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In Reply to: I'm gonna watch "Walk the Line" now posted by Oldtimer on January 04, 2006 at 16:56:25:
I saw the film and liked it. Afterward I was doing some research on Joaquin Phoenix and found an interview from Uncut magazine where he talked about his opinion of the COG:
"Joaquin, however, disputes whether his parents were ever cult members. "It might have become a cult, but when we were there it was a really religious community," he argues. "It was a time when people were questioning the nuclear family of the Fifties, people were saying they weren't satisfied with the upbringing their parents had, is there another way? My parents were just searching for an alternative way of raising their children, they didn't want to raise us in the Bronx. My mom was raised in the Bronx, and she was scared every day coming home from school."
Cult or not, the Phoenix family eventually grew disillusioned with the Children of God and stowed away from Venezuela to Florida in 1978.
"My parents have never been blind followers," says Joaquin. "In fact, they recognised that it was shifting and the ideas behind it wasn't what they wanted, so we left. The awful stuff I've heard about the group in the Eighties, that wasn't our experience. We were trying to figure out how to make alternative societies, and a lot of them fell to the same mistakes that our larger society has made, in which people's egos and greed took over. I think that's what happened to that community. But it wasn't the picture people paint.""
Full Interview:
http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Walking_With_Demons
