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In Reply to: No one threatened to break our arms posted by Oldtimer on December 13, 2003 at 19:20:35:
You don't need guns when you've got someone's soul captive. That was my point. The force and coercion we are talking about was NOT "merely" losing a job or losing the trust of your colleagues -- you can always get another job.
We are talking about people taking spirtual authority over you. You are dealing with minds/souls that were worn down. We are talking about the possibility of losing your children forever as they are spirited away by your obedient sold-out partner, into selah conditions in some unknown country. We are talking about having burned our bridges and pissed off our relatives and not being able to go back to them, having no outside help. You're talking about in many cases, your parents being the whole reason you escaped to join a cult in the first place, and losing contact with them for decades. The fact is we believed our parents were systemites to be used and discarded. You are talking about a time when cult awareness was minimal, and resources/support for people exiting virtually non-existant.
We are talking about many of us joining as teenagers who didn't know better. Some of us did not grow up in normal homes to start with, and couldn't rationally define abuse as abuse. Heck some of us being that young never even had occasion to discuss "abuse." Then with the F. having a 100% monopoly on information and input, taught that something abusive was normal and even scriptural, and just that the rest of the world couldn't catch up with God's true mind about these things, most of us believed it.
We are talking "The girl who wouldn't" "IRFers beware." Stockholm syndrome. We are talking REAL fear, fear of your plane crashing when you leave.
All the 'normal' parameters which should have been available were dissolved, we were in a different paradigm. We were placed in situations where we had to make choices to survive the mental/emotional/spiritual abuse. Of course, we were the ones who went and surrendered ourselves to false shepherds, so we have ourselves to blame. But the surrendering is real. The control and authority someone can have over you is real. I consider my time in the F. as when I was temporarily insane. I am thankful that some semblance of rational thinking was intact in my case, and I didn't do anything serious to hurt anyone other than I was conned into paying tithes and supporting the machine. But it could easily be me, now looking back shamefully, and realizing I did all this unexplainable stuff.
How else do you explain our being willing to be subjected to, our allowing your wife to be subjected to prostitution, or having babies without fathers, or being raped, or lying to the public, and all that? We just weren't in our right minds.
Am I saying we are less responsible just because? Hell no, personally, I don't think so. I agree with Jules that it doesn't matter because a crime was committed against a child. Abuse is abuse, period. And it's punishable by law. But surely this is a case by case thing, and perhaps up to the courts/God/the offender/victim to decide, how accountable the perpetrators should be.
