Posted by Reader on November 24, 2002 at 14:43:36
In Reply to: The Children who died posted by Researcher on November 22, 2002 at 17:48:02:
They lost children due to possible neglect and bad advice or due to conditions created by COG they would never otherwise have put themselves in. One was Karen Meyer and another was "Lucy Lowe" (a pseudonym.)
Lucy's husband used the occasion to force her into FFing, using physical violence on her. Lowe recalled, "l was a wreck. And I remember [that my husband] slapped my face really hard... And he said, You 're murmuring against God... You're going against God's will... [Y]ou've just got to smarten up.' "
Karen was demoted and publicly humiliated.
"Karen Meyer was a member from March 1970 to June 1979, during which time an infant of hers died (on September 3, 1975) in the course of a group automobile trip across Turkey. The eight-month old baby died at night in the back of the van when she apparently crawled off the back seat where she was sleeping, lodged herself between the seat and a piece of plastic, and suffocated. Because of crammed space, Meyer was at the time sleeping outside the van, in a field, but at least one adult was sleeping inside the van when the infant died.
"Internalizing the charge that she was an unfit mother, Meyer later resigned her leadership position in childcare because, in her words, 'I felt that if God was so obviously distraught with me that Re would take a child, then I had no business trying to teach other women how to raise their children.' 36 Unable to blame the death of her child, as she was subsequently able to do, on 'negligence and the way we were living at the time,'37 Meyer accepted immediate affective punishment avoidance by other members - and immediate purposive punishment involving the charge of 'selfishness' in her opposition to her husband's sexual involvement with another woman, as indicators of God's angry response to her own 'spiritual' deficiencies.