Rocky

My point is: all of your efforts to frame what Wierwille taught and what he did are stories that YOU give your preferred meaning/interpretation to. I believe everything about TWI was horse pucky. I do not expect you to believe it because I say it. If I did so expect, it would be unrealistic. I believe it would take something as dramatic for you as what was read in the Book of Acts about how Paul changed his entire belief system in the wink of an eye.

At some point Mike, whether you ever come to realize that your hero was charlatan or not, you still could benefit from thinking through what the social climate was like when this happened. Elsewhere on GSC, I have recently mentioned the book, UnCULTured, which I am reading now. It's a memoir by a survivor of the Children of God cult, Daniella Mestyanek Young published in 2022. The epigraph in the book states, "The first rule of cults is you are never in a cult." I was in a cult. Specifically in the 9th WC, when Jonestown went down. I remember Loy being VERY concerned that WE were going to be labelled a cult. Of course, he was right. The connection of Ms Young's childhood with your story about picking up three 14 year old girls who happened to be in twi... Joker star Joaquin Phoenix had an unconventional early childhood, living in Venezuela, Florida, and eventually Hollywood with his peripatetic parents and siblings Summer, Liberty, Rain, and late fellow actor River. But until Phoenix was around three years old in 1977, the family were followers of the Children of God, a cult helmed by a rogue preacher called David Berg that would later become notorious amid allegations of child sexual abuse. And he’s not the only celebrity who spent some of their early years in the group—Rose McGowan also spent part of her childhood in the cult. Here’s what you need to know. This excerpt is from an Esquire magazine story in 2019. Berg’s church melded worship of Jesus Christ with ’60s-era free love, and preached a fairly standard cult leader prophecy—the apocalypse was coming, and soon. This doomsday predication encouraged his followers to live hand-to-mouth rather than making long-term plans; ex-members later told The Guardian of begging for alms and subsisting off of donated food. The cult earned notoriety for its sexual practices, which included what Berg dubbed “flirty fishing,” and which found him ordering female followers to have sex with men in order to bring them into the cult. In 1979, he reported that “flirty fishers” had added 19,000 members to the group’s ranks. "It was religious prostitution," one of Berg's daughters told Timeline in 2017. Joaquin Phoenix told Vanity Fair that the introduction of the "flirty fishing" policy drove his parents to leave the group. "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that," he said, "and they were like, '.... this, we’re outta here.’" His mother, Heart Phoenix, told the magazine that "it took several years to get over our pain and loneliness" after leaving the group. Rose McGowan’s family also escaped the cult during her childhood. I'm NOT suggesting you did anything inappropriate with those hitchhikers. I AM suggesting it was odd (but I know from being a kid at that time it was certainly in the realm of possibility) that 14 year old girls would hitchhike. There are obvious parallels between twi and Berg's cult. The difference is perhaps in degrees. The cult leader sets himself up to be beyond challenge internal in the group. He then gets to establish the group mores and rationalize it however he can. The practices look less like a Biblical construct than a manifestation of the desires of the cult leader.

Mekia Cox

The lovely (and gorgeous) lady in this clip plays a seriously badass detective in The Rookie.

The post/comment immediately prior to Chockfull's just a moment ago was just shy of 19 years ago. 19 years FROM NOW will be 2041. I hope all (or most... given the constraints of aging) will still be upright at that time. I will then be about 87 years old. Take care as best you can for your health and wellbeing, fellow greasespotters.

Mike, Mike, Mike... How often do you change minds by telling people to whom you reply that they are wrong? If you want to find out, perhaps you can commission a scientific poll. Claiming to have done an informal poll two decades ago really sounds the same as "I'm making up a story for which I have no authoritative back up to my claim."

IMO, the title, The Joy of Serving, was completely subterfuge. Joy is joy. Wanna know what gives me great joy? My grandchildren. Serving in Victor's cult was mostly drudgery. But renaming drudgery as joy may have psyched some people into feeling guilty for not devoting all of their time to selling PFLAP and taking orders from Loy Martindale. No thank you.

Merry Christmas, Mike.

Jumping to contusions sounds better than jumping to concussions. Just sayin'

Steamed live and recorded in October 2022.

Also from page 22 of UnCULTured: So, without being able to peer inside the mind and heart of Victor Wierwille, WE can look at his PFLAP indoctrination with new insight from the recollections of others subjected to cult indoctrination. Again, it doesn't "establish" his motivation, but it does suggest he was setting up BRAINWASHING of vulnerable and susceptible (mostly) young people. And it DOES show the antidote for any and everyone who chooses not to be thus constrained about "how far they can go."

I just read this in UnCULTured: a memoir, by Daniella Mestyanek Young [pgs 21 and 22]who is a survivor of the Children of God cult:

Speaking of the longevity of cult organization, I just started reading UnCULTured: a memoir written by a survivor of the Children of God cult. It's notable (to me anyway) how a common thread (perhaps a RED thread) among all fundamentalist Christian cult survivors' stories is that the founders find ways to rationalize and self-justify sexual abuse of increasingly young women. Twi is no different in that regard.

Are you sure that was me?

Rather than sexual predation being "the core" of cults and religion, I believe sexual predation is an inherent risk/danger of any group or institution in which substantive power imbalance exists without adequate "guardrails" in the written/unwritten mores of the group or institution.

How certain are you of the interpretation the phrase you quoted is a command? I see it differently but find your take to be intriguing. At this time, I see the phrase as a declaration based on assessment or personal inference. I suppose Victor's intent could have been an effort to place constraints on the minds of his listeners.

I won't "expound on" what you personally thing regarding the internet. But regarding the book and movie...here's a description of the book from Goodreads: One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

I'm not shocked. They sell soap (Amway) for the mind. They sit on a lot of scratch and they have a few people making up stories to keep the sheep in the fold. Occasionally, one (or some) get out, but the proselytizing keeps it going.

No. But that would be nice right about now.

And even if they did... oh, come on... how could they possibly make sense of what Mike rambles on about anyway?

THIS movie (and book) seem to me to be very significant an related to the cult (and other religions') practice of sexual predation and abuse.

Of course you wonder in that direction. It's called rationalization.