Quote:
Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
2. Again, I don't think in the 70s it was that clear there was a central leadership. I cannot think of any other church that had any influence on how Houston was operated, and even if LSM did exercise influence at that point it was embraced by the elders and invisible to me.
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I fully believe that much of what I was speaking about was invisible to you at that time. And it is not your fault.
But here is one for you. Benson was not in Houston at any time that you were in the LRC. He was in Dallas from well before 1977. He was in Anaheim during the building of that hall. He was in Irving once that project was under way and for some time afterward.
Yet he had great influence over the Church in Houston. Even so great that he was called in to put down an "uprising" and belittle a sister who only cared for the marriages of the members. They were incapable of doing it themselves. And at the same time, the same thing was being done in Austin. And something similar in Anaheim.
No. You didn't know about it. And it is the fact that such orchestration was kept from many, like you, that we realize now how much connection and control there was then.
I did not say that you knew then what you could know now. I am sure that you could not know because even if you got some kind of hint that there was something in the closet, you would have found it closed and padlocked. And no one would admit to even realizing that it was even there or had anything in it. That is not your fault. My goal was not to condemn you. It was to suggest that hindsight reveals much that we had no way to know at the time.
And within the true leadership and the core that surrounded it, there was a need to have explanations for why the practice did not reflect the teachings. And to the extent possible, there was a sufficient smoke screen created such that only the elders who had a real view into the whole thing had to grimace at the inconsistency. The rest of us were so ingrained with the idea of "two sides of truth" that we would buy contradiction as logical and sound. But there is no "two sides of truth." There are only different aspects of truth that if you don't think about it, you might confuse them as being about the same thing with different conclusions.
I have returned this one last time because both you and Ohio are convinced that I was saying something that I did not say. I read back through my initial and subsequent responses to you and I did not say anything of consequence about you unless it is offensive to discover that you didn't know exactly what was going on back in 78 and 79. I would suggest that we never know as much as we think we do. It is only when we look back that we truly understand what was going on. I left the LRC in 1987. It took me almost 18 years to realize that so much of what I took away with me was simply wrong. And much of the rest of it was seriously flawed. It creates a painting of the past that looks nothing like I would have characterized it as being at the time. If I want to cling to what I remembered at the time, I am doomed to wander outside the LRC in a stupor because I have left "God's best." I now know that this is a completely false view.