It's All Your Fault! "People that are abused either physically, mentally, or both did things before God healed them that were bad"

 

I have been sitting on this response from True Christian that came through earlier this morning because I wasn't going to publish it. The more I read it the more insulting it is. This is a comment that was sent to "Dave Pack's Sickening Ability To Destroy Families In His Cult".

This comment reeks of bad theology because the theology they have been spoon-fed by COG leaders,  especially by Dave Pack, has been totally destructive. Jesus really is not that much in the picture other than telling people to "go and sin no more". COG members have no concept of what grace, justification, and sanctification means, and thus they need to rely upon mental midgets like Dave Pack and Bob Thiel to receive visions and dreams from their creature gods. Because of that, we are supposed to excuse their "mistakes" and give them a pass when they lie, tell false prophecies, and/or mentally and spiritually abuse members. No one is allowed to judge these leaders, only the creature god that rules those churches can do that.

I know Mr. Pack isn't perfect but hear me out. For people looking for a better life., Church of god literature will It is the most Biblically based literature. Church of god literature is because it is backed up by the bible. Our restored church of god it is a good church option that promises to help you further your character building with god. You need to remember something, ok people here at banned by Hwa. Christ said there would be tares mixed with the wheat. He said do not pull them up or the wheat would be pulled up too! We must never think the whole congregation is corrupt because of a couple of evil people. Satan has always come after God's people but he can't unless God allows it. But also people that lived terrible lives before they were called God can and does make clean after they are called and they never do really bad sins again. People that are abused either physically, mentally, or both did things before God healed them that were bad. Like Christ did when He was on this earth!! He healed and loved them and Said, "sin no more!!" GOD IS HIS JUDGE. We will know though. Everything that happened. Anyway, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us and there is no one worthy, no, NOT ONE!! because it is ourselves we should be looking at and repent of. No man is perfect not even apostles so we must remember that before pointing out everyone else's mistakes. So please stop talking about Mr. David C. Pack.

Leaving one cult and joining another. From Armstrongism into NXIVM

NXIVM sex cult leader Keith Raniere guilty of trafficking, child porn offenses

 

A reader posted a link to the following article in one of the comments on another thread. It is a story from Rolling Stone Magazine about why people leave one cult and how they can be easily be attracted to another cult.

Teah Banks was born into an evangelical Christian sect called the Radio Church of God. Founded in the 1930s by an advertising sales representative turned minister, the insular group promoted an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament, eschewing divorce, premarital sex and even wearing makeup. “It was a super closed religion,” Banks, now 42, remembers. “We had pictures of the leader in our home. We worshipped him like he was a god.”

Although Banks started having questions about the group, she attended services until her 20s, when she was expelled from the organization. In 2004, she and her then-boyfriend, a filmmaker named Mark Vicente (best known for the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?), were approached by two women who wanted Vicente to make films for their organization, NXIVM, which taught a curriculum called the Executive Success Program, or ESP. The two women (one of whom was NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman) raved about their leader, a mathematician, scientist, judo champion and concert-level pianist who had patented a unique method of hacking the human brain. The man’s name, the women said, was Keith Raniere.

Banks and Vicente’s interest was piqued, and they agreed to join the women for lunch; when Salzman successfully used ESP methods to “cure” Banks of her lifelong lactose intolerance, she was even more intrigued. “I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. This woman is amazing,” she says. “And I said, ‘Nancy, I want to be one of your people.'” Blown away by the women and by ESP in general, Banks encouraged Vicente to take a NXIVM intensive; eventually, he bought an apartment in New York to be closer to group headquarters in Albany. She was involved with the group until 2005, when the two broke up, though she continued taking courses remotely for years afterward. Vicente, who eventually became a member of the NXIVM executive board, was involved with the group until 2017.

At the time she joined NXIVM, Banks had just left one large organization with an enigmatic leader at the helm. Vicente, too, had also just extricated himself from a similarly insular fringe spiritual organization: the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a group led by a New Age figure named JZ Knight, who claimed to be channeling a 35,000-year-old warrior deity named Ramtha. But even though they were both disillusioned with spiritual organizations, NXIVM struck them as different. “The first day you’re there, they’re like, ‘We’re not a cult. Cult is a bad word. It is used loosely,'” Banks said. “‘[We’re] a success school. We’re helping you raise your ethics.'”

At this point, everyone knows the rest of the story: in March 2018, Raniere and five of his NXIVM cohorts, including Salzman, were arrested on such charges as sex trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forced labor. Raniere is currently standing trial in Brooklyn, where his former supporters (including Vicente) have testified that he, among other things, imprisoned a woman for nearly two years, convinced his followers that he controlled technology and the weather, and ran DOS, a secret all-female organization of “slaves” who were branded with his initials and told to have sex with him.

The general view in the media — and among former followers like Banks and Vicente, who declined to comment, presumably due to his involvement in the case against Raniere — is that NXIVM operated not as a self-improvement “school,” but as a cult run by Raniere, who used threats and coercion to keep his followers in line. The revelations came as a shock to Banks, now a makeup artist and YouTuber based in Oregon, who had fallen out with the community after her 2006 breakup with Vicente but had kept in touch with many members and taken classes for years afterwards. She even recorded an ASMR video about her time in NXIVM, speaking at length about her feelings of guilt over her involvement. “I truly thought that this group had answers, and isn’t that why we join any group? [Because] they have answers there that we don’t have inside ourselves,” she says in the video. How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another: As the NXIVM case shows, “cult-hopping” is more common than you think

Here is the video mentioned above. She apparently is a practitioner of ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) which I find creepy as hell and also irritating to listen to due to the "'s's" and "sh's" that hit her microphone when she speaks. That alone destroyed the "calming" effect" she is supposedly getting across. I could only listen to a few minutes but others find her story to be fascinating.