Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
It is all about control. "Exercised in your spirit" just gives them verbiage to approve or disapprove of you.
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That's the point. There is really not much wrong with most LC inner life verbiage. A case can be made for "exercise the spirit," "the mingled spirit," "the law of life," "the sense of life," all this stuff. It's not bad in itself. That wasn't the problem with the LC, although the vague subjective nature of the inner life talk served what was wrong with the LC. But, let's face it, the inner life is mysterious. It's mysterious because it's about us approaching and even touching God, so of course at some point it's going to be over our heads. Like John Ingalls once said, we talk about saving souls and we don't even know what a soul is. But that's okay. We don't need to know everything.
No, what was really wrong with the LC when you get right down to it was the
abuse of authority. All the possibly good things were used not to serve God and people, but to serve "the ministry, "the work," "the Recovery," and were abused to control people who should have been honored with the freedom to decide for themselves whether they should submit themselves to LC leaders.
They weren't. That was and is the problem. The debate about whether "exercise the spirit" is appropriate language can go on forever because in the end what one thinks it means is so subjective that it can vary from person to person.
Take away the evil controlling aspect of the LC and "exercise the spirit" is a benign phrase. That's true for a lot of things we debate here.