How Cults Work

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Joel
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Woman Claims She Was Branded During Bizarre Sisterhood Initiation

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Joel
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CelestialAngel wrote: October 20th, 2017, 5:09 pm The problem is many religions and cults believe in God so it's important to know you're in the right God worshipping group. Or is God bigger than any religion?

Seems this is the main source why there are so many groups:


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Joel
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LukeAir2008
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As I was reading the list I was checking off each item and thinking well, on this definition, the LDS Church is a cult.

I used to give the standard, defensive response and say NO the LDS Church is not a cult.

The Church of Jesus Christ is not a cult but a lot of cult like behaviours, practices and attitudes exist within the Church.

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Joel
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How Well-Meaning, Intelligent People End Up in a Cult

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EnlightenNext was an organization, founded by self-styled guru Andrew Cohen, that aimed to facilitate spiritual awakening. Cohen’s most devoted students meditated for hours—at times, months—on end, were often celibate, and lived together. However, what started as an idealistic venture quickly turned into a complicated, often-sinister world that revolved around Cohen. The story of EnlightenNext’s rise and fall begs a deeper question: How do otherwise well-intentioned and rational people end up in a cult? In this documentary, The Atlantic talks to former members, as well as Cohen himself, about their stories in order to uncover the life span of a new religious movement that, after 27 years, collapsed nearly overnight.

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Polygamist Cult Founder’s Daughter, Rachel Jeffs, Gives Her First TV Interview

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In her first live television interview, Rachel Jeffs, daughter of Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed prophet of the FLDS Church, tells Megyn Kelly TODAY viewers about life inside one of the country’s most notorious polygamist groups. She says her father sexually abused her “way more times than I can even count.”

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Joel
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Ex-Members: Church Uses Pull, Lies to Keep Kids

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An Associated Press investigation has found that a secretive evangelical church has used lies and intimidation to bring in and keep children. Ex-members of Word of Faith Fellowship say the kids are exposed to sometimes violent church practices. (Nov. 13)

SPINDALE, North Carolina (AP) — As a court-appointed advocate for two foster boys, it was Nancy Burnette's job to ensure they were in good hands. So as part of her casework, she visited Word of Faith Fellowship, the evangelical church they attended with the couple seeking to adopt them.

What happened next haunts her: In the middle of the service, the chanting and singing suddenly stopped, Burnette said, and the fiery pastor pointed at Burnette, accusing her of being "wicked." ''You are here to cause strife!" she recalled Jane Whaley shouting, as she sensed congregants begin to converge upon her. "You don't think these kids are supposed to be here!"

Terrified, Burnette left, but not before promising the boys, ages 4 and almost 2, that she would return — a promise she ultimately could not keep.

"What I didn't know was how hard Word of Faith would fight — and the tactics they would use — to keep the kids," Burnette told The Associated Press.

That was not the only time Word of Faith Fellowship's leaders and members have used positions of authority, intimidation or deception to bring children into the church's folds or keep them from leaving — often at Whaley's behest, according to dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of court records, police reports and social services documents obtained by the AP.

As a result, children have been introduced to sometimes violent church practices that run counter to the North Carolina laws designed to protect them, the AP found.
The state promotes "family preservation," designed to prevent the "unnecessary placement of children away from their families." But the AP found that some young congregants have been separated from their parents for up to a decade — bounced from family to family — as leaders strive to keep them in the church.

In addition, three single mothers told the AP that a longtime Word of Faith Fellowship member who was a county court clerk bypassed the foster system and eventually won permanent custody of their children, even though a judge called the clerk's conduct inappropriate. Two of the mothers said the clerk approached them and offered to temporarily keep the children while they served their jail time.

The AP interviewed a dozen former congregants who said they had personally witnessed the three children living with the clerk being subjected to intense screaming sessions called "blasting" aimed at casting out demons, or being held down, shaken or beaten.

Even as she battled desperately for her young son, one of the three women had told a judge that, if she could not have him, the boy would be better off in foster care due to the church's abusive nature.

A lawyer for Whaley, Noell Tin, disputed the AP's conclusions.

"The notion that church members separate children from their parents at Ms. Whaley's urging is preposterous," he said. "The idea that a thriving and diverse church like the Word of Faith Fellowship functions in this manner is an insult to its members."

Under Whaley's leadership, Word of Faith Fellowship has grown to about 750 congregants in North Carolina and a total of nearly 2,000 members in its churches in Brazil and Ghana and through affiliations in Sweden, Scotland and other countries.
As part of an ongoing investigation into the church, the AP already has cited dozens of former members as saying congregants were regularly punched and choked in an effort to "purify" sinners. Victims of the violence included pre-teens and toddlers, they said — even crying babies, who were vigorously shaken and sometimes smacked to banish devils.

Now, the AP has uncovered numerous instances in which Word of Faith leaders turned children against their parents, with the children then taken in or adopted by other church families. Ex-members told the AP of at least two dozen such cases, which they attributed to the church trying to keep minors from leaving the congregation.

One former congregant, for example, said Whaley pressured her into lying about her sister being abusive when the woman wanted to depart with her four children, leading to a protracted custody battle that resulted in the kids living with a prominent minister.

Another former follower told the AP he was separated from his biological family as a teenager and locked up for months until he began referring to another church couple as "mom and dad."

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Ex-Muslim: Leaving Islam

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Once thriving Church of Scientology faces extinction, says cult tracker

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Once thriving Church of Scientology faces extinction, says cult tracker

Unable to change with the times, the controversial belief system is doomed to fail.


Stephen Kent knew he’d become a threat when the Church of Scientology sent no fewer than 16 letters to University of Alberta administrators demanding he stop disparaging the church.

“They wrote letter after letter to different levels of administration—from the president on down—to curtail my activities, to silence me, to get me somehow sanctioned,” said the sociologist and cult expert.

It’s not surprising when you consider Kent has been tracking the tactics of the church since the early 1980s. As a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University, he began collecting stories of confinement, sexual assault and coercion not widely known at the time.

Since then he’s amassed one of the world’s biggest collections of testimonials and documents on Scientology, and last year co-edited a book with former student Susan Raine, now a professor at MacEwan University, called Scientology in Popular Culture.

Kent has also become a top go-to expert for media commentary. Just last month he was quoted in the Irish Times when the newspaper discovered the church had sent thousands of pamphlets to Irish schools under the guise of a human rights organization—just one recent attempt in a concerted campaign to infiltrate Irish society and promote the doctrine of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

But in Kent’s view, the strategy may be just a desperate ploy to stay alive. There has been significant opposition to Scientology in Ireland, he said. The last census revealed its membership at just 87, reflecting a more global public relations crisis that has been plaguing the church for years.

"Historically, most new religions die, and it's fairly clear now that Scientology is on a downward path,” said Kent.

The seeds of Scientology
The Church of Scientology was created by Hubbard in 1954, developed from ideas he presented a few years earlier in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. A form of self-help psychology, the book was a populist challenge to questionable psychiatric practices of the time, such as lobotomies and electroshock therapy.

Although the principles of Hubbard’s therapeutic process have never been accepted by science, said Kent, they initially held considerable appeal as “the poor person's psychoanalysis.”

Hubbard claimed people could free themselves of the trauma and neurosis associated with painful events of the past—what he calls engrams—by answering a series of questions in “auditing” sessions, the content tested by a lie detector, or e-meter. After enough of these sessions, so the theory goes, the debilitating engrams are erased, and the person reaches a state of being “clear,” capable of fulfilling their full potential.

To avoid charges of practising medicine without a licence, Hubbard rebranded his pseudo-therapy as a religion—calling it Scientology—and proved adept at exploiting celebrity culture to promote it.

“Movie stars in Hollywood had significant status, and Hubbard realized these people influenced popular consumer trends,” said Kent. “He figured out early on that getting media endorsements from key celebrities would be beneficial for his organization."

By the ‘60s and ‘70s, Scientology’s membership exploded with the countercultural movement, emphasizing self-knowledge, spiritual fulfilment, a distrust of established medical science and aspirations towards world peace.

Celebrity backlash, secrets revealed
"Scientology had its heyday in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s,” said Kent, “but then the controversy started," as stories started to leak about abuse within the movement and the exorbitant donations required of its members to reach higher levels of spiritual purity.

Much of Scientology’s recent decline, however, can be attributed to a number of high-profile celebrity defections over the past decade, including by Canadian director Paul Haggis, singer Lisa Marie Presley and actors Leah Remini and Jason Beghe.

Remini especially has been a tenacious and vocal critic. First recruited at the age of nine, she left the church in 2013 and has since published a revealing memoir and hosted a documentary series called Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, exposing many of the organizations failings.

But the main cause of Scientology’s downfall, said Kent, is the growing influence of the Internet. "Critics started posting material—including some of the church's own confidential documents—and former members started telling their stories.”

Some countries, such as Germany and France, have taken a firm stand against Scientology. The German government views it as an abusive sect masquerading as a religion, and France has classified it as a dangerous cult.

"With so much criticism of Scientology and so many of its secret documents available either in whole or in part, the impetus for continued membership is greatly diminished," said Kent.

The curious irony in all of this, he added, is that the trends Hubbard exploited so successfully when he created Scientology in the 1950s—emerging communications technology and the power of popular culture, especially celebrity recruitment—are the very forces conspiring against it now.

"Celebrities helped boost Scientology’s image in its early days, and now they're helping to diminish its appeal internationally.”

Mired in 1950s beliefs
But beyond its image problem—documented in the 2015 HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief—the most destructive seeds of Scientology’s demise were sown in its inception, said Kent. Based as it is on “fixed revelation,” or the unalterable word of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology is unable to change with the times and is therefore doomed.

One case in point is the inescapable homophobia that lies at the heart of the church, said Kent. Hubbard classified homosexuality as a sexual perversion, writing in Dianetics that “the sexual pervert is actually quite ill physically…. He is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also far from normal and extremely dangerous to society.”

Since then, Scientology has tried to “backpedal and respin its position on homosexuality,” said Kent, adding that nonetheless, “Hubbard's statements on it are fairly clear.

"Any group that has a fixed revelation has great difficulty adjusting to change,” Kent explained. “What you see with the books is greatly upgraded glamorization of the covers and the marketing. But the content is still rooted in Hubbard in the ‘50s.”

His doctrine is so fixed, in fact, that the Church of Scientology began transcribing his texts onto stainless steel plates in the 1980s, placing them in titanium capsules in underground vaults. Located in a remote desert location, the vaults are accessible only through a secured tunnel.

“Compare that with the Mormons, for example, who have a doctrine of ongoing revelation," said Kent. In 1890, for example, Latter-Day Saints president Wilford Woodruff received a revelation to ban polygamy, resulting in a policy change that partly made possible Utah’s acceptance as a state in 1896. And in the 1970s, the Mormons abandoned their position that black people are branded with the mark of Cain.

“It’s been able to adjust to the times," said Kent.

The Church of Scientology still has significant wealth, including lavish properties around the world, "but from what I can see, nobody is in them,” said Kent. “And there are some that have closed down because they just don't have the staff."

In the end, the U of A never did cave to legal pressure from the church, said Kent.

“In all instances, university officials responded professionally and appropriately, and in no way interfered with my activities,” he said.

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Craig Johnson
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Re: How Cults Work

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Nearly and maybe all cults throughout history are merely counterfeits of the true cult. In the Book of Revelations we find satan counterfeiting virtually everything in the Church and that God has taught, particularly anything having to do with a representation of God's power or ordinances, satan is really into power. Of course this is teaching us what to expect in this day and age. A cult is really just an organization of people who worship someone or something, we are that. The many definitions given herein about what cults are mainly stem from what we have learned concerning how false cults operate in order to protect themselves, keep people in them and to get people into them. This comes down to people wanting something bad enough to be willing to trifle with the souls of humans.
I had an encounter with a scientology group in 1980 in Coronado when I was stationed at NASNI. I believe there were two males and four females. It was just turning dark and they were out tracting I assume. One of the males approached me in a very pushy manner and started asking me some questions which I guess he thought were very profound. Things like "What do you see when you look in the mirror." "How long each day do you look at yourself in the mirror." "Do you know who you really are?" Questions along those lines. It took me about seven seconds to realize they were not actually capable of being a threat to me, because mentally I had begun deciding whose face I was going to smash first in order to get the best results. I said something like, "You are an idiot and I don't care about any of your trash, punk." This demobilized their leader and they appeared to be in a quandary about what to do next. So I walked away while they stood there slowly coming to the conclusion that I had won with one mere sentence. Although I was a member of the Church at the time, I was not ready at that time to deal with an encounter like that in any other manner, it was just really bad timing, for them that is.
I also had an encounter with a jehovah's witness preacher at my Grandparent's home, I found out later my Grandmother had set this up in an attempt to save me from Mormonism. This man could talk very fast and go from point to point like nobody I have ever met at any other time in my life, but he made the mistake of mentioning something about how we learn the truth. I raised my hand and I asked "So, how do we learn the truth?" He replied, "By studying the word of God." I then said "No that is merely trying to learn about the word of God, I asked you how do we learn the truth." He paused and then said, "As I said, studying the word of God." And then he said, and this is what I was waiting for, "How do YOU learn the truth?" very sarcastically. I looked at him as intensely as I could manage and made a pregnant pause and said, "I learn the truth through the power of the Holy Ghost." After that he would not talk to me anymore and started making some very lame excuses to my Grandmother.
Last edited by Craig Johnson on March 4th, 2018, 11:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Fiannan
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How do cults work?

They have awards ceremonies and televise giving awards to each other to tell the population they are the elite.

Wasn't one of these on Sunday night?

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Joel
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Watchtower media is used to evoke an emotional response from Jehovah's Witnesses.



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So...this thread is a bunch of crap. Sorry to say that.

Now to reveal the lies...

What is the Celestial kingdom? It's a place of love, respect, peace, brotherhood, kindness...and full of people of Christ like attributes. I could go into them by name but basically reference D&C Section 4, also Galatians 5 talking about the fruits of the spirit,...referencing types of people that would be there. Also showing that these types of people are a good influence and pure, holy, and innocent. I can't emphasize this enough.

Now the Telestial kingdom; liars, murderers, whoremongers, priestcrafters, prostitutes, those that love war. You can reference D&C 76 for more on Telestial kingdom people. Also Herod that killed all those babies trying to stop Jesus before he was brought into the world...

Basically you could say Telestial kingdom people are cults and cultists. NOT religious people trying to do good and be active in following Jesus. Notice how the enmity and looking for fault in one another is also a Telestial kingdom trait. And because of that, anyone pointing the finger of being a cultist at someone else is more likely to be a cult or cultist because they are the ones full of enmity, hate, and stirring the pot against another.

All the definitions on this thread previously I didn't see any one of them go over 'good' and 'evil' in their definition. They neglect going over good and evil, and if someone has good fruits. Isn't that the whole point? If you can't consider if they are doing good or evil then we're missing the mark. I wonder if some of you were very cleverly trying to paint churches as cults by deceit. Even non-LDS Christian churches try to do good usually. There is good in people all around us even outside of the church. That doesn't mean those people are cults. Nor are we a cult. When people are good, there is love and peace. Cults have no love and peace, or goodness or innocence. A cult is something that does harm to itself and it's members.

I would encourage you all to use the scriptures to define meanings, existence, and definitions of things in the world and of spiritual things because those are the meanings that matter and are the most accurate. By a lot of the definitions of cults here listed previously many of you could accuse anyone you don't like as being a cultist or a of a cult.

Notice how the Telestial kingdom is full of enmity. Cults are of enmity within and without.

Where Christ is, good fruit is. We are followers of Christ and love him.

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Cults and Extreme Belief S01E01 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6kwt0i

Cults and Extreme Belief S01E02 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6kp6u4

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Re: How Cults Work

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Although initially tangential, this discussion goes on to detail many incorrect principles through which the unsuspecting can be recruited into a community, retained, and activated toward a cause.


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Joel
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Emotions Trump Facts

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“The only difference between a religion and a cult is that, in a religious group, if you contradict them, they call you stupid in a polite way, and in a cult, if you do that, you are expelled.” - Robin Sacredfire

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Jesef
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This would be a good candidate thread for my proposed Heterodox/Un-Orthodox/Heretic Sub-Forum! Please vote here:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=50651

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harakim
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Re: How Cults Work

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ajax wrote: March 8th, 2015, 11:27 am Key Points:
-No legitimate group needs to lie or mislead you about what they practice or believe.
-Any group which says you must belong to their organization to be saved is almost certainly a cult.
-Character Assassination is a sure sign of a cult.
-Cult members are usually very fearful of disobeying or disagreeing in anyway with their leadership. Healthy organizations however are not threatened by openly debating issues.
-Beware of “instant friends”, remember true friendships develop over time.
-Beware of a group that tells you who you can and cannot see.
-If you are instructed by a group not to read information critical of the group, then that is a sign of a cult.
-Legitimate groups have nothing to fear from their members reading critical information about them.
-Is information you expected to be kept confidential reported to leadership? If so, then it’s a cult.
-Never ending compulsory meeting and tasks is a sign of a cult.
-Research the group independently of the group.
Key Warning Signs:
[/quote]
Sounds like the US government

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