Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Polygamist Camp Raided

I never watch the news so I'm a little late on this one but anyways. I can't believe this was happening right in my back yard!!

Polygamist Camp Raided

And Life on the Compound

I think the second link is for a video of a woman who lived on a similar compound in Colorado. I can't watch it to be sure cause I'm at work.

Any thoughts?

Any thoughts? Just who would want 70 wives?! Most men struggle with one!

Thanks for starting this thread, Steph. That way I don't have to.

So I have two thoughts about this. The first one is that religion is sometimes used to justify and sanctify truly horrible things like rape and terror. Some religious people claim that they are doing what is good and righteous in the eyes of the Lord when they commit various atrocities. Their religions allow them to feel good about themselves when they blow themselves up in crowded marketplaces and take hundreds of people with them. Their religion bestows virtue and righteousness on them when they marry dozens of women and rape underage girls. Their religion even promises them that God will reward them for committing these horrible acts!

This off-shoot renegade Mormon group in Texas (not the real Mormon Church in America at all) actually preaches that a man can't reach the highest levels of paradise in the afterlife unless he has many wives. They really preach that God prefers polygamous men over monogamous ones! Can you believe it? Isn't this comparable to the views held by some extreme Muslims, namely, that a suicide bomber will go directly to Paradise after committing his horrible deed, and in Paradise he will be greeted by seventy-two virgins who will offer him unlimited sexual pleasure in reward for his murderous act!

So this is what I would describe as religion as its most despicable. It's the kind of religion that teaches that murder, terrorism, rape and oppression are things that are delightful in the eyes of the Lord and that will bring the perpetrator glorious rewards in the afterlife.

I said that I have two thoughts about this. Well, my second thought is that it is horrible that ordinary people accept this line of reasoning at all. Why do so many normal people seem to buy the argument that religious people always deserve respect for their religious beliefs? Why do so many people accept that something that is obviously horrible should be accepted as good just because the Bible or the Koran seems to support it? Believe me, I have read the Bible, and I know that you could use the Bible to argue that those who are chosen by God have the right to commit genocide. No, the Bible gives NO blanket approval of genocide. ABSOLUTELY not. You would have to build your line of argument from a few individual stories about brief genocidal episodes in the Old Testament. But in my opinion, you COULD use these stories from the Old Testament to justify genocide, if you wanted to do it badly enough. And that is why I'm saying - don't buy the argument that whatever could be sort of justified from passages in the Bible or the Koran is automatically always GOOD!!!

Let's not just buy the argument that people should always be respected for their religious beliefs. They should not! If they believe in and practice bad things, we should not respect them. Do you remember David Koresh and his sect, the Branch Davidians? David Koresh preached that he himself was Jesus who had returned to the earth. :rolleyes: This new Jesus had developed quite a sexual appetite, because while the Biblical Jesus may well have been celibate, David Koresh was - surprise - polygamous. This is from Wikipedia:

Wikipedia says this about how children were treated at Koresh's camp (twenty-one of them were released before the siege, and the information comes from these children):

Koresh stockpiled huge amounts of weapons. When authorites came to investigate claims of child abuse, the Branch Davidians shot four agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This led to a long siege by the BATF of the Davidian sect. It ended after 51 days when the compound with the Davidians caught fire. Surviving members of the sect accused the BATF of setting fire to the camp. Well, I just don't believe that the authorities did that. And why not? Simple. The Davidians were surrounded and could not get away. Why would the authorities kill all the sect members when the Davidians were bound to have to give up sooner or later anyway? Yes, it was costly to keep the siege going, but come on - money was not such a problem in 1993. Remember that there was no Iraq war costing money in those days, among other things. What is a 51-day siege, or a 100-day siege, against a five-year Iraq war? Of course the authorities could afford an extended siege. But David Koresh, the leader, could not afford to get caught. Just imagine the horrible, horrible humiliation he would suffer if the authorities got his hands on him. He who had called himself God! He would be treated like a dog himself if they caught him. Terefore I am convinced that he committed suicide by setting the compound on fire himself. And not only did he commit just ordinary suicide, but he committed what is called "extended suicide", which meant that he took his "family" with him. And his "family", of course, were all the other cult member who died with him.

You know what drove me crazy about the whole Branch Davidian affair? It was that so many people in the United States seemed to take David Koresh's side against they authorities. They talked about how David Koresh and his sect had had their human rights violated, how they had had their religous rights violated etcetera. Come on, people! This was a crazy sect centered on a crazy man who called himself God and who abused and raped children. What respect did he deserve? None at all. What respect do people like Warren Jeffs, polygamist guru of the renegade Mormons, deserve? None, if you ask me.

So please, please, let's not automatically respect whatever people believe and practice in the name of God. Because, frankly, some of the things they do in the name of God deserve no respect at all. None.

Oh, and... is it true that the Bible recommends polygamy, by the way? No. It's not true at all. The Bible allows polygamy. It never issues any blanket ban on polygamy. It never even really and truly criticizes polygamy. But it also never says that polygamy is preferable to monogamy.

Ann

Ann, I don't recall ever seeing anyone here posting in support of cultists like David Koresh or Warren Jeffs. I think you can rest easy knowing that we consider them nutjobs who twisted religion to back their own agendas. It happens far too often, but all we can do is keep fighting it whenever they (cults) show up.

BTW, the only ones I feel sorry for when something like that happens are the victims of the cultists, like the children who were brainwashed into believing that was the right way to live. Certainly not the founders of the cults.

Tara

I was thinking this would be a topic you'd want to discuss Ann.

I'm guessing you're referring to the media in this instance? I don't follow the news enough to even remember what was said about the whole Koresh thing.

I agree with pretty much everything Ann said (which I think is a first for us Ann ).

I don't think that these crazed pedophile lunatics should be considered Mormons. (my own personal disclaimer: I don't think the Mormon theology is correct but I still don't think their religion teaches what these crazy men were doing) They're like any other crazed fundamentalist religious group, bending reality to what their sick and twisted minds desire. I'm reminded of Jim Jones who started off teaching the Bible and then found he'd rather twist it into a religion that suited his needs.


This part you lost me on Ann. I don't think that people accept this line of reasoning. I think that most of America is outraged by this kind of behavior. Anyone who thinks differently is probably following the same path of thinking that led to the sect in the first place.

Ouch. Let's not bring up the war on Iraq. That's a topic for an entirely different thread I think.

That theory makes sense to me. Those crazy leaders tend to do that kind of thing - or try - quite often (Jim Jones, Pyotr Kuznetsov, Marshall Applewhite, etc).

Agreed.

I don't care to comment on the specifics, but on the issue of "respect" I have this to say:

Wow. So many generalizations in this sentence. It boggles the mind.



Wow again. Do you know the implications of this? Let me give you a hint, the "bad" people use this argument too.



By fighting "disrespect" with more "disrespect" you perpetuate the same destructive cycle.

That is not to say that we should simply condone horrible things (sigh I hate to make the distinction, but I know someone is going to want to read my posts as a defense of killings/abuse/horrible things). But to condemn without thinking that there is a very real, very flawed person behind horror reduces that person (and others like that person) into monsters.

That makes matters even worse. And if you can't see that we part ways.

Understand people. Teach people. There is no way to do these two important things right without a fundamental respect towards people as human beings.

And you know, I don't put much stock in religion, but I do think the Bible phrases this brilliantly when it says "Hate the sin and not the sinner."

alcyone

I don't think it was so much that people defended them against some of the things taking place inside the compound but were upset because of the innocent people inside who were killed as a result of some decisions made by authorities.

It was anger over people dying they felt could have been saved if the authorities had acted in a different manner.

Alcyone and others, I agree that this kind of topic is exactly the one where I myself will be at my most intractable and maybe even unreasonable.

However, Alcyone, my point was not so much that we should condemn certain religious people and regard them as monsters. My point was rather that we should not always give religions the benefit of the doubt just because they are, well, religions. I think that we see precisely this tendency in large parts of the world. I suspect that some of you don't respect the UN so much anyway, but I personally was shocked when the UN included an entirely new rule about "respect for religions" in its statutes last year or so. I'm not talking about the right for the individual to belong to any religion that he or she chooses and not be treated badly because of it, because that right has been acknowledged by the UN to be one of the fundamental human rights since 1948. No, I'm talking about the religions as such - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hiduism, Taoism, etcetera - to have the right to ask for special protection from the UN in the name of human rights. By extension, I think that Warren Jeffs could perhaps ask the UN to protect his fundamentalist polygamist sect in the name of human rights. Polygamists and child-rapists everywhere could ask the UN to protect their "human right" not to have their religion violated and thus not to be interfered with when they rape children. Because they do it in the name of their religions, and religions themselves have the right to ask for human rights. Never mind that religions are not people!

(Can you imagine political systems asking for protection from the UN in the name of human rights? Can you imagine Capitalism asking for protection from the UN, because Capitalism should have human rights, too? Or Communism? It boggles the mind, doesn't it?)

Again, Alcyone. I'm not talking about branding religious people as monsters. I'm talking about stopping our societies from giving special protection to religious people just because religions deserve special protection. I don't see why we should ever do that. If we consider a particular act as bad, we should not say that this very act is not bad when it is being committed by people in the name of religion.

Our societies would not give special protection and special consideration to people just because they like to collect stamps, or because they like to listen to hip hop music, or because they take part in pie-eating contests, or because they drive monster trucks, or because they try to protect spotted owls from extinction, or because they like to watch and write stories about and discuss LnC. You name it - other beliefs and interests won't give people special protection or special consideration from authorities. Why should we hestitate to say to religious people that their religions don't give them the automatic right to do things that most of the rest of us would consider improper or absolutely wrong?

In Sweden, the authorities fall all over themselves to give Muslim girls and women the right to wear the headscarf everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Other people are not allowed to wear their favorite clothing absolutely everywhere. Teachers, for example, are instructed to order boys to take off their baseball caps in school, but headscarves are allowed everywhere and always. Public swimming baths do not allow other people to wear big bulky clothing when they swim in the swimming pools, but no restrictions stop Muslims girls from wearing full headscarves and bulky "body suits". Workplaces have to design Muslim uniforms with headscarves for Muslim women. Because heaven forbid that Muslim women should not be allowed to go absolutely everywhere, and do absolutely everything, dressed in their Muslim headgear. Why should we give them this protection and consideration, when we would never give it to people who can't quote religion to justify their clothing preferences? Why should religions be exempt from criticism? It irks me no end.

And one more thing about polygamy. If polygamy and child rape is forbidden in the United States, then authorities should break up polygamous and child-raping sects right away. They should not stop to consider whether or not these sects consider themselves religious, and whether or not the sect members therefore have their human and religious rights violated if they are not allowed to continue their practice of raping children.

Ann

That's an excellent point. And that is, of course, why we should not just use the word "bad" in the sloppy way that I did. Instead, we should define what we mean by bad things. (One example of "bad" things might be enforced marriage of underage girls.) And not only should we describe what we mean by "bad" things, but we should also be prepared to argue, as carefully as we can, about why we think that these things are bad. But if we can come up with no better point than that this particular practice is against our belief or our religion or against the will of God, then I think that we have shown ourselves unable to really defend our beliefs with any sort of intellectual arguments.

Ann

There is a growing group of Christians in the United States that believe the same thing. It's because polygamy is shown often in the Bible (even if it isn't outright "preferred").

The Mormon church won't accept them as real Mormons anyway. Even if you don't take into consideration the pedophilia, polygyny in the Mormon church has been outlawed for the last 100-ish years. For as long as it's been illegal in the U.S.

The thing about that is that religion is universal. Stamp collecting and pie-eating contests are not.

Polygamy is illegal in the U.S. People get around it by only filing for an official marriage with one person. But say you were part of that polygamous Christian group I mentioned earlier. You could have an official marriage with one person, and then a "marriage" (union/commitment ceremony) within your religion to as many others as you want. That's not illegal so long as you don't try to file with the state for an official marriage to more than one person.

As far as child-raping goes, something like that is not advertised, it's kept hush hush. So if it's not open and public, how to you expect the U.S. government to know that it is happening, as well as where it is happening? The best they can do is stop it as soon as they discover it, which is what they do. As far as I know, the goverment wouldn't give a damn if it was part of a religious practice or not. Someone would still be prosecuted for it because it's illegal in this country. Just as someone from that Christian polygynous group would get in trouble if they tried to *officially* marry more than one person.

AFAIK, groups like those are broken up as soon as they're found. The US is a big place and it is sometimes possible to hide these things for awhile before they're found out about. When they're found out about, they're broken up and dealt with. Religion doesn't have anything to do with it. From what I learned a few years back when I was reading up on cults, the only reason for the government to move slowly in breaking these things up is to avoid as many deaths as possible and to be more certain of catching the leadership of these groups. I would guess most people would approve of saving the lives of people brainwashed into these things and, hopefully, deprogramming them so they can lead relatively normal lives. Other than that, they move as swiftly as possible to end these cults when they pop up.

Tara

An inability to see how religion differs from, say, stamp collecting, is a huge stumbling block in this sort of argument.

I think it's pretty easy to see how for some people religion is the basis of their worldview--to the point that everything revolves around it. That's a given. The question is not how to squash that worldview into something palatable for the rest of us, but rather to look for some point of intersection. A place where compromises can be made. You're not going to get very far in convincing someone, if you're yelling at them that they're unreasonable and deluded and/or forcing them to conform to another worldview.

One does better then, making *some* concessions to religion (say conceding its privileged role in someone's life) in this case, rather than to try to dismiss it.

I say this in response to the UN thing. It strikes me that this is a concession to free up some space for dialogue (protecting it via "respect"). We're certainly not getting very far waving free speech as a right to dismiss other religions. The harder we cling to our right to say a religion is backwards and primitive (from our oh-so-enlightened point of view), the harder the followers will cling to it, percieving it as an attack on *them*. This sort of thing leads to a standstill.

Given this, I can understand where "respect religion" thing came from, even if it is shocking from a secular standpoint (and that shock is yet another the problem to deal with, since we're supposed to attempt to climb OUT of ourselves).

Will the "respect religion" thing work out? I honestly don't know. I should hope that the UN uses the utmost care in protecting human rights and decrying abuses, which should be first and foremost. However, the UN is hardly infallible.

alcyone

Trinity, Tara, I get what you are saying about the authorities breaking up polygamist camps as soon as they faind them, but that it may be hard to find them because the United States is such a big country.

And of course we should talk about polygyny, not polygamy. Polygamy just menas that one person has many spouses, but polygyny means that one man has many wives. Of course we are always talking about one man haveing many wives, never about one woman having many husbands. There is in fact a word for the latter phenomenon, polyandry, but that sort of thing hardly exists in the real world.

I still think that it's wrong that religions should be granted special protection. Consider the case of headgear, as I referred to earlier. I am supposed to tell boys in my classes to take off their baseball caps, but I am strictly forbidden to ask a Muslim girl to remove her headgear. The reason for why I am supposed to ask boys to take off their baseball caps is that many people find them offensive. However, the reason for why people react negatively to the caps is, or so I think, that the caps are somehow associated with gang culture in the United States. Somehow boys in Sweden who like to wear baseball caps are supposed to support criminal gangs in United States and in Sweden. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption at all. Very many boys just think these caps look cool.

What about the girls, then? In many Muslim countries, girls have little freedom. Relatively large groups of girls in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq don't go to school at all. Often they are given away in arranged marriages when they are as young as twelve or thirteen. After they have been given away in marriage, their husbands have the legal right to beat them, at least in some Muslim countries. Many women in many Muslim countries have to accept that their husband can take himself one or more additional wives. They have to accept that their husband can divorce them by simply uttering a "divorce phrase" three times, and thereafter the women will be legally abandoned by their husband whether or not they have any other means of supporting themselves. Huge numbers of adult women in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are not allowed to have a job, and in Saudi Arabia they are not allowed to drive a car, either. In the strictest Muslim countries, women are not allowed to even go outside their houses unless they are covered in big and bulky veils and robes. In several countries, for example Iran, a woman may be lashed in public if she ventured outside without a veil.

For all of these reasons, I associate the Muslim veil with oppression of women. Yes, I know very well that all veiled Muslim women are not oppressed, but don't tell me that there is no connection between strict rules about compulsory Muslim headgear for women and the kind of widespread oppression of women that I just described above. My point is, if I am supposed to associate baseball caps for boys with criminal gangs in the United States, why am I not allowed to associate headscarves for girls with oppression of women in strict Muslim countries? I don't buy this contradiciton and I don't accept it.

Ann

Um, because Muslim culture is diverse? Because just because you *think* it's all about women's oppression, that might not be the whole picture? (Again you say, "I know not all women do this but this is what *I* think of when I see the veil." So what if someone said, "I know not all wearers of baseball hats are in gangs, but there is rampant baseball hat-wearing in gangs so whenever I see one, I think of gangs." I'm not touching institutional biases here btw, but the logic in these statements, which is in my view is flawed in BOTH cases).

What you've written sounds like you're drawing a comparison between gang culture and Muslim culture. I'd be careful with that.

You don't see the comparison of a entire cultures values (both positive and negative) embodied in the veil as being different from the (predominantly negative) values of gang culture embodied in baseball hats?



And I'm not even going to touch that practicing religion is not like stamp collecting. Or wearing a hat because it's cool. Or the gap between what an individual does and what a community does and how policing the two is different.

alcyone

Ann, just a point I'd like to bring up on the headscarves thing. To you, a hijab is a form of oppression for women. To many Muslim women, however, NOT being able to wear a hijab would be a form of opression.

I liken it to if someone told me I couldn't wear my crucifix somewhere. To me, that inhibits my right to religious expression. I'm not harming anyone by wearing my necklace, just as these women are not harming anyone by wearing hijabs. It's just what they believe they should wear.

Right off the bat, Ann said:

That's usually the first thing you come up with. Ann, I confess it really bugs me when you seem to blame "religion" for evil. "Religion" is not evil. People are evil. People are also very creative at coming up with justifications for what they want to do, whether those justifications happen to be related to religion, or evolution, or economics, or anything else.

I'm not saying never to criticize -- as you say, saying that all religious beliefs should be respected is really kind of insulting. It says "I should respect your beliefs because they really don't matter", the same way I respect your right to have a favorite ice cream flavor. People's beliefs *do* matter, and should be open to discussion and criticism. I'd just prefer that criticism of a certain belief system not get inflated to include all of "religion."

I have very strong religious beliefs. Does that fact alone make me evil? I don't think you think so, but sometimes I have a hard time not taking hits against "religion" personally.

I haven't read any of the rest of the thread; perhaps when I'm certain I can be civilized, I'll get around to that. Right now I don't trust myself.

PJ

While it is uncommon, it's not as if it doesn't exist in the "real world", as you put it. There are cultures in Siberia and Nepal that I know for sure practice it, as well as Tibet (though it's not as common in Tibert as it used to be, if at all). Fraternal polyandry is what I've heard the most about, and actually is very practical, given some aspects of their culture.

Pam, I said that religion is sometimes used to justify horrible things like terror and rape. And I stick by that. It demonstrably does just that sometimes.

One of the things that I have become convinced of, during the many years that I have been thinking about religion, is that religion does a magnificent job at justifying things. I'd say that probably no other thing is as efficient at justifying things as religion is. To make you see what I mean when I claim that other methods of justification are not as efficient as religion, consider two ideologies that were used to create societies during the twentieth century, and which needed justifications that went beyond themselves. The ideologies that were used to create societies are Nazism and Communism. They both needed justifications that went beyond themselves. Oh, they had their "internal" justifications as well, of course: the Nazis claimed that the "Aryan race" was superior to all other "human races", and therefore the Aryans, like the Germans, had the right to claim and possess land that was inhabited by "inferior races". Communism was actually a lot more intellectual than that, because it was built on Marxism, which is a theory of how wealth is generated by workers in factories and transferred to the owners of the factories. Marxism is also a theory of how the wealth can be kept by the workers and not transferred to the owners of the factories. What Communism did was that it declared that the workers had to be liberated by a Communist elite, whose members would henceforth make all the decisions for all people (and who would, when necessary, execute all its enemies).

Well, both Nazism and Communism needed something that went beyond themselves to justify themselves. Neither of these theories accepted the concept of a God, so they couldn't use religion as a means of justification. Instead they both seized on history. They both claimed that history would prove them right. History was bound to unfold in such a way that the German Aryans would claim their proper place in the world and pretty much rule it, or history was bound to unfold in such a way that workers united all over the world and cast off their chains and claimed their proper place everywhere (and Russia would become everybody's shining example and become the mightiest country in the world).

So Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union trusted in history to prove themselves right. Unfortunately for them, history let both of them down. I personally believe that Hitler chose to invade Poland in 1939 even though he knew that this risked to start a larger war, but he took that risk because he probably believed that he was bound to win. History would make sure that he did. Well, history did not oblige, and when the German forces crumbled under the onslaught of the Allied forces, Hitler had no choice but to commit suicide. Communism held out a lot longer, but eventually it became clear not only that workers were not taking over factories worldwide, but that the finances of the Soviet Union were in such bad shape that the CCCP had to give up its quest for world domination. Not only that, but the Soviet Union had to give up altogether.

Now compare the Nazi Germans and the Communist Soviets with the Jews. The defeats and horrors that have befallen the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists are nothing compared with what the Jews have suffered. For more than two millennia the Jews didn't have any sort of country that they could call their own. They suffered repeated pogroms and were killed or driven out of the countries where their Diaspora had brought them. Why didn't the Jews give up? Why didn't they just chuck their Jewishness out of the window and accept the customs and the beliefs of their adopted countries and become assimilated? There are several reasons, one of which is that they were not allowed to give up and become assimilated into the surrounding societies, because the surrounding societies often did their best to identify the Jews and push them into ghettos and force separation on them.

But another reason is, indeed, that the religion of the Jews was such that history couldn't prove it wrong. No amount of misery and suffering could prove that the Jews were not God's chosen people, or that God's promise to the Jews, that he would give them the promised land, didn't still stand. In the Old Testament books by the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and so many others, the same thing is explained over and over: the children of Israel suffer so many misfortunes because this is God's way of punishing his chosen people for their disobedience. God's chosen people have not kept their part of their bargain with God, and they have repeatedly broken God's commandments. Therefore God punishes them. And therefore, the miseries that the children of Israel suffer are themselves proof that the Israelites are God's chosen people and that God's promises to them will one day come true.

It is interesting, too, to see what the prophets tell the Israelites to do to make God's fury with them abate. According to the prophets, the Israelites must become more fervent, more fundamentalist in their approach to religion. They must obey every single commandment. They must never be lax in anything that has to do with their duties to God. In the book of Ezra, we are even told about how the Jews purge themselves by breaking up all mixed marriages between Jewish men and foreign women, and then they drive out the foreign women and their children.

This Jewish idea of a strict and severe Creator of the universe who never backs down on his promises, even though he may punish his believers for centuries to come, was later picked up by Christianity and Islam. The idea is that if you believe in this God, you will be vindicated eventually. It doesn't matter how bad things look right now. You yourself will be rewarded in paradise even if you suffer on the earth, and if your society commits itself to the proper religion it will eventually triumph, maybe many centuries from now.

Religion allows you to believe that failure itself is a kind of proof that you will succeed eventually, or that your descendants will succeed after you. It is impossible to really believe that if you trust history to prove you right in your own lifetime. History is impersonal. It doesn't give promises. It simply unfolds, and by doing so, it proves you right or it proves you wrong. God, however, is personal. He gives you promises but he doesn't say when he will fulfill them. A religious person can never be proven wrong.

Also, the Bible and the Koran are both slightly cryptically written. It is not absolutely clear what they mean. They are open to interpretation. So if you are a Christian or a Muslim, you have to obey the Bible or the Koran, but it is open to interpretation what exactly you are supposed to do in order to obey these holy scriptures. The Bible and the Koran both tak about people going to war and killing their enemies, and both the Bible and Koran make it clear that men have precedence over women. Both the Bible and Koran allow polygyny but does not prescribe it. Clearly, however, if you want to, you can argue that it is God's will that you should kill your enemies and that a man should have many wives. And you can claim that God will reward you for creating a society where people kill others in the name of God, and where men clearly oppress women. And there is just no way to prove you wrong. (All right, yes, a religious person can be proved wrong about his or her timing, if he or she expected God's help now. But it can never be proved to a religious person that his or her belief in a God who will vindicate him or her eventually is wrong.)

So, Pam, are you evil for being Christian? Do you think it is your duty to kill others in the name of God? Would you recommend a society where men have many wives and where underage girls are forced into marriage? Honestly, Pam, I really, really think not. Please note that I didn't say that "Christian people are evil". And I didn't say that "Muslim people are evil". And I didn't say that "religious Jews are evil". Even I am not stupid enough to believe in that sort of generalisations, even for a moment. (And I don't believe that atheists are better people than others, either.)

I said that religion is extremely good at justifying things, and I'm not backing down from that. Because when you use religion to justify things, whatever they are, it becomes so personal. You know that this is right and good because the Creator of the unverse has told you so. What do you care if people tell you that you are wrong? What are people compared with God, who has told you that you are right? No matter what people say, God will prove you right eventually.

Ann

There is one other thing....THERAPY. I heard an awesome line on "REAPER"(a TV show) Satan(one of the characters) says he invented therapy so people could justify their sins.


TEEEEEEEEJ

My memory on all this seems to show that this child rape/I'm Jesus cults really hit there stride with Jim Jones and have grown since. It seems here in the US that we having a growing population of sick men with little egos that are so desperate to be important that they set themselves up in their own religion and find equally sick men to join who bring their oppressed dominate wives and children into the cults. Which then breeds the next generation ripe for this mess.

Too many have forgotten real lessons taught in the Bible.

1. Beware false profits.
2. The Ten Commandments - those these cult leaders seem to enjoy breaking the most are:
a: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
b: Honor thy father and thy mother.