The one thing I remember WL saying about his imprisonment at the Japanese is that "they would kill you like killing a chicken" and everyone would chuckle nervously, and stir. In this statement WL was trying to portray his peril, which was undoubtedly real. I heard him say this repeatedly.
While he was showing something of his situation, I think that he also showed something of a cultural "freudian slip" - the Chinese will also kill you like killing a chicken. Today they kill people just to harvest their organs.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7107091.html
http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinas-g...07-1mgabb.html
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/rea...a1cc5b39f223b7
It's a culture where the individual isn't valued that much, while the collective is everything. We thought giving into the collective of WL, the "glorious church life" was the proverbial road to Zion. It wasn't; we were just getting sucked into someone's mind-set. And WL's culture wasn't any more spiritually evolved than the culture we left. Just different.
And we thought that repeating stilted, hackneyed verbiage was a fast track to spiritual transformation. It wasn't; it just made us peculiar.