In Favor of Clarity

Written by Bart Bacon Monday, 31 August 2009 12:00

In the June 2009 Issue of Miracles Monthly, Doug Thompson quotes a post that I made on April 4, 2009 at the Community Miracles Center’s On-Line Discussion Group. My post was a very strongly worded opinion against referring to the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) version of A Course In Miracles. Given that my post has now appeared in print, I would like to offer some reasons for my opinion.

First let me say that I am grateful to Foundation for Inner Peace for the service that they have rendered. From 1977 to 2007 the FIP version was the only bound version of A Course In Miracles that I knew of, and it served me well.

Let me give three examples that will help to illustrate the problem that I have with the Foundation for Inner Peace version.

First example. When I was an undergraduate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I wrote a letter to the editor of the college newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. The letter was in response to an opinion that the editors of The Daily Tar Heel had written about an upcoming election. Apparently they liked the content of my letter to some extent. It said almost, but not quite, what they wanted someone to say. So they printed parts of my letter. I had no problem with the fact that they didn’t print my entire letter. It was a long letter, and they had space limitations and other editorial considerations, so they didn’t print the entire letter, and I understood that. Unfortunately, they couldn’t resist the temptation to make up a few things that I never wrote and insert those into the part of my letter that they wanted to print, and present the result to the public above my name. The bottom line is that they made up words that I never wrote, added them to my letter, printed the words that I had never written, and attributed them to me. This was blatant, bald-faced dishonesty. Due to the fact that the opinions that they attributed to me were in fact quite different from the opinions that I had written to them, I spent the next several weeks telling friends that I had never written those words and that the editors had made them up and attributed them to me. What those editors did was surely wrong under every moral and ethical code ever known to man.

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Question, Response, and Response

Written by Rev. Tony Ponticello, Tom Whitmore, & Doug Thompson Tuesday, 30 June 2009 12:00

(Following by Rev. Tony Ponticello)

Tom,

I assume you know that Doug Thompson makes several statements about the Course In Miracles Society’s (CIMS) A Course In Miracles Original Edition in the newly published A Course In Miracles Urtext Manuscripts. He believes you (Tom Whitmore) made numerous changes to paragraph breaks, comma positioning and word emphasis. He believes these numerous changes are significant and have created and eclectic interpretive version of the book, with your interpretation. He uses your name. 

I know there has been some discordant dealings between you and Doug in the past so I am reading what he says with the proverbial grain of salt. I would like to hear what you have to say about his claims. Someone has already asked me what I think about them, especially since I have embraced the Original Edition for my teaching purposes.

A response?

Love (Rev.) Tony
June 14, 2009

(Following by Tom Whitmore)

Dear Rev. Tony, 

Believing that in my defenselessness my safety lies, I have refrained from engaging with Doug Thompson’s criticisms of the Original Edition to the extent that I have been able. However, the subject keeps coming up, so I suppose I must reply. 

Doug’s criticisms are difficult to answer specifically because they are so general. He never cites chapter and verse; rather, he paints with a broad brush. 

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The Importance (and Power) of Purpose

Monday, 02 March 2009 12:00

One Sunday November 16, 2008, Rev. Mo Benson addressed the congregation at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco, CA. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that lecture.

Good morning family! First off, I’d like to thank Reverend Tony and Reverend Larry for trusting me enough to let me come up here to talk about A Course In Miracles. 

What I’m going to talk about today is the importance and power of purpose. I said it that way because I like the alliteration, but it’s not to be confused with a book that was written a while back called The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.  The only thing I know about that book is that he talks about five purposes given to each of us by God. Those are worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, and evangelism. You can probably tell that those don’t resonate with me, (laughter) but they probably resonate with a lot of people so, if they wish to go down that path then that’s certainly fine for them. 

The dictionary defines “purpose” as “something set up as an object or end to be attained.” For myself, an example would be that for 11 years I have belonged to what is called a Men’s Division.  That’s a group of men who have an organizational purpose. Each division is made up of teams and the teams have their own team purposes – and often what we do among the teams is talk about our own personal purposes. I personally like to call them a higher purpose rather than just a purpose because, for me, and maybe for some others in this room, it would seem that my basic purpose is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Can anybody relate to that? (laughter)  That’s a very hedonistic purpose to be sure, and that would simplify everything to be sure. If it brings some degree of pleasure, you do it and if it brings some kind of pain, you avoid it at all costs if possible!

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Spiritual Stimulus Package

Written by Rev. Tony Ponticello Tuesday, 31 March 2009 12:00

One Sunday March 15, 2009, Rev. Tony Ponticello addressed the congregation at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco, CA. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that lecture.

Two weeks ago we were at our conference, “A Blessing From The Abundance of Grandeur.” Many of you were there as well. I spoke about many things (*1) and that’s a picture of me at the conference on the cover of the program, looking rather sharp in my white tuxedo. I spoke about our economic situation, among many other things. I spoke about our conference gathering being a spiritual stimulus package. People really resonated with that idea so I thought I’d expound on it a little bit more.

At the conference I was talking about the conference itself being the spiritual stimulus package. I’d like to open that up a bit and talk about how we metaphysical students, we A Course In Miracles students, are a spiritual stimulus package for the world and one that the world absolutely needs.

Right now the world is contemplating the effectiveness of our governments economic stimulus package, and there’s a lot of debate whether it is effective or not. There’s a debate with both political parties. Maybe it’s not enough. Maybe it’s focused in the wrong direction. It’s an interesting little discussion. There’s not only a national discussion there is also a world discussion. In fact, the past week the G 20 nations met to discuss a world economic stimulus package, some way that all of these countries, the most dynamic financial countries, could do something in joint effort so that we could really kick start the world economy.

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