The need for community & acceptance

Kerry, this was written thinking about one of your recent posts, so I'm just going to ramble on some thoughts I had, OK?

For months after I stopped believing that leadership was divinely anointed of God, I still stayed in the Family because amongst the brothers and sisters there was genuine comraderie and acceptance. Sure, we had the feeling of tightness and unity by self-righteously shutting out the rest of the world, but it was there.

And there were sincere brothers and sisters you could really tell cared. So after leaving the Family you get out in the world, sometimes you find good friends and sometimes you don't. And when you don't the temptation is to think of the "rosy" memories of the Family and the sense of purpose and love there.

But it's so easy to forget the wolves watching over the flock. Not just the local leaders but the inhuman policies they enforced that turned normal half-decent leaders into destructive monsters. The love and acceptance stops real quicky when the policies say to stop, when the policies say to shun someone and start treating them like crap.

"Policies" is what cause the Family to look down on you, Kerry when your wife was murdered. Policies turned otherwise-loving brothers and sisters into a pack that turned their shoulders on you, shunned you and shut you out. You had become pariah, the outcast. These were kind sensitive people many of them, I'm sure. But the polices (the "will of God" spoken by "God's anointed leaders") told them that you were now outside the circle.

In the end, the shocking conclusion is that though you had that sense of community and acceptance by brothers and sisters in the Family, you can ONLY have that so long as the Family doctrines and polices and leaders and edicts didn't get in the way. That happened for short times, but the big fact is that for the most part it's everywhere. And to this day it turns kind, sensitive people into harsh, shunning, unloving people.

If you think of going back to the love and acceptance in the Family, you find that their love is very conditional. You must "obey the least of these commandments." The love and acceptance free of group control is best found in exmembers who have been there, done that, and relate.