In Reply to: Re: Non family belief question posted by Perry on March 06, 2005 at 03:00:28:
But what you are revealing of Joppa's answer is truly the essence. An outsider cannot know. We are outsiders of that which we don't belong to. Insiders know differently. One can study intellectually but, as was discovered by anthropologists is that without full immersion there cannot be true knowledge. The so-called scholar Gordon Melton is a proof of this, writing about things he only inspected superficially
Christianity, as any other religion, is that way. Jesus said that to know whether his words are true or not, one must DO them. Otherwise, not having been in the moon and following communal consensus, we can believe that it is made out of cheese. It takes a real rebel, an honest truth-seeker, a fool, to challenge the status quo in their minds and examine through action, to see whether they are true. Some of us did one or two of those things once upon a time.
People who have never been in The Family International, seeing the same things we see, don't know what those things mean. We do. And then we only know up to a certain extent because we are not insiders anymore.