Posted by Candy on February 12, 2004 at 22:03:50
(Repost from below)
Maybe I was too hard on Mr. Don below(apologies) but my ire gets up whenever I find people defending the 'innocent' cult because "after all it was your own personal choice...blah..blah."
I think the testimony below about Sara is indicative of the mind games and personality disorders that pervaded the cult and drove even moral and ethical personalities to uspeakable abuses that in retrospect are like scenes from a gothic horror film.
Isn't it the children who always suffer the most though?
Sure I did my time in the cult(there were some good and bad times) but when I hear that one child suffered and it was covered up--Forget IT!
The leadership have proven themselves unworthy of our idealism, support, and further concern.
Go away I say to them. Go away and stop the facade! Even plants with no brain will bend towards the light of the sun,--so too humans will bend towards the light if not abused and prevented.
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Lucky you Mr. Don to be an apologist for the cult. 'You' made your 'free' choice to join and to leave and so did we you say. Black and white, so simple, you seem to think. Were you ever my CRO? Sounds like it!
Maybe you can't face the pain yet. Maybe just having 'choice' means to you that you were free in your simple-minded journey in the cult.
Like Watchman on Larry King informing us of his tragic choice that was supported by leadership and the "Word" of god-berg, what a sad situation--a free choice he could never live with. He felt it trapped him, compromised him, destroyed his stability and eventually his life.
Didn't the CRo's and other top leadership glory in their faults and sins? Like it was required form for leadership at the top to commit the ultimate act that then shrouded the leaders in a code of, not silence exactly, but rather a self-righteous sanctimonious retelling and fable-making of the sin in a self-promoting and cult-royalty-promoting "gaga" method that left us stupid jerks on the street looking like the peons that we were: In awe of leadership's higher skills at rhetoric.
You sound like leadership material to me. Perhaps the Cro's didn't recognize that in you soon enough. You may perhaps want to look at the movie "Training Day" with Denzel Washington, about a rookie cop who gets 'trained' by a corrupt veteran. You will see how an idealistic young man can be coerced into taking dope, drinking on the job, violence, and general corruption--all the while making the 'correct choices' as dictated by his leader.
It's a study in nuanced and complex and cognitive thinking--not sloganeering and chanting of tired cliches hoping that the bad will go away. Free choice does not always denote liberty!
That's why the cry: Give me liberty or give me death!