Lord Larehip

Retracting your claws means you're pulling them in unless that's what you mean in which case I'm confused as to your position.

There are a lot of people from ordinary religions who have the exact same problem. The military can do that to people also. I know a guy who joined the marines in his youth and over 20 years later, he's just not the person he was when he went in. He'll do things like suddenly drop to the floor and do push-ups while shouting the number--20 years after he got out. I literally do not know him anymore, I do not recognize the person he now is.

Cults are portrayed all kinds of ways so that's not a helpful statement. And your experience in a cult cannot and does not serve as everybody else's experience. I know people who joined cults for a few years and then left none the worse for wear. Some cults are dangerous, some are not. Some are strict, some are rather free. Some are closed, some are open. Some are hostile, some are friendly.

The only thing the various cults have in common is that ALL cults are cults of personality. Some may have a rigid chain of command while some just have the leader and then everybody else. But there s always a leader.

You don't fool people into drinking kool-aid. They will drink it quite voluntarily knowing full well they will die if they do. People WANT to be controlled. Deep down we know we don't know who we are, what we are doing or why we do it. On the surface, it seems that way but underneath, we are dummies. If people list the three most important issues facing the country right now, virtually all of them pick issues that are most prevalent in the media. Moreover, they know little about each of these issues. They chose them because, basically, someone told them to. That's a form of cult-think and yet most of us engage in it all the time and all of us engage in it at least some of the time.

We are so geared in this age to accept arguments from authority that we often believe statements without testing them if they come from someone with a fancy title. In fact, we often accept these statements without even bothering to find out if this authoritative person in question actually said it! And we have all done this. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't. We also will take a skeptical position without knowing whether it is the correct one because we feel it makes us seem more educated and free-thinking.

We become accustomed to believing we see the world as it is because we know ourselves--until we find out that we don't. When that happens, we are shocked. It can't be! As an example, a professor at a college flashed a bunch of slides on a screen for just a split second. The students were to write down what they saw. One slide depicted two men--one white and one black--stripped the waist, grappling in hand-to-hand combat where one man held a knife. The majority of white students stated that the black man held the knife. When the slide was shown again and left up so that it could be clearly observed and studied, the knife was not only in the white man's hand, it was CLEARLY in the white man's hand. The angle of the knife would be impossible for the black man to hold it that way. Many of these students became VERY upset. "You're trying to tell me I'm a racist, is that it?" or "You switched the slides because the black guy was holding the knife!" The slides were not switched and those students who saw the knife in the black man's hand were not necessarily racist. The experiment was meant to show the unconscious but highly important role that cultural bias plays in our everyday lives and perceptions. Is it any wonder so many black men are freed from prison based on DNA evidence only now available after they had already spent 25 years behind bars? Is it any wonder that a black man is far more likely to be convicted of a crime than a white man for the same crime? Because of our subconscious biases, our justice system is very unjust.

We really don't know ourselves the way we assume we do. You like to think you're honest but if you found a million dollars would you turn it in, would you turn most of it in but keep some? Before you answer, remember, you don't really know yourself the way you think. What if you were in deep financial straits and desperately needed this money for your family or to feed and clothe your kids or you had no retirement savings to live off when you get too old to work in a couple of years and have no idea what you're going to do to get by?--scared to death of becoming a homeless old beggar. What would you do then? Basically, until you are in that situation, you don't know.

An experiment was performed in various countries a few decades back where a subject was strapped into an electric chair. Another person was then to be an interrogator. He would command the person in the chair to recite a poem or tell a joke. If this person refused to comply, a researcher standing nearby would tell the interrogator to press a button and it would administer a mild shock to induce the subject in the chair to behave. These shocks came in 10 levels, each one more severe than the last. At the 10th level, the subject would receive a lethal dose and die. The interrogators were only to do what the researcher told them to do. It was all a set up, of course, the man in the chair was in on the experiment and was not to comply with the interrogator who was the real subject being tested. What was being tested was his obedience to authority. In Germany, the test subjects had a 90% obedience rate!! They killed when they were told to kill. Many were permanently traumatized by their actions because they had thought they had killed a man on someone else's orders and even after being shown it was all a setup and no one was hurt they were not comforted. In their minds, they committed murder. A murderer lurked inside them and they never knew, never suspected, it was was there. We were so shocked at all the torture photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and yet 90% of the most shocked among us would have done exactly the same thing as those soldiers.

I was intrigued by the case of the three Army soldiers that came upon the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where American soldiers were slaughtering innocent Vietnamese women, children and even babies and they tried to stop it. The Army refused to honor them as heroes for decades. They went back to My Lai many years later and an old lady came up to one of them and told him she did not hate Americans but she wanted to know why they had done this terrible thing to her village. The man looked her in the eye and said, "Ma'am, I don't know why. I've asked many times and have never received an answer." That struck me. We commit massacres and we really don't know why we do it. Someone told us to.

So we figure it is better to be controlled for a purpose than to be doing things subconsciously for no purpose or for a purpose we don't understand. In Jonesville, they figured it was better to die for Jim Jones than to continue living and not knowing what for.