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In Reply to: Re: Guilt, guilt guilt posted by archivist on September 11, 2003 at 16:22:12:
"Our experiences and sufferings took place in the context of us joining a cult as an adult, of our own free choice, and more or less being able to leave whenever we wished to. IE we were not minors."
i take issue with your generalizing statement. There are quite a few who joined as minors, (adult? a 14, 15, 16 yr old an adult? i know quite a few) and i take issue with your 'free choice' wording for the ones who came from their own unbearable 'family' hells.
"'being able to leave whenever we wished to?"
where were you?
some had documents taken away, risked to lose spouses and children, were subjected to exorcisms, solitary confinement etc for even just voicing the fact that they wanted to leave for a while...
maybe you were a single, maybe you have no kids and do not know these things, but it is good to remember them.
have you thought how 'free' you are to 'leave' when you are a young mother in a foreign country with scads of little kids and no place to go except maybe your 'fish' who is no better at exploiting you than the people who are around you anyway?
i take issue with your blanket statements that only show that 'guilt, guilt, guilt' is a personal issue and you cannot assign the same amount of guilt to others who may have been your excog peers at one time, just by accident or for whatever reason.
perhaps one of the things that gets under your skin so much about sam (i read some of the discussion below) is the fact that he left very early, late 70's i believe, and for years was the only one denouncing the oppression and the abuse while others who are here were instead making sure those policies were enforced. sam needs to learn a few things indeed, but guilt is not a great motivating factor to displace onto others who have their personal and different story as well. the degrees of collusion vary tremendously among all of us, and so does the level of guilt. it is not a one size fits all.
let us all own up to our own specific guilt and realize that at the end of the day it is only our own conscience that is staring back at us and that forgiveness (badly needed in order to move on at a personal level) starts right there with the courage to forgive ourselves.
