Whether you are teaching or critiquing the DP, I don't care - but please, PLEASE take a minute to read this before talking about the DP.

In old-school DP lecture notes, there was a slide with a chart that looked something like this:

Most DP lectures, and most people's understanding of the DP, generally, stem back to these notes (as opposed to the DP, directly), it appears.

When I was being trained to lecture, it bothered me to no end when I saw this chart in my lecture notes, because molecules do not "come in cations and anions".

Atoms do.

I thought this was some sort of typo from whoever typed up the notes (there were more than a few).

Eventually, though, I saw this same thing in a major slide presentation. "Oh God," I thought, "the typo goes back even further...."

So, afterward, being the kind of person who will tell you when you have spinach in your teeth, I brought the issue to the attention of the people in charge.

I was told that this was not a typo - that this was, in fact, true to what the DP said.

I disagreed. Strongly.

A DP was whipped out.

Ends up that both of us were right, and both of us were wrong.

It wasn't a typo, it was a completely bogus chart, and apparently everyone who had ever lectured had given me a fundamental misunderstanding of the text that goes along with it....probably because they hadn't, themselves, read (or understood) the text and so assumed the chart was something much more simplistic than it was.

In today's age of public debate, I see it cropping up Every. Damn. Where., and from seemingly intelligent people on all sides. So, I've come to the conclusion that most moonies either don't know what cations and anions are, or haven't actually read the DP.

So listen up:

The DP does not teach that "everything is created in pairs"

It's teaches that:

a) every individual entity is composed of dual characteristics, because

b) force is generated through the interaction of two elements (giver and receiver).

c) therefore, nothing can exist, act, or be created without some sort of give-and-take action between two elements...

d) ...and so neither can God.

This is the really friggin' fundamental "why" behind literally everything that comes afterward in the text.

Now everybody go whip out your dusty old DPs and reread Chapter 1, please, before you start throwing it around in an argument.

k thx.

(And stop calling shit "unprincipled", because the point is that this stuff is supposed to be a spiritual law akin to how gravity is a physical one - i.e. it's not actually possible to defy it. Not even God Hisself can act against it. So, anything that happens or exists by definition follows these principles. The fall was hella principled. Satan could probably teach a DP lecture better than all y'all. What you mean to say when you say "principled" or "unprincipled" is "God-centered"/"providential" or "not-God-centered"/"anti-providential", respectively. Things can't "go against the principle", but they can "go against God's providence". So, regardless of your moral views on an issue or event, no one needs to freak out about whether homosexuality, for instance, "goes against the principle" because, if you believe the words of the DP, it cannot. Ok? OK???).