An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part I

One of the criticisms of the Bible that is tossed about is that there's no proof that any of it happened, or that there's no contemporaneous confirmation of its contents. One of the most attention getting statements that I have read in recent years is there are indeed historical documents regarding the life of Jesus Christ...the four gospels. To those of us with a non-religious orientation that statement sounds ridiculous. Of course they're not historical documents, they're religious texts! The people who wrote them had an agenda! Yes, both of those statements are true, the gospels are religious texts and they were written by people with an agenda. We've all heard the saying "History is written by the victors", which is just a different way of saying that history is written by people with an agenda...always. 

Over the last few years I listened to a few history-themed podcasts - the history of Rome, of Byzantium, of the successive Persian Empires. In each of them I was struck by how often the only information that we have about an event was written decades or generations after the event took place. How there are often gaps in lists of rulers that can only be filled in by speculation. How the only contemporaneous documentation of an era has been long lost and all we have are fragments by historians quoting earlier historians. While there are exceptions, for the most part ancient historians were employed by their rulers to make them look good, or to make the ruler's opponents look bad. Or it was a citizen of the winning side wanting to paint his people in glory. Or maybe it was the losing side trying to depict their people as something other than abject losers. Yes. They had an agenda.  

The writers of the Gospels had an agenda too, which doesn't make them any better or worse than any other writings from that time period. The first of the surviving Gospels, "Mark" was most likely written around 70 C.E., i.e, around 40 years after Jesus' ministry. This gap in time is brought up a lot to disparage the authenticity of the Gospels, but it was not unusual, especially since it is likely Jesus' early followers were illiterate or at least not educated enough to put together a narrative like you see in any of the Gospels. So a written account during or immediately following Jesus' life would not be expected. The utter lack of any originals of the Gospels or even the epistles, or even any copies dating any earlier than hundreds of years after Jesus' life is also cited as problematic, yet you'd be hard pressed to find an original edition of any of the classical writings, or any writings that have as many extant manuscripts as does the Bible. 

 Historians will examine any historical document to determine, not only its authenticity, but to discover any biases that the author had; they also have a number of ways to test the reliability of the claims made in any history, any ancient biography. Unless one is of the opinion that The Bible is the revealed Word of God, inspired by God Himself, it makes sense to subject The Bible to the same scrutiny that any other historical document would be. 

For most people, however, The Bible is an either-or proposition. Either it's God's Word delivered via prophets of God to His people, or it's a book of fables with no truth in it whatsoever. (Of course there are intermediate positions - some believers admit that some passages in The Bible may be metaphorical while some disbelievers accept that there's some decent morals and ethics in it.) 

In this series I take the position that there is good reason to accept that there was an historical Jesus that the New Testament was based upon, but that not only are there contradictions regarding him among the different books, but that Jesus wasn't who most people think he was. I'll be touching on the milieu in which Jesus lived, the Jewish scriptures that he was taught, contradictions between how the Gospels differ from the message of Paul in his epistles, how how it all morphed into "The Church". 

And off we go!

Sports

Despite having removed "being a sports fan" from the lists of things that describe me, I have absolutely no problem with people who are sports fans. Even the "rabid" ones, but I just don't get it any more. (By the way, if you see me wearing my NY Mets cap - I know absolutely nothing about the current version of the team and only wear it as a sign that I am a New Yorker)

There's a lot of things that perplex me about sports fandom. I'll start with New York fandom, since a lot of people in my adopted state of Nebraska think that the fact that I'm not from here explains my disinterest in the local college sports teams, especially the football team.

New York Football Teams: in my view, there's only one New York NFL team, and that's the Buffalo Bills. Both the "New York" Giants and "New York" Jets play their home games in New Jersey, and have for decades. Yet New York football fans happily refer to both teams as New York teams. They're not only out in the suburbs of their eponymous city, as many sports teams are, but in a whole 'nother STATE! It's true that both teams started their existence in New York City, but the Giants have been a New Jersey team since 1976 and the Jets followed soon thereafter. 

Sports vs. Education: I fully understand that professional sports teams, and even popular college teams are good for business. It makes a certain kind of sense for donors to pour their discretionary funds into new stadiums or even for cities to offer big tax breaks rather than funding its educational institutions. Sorts fans spend money. But high school sports? I'm not criticizing the existence of high school sports, but the priority that is often placed on them. When my step-daughter was in high school she participated in several sports. Coaches thought nothing of requiring players to devote many hours to practice or to observing other teams when homework got neglected. Out of town games kept them up late on "school nights". The track team regularly pulled team members out of class to go to most-of-the-day meets. Class was sometimes cancelled to facilitate a tournament. 

The Two Sides of Criticism: Sports fans love to criticize every move a coach makes, but at the same time will get nasty if criticism comes from the wrong quarter. The fans of a team that isn't doing so well will spend hours debating the relative merits of their team's game day strategy.  They call for the coach to be fired over losses. They wait in the queue to comment on sports radio talk shows. But some fans will try to shut down criticism with the position that unless you're actually a current or former coach or player you have no grounds to criticize, because you can't do any of it yourself, so you have no grounds to point fingers. (My position is that if you have a high-profile job that depends on thousands of people being excited about your work, and you accept the adulation when you're doing well, accepting the criticism is part of the job) College sports isn't much better, although more of the anger is directed at the coaching staff since players, being students, get rotated out every few years. Some fans will defect complaints about a team's losses by pointing out that "they're just kids", while having no problem putting those same "kids" on a pedestal and subjecting them to hero worship when the team is winning. 

"It's OUR Team - Why Aren't You a Fan?": I saw this as a transplant from the East Coast to Nebraska. Even when I was a sports fan, football never interested me, so I was indifferent to the local college team. This apparently wasn't good enough. Obnoxious local fans intimated that there was something wrong with me for not enthusiastically rooting for the home team. This introduced me to a phenomenon that I'm sure exists wherever there are sports teams - the locals expect new arrivals to jettison their loyalties to their former city's teams and taking on the local boys, while locals, if they move away, fully expect to retain their team loyalties. One of those mysteries. 

The Glory Days: In any sports league, division or conference there tend to be "dynasties". One team, for various reasons, dominates and wins a few championships. These sports dynasties don't last forever though. For various reasons the top dogs get replaced by the new dogs. This leads to two differing yet related behaviors. Fans of teams who were regularly beaten by championship winners experience a sense of schadenfreude when their former tormenters aren't so good any more. While beating them while they were on top might have been an accomplishment worth bragging about, beating them years after their winning days have faded away isn't much to brag about. The other side of this is the fans of the former golden boys haven't forgotten those glory days. When they are being mocked by their opponents for being thrashed in a blowout, their retort is to brag about championships that took place before the current players were born. My own local college team is in this category. Teams that easily beat them today are giddy with celebratory excitement that they beat a struggling team with a losing record, while the loser's fans console themselves that at least they're has-beens and not never-beens despite being losers in the present. 

Loyalty Doesn't Go Both Ways: Once upon a time a player on a professional team might spend a majority of his career with one team. As a fan, it was easy to have your favorite players - you might even switch teams if the team had the audacity to trade your favorite. (My dad was a New York Rangers hockey fan. In his youth they traded his guy to the Montreal Canadiens and he became a lifelong Montreal fan) These days players are compensated better and have more opportunities to get the best deal for themselves by negotiating with different teams. They are, rightly so, more concerned with their own future and lack a loyalty and connection to the cities where they play. Many don't even live in their team's cities in the off-season. So, have fun cheering on your team, but they don't really care about you or your city.

Everyone has something that entertains them. For many that's sports - not me though! 

Science and Religion: Do They Have Objective Existence?

Not too long ago I read a Facebook post that claimed that Religion did not exist without people to believe it, but that with Science, it didn't matter whether people believed it or not. I ended up getting into an augment with a guy who attempted to "prove" (his version of) religion by repeated utilization of strawmen, goalpost moving and appeal to authority among other logical fallacies. 

There were other, more logical arguments from others, but the way that the meme was worded left a lot of room for imprecision. For example, what was meant by "religion", or for that matter "science"? There are a lot of things about religion that you have to "take on faith", i.e., there is no way to prove or disprove them. Science, on the other hand, is all about proving things, even though there's a great number of things that cannot be proven (yet), but scientists have put forth their best estimate, based on available observations. Yet "science" is not a thing, it's not a belief, it's a process for determining how things are. The thing about science is that its conclusions change in the face of new evidence. While it does take people, i.e. scientists, to work out the truth, the whole goal is to discover how things are, based ultimately on observations. The observations lead to predictions, which, if they turn out to be correct, lead to a theory of the way things are. Can a scientist draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence? Do scientists disagree among themselves as to what the underlying truth is? Yes and yes. But that underlying truth is true is what it is no matter who believes it. 

Religion, in all it's myriad forms, is also in some way an attempt to explain why things are the way they are. Unlike science, religion usually doesn't change its doctrines in the light of new evidence, but doubles down on its original explanations and attempts to make the observable facts fit the preconceived doctrine. While a true believer may insist that the existence of their god is an objective fact, in reality there is no objective test to verify the existence of any god. This would be fine if believers would be content to act on their faith, to live according to the ethical tenets allegedly handed down by their god, privately. However, many religious people insist on requiring everyone to adhere to their interpretation of their religion, and making religious texts the law of the land. Such people set out to prove scientifically that their religion is true, or at least indicate how scientific theories are not inconsistent with their religion. 

Before I go on, let me make clear that I have no problem with people basing their lives on their religion. There's a lot of good in most "holy" books, and great ethical and moral guidelines and examples of how to live a good life. I have a problem when they try to force their beliefs on the rest of us, or suggest that those who disbelieve are stupid for not believing. I look askance at those who act ethically only because a god allegedly told them to act ethically, or due to fear of divine wrath, rather than because it's the right thing to do. 

During my discussion with the aforementioned religious guy on Facebook, I was treated to all manner of attempted debunking of my points as well as attempts to "prove scientifically" that the Bible, and therefore Christianity, is true. I had made a statement that if all the adherents of a religion died and all their literature disappeared, then that religion would cease to exist. That seems pretty straightforward, but he repeatedly challenged me to prove my point, which he insisted was unscientific and without evidence. Of course it's without evidence! It hasn't happened! It's a hypothetical situation that's self-explanatory. It's axiomatic: if there's no one left who believes in a religion's tenets, and all evidence of their existence is gone, in what sense would that religion still exist? And that's the difference between science and religion in the context of objective existence: what we know about the world due to science is still true, and could still be proved to be true, if every scientist and everything written about their discoveries were to disappear from the face of the earth. It might take a while for anyone to figure it out again, but it would not be any less true. Religious belief does not exist independently of the believers. Believers might believe that it does, but they can't prove it. 

Many believers, unsatisfied with living a moral life according to the teachings of the faith's profits, want to find physical proof that their holy books are factual accounts. (It's part of their mission to impose their "truth" on the rest of us) They have gone about this in a variety of ways.

One method is by "logical" argument. My discussion opponent last week brought up Aquinas. Aquinas'  first proof stated that since we can see things changing all around us, and that each change was initiated by something else, and that chain of causation can't be infinitely long, there must be something that causes change without changing itself. According to Aquinas, this everyone understands to be God. His second proof is similar. In this proof, he observes that everything has a cause, and, like the first proof, he states that the chain of causation cannot be infinitely long. He concludes that there must be a "first cause" that was not caused by anything else. Again, like the first proof, he assumes that everyone understands that this is God. What is generally not understood about Aquinas’ “proofs” are not only not proofs, but he did not intend them to be viewed as such. Aquinas believed not only that the existence and attributes of God were not self evident, but were beyond mankind’s ability to understand. They were, on the other hand, a way to explain God “in layman’s terms”, possibly as much to himself as to anyone else. Think of a much simpler explanation (which is probably apocryphal) - St.  Patrick’s explanation of The Trinity by comparing it to a three leaf clover. The analogy didn’t prove anything, but assisted in understanding. Most attempts at “logical” proofs for God are like this: they’re less evidence-based and more like a way for a believer to convince himself, and is unlikely to convince a skeptic. Check out this link for a list of various "proofs" for God's existence. A further weakness in any "proof" is that they generally "prove" the existence of a generic creator entity. Even assuming that there must be a creator to have a creation, a first cause in order to have any effects, there is nothing to require that the creator is specifically your version. 

Those who hold to the belief that something must have created everything, or at least set in motion, subscribe to the corollary that although everything else had to have a precursor, somehow God was exempt. That God did not need to be created, that he always existed. But once you postulate that there exists something (or someone) that always existed, what prevents there from being other somethings that always existed? There are strains of theoretical physics that theorize a universe that did not have a moment of creation. 

Proofs based on archeology have become pretty popular. They’re also incredibly feeble. No one is suggesting that none of the people and places mentioned in The Bible existed. It can be confirmed that there was a Roman official named Pontius Pilate around the beginning of the Common Era. There is an inscription on a monument dating around 900 B.C. referring to "The House of David". Some of the cities mentioned in the Old Testament have been dug up. But archeology minded believers will latch on to any discovery that confirms that a place or a person existed as if that confirms everything in The Bible. Never mind all the archeology that disproves parts of The Bible, or historical records that contradict the biblical ones. Those believers will insist are wrong. Why? Because they contradict The Bible. Even if every person in The Bible can be verified to have existed, that does not confirm that the supernatural events or entities therein are real. Anyone can write a book that is set in historically verified milieus. Back in my late teens I read James Michener's book, "Centennial" as well James Clavell's "Shogun". Both made use of real people, events and locations out of history. But all of the main characters in both books were fictional and the stories were made up as well. I can't claim that the family tree in "Centennial" is accurate just because there really is a state called Colorado or a tribe called the Cheyenne. Or that the adventures of Blackthorne actually happened just because Shoguns were a real thing in 16th century Japan. To cite a more ridiculous example: Spider-Man isn't real just because I happen to know from being there that Forest Hills, Queens is a real place. 

The difference between science and religion is that science isn't attempting to explain the world by spinning plausible (for a certain value of plausible) but unprovable stories. Science is about constructing a framework that helps us understand the nuts and bolts, the "what" and the "how". That framework is looking at the world and making predictions based on what can be seen and adjusting those predictions based on ongoing observations. Religion is based on the construction of a framework more on how we want things to be, rather than how they necessarily are. Religion at its best is about hope, it's about how to live peaceably in the society of others, how to treat others, how to be the best person that it's possible to be. It's about building a philosophy that enables us to do all those things. If it helps someone to believe that all that is the plan of some invisible and objectively undetectable entity in order to be a good person, then so it is. But the best of religion doesn't require a god, it only requires that one acts in a godly way. 

Managers - Post Pandemic #5 - What the Hell Happened to Customer Service?

Once upon a time business competed mainly on one aspect of their business: value. Was the quality of the product worth the price they were charging? Was the product of such sterling quality that the price was out of reach for most consumers? Was the price super-affordable but the product broke down soon after purchase? Companies looked for the balance between price and quality and battled with competitors on that basis. Then came Walmart. Most retailers couldn't compete with Walmart on price, and were often selling the same products, so they had to emphasize that ephemeral aspect of the buying experience: customer service. 

The phrase "the customer is always right" predated Walmart, but surely came into its own as a strategy to lure people away from the Bentonville Behemoth. No action was too servile if it meant keeping a customer from defecting to the low price leader down the street. Retailers in effect trained their customers to be assholes, since that was a surefire way to get what you wanted.  Customer service in the Walmart era meant that customers could scream profanity at retail workers or outlandish demands and managers would acquiesce afraid of losing just one customer. The whole system was out of balance.  

The roots of change can be traced back to 2015, when the unemployment rate started to flirt with the 3% level. It accelerated when, during the pandemic and immediately after, when service workers realized that they had the power to set the terms of their own employment. Knowing that if they quit or were fired, another job with similar pay could be had in short order, many did quit if they didn't like the work environment. The management-employee dynamic became more balanced, if not skewed toward the employee. Overall, this was a good thing. Employees with a solid work ethic were no longer content to be enslaved by their employers. The problem is that not all employees had a solid work ethic.

Let's divert for a moment to define "customer service". I would define it as giving the customers what you advertised you would give them - this includes stock levels; and interacting with them in a civil, polite, manner - including dropping personal conversations or cell phone use when a customer needs some help. In my view a friendly demeanor is a plus, but not required. I'm not shopping in your store looking for friends. 

Back to comparative work ethic. 

Mainly due to the perception among managers that "nobody wants to work" and various corollaries as well as the very real low unemployment rate, managers are afraid to fire bad employees. No manager wants to be short staffed. Staff has to work harder to make up for missing people, or work simply doesn't get done because there aren't enough people to do it. Corporate executives don't want to hear what they term excuses and usually are not interested in altering expectations to accommodate the new reality. When I ran a grocery store the standard in the in-store bakery was for an employee to take a customer's doughnut request and remove it from the case and bag it up for them. The result was that one employee was tied up during peak times and one customer with a large order could cause a line - when customers would be just as happy to get their own doughnuts. Eventually, after many years, the corporate office figured it out, but not because anyone at the store level complained about it. 

So what do managers do? Two things: (1) They hire using the "warm body" principle and (2) They put up with what should be unacceptable behavior from employees. #1 is because they are in a hurry to get someone hired, and #2, they are terrified that someone is going to quit and they'll be short staffed until they can hire another warm body that incidentally they don't have the time or the staff to train properly. 

Employees at  entry-level jobs are not stupid. It doesn't take them long to see that there are no consequences to not doing the job that they were hired to do. A bad employee will just get worse seeing that management ignores them and a good employee will soon see that working hard and following company policy just means that they're doing the work of the bad employee. Overall productivity and customer service levels plummet. Whose fault is this state of affairs? The managers.

When I say "managers", it's ultimately the fault of the level of management that makes decisions. A store manager has to have the guts to set standards and stick by them. If an employee is not doing their job, the manager can't be terrified that the sky will fall if the employee terminated and they are short-staffed. Corporate management has to be flexible enough to allow their retail-level managers the freedom to adjust expectations in response to changing situations, and not wait for months of meetings to green-light a decision that the leaders on the front lines know must be done. Earlier in this post I mentioned that in the Walmart era companies trained their customers to be assholes. In this post-pandemic era, companies have trained their employees to be bad employees. The solution isn't to update the employee handbook, or to embark on a search for the perfect employee - rules are ineffective if they're not enforced and "perfect" employees quickly devolve into horrible employees if they see that being a bad employee is the easier path. 

It's not an employee problem, it's a manger problem.

The Alleged Afterlife

 I don't know the nature of the afterlife, or even if there is an afterlife.

And neither do you.

Yes, yes, maybe you say that you "know", based on your holy book, or you had a "seeing the light" near-death experience, or heard from a dead loved one in a seance, or in your dreams. What you're really saying is that you have settled upon a version of the afterlife that fits into your worldview, gives you comfort, and allows you to make sense of an extremely unfair world. You perhaps have chosen to view certain experiences as evidence to back up what you believe will be your fate after you draw your final breath. 

But no one knows. 

What people thought happened to the dead changed and evolved through the centuries. The Jewish Bible is pretty quiet about any sort of afterlife, other than a couple of places. Two people, Enoch and Elijah are described as having been received bodily into heaven, while the prophet Samuel, or his ghost, is temporarily brought back to the land of the living to give some advice to the soon-to-be deposed-and-killed King Saul. Jewish thought around the time the New Testament was written tended toward a belief in a bodily resurrection at "the end of time" when God would overthrow the existing order and institute a "Kingdom of Heaven". Jesus seems to be an adherent of this view - his moral teachings very clearly intended to get people "right" so they would be able to enter the soon-to-be-established Kingdom. (Which he thought would come pretty darn soon)

After Jesus' alleged resurrection and ascension, and the failure of the end of the world to happen, the Apostle Paul put forth his theories. In some places in the Epistles he seems to go along with apocalyptic theology, describing a bodily resurrection at some future time. At other places he is apparently teaching that a Christian goes right to Heaven upon death. He never mentions Hell, but does write about wrath and judgement in many places. This lack of specificity left it to subsequent generations of Christian theologians to devise descriptions of Heaven and Hell, although the way they imagined Hell was a lot more graphic than that of Heaven. 

Despite a paucity of official descriptions of what awaits us in Heaven, most people have at least a sketch of an opinion about what it entails. Usually a reunion of one's loved ones, living joyfully for all eternity. In my own experience, people envision their deceased family "looking down on them" and providing some kind of help, comfort or intercession while "up there". Like most religious beliefs, beliefs about the afterlife owe less to sanctioned dogma than to personal imaginings. 

Beliefs outside of Christianity aren't any more concrete than the dominant Christian beliefs: feasting in the Halls of Odin in Valhalla, the Summerlands, reincarnation, Nirvana, getting your heart weighed against a feather, they're all based on some ideas that someone who wasn't dead thought about what happened to the dead. It's interesting to me to note that the Greco-Roman conception of the afterlife before Christianity was pretty dreary. You just shuffled around as a shadow (literally) of your former self in some dank underworld. 

The truth is that if there is an afterlife, we don't know anything about it because it's not something we can investigate. 

Belief in an afterlife is usually pretty harmless. If thinking that your loved one who died is "in a better place", or happily playing in an amateur harp combo, free of pain, etc, gives you comfort, then I have no problem with it. Historically, people have been conned into accepting pain and suffering during their lifetime because it would all be better "later". Personally I take the "I don't know and it doesn't matter" position. I'm going to live my life the best I can while I have a life. If it happens that there is an afterlife that I can consciously enjoy, cool, if not, I'll never know, will I?

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part XII - The Ethics of Deprogramming

I've been blogging about cults for several years now - my own history in one cult, The Way International, as well as more generic discussions of cult methods and practices. I'll argue that cults are generally bad things and people shouldn't get involved in them, but is it justified to forcibly remove cult members from the a cult?

No.

During my involvement with The Way International my parents considered "deprogramming" me in order to "free" me from my supposed mental imprisonment. They went so far as to consult with a deprogrammer, who actually talked them out of the attempt, pointing out that failure would mean that I'd likely never want to have anything to do with them ever again. They chose not to risk it. Mom and Dad never spoke of it, but many years later one of my sisters spilled the beans. At the time there was a lot of media focus on cults in the wake of the forced mass suicide at The People's Temple in Guyana. Parents whose children were in cults assumed that all cults were potentially going to end up like Jim Jones' followers. The cults that attracted the most attention also tended to have beliefs or practices (or both) that were far enough outside the mainstream as to appear "weird". The assumption was that the only reason that anyone would get involved in a cult was that they were brainwashed. Mind control was the only way to explain it.

Family members often point to how their loved ones "changed" after getting involved with a cult, not only their beliefs, but their behaviors and loyalties. But is that so unusual when new recruits to a cult are more likely to be young and actually looking to change their lives? Many people who have had family members join the military, especially those who have seen combat, could attest to the changes in the outlook of their loved ones. A new cult member typically is looking for some meaning in their life and a cult provides that meaning. Is it any wonder that they are often exceedingly gung-ho about their new life's focus? 

What about when the honeymoon period of cult involvement has ended and the cult member begins to experience some of the abusive treatment? Surely that's brainwashing? Not so fast! We can compare someone who stays in a harmful cult to someone who stays with an abusive spouse, sure that she loves the man who beats her every day, or is afraid that she won't be able to survive on her own. Or someone who hates their job but won't look for a new one. Justified or not, logical or not, people continue in harmful situations either because they fear that the alternative is worse, or have made the calculation that the perceived benefits outweighs the downside. I personally have done both - I stayed in a marriage that was mentally abusive because I was afraid that I'd lose my children and afraid to be perceived as a failure, rather than get out; I continued in a job that was terrible on many, many levels because I judged that the financial benefits outweighed the negatives that I had to endure. 

People join cults because they make a decision to get involved in something that they believe gives them what they want...whatever that may be. People stay involved in cults because they make a decision that staying in is the better alternative to getting out. Are they making the "right" decision? Who knows? Unless one knows all the variables in another's life, how can you decide what is best for that person? Spoiler alert: you can't. 

So what about deprogramming? You don't hear too much about deprogramming these days, or cults for that matter. But back in the eighties there were a lot of people making big money from the families of young people involved in cults. I know of several people who were the target of deprogrammers, some succumbed and left their cult, some escaped the deprogrammers and went back. What did deprogrammers actually do? Their first step was kidnapping the target of the deprogramming. Kidnapping! Often violently. The head deprogrammer would hire muscle to abduct the target who then be locked away from the world, often in an isolated farm house of hotel room. The abductee didn't usually even know what city they were in. They were allowed no contact with their fellow cult members, were not allowed to leave and sometimes were physically restrained. In extreme cases they were sleep deprived. Various methods of persuasion were employed - the cult's beliefs were questioned or mocked, accusations made about the cult leader, and in one case that I am familiar with, the abductee's fiancée was accused of cheating on him! The methods used by deprogrammers appear closer to what would be consider brainwashing than what the cults actually engaged in. 

If cults, in particular the one I was involved in, had brainwashed their members, it would stand to reason that it would be difficult for someone to leave. Yet during my own involvement I saw people freely walk away, new people, as well as those who had been in for decades. My own cousin, who got me involved, walked away within a year, presumably because she decided that it wasn't providing anything that she wanted or needed that she wasn't getting anywhere else. 

Finally, in the United States we have the right of free association, as well as the right to the religion of our choice. No one has the right to forcibly convert (or de-convert) someone else...even if they think the other's beliefs are harmful...or weird.

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part XI - Hidden Knowledge & The Pseudo-Caste System

Among the many ways that cults use to recruit and retain members is by the hint of a special or secret knowledge that is only available to the initiate. It's reinforced by a hierarchical structure where more special knowledge is revealed as you move toward the center of power. 

The Way's initial appeal for many was that they claimed to be able to teach you the Bible "like it hadn't been known since the First Century". Anyone who has studied the Bible from a scholarly, disinterested point of view knows that t is full of contradictions. I won't spend time here pointing them out, but they are numerous. They range from historical and archeological mistakes to different Biblical authors describing the same events in mutually exclusive ways. There are also many instances where the average Christian believes something about the Biblical narrative that is totally at odds with what it actually says. The founder of The Way was well aware of these things and did a great job spotlighting them in his Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class. His purpose, of course, was to undermine trust in mainstream Christianity and its leaders and traditions in order to substitute his own foundation for belief. 

At face value, he was substituting simply "reading what was written" for tradition. But the Bible is not a simple book. It's not "a" book at all, but a collection of more than 60 books by almost that many different authors. Despite his "keys to interpretation" that emphasized reading what was right there on the page, in the context, the contradictions and difficulties still existed. They called them apparent contradictions, and set about constructing logic-twisting explanations to harmonize the various discrepancies. One of The Way's more obvious doctrinal deviations from mainstream Christianity was a disbelief in The Trinity. The Trinity is the doctrine whereby God is a threefold entity, consisting of The Father, the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit. You can't find it detailed explicitly anywhere in the Bible, but is the result of centuries of early Christian theologians attempting the reconcile the conflicting descriptions of Jesus' nature set down in the Bible. The Way's unitarian view of Jesus was a similar attempt, albeit one that took significantly less time than the development of The Trinity. 

But the fact that a different conclusion about Jesus' nature was reached isn't the point, it's the use of that unique take, that special knowledge which was part of The Way's hold on people. The undermining of trust in mainstream Christianity, replaced by reading what was written, cemented a trust in what Way leadership was teaching, making it clear that The Way was the only place where you could find Biblical truth. If that was important to someone, that was a powerful tool to keep people from straying. In fact, so much emphasis was placed on the trustworthiness of the teachings of Victor Wierwille, The Way's founder, that any questioning of his conclusions were brushed aside. However, it was never framed as "Wierwille is infallible", but suggested that you should hold your questions "in abeyance" until you understood more, i.e. became as knowledgeable as Wierwille...which was effectively never. 

The special knowledge did not end with what was presented in PFAL. The class itself was only part of a series of classes, culminating in the "Advanced Class". This class was billed as training in more special, secret knowledge, including spiritual healing, discerning of spirits, and revelation from God. As I look back on it 40 plus years later, it was a bit of a disappointment, but Advanced Class Grads still had that elite cache, and got to wear a special nametag identifying them as such. (The Way was big on nametags identifying which caste you belonged to) But taking the Advanced Class only took a couple of weeks out of your life and a few hundred dollars. The next circle included participants in The Way Corps "leadership training program", which was effectively a lifetime of servitude. 

The structure and time commitment of Way Corps training varied during my time in The Way, but it was never less than two years, spent at one of The Way's properties. Graduates of the Way Corps training made up the leadership cadre of The Way. Upon their graduation they were given assignments, either at Way headquarters or "in the field", i.e. running fellowships, or state programs. Although initially billed as a program to turn out the best "Twig" (aka local fellowship) leaders, in reality, you were in it for life. Dismissal from the Way Corps was viewed as shameful, a failure. 

These Way Corps grads typically had a higher level of commitment and loyalty and helped standardize fellowships around the country and world. To the rank and file "believers", Way Corps leaders were the authorities. You didn't question leadership. They themselves were recipients of more special and secret knowledge that the non-Corps weren't privy to, tantalizing their egos and locking them more firmly into the system while simultaneously keeping the non-Corps in a state of obedience. If you weren't a Corps graduate you were conditioned to trust Wierwille and in turn, logically accepted the virtually infallibility of those he had deputized to lead in his place. There was a balance between feeling above the riff-raff of the world due to being holders of secret knowledge that the non-Way didn't possess and being inferior to the Way Corps who had even more secret knowledge and who were spiritually incapable of steering you wrong (God just wouldn't allow it). 

Those who came to The Way because they were lonely, or fell in love with the person who "witnessed" to them, typically did not stick around. The Way's appeal was intellectual. I don't mean that intellectuals were attracted to The Way, although some were, but that it was a search for answers based on logic (with the Bible's inerrancy as the basic premise) and not faith, that attracted the vast majority and kept them around, often for decades, if not their whole lives. The hook that snared many of us was the declaration that on one hand God's will was easy to understand and apparent to anyone who could read, yet at the same time hidden away from the ignorant hordes of mainstream Christians. 

The seeds of The Way's destruction were sown from the first days, although it took 40 years for them to come to fruition. The special, secret knowledge had always been based on the promise that The Bible was very literally an open book. Anyone could read and understand it without the aid of priests or theologians. This was never strictly true, but it was the selling point and it kept people around. The trust that was engendered in Wierwille and his successors sealed most people's compliance. But that required unity among the leadership. It also required a membership body that was unskilled in actual Biblical research. Wierille's "research" was shoddy and incomplete. He quoted scholars such as E.W. Bullinger without understanding the points that they were making and had no understanding of Hebrew or Greek grammar beyond what could be looked up in a concordance. His definitions of Greek words would have surprised anyone who had studied Biblical Greek. But most Way members had no such expertise, so they were easy marks. 

Internal dissension was usually handled by kicking people out, often in the middle of the night. And in pre-internet days, the dissenters might never be heard from again. In the late eighties though, there was a very public "civil war" amongst Way leaders in the wake of the death of founder Wierwille. Instead of one voice parroting what was coming down from the top, various leaders began developing their own followings and "ministries", people began to see this lack of direction and began doing what they had been promised they could do - read, study and understand the Bible and make their own decisions. Eventually this all began to be played out on message boards and websites all over the internet. The Way splintered into dozens of groups all competing to be the true heirs of Wierwille's mantle. 

The Way still exists, as well as a multitude of Way-derived groups promoting various versions of Way doctrine. But it's no longer what it was, and the control mechanisms that were in place for many years were no longer effective. I have no idea if the raggedy remains of The Way can still be considered a cult, since I have been out and away for over 20 years, but cults proliferate and they don't ahve to be religion-based. 

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part X - Everyone Else is Wrong

One of the hallmarks of political social media is the straw man. Someone posts something that they allege the opposition said, when a teeny, tiny bit of digging would reveal the lie. They attack the lie, and then a bunch of followers pile on and they attack the lie, which they assume is the truth. It's especially egregious when the offender posts a link to a news article and the headline contains information that is at odds with what's in the article. Not so different in the word of cults. 

One of the basic moves of any cult is a form of Gnosticism, they claim that there is special, hidden knowledge that is available only to the cult, sometimes only to the inner circle of the cult. Related to this is a misrepresentation of what the mainstream believes in order to mock it. One of the core beliefs of The Way is that Jesus Christ isn't God. They aren't the only self-described Christians to believe this, but they are certainly a tint minority. This is one of the doctrines which they used to set themselves apart, to show their followers that they were adherents of the truth that no one else believed. Like today's social media conspiracy theorists, they cherry-picked the available information to come to their conclusion. The Way's leaders employed insults, calling mainstream Christians worshippers of a three-headed God and other misrepresentations of what people who believed in the Trinity actually believed. Granted, the actual theological doctrine of The Trinity is pretty complex and evolved over centuries, and the average Christian had not the slightest grasp of the nuances. From my vantage point of a disbeliever in the inerrancy of the Bible, I can see that the problem is that different writers of the various books of the Bible had different opinions of who and what Jesus was, and there was an evolution in what people thought of Jesus even within the pages of the Bible. However, both The Way and mainstream Christianity were of the opinion that what the Bible said about Jesus was Truth, and they had to find ways to explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions. They each resolved these contradictions in different ways with different endpoints. They both insisted that they were right.

The difference, at least in modern times as opposed to the early days of Christianity when the term "heretic" was being thrown around willy-nilly, is that most churches are part of a tradition in which, in their minds, the question was settled 2000 years ago. The Way is making their differing understanding of the question a central part of their identity. Any deviation from this interpretation of Jesus' nature would result in the 21st Century version of accusations of heresy within The Way. There is no question that they are right and everyone else is wrong. 

Another tactic where The Way was similar to today's "do your research" crowd is their constant encouragement to...do your research. Just like today's YouTube "researchers" pontificate as if there had never been any legitimate study of virology, Constitutional law, or climate science, The Way embarked upon research by people totally unsuited to the task. If you had a Greek-English concordance and a working familiarity with parts of speech you were a Biblical researcher. I could spend thousands of words giving examples of amateurs interpreting Greek words in novel ways -but this enabled Way members to promote their supposed superiority over those poor dumb Christians who studied their whole lives and built upon the work of others going back decades or centuries, learning Biblical Greek and Hebrew. Of course John Doe high school dropout knew the truth. 

So yes, in a cult, everyone but you and the people who agree with you are wrong. Everyone else is a sheep. Just like on the internet.

 

Managers - Post Pandemic #3 - Maintaining Balance

It's been a year since I weighed in on management theory post-pandemic, and I think the pendulum is starting to swing back. The unemployment rate is still low, and entry-level jobs are still available, but managers are starting to figure out the balance.

One of the things that many employees learned during the pandemic was that it was acceptable to set boundaries for themselves. It became normal for people to refuse to work their schedule, take off during busy times of year, and refuse to do simple job requirements - they knew that their managers would have difficulty replacing them and that they had the upper hand in the employee-employer relationship. But one of the main causes of strife between workers and management is a lack of honesty at the onset of the relationship.   

When I was in management, one of the more frustrating issues was new employees changing their availability. We would advertise for a position and would usually be pretty clear about what the schedule would be. We would hire someone based upon their availability and willingness to work that schedule only to find out that their actual availability was quite different. Once we advertised for a weekend clerk in the meat department. Since we usually gave workers one weekend day off the pool of potential staff was reduced on weekends when we were busiest - we thought if we could find someone who was only available on Saturdays and Sundays that would help our staffing problems. We found someone who assured us that he wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays, but after about a month he was complaining that he never got weekends off! Applicants who changed their availability shortly after being hired was quite common. I assume that the strategy was to get their foot in the door and then try to change up their schedule after being trained and we had invested time in them. The flip side of this is employers who expect their staff to put up with ever-changing schedules, wildly varying hours and the expectation to drop everything when the boss needed them. When I lived in Kearney and worked at a Burger King, I might be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 12 the next. When I worked for UPS over the holidays I was scolded for asking to be unavailable for one day to go for a job interview (it was a temporary position). I had given several days notice. What was galling was that I never knew from day to day whether I would be called in to work; I usually wouldn't hear until around 10:00AM if I was going to work that day. Employers should be honest about the requirements of the job and potential employees should be honest about what they're willing to do. 

One thing that many people don't understand is that a business exists not to provide jobs, but to sell products or services and make a profit doing it. Since labor costs typically are the single greatest expense, business owners will do what it takes to minimize, or even eliminate, the number of employees that they need to keep the doors open. Many of us complain about, for a variety of reasons, the proliferation of self checkouts, but this is but the latest example in a long trend of automation. Think about bar codes and scanners on check stands. When I was in my late teens I worked in a hardware store. We used a pricing gun to hand price every single item in the store. Cashiers would hand enter the price of every single item that they sold. Now we take the existence of bar codes and scanners for granted. Automation in manufacturing is something that has been progressing for decades, something that unions fight against...at least where there are unions. We may not like it, but that's the reality of it. But despite the creeping influence of automation, most businesses still require human beings in some capacity. 

Most businesses have busy times. They may be certain times of day, days of the week or seasons of the year. When I worked in retail grocery we had a pretty good idea when our busy times would be and tried to plan accordingly. One of my tasks was to project what our sales would be in each department every week, sometimes down to the day or hour during holiday weeks. If both the employer who is hiring staff and the job seeker are both honest they will each reveal what is necessary for a hire to take place. A grocery store that is going to be "all-hands-on-deck" during Christmas of Independence Day weeks should be upfront about there being no time off during that period; a job hunter who is unwilling to forgo family time during the holidays should make that plain and probably seek employment elsewhere. Taking a job knowing the restrictions, yet intending to flout them in the future is dishonest, just as withholding key requirements or information about scheduling just to get someone on the payroll is also deceitful. 

One of the worst things that a manager can do is hire someone just to get a warm body on board, or retain a nonperforming employee to avoid be shorthanded. And I'll include in "nonperforming" an employee who refuses to do what the job requires of them. There has always been the tendency among rookie managers to do this, but the low unemployment rate and the willingness of people to quit at a moment's notice has made the practice more prevalent. Nothing good can come of situations like this, and there are multiple negative consequences: (1) Work doesn't get done even though someone is still getting paid to do it (2) Built up resentment from the "good" employees. I can go on all day about how departments became more productive, working short-staffed after a lazy employee quit or was fired. Productivity will be negatively affected when other employees or the manager has to pick up the slack or constantly correct errors. 

In addition to resentment and extra work, an unpopular opinion is that it is not the manager's job to "do the work". A manager's job is not to "do things", but to "get things done". Of course this doesn't mean that a manager should ideally be sitting in the back room, feet up, sipping coffee all day. Depending on the business a manger might also be responsible for ordering stock, doing payroll or even stocking shelves, but it's a misunderstanding of the manager's role to believe that the main responsibility of a  manager is "getting his hands dirty" and working side-by-side with the crew. Through training, coaching, setting expectations and above all, leadership, a professional manager leverages the skills of her staff to get the job done. A newly-minted manager might find himself spending 25-30 hours doing what he should be paying other people to do while still spending 40+ hours doing "manager stuff". Picking up after employees whose idea of personal boundaries is to refuse to do what they were hired to do, or constantly correcting errors by underperformers, simply because they're afraid of being shorthanded is a vicious circle that will never end. 

Was Jesus a Lobbyist?

The other morning I came to a realization - one of those realizations that made me wonder why I hadn't realized it before. It came amidst the many laws that state legislatures are passing that have purely religious thinking as their motivation. The governor of Nebraska even characterized opposition to the laws that he championed as "diabolical"  (in the literal sense as "devilish") and "Lucifer at it's finest". I have long criticized certain laws as nothing but religious opinion that shouldn't be applied to those who don't adhere that religion, but it's obvious that legislators aren't even trying to hide the religious nature of their legislation.  

Oh yeah, the realization.

Jesus never attempted to change the laws of Judea or Rome to match up with what he was preaching.

I'm of the opinion, influenced by the books of Dr. Bart Ehrman, that Jesus was a real, historical person. No, I don't believe that he worked miracles, or rose from the dead or ascended into "heaven", but that by reading the gospels without preconceptions, and applying principles that would be applied to any other historical figure, you can determine, with a reasonable degree of confidence, what the historical Jesus preached. He was what is called an apocalyptic prophet. That means that he was predicting that the end of the world was coming pretty damn soon. One strain of Jewish thought and belief at the time was that evil powers ran the show and that at some point God would intervene to set things right. This was not a predominant mindset throughout what Christians call the Old Testament, but was a way to explain a way the fact that the Jews, time and time again, were being defeated, enslaved and beat down. How to reconcile this with the triumphantist attitudes of the earlier books? Change the rules! Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, was clearly within this apocalypticist tradition. 

Throughout the gospels Jesus is urging his followers to change their behavior, to modify their actions so that they might be worthy to be part of the soon-to-come Kingdom of God. There's a new administration coming to town and he's telling people what they need to do to be part of it. Individually. He's not trying to change society, he's not trying to remake the culture, because he doesn't think that there will be a society or a culture - God's going to tear it all down and build a new one. He's most definitely not lobbying to have laws changed, because the legal system will have been destroyed in the near future and replaced with a heavenly regime. Even the post-ascension preaching of the apostles is focused on individual repentance and not societal change. 

Eventually, when Christians gained control of the levers of power in the Roman Empire, and eventually the kingdoms of Europe, Christianity, or at least it's outward expression, was imposed on society, but I doubt a convincing argument can be made that the conversion by the sword, or the mass conversions because the king said so, are what Jesus had in mind. 

In today's United States, there are millions of Christians who strive to live their lives as they understand Jesus wants them to live, but there are also millions of Christians who support the forcible molding of society into the image of what they think Christianity is, or should be; and they have elected representatives to make it a reality. A significant number of Americans equate Christianity with patriotism and believe that it's the mission of government to turn us into a theocracy. 

Jesus would like a word.

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part IX - Could I Be Fooled Again?

I've been writing these "So, You Want to Join a Cult" blog posts since October 2020. I've documented my own journey from my first contact with The Way in 1978 to my exit from the cult in 2001. Here's the first installment . I've done a few follow ups, covering how a cult recruits and keeps members. Today I'll be musing on the question of whether I would have been sucked in had it been 2018 instead of 1978 when I was approached by The Way.

If the culture, as well as the state of technology in 1978 been what it is now, would I still have been convinced to become a cult member? What-ifs are "iffy" things, you never really know what you would have done if circumstances had been different, nor do you know what the cascading effects of your actions had been if you had chosen differently. But one of the main differences between now and then is the widespread availability of information. Not that all the available information is accurate, but it's orders of magnitude easier to not only access information, but also to spread lies. In 1978 the internet was a science fiction dream, not to mention the possibility of everyone holding a powerful computer in their pocket being outlandish fantasy. What would my teenage self have done if the internet and smart phones had existed in 1978? 

Me in 1978 was intensely curious not only about my own religion, but about other religions as well. Part of this was because I was bemused by the huge number of religions to choose from. In addition to Christianity, the faith I was raised in, but there was Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and others I was only dimly aware of. And not only that, besides Catholicism, which I was taught was "The" church, there was a number of Protestant Churches. (I naively thought that the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Baptist churches in my neighborhood were the extent of it) I visited the churches of the other Christian denominations in my neighborhood and read all that I could about other religious traditions. It didn't lead me anywhere. It wasn't until I met people from The Way that anyone so much as suggested that firm answers could be found. Since no one else was making any kind of case for determining truth, I defaulted to the only people I knew who at least attempted. But what if resources available on the internet had been at my fingertips? Hard to say.

The vast pools of information would have definitely given me more options. A deep dive into Catholic theology may have served to convince me that truth could be found there, or the labyrinthine and evolving arguments on the nature of Jesus could have convinced me that it was all double-talk. Educating myself on theology would have likely inoculated me against the facile and simplistic descriptions of what Catholics and mainstream Protestants believed peddled by The Way. It's almost impossible to speculate what direction I would have gone in spiritually, but with virtually unlimited options, I doubt that I would have settled for joining one little group that claimed to have all the answers. 

Another question is easier to answer. When accusations of being a cult first surfaced in the late seventies, the information was scant. Newspaper articles by disgruntled ex-Way people or Christian pastors copied over and over so you could barely read the print were the main source of anti-cult information. I was never swayed by the information that I saw, mainly because it bore little resemblance to what I saw in my interactions with other Way people. Church centered people often threw the "cult" label around based mainly on doctrinal differences. I was far from convinced, and the attacks strengthened my resolve, kind of like a martyr. But in 2001, when Wayworld was roiled by accusations of sexual coercion and corruption in the lofty ranks of Way leadership the internet was available. It wasn't just people who objected to The Way's nonstandard theology or misrepresentations of fairly innocent situations, this time it was internet posts by people currently in The Way who shared very plausible stories that were consistent across wide parts of the country. People compared notes and researched Way beliefs and the background of The Way's founder. This information helped solidify my reasons for getting out. The problems that could with little effort be swept under the rug in 1978 were revealed in the bright light of day in 2001. 

The internet is not an unalloyed positive though. Millions of people have gotten caught up in outlandish beliefs based on unsupported and twisted information on the World Wide Web. Would I have become a wearer of the metaphorical tinfoil hat if all of this was available in 1978? Impossible to say. I can say that the one thing that my involvement in The Way and my escape from it have made me a skeptic. One of the positive aspects of the methods that The Way used to indoctrinate was by undermining the authority of what they called "denominational Christianity" (as if they weren't themselves a denomination). Naturally this was done in order to bolster their own credibility, but in most cases the contradictions in mainstream Christian doctrine and the misunderstandings of what was written in the Bible were correct. The Way substituted unquestioned beliefs in their doctrine instead, but for most of us, the tendency to question and "research" was too ingrained. It proved their undoing. Once I was no longer involved in cult life I found that not only was I no longer interested in being a "joiner", and I was skeptical of any dogmatically stated opinions, no matter whether it was religion, politics or any other category. 

Would I have gotten involved specifically in The Way if the internet had existed in 1978? Would I get fooled again? probably not in that way, but I'm not so egotistical to think I'm so much smarter than the rest of society that I wouldn't have fallen for something. After all, I would still have been a naïve teen, searching for answers. The 1978 Tom hadn't seen or experienced everything that the 2023 Tom has.

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part VIII - Insidious Leadership Influences

I've been writing these "So, You Want to Join a Cult" blog posts since October 2020. I've documented my own journey from my first contact with The Way in 1978 to my exit from the cult in 2001. Here's the first installment . I've done a few follow ups, covering how a cult recruits and keeps members. Today, I'll take some time to look at how cult thinking influenced one area of my life: management. 

One of the core tenets of most cults, and The Way International was no exception, is that the leader is not to be questioned. This, of course applies primarily to a cult's "supreme leader", but it also applies to anyone down the line in any kind of leadership role - local or state leader, or parent. The presumed infallibility of any subsidiary leader is subordinated to the levels of leadership above him, but is considered sacrosanct within his area of responsibility. So much so, that even when a leader is shown to be wrong, or even kicked out of The Way, that leader's previous decisions are considered to be blessed by God and not subject to questioning by the peons. Shortly before I left The Way Craig Martindale, the Way's President, was forced out following legal action against him involving coerced sex with a follower. My thinking, and the thinking of many Way followers at the time, was that Martindale obviously did not have God's Word foremost in his mind - how could we trust the doctrine in the extensive series of classes that he had been putting together if he thought it was okay to cheat on his wife? His class series, The Way of Abundance and Power contained many novel takes on The Bible that many were unsure of, but the remaining leadership assured us that what he taught was still valid due to some mystical connection due to him being the "Man of God" at the time. 

Leadership style was also something that set a terrible example to those of us who had less lofty leadership roles. Martindale's style was yelling. His style could also involve name-calling and insulting those who weren't on board 100%. Think Donald Trump, but spouting Bible verses. This leadership template made its way down the ladder to local leadership, who also got their points across with unyielding bluster and yes, yelling. Even the ones who didn't yell, were inflexibly dogmatic in their approach. These were my examples of how to be a godly leader.

In my work life I gravitated toward management roles - managing people and operations was something I was good at. Each year The Way put on a conference called God's Word in Business and Profession. In its early iterations it had sessions geared toward specific businesses and gave guidance on how to apply Biblical principles at work, and gave the opportunity to meet with people in the same line of work. Eventually it became just another "teaching" event, with nothing specific to business or profession. But I would attend these conferences and soak up the example of what being a leader meant and became a bit of a yeller myself. 

During most of my time in The Way in the nineties (after having been out during the eighties) I worked for the Omaha World-Herald newspaper as a Circulation Manager, but in 1999 I changed companies to become a manager with B&R Stores a local grocery chain at one of their Super Savers. With the World-Herald my management was mostly at a distance, but at Super Saver there was much more face-to-face management. In my management series I talk about different types of managers, but in retrospect I was definitely a bad one. In Managers Part-III - Sources of Power I cover the ways managers can assert their influence over subordinates. I relied upon what is called "Legitimate Power", which is simply the authority that comes with the title, rather than any personal charisma. I was swayed by my Way experience to think all it took was the title and the implied authority that came with it. In a cult like The Way that was all it took; if you're claiming that the title as bestowed by God, then anyone arguing with the cult leader was arguing with God. 

This isn't to say that there aren't managers out there who don't have cult backgrounds but are nonetheless dictatorial in their leadership style, I've worked for a few of them in my time. In my case it was the cult influence that molded me into the type of manager who expected unquestioning obedience and who yelled when I didn't get it. Fortunately I had several bosses who recognized my potential and took the time to show me how my approach was suboptimum. They gave me constructive feedback regarding my style and how it was perceived. By this time I was out of The Way and was open to different ways of doing things. By the time the company decided to rotate all the Assistant Store Directors (my position at the time) to different stores, I had rehabilitated my reputation and was viewed as a straight-talker, and was very direct, but a manager who coached and developed younger employees and managers. 

As part of my new approach I was far from a pushover. I still had employees who viewed any type of correction as getting "yelled at", and I was not at all patient with employees who persisted in arguing about everything. However, instead of yelling, or demanding blind obedience, my goal was to teach employees why they had to do things. 

We're all products of our environment, nature and nurture, and my environment for decades was a religious cult, which couldn't help by affect my outlook on life, but once out, I was willing to make changes and put it behind me. 

Weather Magic

I'm defining "weather magic" as any method, by supernatural (aka magical) means of changing or affecting the weather. If you don't believe in magic, or even the possibility of affecting nature through prayer or appeal to deities, this isn't a discussion for you. 

I'm going to look at weather magic from two perspectives, the practical and the ethical, and finally, discuss alternatives. I will be assuming, for the sake of this discussion, that nature can, in theory, be manipulated, either by the magical ability of an individual, or by intervention by supernatural beings. 

Weather in general, and storms in particular, are complex things that do not exist or function in a vacuum, nor is weather in one region isolated from that of other regions. Everything affects everything else. We've all heard of the Butterfly Effect, which postulates that the flapping of one butterfly's wings  has cumulative effects that can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. A bit overly simplistic, but true in principle. Therefore any weather manipulation is going to affect more than just the immediate vicinity. If you magically stop the rain that's ruining your picnic, where is that storm going to go? Will the intensity of the storm increase and cause unforeseen damage if it's moved? 

A typical storm has a lot of kinetic energy. See this encyclopedia article about the energy inherent in a storm. If you think that you have enough power to shift the incredible momentum inherent in a thunderstorm, why not try to nudge something smaller, like the path of your lawn sprinkler or the gentle breeze that's blowing a leaf across your driveway first? If you can't do that, you are out of your league when it comes to guaranteeing a sunny day for your softball game. 

The alternative to envisioning yourself as a powerful weather mage is to posit a god or goddess who has the power to do the weather shifting for you. Any deity so proposed can be as powerful as you want to imagine. There is no arbitrary upper limit to god power. An omnipotent pantheon dweller should be able to clear the skies, or water your crops, or melt the snow or whatever you else you might need. The energy of the storm is negligible for such an entity. But in this scenario we still run up against the reality that weather systems are global, not local and the storm has to go somewhere. 

Let's look at the ethics of magical (or divine) weather manipulation. Being that weather is global, stopping a tornado in your vicinity might mean that someone else gets it, or getting rain to water your crops if you're a farmer could result in someone else experiencing drought. What about if you really need the rain and you trust the deity of your choice to work it all out so that no one else gets hurt? I've addressed on a several occasions the ineffectiveness of prayer here, here, and here. You can follow those links, but they can be summarized as "prayer, i.e. the asking a deity to do or provide something, does not yield discernable results". So I guess we can theorize above the ethics of omnipotent being fixing the weather to your liking, but their track record is poor. 

I'm very much a disbeliever in the belief that things were "meant to be". That it's raining today because of some divine game plan that stopping the rain would interfere in. So my objection to weather manipulation magic, even if an individual or group would have the ability to work it, is that it's almost always self-centered and ignorant. Self-centered because it takes into account only one's own interests and ignorant due to a lack of knowledge of the wider effects of the changes wrought. If you're a magical practitioner, my current opinion is that the magic should be worked on oneself.

Look, I don't care if you're Aleister Crowley or Jesus in a boat on the Sea of Galilee you don't have the metaphysical watts to change climate, i.e. the changes that need to be made to reverse drought conditions or seasonal flooding. For most people it's the immediate weather circumstances, affecting them personally that offers a target for change. What if, instead of attempting to stop the rain from ruining your outdoor event after it's already on its way, you work on being aware (magically or otherwise) of what the weather will be like and plan based on what the weather will be rather than expecting the weather to change for you? Hone your thinking skills (magically or otherwise) to know what to do when dangerous weather comes to you. Magically increase your reaction time and eliminate distractions so that you can safely navigate that slick road during a storm. 

What more realistic? Magicking yourself  or the entire weather system of our planet?

Bad Customer Service

Like anyone who has worked in retail or food service I've encountered rude and demanding customers and rude and incompetent workers as a customer. Having worked in retail for so long I know what good customer service looks like. I'm not going to entertain any "both sides" comments - I know that there are both sides, but today I'm talking about the customer experience. 

At one time I taught introductory customer service classes for the company that I used to work for. I explicitly debunked the old "the customer is always right" saying. The customer is not always right. With the exception of those people who come in looking for trouble, or are just entitled jerks, most customers just want what from a company, be it restaurant, or retail store, or any kind of service company, is just what the company advertises that it is providing. In addition, as the ultimate provider of the company's revenue, to be treated with a minimum of respect. Even angry customers are usually angry for a reason and can be made not angry by reasonably addressing what they're angry about. 

This morning I stormed out of a local diner, angry at escalating rudeness, confusing my family members who were with me. As a customer, and in general just as a human being, there is just so much crap that I'm willing to tolerate. My wife and I arrived at the diner where we would be meeting other family members. There were many open tables, although both of the six seaters were taken. I inquired about pushing a couple of tables together and was told, after the hostess checked with an unseen person in the back area, that they couldn't do that. I was later told that doing so would be a fire hazard - an explanation about which I was skeptical, but I figured one of the two six seaters would be open soon enough, so I was content to wait. This was the first miss on the customer service scorecard, albeit a minor one. Our request to push a few tables together was not unreasonable and could have been accommodated. They just didn't want to. 

Soon after, we found out our group might be eight, and not six. Susie attempted to relay this information to the hostess, who shrugged off her additional information. We thought, rightly so, that this information was important, since they weren't going to push tables together, and there were no tables with more than six chairs. (Customer Service violation number two: ignoring the customer) As the additional members of our troupe arrived, a six seater opened up and we were led to it by a different employee. When I asked her how our eight people (it turned out actually to be seven) she said we would have to wait and reiterated the "rule" about not pushing tables together. This new employee, who appeared to be in her early twenties, clearly was uninterested in our dilemma, punctuating her lack of assistance with eye-rolling, shoulder shrugging and rudely asking "What do you want me to do?". There's transgression number three - acting like your customer is nothing but a nuisance. I still hadn't lost it. I still wanted to eat there, so I suggested that we take two booths that were near the door, to which she responded that she didn't care what we did. Then I announced that I was eating there and started to leave. 

The original hostess attempted (a day late and a dollar short) to salvage the situation, telling us we could wait even longer for a table "back there" (wherever that was). If "back there" was an option, why were we not offered it initially? To make matters worse, the younger employee began undercutting her older co-worker's peacemaking overture by repeatedly stating "they don't want to eat here". 

But the story keeps getting better. Plan B was to drive down the road to a fast food joint. We ordered our food at a kiosk, which came out fairly quickly. Most of it anyway. A few items, including one complete meal for one of the kids, was not there, but we were assured that "they were making it" and would be out soon. (One of these items were cookies, which I'm reasonably sure they didn't make there). After most of our first round of food was consumed, one of us went up to the counter to inquire about the rest of our order. Again, assured that "they were making it". This clerk was encouraged to go check in the back to see what was taking it so long. Nope, it wasn't still being made, it had been bagged up incorrectly and given to another customer! Yes, mistakes happen, but before you give a customer a stock answer, confirm that what you're saying is in fact the correct answer. No rudeness, just incompetence and probably lack of training. 

Despite it all, it was still a pleasant outing with out of town family. 
 

Social Media Chaos

Social media. Can't live with it, can't live without it. Okay, you can live without it, but its various incarnations have become quite intertwined in our lives. Invitations to all but the most formal of events are sent out on Facebook, Twitter has become the communication medium of government officials, bands use various platforms to promote their shows...it goes on and on. 

I have become over the years a regular user of social media. I post my photos on various sites, I use Facebook as a soapbox for my political rants and Twitter has become my go-to source for information - or least links to the information. Occasionally I discover an old friend that I had lost track of, and probably never would have reconnected with if it hadn't been for the internet. This, however, is a double-edged sword.  

During my time in The Way I met many people who I had not stayed in touch with over the years. Some had left The Way before I did and I, following Way dictates, cut ties with them; others did the same to me when I left The Way. One couple that I rediscovered on Facebook were Mike and Rosemarie. Mike was the best man at my first wedding and was my roommate for about six months before then. Rosemarie was part of the group of four that I was a part of on Way assignment in 1980, and was also my roommate just before I got married. We had stopped talking when my first wife and I had temporarily left The Way in 1983. When we became active again in The Way in 1990 we found that Mike and Rosemarie had joined one of the Way offshoots. By the early 2000's I was out of The Way and so were they. I reached out to them on Facebook, but was quickly told to not have contact with them. Mike noticed a pentacle that I was wearing in my profile picture; they decided that they couldn't be in contact with someone who had rejected Jesus. Mike was also very excited about "studying" the Nephilim in the Old Testament...the kind of thing that I can only describe as the religious version of a conspiracy theory. 

Another lesson that I learned on social media is that most people with strong opinions don't want those opinions questioned or challenged. I've always been the kind of person who enjoyed a good discussion, a lively debate, even in the so-called taboo areas of religion and politics. If you want to disagree with me, do it politely, state your case logically and we can still be pals. Yet there is a subset of internet denizens who don't want their own opinions questioned, but are free with their critiques of other people's opinions. Some years ago an in-law regularly took me to task for some of what I posted on Facebook. I promised to take this person's point of view into consideration, but when the tables were turned there was an unwillingness to reciprocate. A family feud, with one of my children refusing to speak to me, continues to this day, even though the in-law in question is no longer an in-law due to divorce. 

Although I maintain a policy of inviting civil debate, I have noticed a string of former Facebook "friends" who have disappeared. I can only assume that my strong political posts have run them off. Others, who I know disagree with me, stick with me. Despite being easy going as regards to disagreements I have had to "unfriend" and block several people over the years. Fortunately not too many. The first was another in-law. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2021 repeatedly made rude comments about the protests. Despite several attempts to get him to phrase his comments in a more civil manner, he persisted and had to be gotten rid of. There was another one just this previous year. One of my best friends from high school, part of a group of guys who I spend virtually all my free time with sent me a friend request. I was thrilled to hear from him. Most of my old teenage years buddies aren't on Facebook and this connection with the past was most welcome. It didn't last long. A retired cop, he quickly revealed himself as a Trumpist and regularly made what I call "drive by postings" - short snarky comments on my posts with no follow up or explanation, even when asked to elaborate on his statements. He got blocked after accusing me of being a sheep because I held the views that I did. 

On average through, I find social media to be a positive thing. Sure, there are times when I'm sitting right next to another person and we're both on our phones, scrolling along. But I can honestly say that those are times when I would have been reading a book, or the newspaper, or watching television anyway. Our wedding business does all of its advertising on social media;  my photography gets a lot of recognition (and occasional paying gigs) because of social media; I participated for years in an online forum for former members of my old cult.  Through social media I have been able to stay in touch with people that I have met at concerts. I can put up with the irritations - the benefits (for me) outweigh them. 

Teg

 Teg waited patiently for the receipt to pop out of the slot proving that he had just put eight dollars’ worth of ethanol-infused gasoline into the tank of his ’95 Saturn S-1. Why eight dollars? Two reasons: first, eight dollars was one hundred percent of Teg’s funds and second, at 25 miles per gallon, eight dollars would purchase a bit less than 2 ½ gallons of gas, enough for a one-way trip to Eppley Airport in Omaha, 58 miles away, with enough fumes to roll into the parking garage. Give or take. Despite being in possession of a countenance that suggested, if one were being charitable, that his intellect was somewhere in the neighborhood of “dim”, Teg was adept at doing math in his head. This facility with numbers was why he was heading to Eppley with no money and an undependable vehicle. 

Two things were going to happen at the airport. He was going to meet a guy named Steve in the parking garage. He’d met Steve once before, although on that occasion he introduced himself as “Clint”. Steve/Clint was one of those guys who looked like he never washed his hair, but was vain enough to have a carefully sculpted beard and mustache. To describe him as “menacing” would be a mistake. Not because it was inaccurate, but because Steve didn’t know what it meant and would surely think it was an insult. Some of his tattoos were spelled correctly, but not the ones on his face. 

 Steve was going to give him 10 cases of Hrast that he had “found” somewhere. Well, not “give”. The Love of His Life, Ariadne, or Manila, or Svetlana or Joan – he still was unsure of her name, had sent Steve $360 by some online cash transfer app. The second thing was that Steve was supposed to give Teg a $20 gas card so he could be able to get back to Lincoln. The rest of the plan was that Ariadne/Manila/ Svetlana/Joan would sell the cases of Hrast to local bars for $10 a bottle (for some reason Slovenian Whiskey had become popular among the neo-hipsters), cutting Teg in for 10% of the profit, which wouldn’t pay his rent for the whole month, but might cover a week. (Teg calculated that his $84 cut, plus the $20 gas card, minus around $15 in fuel cost, would indeed cover one week of his $360 rent – if he could find another dollar) 

“Fuck you Teg”. That was Steve, who had no intention of giving him a $20 gas card, “Tell Agnes that she never paid me for a gas card, and the price next month is $5.00 per case”. Mostly, the fact that he now knew that the love of his life was improbably named Agnes was what got through to Teg. A tiny part of his brain though, focused on the fact that he had just enough gas in his vehicle to get out of the garage and about halfway to the interstate – if he was lucky.

Teg, being the math savant that he was, knew that $8 in gas had gotten him to Eppley, so all he needed was $8.00 to get him back to Agnes (Agnes? Really?). He also knew that Agnes would be very sad if he didn’t bring back $1200 worth of Hrast (the resale value). What if he brought back $1190 worth of Hrast and $10? If he could sell one bottle for $18, he was all set. 

Teg was one of those people who are irrationally optimistic. He always was convinced that things would work out, even when it was abundantly clear that they wouldn’t Sure, it’s not a bad thing to have a can-do attitude, and being consistently negative is going to yield consistently negative results, but there should definitely be some kind of basis for optimism. You’re not going to get hired at NASA on the strength of a GED. If Teg were most people he would just call Agnes and explain the situation, but being that Agnes was the Love of His Life (for a certain value of “love”), even if she didn’t know it, but you don’t let The Love of Your Life down. So, irrational optimism it is. How hard could it be to sell one bottle of whiskey for $18? 

Pretty hard as it turned out. 

Teg, math savant that he was, was no savant when it came to discerning people’s motivations. Surely that guy who smelled faintly of cat urine really did have $120 back at his house and would surely pay him for the case of Hrast that Teg let him have on credit. Surely that Omaha cop really was doing him a favor by taking only two cases of Hrast instead of locking him up. Surely, he’d be able to convince the tow truck driver that it was all a mistake that the Casey’s manager got his car towed while he was in the bathroom, and the remaining seven cases of Hrast would be safe in the back seat until it all got worked out. 

Surely. 

At least the clerk at the Casey’s let him use the phone after the manager left so he could call The Love of His Life and leave a voice mail message. 

Once again, Teg was on the side of the road, waiting for The Love of His Life, who he now knew was named Agnes. The day might have gone downhill faster than the Jamaican Bobsled Team, but what do you know? There’s still a little Hrast in his flask.