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It was never written down.
That is where I started in life, evangelical. My parents were baptists but got involved in an evangelical type church. I went to a small christian school sponsored by the church and sat including school chapel about 3-4 sermons per week for many years. I later left, went to a baptist church about a year....then converted to the christadelphians who are somewhat similar to JW's and to Church of Christ but not the same. I have also spent a year with some liberal quakers. I've also met various kinds of Christians, pagans, Jews, Muslims, couple of Vedics (Hindus), lots of atheists, some witches, some satanists, some gang members etc. I've met homeless people, been homeless, been many things none very lofty or successfully. When they passed out the pranks they must have thought I said "Thanks!" Anyways I've had my brushes with cults.
Families are cults. Everything else builds on that, and you can't live without a family. Even an orphan has some kind of a family, even if its just an administrator shuffling their file or clicking 'Status'. We start out looking at grownups as if they are gods. They're so tall and strong. They seem like everything they do is better than what we do when we're small. Its so easy to believe and so comfortable. I can't even be honest with myself about whether I'd go back. I say I wouldn't, but its like a drug. Its like a great big chair made just for you, and believing you sit back and are held. That's childhood, and that's how childhood ought to be at least at first. It should be so soft and wonderful, and you should have everything you need with some minor challenges of course.Children should have little problems not big ones.
The trouble comes when children are kept immature. When they're not given responsibility and not taught anything or played with, then there are problems that stem from that. Its especially bad when they are bred to be dependent. That is a favorite tool of slavers throughout the millennia. The enslaver works to convince the slave that the enslaver is an essential part of life. Sometimes the enslaver believes their own lie, too. When I was a child I really needed parents, but I'm not a child now. I need to take responsibility for my own life.
"You are IN now." Most groups have joining rituals. Its all about sweaty palms. They trot you up front to cement your membership and make you feel like you are responsible to keep showing up. Its not good. If you're a member its obvious. There's no need to play limbo. You just fit in. Now...if you want to work in the nursery or serve then of course there needs to be some kind of check, such as a criminal background check. That is administrative though. They take donations from anybody, and that should be more than enough of a joining ritual for most purposes. What's with all the pressure?
The vast majority of mental disorders ar ultimately neurosis. There is as we grow up a development of the self. That then is teained to navigate by waus amd means of abstractive symbols. That creates this self abstracting away im a limited small part of the nrain and it begins to abstract in context to itself. The process creates a stronger sense of self individualism at the expense of the physicality of reality itself.
Thanks! I'm more embarrassed of it than proud, but it is an experience that has made me. I wouldn't want to be someone other than who I am.
My thought is, it wasnt a religion. It was a something else. Read jungs red book better yet get it. Its that. Or more precisily they were inducing what he was experiencing at that time as he wrote it. They were using Psychcotropics of the day. Not to stablize but to destablize the normal state of me on one end of the board and brain on the other to bring that back together. The saw "normal",as the problem actually, as it tends to herd and breakdown. Look at politics. They are nuts. Starting at the top. The mysteries would se me that as delusional.
Lol i did a whole what would so and so say.
I’ll try asking my question a different way. If someone tells you about an organization that looks like a dangerous cult to them, and there is one leader in the cult who sometimes uses one of those BITE techniques in harmful ways, Will you add that organization to your list of cults?
In that case you can add the Baha’i Faith to your list of dangerous cults. It uses shunning and information control.
There are people who are labeled as “Covenant-breakers,” and there is a prohibition against associating with them. Whenever a member writes a book about the Baha’i Faith, they are required to have it approved by a Baha’i national spiritual assembly before they publish it. Once when someone wrote a paper contradicting a view of the Baha’i Universal House of Justice, the owner of an online collection of documents about the Baha’i Faith decided not to include that in the collection, on the advice of a member of a national spiritual assembly.
I don’t have any problem with it, if that what you mean. If what I’m saying is true, if there’s a prohibition against associating with people named as Covenant-breakers by the leaders, and if members are required to have books about the religion approved by the leaders before publishing them, then would you include that religion on your list of dangerous cults?
