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In Reply to: Cultic Mindset Productions posted by Former Family Prophet on January 18, 2006 at 04:40:00:
I didn't teach my children to be either. But the subject of Abrahim being invented is explained again, in another clearer fashion at NDN by George at Open House. Apparently it was talked about long ago, but now you have it from two sources.
btw, I am glad my children weren't around long enough for all that BS and it isn't second nature to them or natural at all for them. But I can't put down other FG that were stuck in the cult mindset longer than I was. There were so many factors for what people joined for and why people did not all just run when different doctrines or garbage came out.
Whether you get sucked into a lie as a young adult and it is developed for years or you are taught it from childhood it is damaging to all.
I was very fortunate to have things come together at a time when I was with my children to be able to leave.
The story of the invention of Abrahim is true.
It clarifies all the other mystical BS that continues to be regurgitated in new forms inside the Family today. Since Maria made that up and people bought it, as you said, the youth of the sixties and early seventies were ripe for this sort of thing because there were many different searches for meaning and imports of Eastern religions that people looked for magical and new (to them- old by world standards) ways of thinking and believing.
Berg and other cult leaders rolled things up together in cults and utilized his own youth and the youth that joined to attract other followers.
But most that joined in the early days did not know that the sorts of things that were happening with Maria and others that berg decided to exploit were going on. Not until well entrenched in doctrine and then only part of the story.
As someone mentioned above, "Dropout" was not a Berg invention. FG youth knew that because the saying by Timothy Leary was widely read and parodied or promoted in magazines, TV, media at large. Berg adapted part of the phrase to try and speak the language of the youth of that day to attract them to the group.
But the attractant wasn't to drugs or wild sex then. It was as Acheick decribed, quite Victorian within the regular ranks and while people could be severely humiliated before all by leaders who KNEW what Berg did behind the scenes and just because they had seen someone attractive and "lusted after them" in their mind.
These humiliations and "breakings" would occur regularly in "purging sessions" where weeping and being screamed at in front of everybody for horrible sins such as this or simply someone saying "their mind wandered" would be reason to crush someone emotionally. And we were all crushed.
You have to wonder how leaders that knew the real story could lead sessions like this, made to seem to be spontaneous as if god had come down and told them what was in the minds of others.
In my youth and naivete, I believed it as did many because after all we were in our teens and early twenties for the most part.
Making funny writings about Family doctrines can be entertaining and has its place, but I want to ask you to please not discount what happened within to people when it is talked about seriously. Questioning it and being skeptical is healthy and often brings out more understanding and more truth about the matters are brought up.
