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In Reply to: Trying to understand posted by Bill on September 22, 2006 at 01:39:29:
I have asked myself the very same question many times and I am still at a loss. The explanations you read here and whatever else you read elsewhere are only one part of the picture. Those who write are either outsiders who just cannot understand or insiders trying to make sense of their part of the elephant.
I am a FG who stayed in for quite some time and the most radical part of the doctrines I took was related to One Wife. I still have trouble reconciling real life with those teachings. My explanation is that this point was my active side of "faithfulness" and I just have to deal with it.
But on the passive side, my failure to voice my opinion about the Davidito Book as wrong, is something I have questioned many times. There many other points I disliked: the quotas, the arrogance of leaders, the lies when litnessing, the stupid 100%, the stupid 10%, the bullying of the weak, the bias to favor some... the list is long. Why didn't those bothered me much?
When the BAR letters came, outlining the gory details of ways parents were supposed to lead their revolutionary sex life of their children signal my "to here and no further" and I knew I had to leave.
That was my point of no return and, feeling sorry for those I was leaving behind, I left to never look back again. But many other stayed. How come?
Looking back into the past, this point had come to many others all along. For example, the Kohoutek false prophecy was the last drop for many, who left then. Maybe the reasons I didn't leave then were similar to the reasons my friends, brothers and sisters until that day, didn't leave with me when the BAR letters came out. They had a larger bucket, they didn't have a way to go, they were afraid, they... All those other things you read about. All of those things are true.
Berg and his robots call it "stretching the new bottle" and "let the old bottles go", etc. but the truth is that the last drop of sin and misappropriation of truth didn't pass the limitations of humanity some of us still have, and saying "enough is enough", we left.
We all were put to the test many times, sleep on the floor, on stair cases, or even stairs. We suffered a lot and a lot of that suffering was not our doing. Some, a lot of it, was planned. Many people were sent out with full knowledge, expectation and even hope that they would not come back. That was not love. It wasn't even smart but the plain blindness of arrogance taught by Berg and now her blind maid Zerby.
But things were not this simple. There are many people who stayed in the cult because of the personal perks they received and not because they really believe any of the teachings. The cult is a class-based environment where some people were and are "more equal than others".
Thank God I don't have anything to do with the cult any more but I would be willing to bet that the same small cluster of "trusted" leaders of 20-30 years ago are still leaders, if not directly themselves, through their influence on their own children.
This is my part of the elephant. I hope it helps.
Then, keep in mind, that upon leaving we also need to keep our sanity and embellish our memories and our actions become heroic. We want to look good in our eyes and so tell ourselves stories that we end up believing.
Also, I have not said anything about people who actually got kicked out. Some for good reasons (like stealing bread a-la Jean Valjean from Les Miserables) and others because they were not willing to bring money to the home. Then there is another group of people who left after being demoted from cozy positions of power. And so on and so forth.
It is a huge elephant but the common denominator of why people remained silent was and is the control exercised by the social structure created by Berg. People were either benefiting greatly or were afraid of the consequences from speaking up.
Either greed or fear, those are the two reason why even to this day some people are silent. What gets me is that both greed and fear are not part of the cult's explicit doctrine, but it is in there as part of the natural human condition, a given that Berg used to maximize his evil goals.
