From: Hermit (virus@hermit.net)
Date: Sat Oct 04 2003 - 16:26:45 MDT
[Mermaid] A glance at the material tells you that it is lifted straight off religious material or legal texts with certain words substituted.
[Hermit] Err, your glance misfired. The material posted was not "lifted straight off anything." The material in the Disownmnet Process was, as is acknowledged, based on the methodology of the Society of Friends, but was extensively reworked with input by a number of Virians. The material in the Disciplinary Process was completely independently developed - again, with input from many Virians, some with legal experience; but this is not particularly important except in establishing clarity, as the "Disciplinary Process" is not a legalistic process at all.
[Hermit] Many of the ideas behind the the Disciplinary Process are based on extensive study of the orders for community living, developed by societies as varied as the Dutch of the 1600 and 1700s, through the "Community of the Poor" at Q'umram, to the great religious orders of the 1000 to 1700 CE period, as well as the "Community Orders" of the Cathars, Waldensians and Albigensians. While the "Disciplinary Process" of the CoV attempts to capture the spirit of their concepts (which were psychologically well founded), it had to be written from scratch, not least because the above were written in obsolete languages which I doubt many members of the CoV follow, but more importantly, because they relied largely on religious concepts, dealt with communities with very well defined roles and responsibilities, and were written to deal with and guide everyday activities which are quite alien to us.
[Hermit] Nevertheless, they were useful, as most focused on the effective development and maintainance of communities and embody several thousand years of experience in managing groups of people. As we are attempting to develop a community, and we are an evolutionary body, we don't mind where we find ideas that might help us succeed. If we do as well as even the shortest lived of those communities (about 20,000 members in the Q'umram community before its final destruction after 400 years, by Rome in 135CE), we will be doing much better than we have managed to do to date.
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2003 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;threadid=29437> --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Oct 04 2003 - 16:27:04 MDT