So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XIII

These days, while still leaving open the possibility of the supernatural, I'm pretty skeptical. I operate in a mildly religious philosophical framework, but am well aware that I might be wrong. But back in the seventies and eighties I was a believer. I believed that there was a God who was intimately involved in human affairs. I believed in miracles. I believed in miraculous healing. I spoke in tongues. I prayed and fully expected to get results. 

I grew up in a Christian family in a majority Catholic neighborhood and although we all prayed and believed in God, I have to say that growing up we didn't expect results with the surety and confidence that we did in The Way. I recall a conversation with my father, one of the most observant, religious people that I knew, explaining how I really believed this stuff, and how his facial expression expressed skepticism. The Catholicism of my youth, like that of many Americans contained the caveat that God might say "no" to your prayers, a hedge against lack of results.

The Way had a different approach to hedging against lack of results: The Law of Believing. 

The Way differentiated between "faith" and "believing", even though both words were translated from the same Koine Greek word, πίστις (pistis). Although their definition of "faith" was never entirely clear, it was vaguely defined as "an inside job", something accomplished by God within you, while "believing" was an action that you took. You actively believed what God, via the Bible, said, and you acted upon that belief. For example, if the Bible said that you could be healed of disease, then you believed that promise and reaped the result of believing it. Perhaps you've spotted the hedge?

Of course the problem was that it all depended on whether or not you were really believing, and in the circular logic employed by so much of religion, if you got the desired result then it proved that you must have been believing—if you didn't get the desired result it couldn't be God's fault, you must not have been believing. In some ways this neatly solved the theological problem of why God allows bad things to happen. In Way World, God doesn't allow bad things to happen, you cause them to happen due to your lack of believing. 

This doctrine claimed that anyone who suffered from chronic illness, financial difficulty or any kind of problems simply wasn't believing. The Way also taught that fear was the opposite of believing. It was often referred to as "negative believing". It was the other side of the believing coin. They also lumped doubt and worry in with fear. You didn't dare express doubt that a certain outcome would materialize, or worry about possible layoffs at your job. This doctrine manifested itself in an almost crazed positivity, a denial that anything negative could possibly happen. People would ignore the reality of their lives in order to maintain the illusion that they were believing and not succumbing to doubt, worry, and fear.

The initial doctrine describing how believing was defined as believing what was written in the Bible morphed into several related practices. One was the tendency for Way people to say that they were believing for something, often something as insignificant as a parking space, as if parking spaces were promised in The Bible. The other was the increasing tendency to view whatever "leadership" said or did as blessed by God, so if something bad happened to a leader, or they just didn't get a desired result, it wasn't that they "weren't believing"—they were being attacked by The Adversary (Wayspeak for The Devil). In the early eighties I ran a PFAL class—and all of the students subsequently declined to further involve themselves with The Way. I was berated for my lack of believing, which obviously caused all these people to "trip out", (Wayspeak for anyone who walked away from The Way) but the wife of the state leader had the same thing happen to her and it was explained away as The Adversary attacking her "godly stand" on The Word. 

Like I mentioned in Part XII, I transferred from the Queens Village Way Home to a different Way Home in the Richmond Hill neighborhood after some incidents that should have caused me to question the whole foundation of The Way, but instead had the opposite affect of causing me to double down on my Way commitment. I didn't want to give in to fear, I wanted to manifest positive believing. During the next six months a combination of more red flags and what looked like genuine miracles pushed me even further into Way-World. The red flags perversely convincing me that a deeper commitment on my part would be the solution to eliminating these speed bumps in my life. After all, it must be my own lack of believing that was causing these issues. The apparent signs, miracles and wonders further convinced me that it was all real. 

Start from the beginning

Part I