They are still doing it. Day after day, people are still finding the courage to walk away from a cult and look for a real life in the real world outside of sectarian walls.
To borrow (respectfully) from Paul Simon, I am here applying part of his song title not to myself as being still crazy, but rather to myself as being still happy with my decision of thirty-six years ago. But I am utterly flabbergasted when I am again reminded that there are so many who are still crazy, still completely enslaved by a heavy-handed, authoritarian belief system that orders their daily lives down to the tooth brushing.
Again today, my email was flagged to alert me to a newly posted comment on the Non-Believer blog site which I discovered last year and have mentioned previously here. Another youthful-sounding person shared her story (as the latest comment on the long post by Joy) of having finally managed to escape the cult of Armstrongism and is now dealing with the long and difficult carry-over of damaged family ties, self-doubt, questions of all kinds regarding belief. She calls herself a new-age atheist now. And the pain of her experience is palpable in her words.
My surprise at the phenomenon is itself a surprise. Why do I continue to be caught in the swirl of questions about that old madness? Simply because I think of it as it relates (actually, no longer relates) to me personally. After thirty-six years enjoying freedom of thought, I actually do NOT think about the old madness and for my part, it has ceased to exist. Sadly, for many a young person born to parents who were shackled by that system, the whole mess exists very powerfully. Even today, more than a decade since the basic sect known as the Worldwide Church of God fell into a dysfunctional mode and lost its old name as well as most of its followers, the cult still injuriously affects people. As I understand, from scattered notes and comments around the web, there now exist far more than one hundred splinters of the old Armstrong empire. Any one of those, whether now grown fairly large (meaning more than, say, ten thousand adherents), or as small as the known strangeness of a couple worshipping alone, still grasping to the old tenets but with no group to call a church, is still harmful. In whatever form it takes, I find it all quite sad that the residual madness still hampers life for some who can't shake it.
Then again, what difference is there, really, between these duped and the masses (pointed reference) of duped all around us? My own world of freedom-from-religion is daily pressed up against that other world of belief in one thing or another. The constitutional freedom-of-religion is something I honor and cherish for my nation, but that doesn't prevent my pity for the millions who are emotionally strapped into the seats on that spaceship to nowhere, expecting to eventually arrive at some pearly gate. So much of life daily on this planet is lost and counted as worthless to people who see that imaginary afterlife as most important. They apparently have found their pearl of great price and have sold everything that life could bring them so they can devote themselves to the protection of that pearl and its promise.
Oh, well - everyone deserves the same rights I enjoy. I choose to worship life as I know it.
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