deceivers yet true??

Do you know how detrimental this doctrine has been? We were brought up to believe that police and authorities were bad, to evade the government and lie whenever we had to to avoid paying taxes, to avoid being identified, to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. The ridiculous thing is, just having more than 7 people living in a 4 room house (try 25) brought a lot of attention on ourselves, being a bunch of foreigners in the middle of a local neighborhood, being only 3 girls aged 17, 13 and 11 who should be in school, passing out tapes shop to shop brought attention.

And when questioned or stopped, we lied through our teeth to avoid giving anyone our address, how more suspicious could we be.

Only people who have something to hide will hide it.

The paranoia was ridiculous and it took a few years to get over it, to realise that the government and officials are in place to keep the order and deserve our respect and cooperation. They for the most part, are underpaid and work hard. They aren't usually sent by the Devil to cause trouble to God's elite children.

I've also seen this doctrine used to ridiculous lengths to get out of hassles with the law. The group never turned in child molesters, which according to the law should be reported to the proper authorities, why is that?

If there was a case of domestic violence in the home, it was never reported to authorities. I know a now ex Family member who helped "spirit away" 4 children from their father so that they could "escape" the system and rejoin the group. The result, those kids were molested and maltreated, one of them now in jail, one of them dead.

Deceivers yet true--it's really an excuse for your own sins, same as "According to your faith" to justify breaking rules.