Thanks for exposing those far right people who are eliminating reproductive rights, banning books, outlawing the teaching of certain types of history, banning vaccines, spreading disinformation about anything they feel threatened by, like BLM, etc.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Religious Nationalism in the US
- Thread starter The Hammer
- Start date
With a gun to their heads. And after their societies were obliterated just for existing. It's not genocide when it's white people killing brown people. I just can't find where Jesus said this.
As if I'm going to read any more revisionist, right wing disinformation.
Equality rights. Reproductive rights. Voting rights. Gender rights. Rights to be educated wiith accurate content, not right wing revisions and bans. Right to life and safety from guns. Healthcare rights (look at Idaho). Etc.
That's why disinformation is so important to republicans. Just vilify liberals as Communists and Socialists and you get the guilibe far right citizens to believe it.
The word is not controversial. Facists are corrupt and oppressive of rights. Look at what repulicans are becomming in America, just a party of bans and opposed to freedom. They want power and they will use manipulated and fearful conservative voters to do it.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
I think you're just wanting to ignore America's self-inflicted idiocy that traditionally, as your own prior post reflects and congruently aligns with, finds education (especially college) to be problematic, concerning and even potentially dangerous. Those thoughts and ideas have been around in America long before any of us were born. It's also why school funding has always been an issue in America. This is why Americans have sucked at math for so long that it was brought up as a concern during WWII.
Yeah, America has a few good universities. The country itself must import brain power because America thinks intellectual prowess is nothing, downplays it, and is so damn bad we all know of cashiers who can't make change. That's because America (even before you were born) has not seen math as that important to teach, thus the students of other countries are way ahead of American students in math and American students are plagued with needing remedial math courses when they get ti college.
Since I was born 68 years ago, know what was taught and can see what is taught today, I can safely say
1) Yes, today more than ever American students need remedial math.
2) It is today that they think that math isn't as important as before. They prefer about sex, racism, CRT, identity rather than teaching critical thinking, math, reading, writing and history et al.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
America has never been too keen on math. This concern was even voiced by a general during WWII that Americans aren't good enough at math.
Amd, yeah, around the time you were born it was decided things like teaching how to be a good, proper law abiding citizen and topics like dating in school and how to be a good party host were more important than math and science that, it was decided, most Americans can't do anyways so it's a waste amd we'll just let those going to college learn it there.
Yeah, it's been a long term trend.
And you think people don't already have those rights, or that the rights are somehow threatened? Maybe you are right, no one seems to be safe from Antifa guns.
I think it is wrong to use the word liberal about the people who act like communists (=socialists). The modern "liberals" are not in any way liberal.
It seems to me that right and left are only opposite sides of socialists. And I think socialism is evil in all forms. There is no meaningful difference in national socialists and communists (internationalists, globalists).
How are republicans against freedom?
Sand Dancer
Currently catless
They are against social freedom. They love fiscal freedom though.
Colt
Well-Known Member
Did I just Leave a Cult?
Because it Feels Kind of Like I did...
Sosha Stone
“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.”
― Marty Rubin
I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.
We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pandora’s Box turned out to be just what marrying my father was like for my mother. Her whole world changed. She had three daughters right in a row and now had four kids all before the age of 24. Then my parents split and she raised us as mostly a single mom with various boyfriends who drifted in and out.
We had to look out for ourselves because danger was everywhere. Grownups were off on their own trips - finding themselves, getting drunk and naked at grape stomps, their bodies and fluids co-mingling, along with the grapes and grape juice that would one day become wine.
My mother, like so many in the counterculture, was and remains an atheist. Back then, God was uncool. Freedom was cool. Breaking free from tradition and convention rippled through the Left with tornado-like speed, destroying the past, creating a world anew.
The Boomers broke free and saw nothing but wide open spaces and a chance to remake a world without God as they launched their counterculture revolution. Eventually, though, they would be sent adrift, with no collective sense of purpose. They chased everything from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to celebrities and cults. So many cults.
Cults seemed to sprout up everywhere, all of them with the promise of a brand new way of living that fixed every problem. They would always try to lure my mom or us kids into them, always promising the same thing - happiness, a sense of belonging. They were at airports and outside supermarkets. We knew to stay away. Something about being raised as a wilding teaches you to trust no one.
Most of the cults back then always collapsed under the weight of their own utopian ideals, sex and financial scandals would rise out of the ash heap of failure.
Whatever was left swirled down the drain in the wake of Watergate, the end of Vietnam, and the failure of the Carter presidency, not to mention the more terrifying events like the Manson murders. It was not cool to be a hippie anymore. But their kids, kids like me, would grow up lost too - worse than lost. Depressed, full of anxiety, and in need of a fix.
We sought out therapy to talk about our bad childhoods. We gathered to watch Oprah every day at 3. We wanted to fix ourselves and thought we could. It was self-help books and anti-depressants. It was yoga, aerobics, meditation, juice cleanses, fasting, and gurus.
First, we focused inward, then we focused outward. Then it was climate change, women’s rights, racial injustice, cloth diapers, hybrid cars, cruelty-free cosmetics, feeding the hungry, and eventually, we had kids and then we sought about fixing them. They had to be perfect too because otherwise all of the work we did on ourselves was for naught.
Unlike us, our kids would have high self-esteem so they wouldn’t become school shooters. They would not be abandoned or abused or molested or kidnapped. We hovered. We coddled. We tinkered. Imperfect children were diagnosed with this disorder or that, even as toddlers, then we would drug them into perfection. We gave our children nowhere to escape. So they escaped online.
Eventually, though, all points led to Barack Obama. A perfect president for a perfect utopia of perfect people raising perfect kids. We were good puritans, utopians who had fixed ourselves, and our kids, and now we had a president to fix our country.
That feeling most of us had when Obama won was like a religious awakening, filling up a hole that had been left empty for decades.
Finally, what we had been searching for, working toward, and desperately craving had arrived: a collective sense of purpose embodied in the first Black president. The idea of the “first” was the high we were chasing, and would keep chasing to find ultimate purity.
But sooner or later you run out of the ones that already exist so then you have to start inventing new ones, finding new ways to define people as marginalized. Who is not accepted by Hollywood? Who is never noticed in public? Who is shamed or ridiculed or bullied? Those people needed rescuing and we were going to rescue them.
Everyone else, which was mostly everyone, was to be named as the oppressors. The more successful, the more oppressive.
Meanwhile, many of our kids began creating and inventing their own religion online, a jacked-up version of ours based solely on identity, purity, and a binary measure of people who are good and people who are bad. They didn’t realize it but they were building a utopian cult that would grow up, join the workforce, and completely overtake the Left. We saw the beginnings of it at Evergreen College in 2018.
The Democrats folded. The media pandered. Corporations surrendered. Though it took me a while to really understand what had happened to the Left, I knew eventually it would drive me away. I was with them as a loyal Democrat who really was a true believer in the Party and even the social justice movement for a time. But then it got weird. Really really weird.
I spent a few years trying to fight with them, pushing back against the many cancellations, trying to convince my friends and family that something was very wrong with the Left but none of them would listen to me. They were in a kind of “mass formation” fugue state and all they could do was try to pull me back into the fold. Even now they show up with their fingers pointed, accusing me of being a heretic, a blasphemer, a witch.
They whisper about me behind my back, they gossip and worry and fret about what happened to me, why I went so wrong. They seem to think that nothing is quite as bad on the Left as Trump. So they keep asking me, “are you a Trump supporter now?” And “Are you voting for Trump?” If I answer yes, then they have their confession and they can feel satisfied that they were right to throw me away like human garbage. But I don’t answer because I don’t know.
What I do know is that it was a lie that we were the resistance. We were always the empire. It was a lie that Trump was a fascist. We’re closer to fascism now than we’ve ever been as a country with the Democrats in power. And it was always a lie that Trump World was a cult.
What kind of cult leader takes credit for the vaccine and then can’t get his supporters to take it? Wouldn’t they have complied like everyone on the Left? Did Jim Jones allow anyone to not drink that flavoraid laced with cyanide?
The cult of the Left is ruled by fanatics, zealots, and true believers. While there really are people who suffer from gender dysphoria - and trans people do exist, in my view - they aren’t part of the cult of the Left so much as they have become sacred symbols of it.
To be a member of the cult you have to be always deferential to the sacred and protected groups. America is still majority white, majority Christian and majority heterosexual nation. That means cult members have to either “cross over” as non-binary or trans to be “saved” or they have to be good allies:
The women are bad enough - trading their journey of empowerment for endless self-punishment over their whiteness. So now their children are being used as sacred symbols for their path toward salvation. They might not be sacred themselves but they are “holy mothers” of the sacred which gives them some status.
CONT> Did I just Leave a Cult?
Because it Feels Kind of Like I did...
Sosha Stone
“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.”
― Marty Rubin
I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.
We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pandora’s Box turned out to be just what marrying my father was like for my mother. Her whole world changed. She had three daughters right in a row and now had four kids all before the age of 24. Then my parents split and she raised us as mostly a single mom with various boyfriends who drifted in and out.
We had to look out for ourselves because danger was everywhere. Grownups were off on their own trips - finding themselves, getting drunk and naked at grape stomps, their bodies and fluids co-mingling, along with the grapes and grape juice that would one day become wine.
My mother, like so many in the counterculture, was and remains an atheist. Back then, God was uncool. Freedom was cool. Breaking free from tradition and convention rippled through the Left with tornado-like speed, destroying the past, creating a world anew.
The Boomers broke free and saw nothing but wide open spaces and a chance to remake a world without God as they launched their counterculture revolution. Eventually, though, they would be sent adrift, with no collective sense of purpose. They chased everything from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to celebrities and cults. So many cults.
Cults seemed to sprout up everywhere, all of them with the promise of a brand new way of living that fixed every problem. They would always try to lure my mom or us kids into them, always promising the same thing - happiness, a sense of belonging. They were at airports and outside supermarkets. We knew to stay away. Something about being raised as a wilding teaches you to trust no one.
Most of the cults back then always collapsed under the weight of their own utopian ideals, sex and financial scandals would rise out of the ash heap of failure.
Whatever was left swirled down the drain in the wake of Watergate, the end of Vietnam, and the failure of the Carter presidency, not to mention the more terrifying events like the Manson murders. It was not cool to be a hippie anymore. But their kids, kids like me, would grow up lost too - worse than lost. Depressed, full of anxiety, and in need of a fix.
We sought out therapy to talk about our bad childhoods. We gathered to watch Oprah every day at 3. We wanted to fix ourselves and thought we could. It was self-help books and anti-depressants. It was yoga, aerobics, meditation, juice cleanses, fasting, and gurus.
First, we focused inward, then we focused outward. Then it was climate change, women’s rights, racial injustice, cloth diapers, hybrid cars, cruelty-free cosmetics, feeding the hungry, and eventually, we had kids and then we sought about fixing them. They had to be perfect too because otherwise all of the work we did on ourselves was for naught.
Unlike us, our kids would have high self-esteem so they wouldn’t become school shooters. They would not be abandoned or abused or molested or kidnapped. We hovered. We coddled. We tinkered. Imperfect children were diagnosed with this disorder or that, even as toddlers, then we would drug them into perfection. We gave our children nowhere to escape. So they escaped online.
Eventually, though, all points led to Barack Obama. A perfect president for a perfect utopia of perfect people raising perfect kids. We were good puritans, utopians who had fixed ourselves, and our kids, and now we had a president to fix our country.
That feeling most of us had when Obama won was like a religious awakening, filling up a hole that had been left empty for decades.
Finally, what we had been searching for, working toward, and desperately craving had arrived: a collective sense of purpose embodied in the first Black president. The idea of the “first” was the high we were chasing, and would keep chasing to find ultimate purity.
But sooner or later you run out of the ones that already exist so then you have to start inventing new ones, finding new ways to define people as marginalized. Who is not accepted by Hollywood? Who is never noticed in public? Who is shamed or ridiculed or bullied? Those people needed rescuing and we were going to rescue them.
Everyone else, which was mostly everyone, was to be named as the oppressors. The more successful, the more oppressive.
Meanwhile, many of our kids began creating and inventing their own religion online, a jacked-up version of ours based solely on identity, purity, and a binary measure of people who are good and people who are bad. They didn’t realize it but they were building a utopian cult that would grow up, join the workforce, and completely overtake the Left. We saw the beginnings of it at Evergreen College in 2018.
The Democrats folded. The media pandered. Corporations surrendered. Though it took me a while to really understand what had happened to the Left, I knew eventually it would drive me away. I was with them as a loyal Democrat who really was a true believer in the Party and even the social justice movement for a time. But then it got weird. Really really weird.
I spent a few years trying to fight with them, pushing back against the many cancellations, trying to convince my friends and family that something was very wrong with the Left but none of them would listen to me. They were in a kind of “mass formation” fugue state and all they could do was try to pull me back into the fold. Even now they show up with their fingers pointed, accusing me of being a heretic, a blasphemer, a witch.
They whisper about me behind my back, they gossip and worry and fret about what happened to me, why I went so wrong. They seem to think that nothing is quite as bad on the Left as Trump. So they keep asking me, “are you a Trump supporter now?” And “Are you voting for Trump?” If I answer yes, then they have their confession and they can feel satisfied that they were right to throw me away like human garbage. But I don’t answer because I don’t know.
What I do know is that it was a lie that we were the resistance. We were always the empire. It was a lie that Trump was a fascist. We’re closer to fascism now than we’ve ever been as a country with the Democrats in power. And it was always a lie that Trump World was a cult.
What kind of cult leader takes credit for the vaccine and then can’t get his supporters to take it? Wouldn’t they have complied like everyone on the Left? Did Jim Jones allow anyone to not drink that flavoraid laced with cyanide?
The cult of the Left is ruled by fanatics, zealots, and true believers. While there really are people who suffer from gender dysphoria - and trans people do exist, in my view - they aren’t part of the cult of the Left so much as they have become sacred symbols of it.
To be a member of the cult you have to be always deferential to the sacred and protected groups. America is still majority white, majority Christian and majority heterosexual nation. That means cult members have to either “cross over” as non-binary or trans to be “saved” or they have to be good allies:
The women are bad enough - trading their journey of empowerment for endless self-punishment over their whiteness. So now their children are being used as sacred symbols for their path toward salvation. They might not be sacred themselves but they are “holy mothers” of the sacred which gives them some status.
CONT> Did I just Leave a Cult?
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
So what happened? Why don't "schools" like Prager U promote actual education anymore?
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Being a person who actually has attended a University, I can assure you, I learned a lot of math, plus a lot of other great stuff like critical thinking and yes, sex\gender, racism, identity, reading and writing as well. Hopefully by the time you get to university, you're pretty well versed in math, reading and writing and you're ready to take it to the next level. The main thing I learned overall, the most important thing of all .... was how to think, rather than just what to think. It's almost like you get a well-rounded education or something.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
You lost me at, "people who collectively dressed as characters from a popular and relevant TV show to protest and make a point" are a cult.Did I just Leave a Cult?
Because it Feels Kind of Like I did...
Sosha Stone
“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.”
― Marty Rubin
I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.
We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pandora’s Box turned out to be just what marrying my father was like for my mother. Her whole world changed. She had three daughters right in a row and now had four kids all before the age of 24. Then my parents split and she raised us as mostly a single mom with various boyfriends who drifted in and out.
We had to look out for ourselves because danger was everywhere. Grownups were off on their own trips - finding themselves, getting drunk and naked at grape stomps, their bodies and fluids co-mingling, along with the grapes and grape juice that would one day become wine.
My mother, like so many in the counterculture, was and remains an atheist. Back then, God was uncool. Freedom was cool. Breaking free from tradition and convention rippled through the Left with tornado-like speed, destroying the past, creating a world anew.
The Boomers broke free and saw nothing but wide open spaces and a chance to remake a world without God as they launched their counterculture revolution. Eventually, though, they would be sent adrift, with no collective sense of purpose. They chased everything from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to celebrities and cults. So many cults.
Cults seemed to sprout up everywhere, all of them with the promise of a brand new way of living that fixed every problem. They would always try to lure my mom or us kids into them, always promising the same thing - happiness, a sense of belonging. They were at airports and outside supermarkets. We knew to stay away. Something about being raised as a wilding teaches you to trust no one.
Most of the cults back then always collapsed under the weight of their own utopian ideals, sex and financial scandals would rise out of the ash heap of failure.
Whatever was left swirled down the drain in the wake of Watergate, the end of Vietnam, and the failure of the Carter presidency, not to mention the more terrifying events like the Manson murders. It was not cool to be a hippie anymore. But their kids, kids like me, would grow up lost too - worse than lost. Depressed, full of anxiety, and in need of a fix.
We sought out therapy to talk about our bad childhoods. We gathered to watch Oprah every day at 3. We wanted to fix ourselves and thought we could. It was self-help books and anti-depressants. It was yoga, aerobics, meditation, juice cleanses, fasting, and gurus.
First, we focused inward, then we focused outward. Then it was climate change, women’s rights, racial injustice, cloth diapers, hybrid cars, cruelty-free cosmetics, feeding the hungry, and eventually, we had kids and then we sought about fixing them. They had to be perfect too because otherwise all of the work we did on ourselves was for naught.
Unlike us, our kids would have high self-esteem so they wouldn’t become school shooters. They would not be abandoned or abused or molested or kidnapped. We hovered. We coddled. We tinkered. Imperfect children were diagnosed with this disorder or that, even as toddlers, then we would drug them into perfection. We gave our children nowhere to escape. So they escaped online.
Eventually, though, all points led to Barack Obama. A perfect president for a perfect utopia of perfect people raising perfect kids. We were good puritans, utopians who had fixed ourselves, and our kids, and now we had a president to fix our country.
That feeling most of us had when Obama won was like a religious awakening, filling up a hole that had been left empty for decades.
Finally, what we had been searching for, working toward, and desperately craving had arrived: a collective sense of purpose embodied in the first Black president. The idea of the “first” was the high we were chasing, and would keep chasing to find ultimate purity.
But sooner or later you run out of the ones that already exist so then you have to start inventing new ones, finding new ways to define people as marginalized. Who is not accepted by Hollywood? Who is never noticed in public? Who is shamed or ridiculed or bullied? Those people needed rescuing and we were going to rescue them.
Everyone else, which was mostly everyone, was to be named as the oppressors. The more successful, the more oppressive.
Meanwhile, many of our kids began creating and inventing their own religion online, a jacked-up version of ours based solely on identity, purity, and a binary measure of people who are good and people who are bad. They didn’t realize it but they were building a utopian cult that would grow up, join the workforce, and completely overtake the Left. We saw the beginnings of it at Evergreen College in 2018.
The Democrats folded. The media pandered. Corporations surrendered. Though it took me a while to really understand what had happened to the Left, I knew eventually it would drive me away. I was with them as a loyal Democrat who really was a true believer in the Party and even the social justice movement for a time. But then it got weird. Really really weird.
I spent a few years trying to fight with them, pushing back against the many cancellations, trying to convince my friends and family that something was very wrong with the Left but none of them would listen to me. They were in a kind of “mass formation” fugue state and all they could do was try to pull me back into the fold. Even now they show up with their fingers pointed, accusing me of being a heretic, a blasphemer, a witch.
They whisper about me behind my back, they gossip and worry and fret about what happened to me, why I went so wrong. They seem to think that nothing is quite as bad on the Left as Trump. So they keep asking me, “are you a Trump supporter now?” And “Are you voting for Trump?” If I answer yes, then they have their confession and they can feel satisfied that they were right to throw me away like human garbage. But I don’t answer because I don’t know.
What I do know is that it was a lie that we were the resistance. We were always the empire. It was a lie that Trump was a fascist. We’re closer to fascism now than we’ve ever been as a country with the Democrats in power. And it was always a lie that Trump World was a cult.
What kind of cult leader takes credit for the vaccine and then can’t get his supporters to take it? Wouldn’t they have complied like everyone on the Left? Did Jim Jones allow anyone to not drink that flavoraid laced with cyanide?
The cult of the Left is ruled by fanatics, zealots, and true believers. While there really are people who suffer from gender dysphoria - and trans people do exist, in my view - they aren’t part of the cult of the Left so much as they have become sacred symbols of it.
To be a member of the cult you have to be always deferential to the sacred and protected groups. America is still majority white, majority Christian and majority heterosexual nation. That means cult members have to either “cross over” as non-binary or trans to be “saved” or they have to be good allies:
The women are bad enough - trading their journey of empowerment for endless self-punishment over their whiteness. So now their children are being used as sacred symbols for their path toward salvation. They might not be sacred themselves but they are “holy mothers” of the sacred which gives them some status.
CONT> Did I just Leave a Cult?
Sorry.
We see have been seeing news reports of conservtives working to eliminate rights that have been established for many decades. Conservatives are moving towards authoritarianism as led by Trump and his corruption, and it is a losing tactic. Conservative moderates don't have a taste for this, so for the far right base to push for corrupt authoritarian leaders is going to lead to more losses in elections. Republicans barely took back the House last November due to the many bad candidates.
1. Antifa doesn't use guns. 2. Suddenly you as a consevative are worried about guns?
Then encourage your fellow conservatives to stop equating liberals/democrats with communists and socialists.
By European standards even American liberals are fairly conservative.
Arguably public schools, police, social security, public roads, etc. are all socialist in the broad sense, so yes, both republicans and democrats are a type of socialist governing. Our system is called a republic, and more accurately a socialist republic. That probably sounds scary to you.
So what do you want as a governing system? A Christian theocracy, a dictatorship?
Since there is no socialist movement in the USA it's irrelevant. I'm not sure what is so scary about socialism. I suspect you are a victim of right wing propaganda that has vilified and misapplied socialism as a word in American politics. I notice conservatives can't explaian what is bad about liberal policies, rather the flawed tactic is to call democrats "socialists", and then attack socialism as a bad thing, as you did.
I listed a few in post 263, I was responding to you. No need to repeat it.
Last edited:
Colt
Well-Known Member
Did you read the article entire article?
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Yes, it's garbage.
Colt
Well-Known Member
LoL! Must have struck a nerve?! She is sharing here experience of being a part of the free thinking as long as you think like we think-club. Its a kind of vicious cult! I agree with her and think that more like her will snap out of the insanity.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Sure she is.
I know that's your go-to answer. But no, I just found it to be a pile of garbage. Starting with the very first thing I pointed out about it. To which you had no response.
Colt
Well-Known Member
I didn't address your original point because you didn't have one. Your quote isn't in the article. "people who collectively dressed as characters from a popular and relevant TV show to protest and make a point"Sure she is.
I know that's your go-to answer. But no, I just found it to be a pile of garbage. Starting with the very first thing I pointed out about it. To which you had no response.
Last edited:
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
I left I cult when I left Christianity.Did I just Leave a Cult?
Because it Feels Kind of Like I did...
Sosha Stone
“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.”
― Marty Rubin
I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.
We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pandora’s Box turned out to be just what marrying my father was like for my mother. Her whole world changed. She had three daughters right in a row and now had four kids all before the age of 24. Then my parents split and she raised us as mostly a single mom with various boyfriends who drifted in and out.
We had to look out for ourselves because danger was everywhere. Grownups were off on their own trips - finding themselves, getting drunk and naked at grape stomps, their bodies and fluids co-mingling, along with the grapes and grape juice that would one day become wine.
My mother, like so many in the counterculture, was and remains an atheist. Back then, God was uncool. Freedom was cool. Breaking free from tradition and convention rippled through the Left with tornado-like speed, destroying the past, creating a world anew.
The Boomers broke free and saw nothing but wide open spaces and a chance to remake a world without God as they launched their counterculture revolution. Eventually, though, they would be sent adrift, with no collective sense of purpose. They chased everything from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to celebrities and cults. So many cults.
Cults seemed to sprout up everywhere, all of them with the promise of a brand new way of living that fixed every problem. They would always try to lure my mom or us kids into them, always promising the same thing - happiness, a sense of belonging. They were at airports and outside supermarkets. We knew to stay away. Something about being raised as a wilding teaches you to trust no one.
Most of the cults back then always collapsed under the weight of their own utopian ideals, sex and financial scandals would rise out of the ash heap of failure.
Whatever was left swirled down the drain in the wake of Watergate, the end of Vietnam, and the failure of the Carter presidency, not to mention the more terrifying events like the Manson murders. It was not cool to be a hippie anymore. But their kids, kids like me, would grow up lost too - worse than lost. Depressed, full of anxiety, and in need of a fix.
We sought out therapy to talk about our bad childhoods. We gathered to watch Oprah every day at 3. We wanted to fix ourselves and thought we could. It was self-help books and anti-depressants. It was yoga, aerobics, meditation, juice cleanses, fasting, and gurus.
First, we focused inward, then we focused outward. Then it was climate change, women’s rights, racial injustice, cloth diapers, hybrid cars, cruelty-free cosmetics, feeding the hungry, and eventually, we had kids and then we sought about fixing them. They had to be perfect too because otherwise all of the work we did on ourselves was for naught.
Unlike us, our kids would have high self-esteem so they wouldn’t become school shooters. They would not be abandoned or abused or molested or kidnapped. We hovered. We coddled. We tinkered. Imperfect children were diagnosed with this disorder or that, even as toddlers, then we would drug them into perfection. We gave our children nowhere to escape. So they escaped online.
Eventually, though, all points led to Barack Obama. A perfect president for a perfect utopia of perfect people raising perfect kids. We were good puritans, utopians who had fixed ourselves, and our kids, and now we had a president to fix our country.
That feeling most of us had when Obama won was like a religious awakening, filling up a hole that had been left empty for decades.
Finally, what we had been searching for, working toward, and desperately craving had arrived: a collective sense of purpose embodied in the first Black president. The idea of the “first” was the high we were chasing, and would keep chasing to find ultimate purity.
But sooner or later you run out of the ones that already exist so then you have to start inventing new ones, finding new ways to define people as marginalized. Who is not accepted by Hollywood? Who is never noticed in public? Who is shamed or ridiculed or bullied? Those people needed rescuing and we were going to rescue them.
Everyone else, which was mostly everyone, was to be named as the oppressors. The more successful, the more oppressive.
Meanwhile, many of our kids began creating and inventing their own religion online, a jacked-up version of ours based solely on identity, purity, and a binary measure of people who are good and people who are bad. They didn’t realize it but they were building a utopian cult that would grow up, join the workforce, and completely overtake the Left. We saw the beginnings of it at Evergreen College in 2018.
The Democrats folded. The media pandered. Corporations surrendered. Though it took me a while to really understand what had happened to the Left, I knew eventually it would drive me away. I was with them as a loyal Democrat who really was a true believer in the Party and even the social justice movement for a time. But then it got weird. Really really weird.
I spent a few years trying to fight with them, pushing back against the many cancellations, trying to convince my friends and family that something was very wrong with the Left but none of them would listen to me. They were in a kind of “mass formation” fugue state and all they could do was try to pull me back into the fold. Even now they show up with their fingers pointed, accusing me of being a heretic, a blasphemer, a witch.
They whisper about me behind my back, they gossip and worry and fret about what happened to me, why I went so wrong. They seem to think that nothing is quite as bad on the Left as Trump. So they keep asking me, “are you a Trump supporter now?” And “Are you voting for Trump?” If I answer yes, then they have their confession and they can feel satisfied that they were right to throw me away like human garbage. But I don’t answer because I don’t know.
What I do know is that it was a lie that we were the resistance. We were always the empire. It was a lie that Trump was a fascist. We’re closer to fascism now than we’ve ever been as a country with the Democrats in power. And it was always a lie that Trump World was a cult.
What kind of cult leader takes credit for the vaccine and then can’t get his supporters to take it? Wouldn’t they have complied like everyone on the Left? Did Jim Jones allow anyone to not drink that flavoraid laced with cyanide?
The cult of the Left is ruled by fanatics, zealots, and true believers. While there really are people who suffer from gender dysphoria - and trans people do exist, in my view - they aren’t part of the cult of the Left so much as they have become sacred symbols of it.
To be a member of the cult you have to be always deferential to the sacred and protected groups. America is still majority white, majority Christian and majority heterosexual nation. That means cult members have to either “cross over” as non-binary or trans to be “saved” or they have to be good allies:
The women are bad enough - trading their journey of empowerment for endless self-punishment over their whiteness. So now their children are being used as sacred symbols for their path toward salvation. They might not be sacred themselves but they are “holy mothers” of the sacred which gives them some status.
CONT> Did I just Leave a Cult?