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orion-list Response to Goranson




In his post on 63 BCE S. Goranson wrote:

> 	While searching for something else on the web, which, to
> understate, includes some unreliable info, I saw an essay quoted, said to
> be by Greg Doudna, titled "Showdown at Big Sandy," which was said to no
> longer represent the author's views. It concerns interpretations in Bible
> prophecy of Ephraim and Manasseh:
> 
I knew this skeleton in my closet would come out at some point!
I was a student 1972-75 at an unaccredited, fundamentalist Bible
college in east Texas (Ambassador College, Big Sandy, Texas).
I'm looking into what is going on with the fundamentalist web page
cited by Goranson which apparently has picked up some paper I
wrote as a second-year student at that Bible college in 1974.  I wrote 
a book about my fundamentalist experience, _Showdown at Big Sandy:
Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional
Bible College in East Texas, 1972-1975_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University
Microfilms International, 1987).  It is a light-hearted, but also serious,
memoirs of the fundamentalist experience from one who was there
(me).  I sought through humor and the foil of myself as the innocent,
believing, naive, but growing young mind at this Bible college, to show
the way forward and out of such thinking.  Everything in the book is
true yet I wrote it as a story with plot and theme.  The theme 
revolves around about a dozen or so creative papers I wrote mostly 
when I was a sophomore student at this college (I left before
graduating).  One paper proved there was a 7000-year plan in history.
Another unequivocally proved through the use of Jubilee cycles that
Christ was due to return in the year 1987.  Another argued that the
church doctrine forbidding interracial dating and marriage had no
biblical basis and looked instead like it originated from racism, etc.
There were about a dozen or so papers of this nature in a c. 18-month
period, each submitted to the church, and the story is how the
bureaucracy in this authoritarian, hierarchical church responded to
this input of creativity from below.  Those with no or Jewish religious
backgrounds, or with Roman Catholic or mainstream Protestant or
European state church backgrounds maybe will not understand.  
Those who know the American Protestant sectarian experience
from younger years will understand.  After I left fundamentalism I
returned to ancestral roots as a Quaker and started challenging
political authority (anti-nuke activism, etc.).  That's as much answer
as I intend to give to Goranson's question on orion.  Since all of
this involves my life before I entered accredited academia (as
an undergraduate at the U. of Oregon in 1989) and none of it
involves anything to do with the Scrolls, I regard Goranson's
question, complete with webpage link, as more of an attempt
to embarrass than to further serious discussion.  

Greg Doudna


For private reply, e-mail to Greg Doudna <gd@teol.ku.dk>
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