I am re-posting an older post…I found it while looking at various posts.
Glancing through the book “Truth vs Falsehood” by David Hawkins, I read this headline, “Cultism”…so here it is.
“Cults ensnare the unwary by their specialness and false promises. Members have ‘insider’ status and a special ‘lingo’. The group leader is charismatic, seductive, and courts the intimate, who is flattered by the attention. The leader is very ‘special’ and treated with adulation, which is quickly turned into control of members, including especially their money and sex lives, as well as lifestyles, diets, clothing, etc. Members must take allegiance and break off relationships with family or even spouses and often associations or groups.”
“The group often forms a geographic, restrictive enclave and develops a group paranoia as well as a characteristic “cult glaze” (cal. 120) as though in a hypnotic state (the effect of isolation and brainwashing). Once detected, that glaze is easily recognized (the “programmed cult look,” as one observer described it. There is a flatness and automation style to rationalization where content is like a “party line” that is parroted from having been programmed. Cults especially target celebrities and exploit them as showpieces.”
“The influence of the cult leaders is so strong that large groups of people will willingly kill not only others but also themselves (e.g. Heavens Gate, Jim Jones, Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, Aum Shinrikyo subway gassers, Bolsheviks, Nazi party, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, liberationists etc.”
“Another characteristic of cultism is proselytizing and insistence of following the party line of a pseudo-religious group belief system by which individuality is scorned or even threatened. Leaders are very power-oriented, and control plus paranoid egoism are dominant themes.”
“Sometimes a spiritual leader will calibrate as integrous early in their career but then will fall victim to the seduction of prestige, money, sex, or the adulation of followers. Then the original spiritual group degenerates into a cult, or a spiritual technique becomes actually trademarked and then commercialized and marketed by hired publicists. In that case, the technique calibrates above 200 but the organization itself falls below 200 and becomes primarily a marketing organization that trades on the original concept or exclusive technique. The technique is thus only taught for a price and ‘trainees’ are forbidden to reveal the secret teachings (which are usually merely a few simple phrases or sentences with a general application to ‘improve health’, “attract abundance”, “increase love life,” “be more popular”, fulfill your potential success”, “attract a mate”, etc) Some of the promoted techniques can be found in any fortune cookie, e.g. “One smile can change your life forever” (cal. 350), or “Success goes to one who is kind.” (cal. 360)
“The true value of such workshops is not the magic of the central concept or technique, but the disciplined practice of actually applying it with regularity in the daily life instead of merely quickly dismissing it as “I already know that.” The value of training workshops then lies in the learning of the value of steady application and actually putting a valuable tool into practice and steady focus, e.g., the “faithfulness” of A Course in Miracles workbook.”
“Another expression of cultism is the cultification of splinter groups from traditional religions, e.g., the far-right “fundamentalism” most prominent and visible in Islam, Christianity and ethnic variations of worldwide religions.”
David Hawkins
While I know when you are in the midst of a cult, you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you step out and find your own freedom to be an individual to feel the open space where the programmed mind used to be, it is mind blowing.
Most feel and think that a cult is this small hidden special group, but if you look around within many religions, you will see what they are doing to the individual, they are controlling it.
Any organization that tells you what to wear and what not to wear, what is acceptable and what is not, what you can and cannot do with your own body is a cult. Albeit a milder level for perhaps your religion hasn’t asked you to kill, yet.
In my childhood religion, there was a phrase that could erase all sins and we literally believed in its power. “Your sins are forgiven in Jesus name and blood…” By believing in this phrase, ‘there was no sin to great to forgive’. All transgressions against others were deleted.
With this phrase, many criminal behaviors are washed away without ever needing the police, the law or the court of the land.
It is insanity at its best and what happens to the victims of these crimes? Who is there to protect them, when it is known and approved to have pedophiles preying upon the children, and the only consequences are they have to ‘confess’ and be ‘forgiven’?
Where are all these sins? Do they really believe that Jesus is carrying the weight of all the tortured children? Is he indeed that forgiving, to allow the children to suffer while the adults get a new cloak that is whiter than snow? Come on people wake up the sins are living in your midst, they are the abused, the confused and the broken.
There are no magic words that will take away the physical act of abuse on a child’s body nor erase the terror and the shattered trust and innocence….
The most evil words that I can now hear are “Your sins are all forgiven…” For what it means to me, is that the monster has been blessed to abuse again.
When will the people in the cult wake up and see the bleeding children? When will they understand that the words spoken are destroying the spirits/souls of the children among them?
As they sit in the pews singing “Bless be the tie that binds us…” I want them to know, they are the chorus in a ring of child abuse!
I wanted to believe that my family was an oddity that we were not the popular way within the church, yet I fear that I was the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath is beyond what my mind can hold.
I M Perfect lady 