Friday, October 30, 2020

Restored Church of God: Lil'Dave's Dirty Tricks He Will Use To Catch His Moles


 


From a reader:


For anyone in RCG who leak materials out, understand that the leadership will lay traps to catch you. They will determine a short list of people who they determine are the most likely candidates who are leaking materials, then they will send you copies of messages that are slightly different from the rest of the membership. This will look something like a couple of added words in a member letter or perhaps a few additional seconds at the end of a sermon. When the material is leaked online, then they will know if it is from the larger membership, or in the smaller group they distributed the different copies to. I would recommend avoiding posting materials in their entirety. Instead excerpt segments of the full message to be posted. It is harder to compare if its the copy or the "approved" version. Another idea is to use a cell phone to make a recording of the video or audio file if you can no longer download them. I am sure there are other tricks they may try, so just be smart about it!

Restored Church of God: Suspicious Lil'Dave Pack Struggles To Find His Moles

 


Poor Davey Pack. The little guy is not happy these days. With his Jesus failing to appear, his ministers reading this blog and other exCOG sites, videos of his sermons leaking to the world, and members so tired of his lies that they are spilling the beans on his carefully crafted empire, Lil'Dave is lashing out again.

For many years Davey has been posting his superfantabulous sermons to the Member Area of the Restored Church of God website. Well, those days have come to a crashing end. Just like the non-existent Jesus that still can't be found on the RCG website or property, Davey's sermons will no longer be found on his site.  

Lil'Dave is on a campaign to find the moles in his organization.

This just in from an RCG source:

Something all cult leaders have in common is suspicion. They are suspicious to everything and everybody and David Pack is no exception. 

The RCG members were told this week, that all messages are no longer posted in the 'Member services' part of the RCG website, but will be sent by email to all the members instead. The RCG is trying to locate the mole in the organization. 

Good luck with that Dave! Because too many of the RCG members see you for what you really are: a liar and a fraude. And too many of your ministers are regular visitors of 'Banned' and the ESN. You are the captain on a sinking ship. 

The current state of the Restored Church of God


Thursday, October 29, 2020

Leaving one cult and joining another. From Armstrongism into NXIVM

 

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.