the unknown by embracing an obvious moral dictate? clearly, it's not so simple as this black and white dichotomy which i just presented but i sincerely believe that at issue is courage and the will to embrace the present rather than past allegiances.
happy trails, prettyboy

p.s. thank you richard

richard m,
i just posted something on this forum that took me 30' to compose and will take readers only 2' tops to read. curious, do you do the same? - my guess is unlikely.

Maybe the shot of whiskey I just had is making me soft in the head or heart, but I wanted to shout out to the people who have bravely been posting on this forum: THANK YOU.

RichardM - I hope you won't be so overwhelmed by the huge response to your post that you feel you have to be silent. But I also know you have a beautiful family and a wonderful life and you have to be selective about your time lest those of us you are so grateful for your information, try to pull you in more deeply than you may want. I appreciate your viewpoint on history (especially the first-hand witness info) but I also really treasure your measured wisdom from the present.

The one thing I think we all have agreed on over the months is, a bunch of people getting free can be a very active, rowdy bunch. Welcome to the freedom fray, one and all.

Cloudwatcher Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> changedagain Wrote:

> > Yes, at root, a con man--nothing more.
> > Meanwhile, I came across this (link below). I
> had
> > no idea that The Church of the Living Word was
> > seeking an answer to the problem of
> homelessness
> > in L.A. County:
> >
> >
> [www.churchofthelivingword.com]
>
>
> What a joke. They want to make people think they
> care to try and bolster the image. It is
> sickening. In all the years--never did we do
> anything for the community and in fact were
> discouraged---it was considered beneath the "real"
> purpose of God.

That's what I recall as well. When I came across this report, it seemed so ludicrous (even for TLWF)--the idea that church leadership would be seeking God for an answer to homelessness while spending time at the Rayen resort. Of course, the ways of God are mysterious. His thoughts are not our thoughts :)
Isaiah 55:8-9

Just a note to get a message to the person who posted on Shiloh Group Facebook page that it was removed prior to people being able to read it. If that person will repost it here perhaps we can get the word out to people

What happens when a leader's prophecies don't happen as foretold? (Or, in the case of TLWF/The Walk, it becomes stunningly obvious that "The Apostle to the Kingdom" was a conman?) Do the cult members realize that something is wrong with the teaching? Or do they go through mental gyrations to keep their beliefs intact? This story about the Christmas the aliens didn't come may sound far-fetched, but the underlying system of believing, no matter what happens, should sound pretty familiar. The research from this situation formed the basis of the book When Prophecy Fails, and the explanation of the psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, first explained by Leon Festinger.

The lesson the researchers learned from all this, as they wrote in the introduction to When Prophecy Fails: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” And when that conviction is as important as the promised salvation coming from the sky, “it may even be less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief and admit one had been wrong.”

The following link comes courtesy of Rick Ross' Cult Education Institute.
[culteducation.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2019 06:28AM by Reepicheep.

Prettyboy, Onion and changedagain:

First, thanks for the replies and concerns. I hope this lump-summed attempt at clarity for both my past and current situations puts it to some ease. I mostly remember Ric and Marti as good kids hardly any better or worse than I was at that age, but smarter than me. My door was always open for them, but you know better than I the forces that were daily working against it. Not their fault. However, What occurred to them after my divorce from that church culture, and that formed their course to maturity afterwards, I do not personally know. I would say to those obviously curious about my thoughts on the allegations of Ric's sexual "misconduct" with underaged girls or other spurious misconduct, if by unbiased adjudication found true, I would have booked him myself. But the present circumstances finds me in some ambivalence; in spite of the law, there are ex-wives, and if I've been informed correctly, at least two "grandkids" to consider. . . . isn't that a moral and ethical dilemma of its own? . . . what a web we weave . . .

As for maybe being "overwhelmed" by questions or comments here, to the contrary, thank you all. Having done multi-person, organized crime conspiracy cases and ten years of plainclothes vice investigations, I'll try to respond to whatever comes up . . .

Regards,

Dick
--

Onion or anyone, how do I get in contact with "fromsouthchicago?"

Dick

Okay, I figured out the private message "stuff." Sent fromsouthchicago a "PM." So far, the way this site works is brilliant. Far cry from back in the 1980s when LA City only had a central a-frame and my staff of researchers at Planning and Research Division were using their own computers for police work . . . thanks . . .