Sunday, June 26, 2011

Cultism And Fear: The Watchtower's Joy In Human Misery

Cultic movements aren't terribly creative, just diabolically clever at using the same old basic elements found in human nature and social group dynamics in an infinate number of ways to recruit, deceive and enslave their followers. In our latest and by no means final article on the Franklin, Tennessee cult calling itself Remnant fellowship, we took a long hard look at the basic premise behind its chief claims to "Christian weight loss" and have long seen that it is fear that motivates its members and not faith.

Fear is a horrible thing to live under and the testimony of cult members who have left places like Remnant and others all universally attest to this. The underlying dynamic of dread, horror and anxiety that they indoctrinate their followers in can and does profoundly and often irrevocably affect them in many adverse ways. It paints the world and reality in frightening colors that cause them to shrink from it, to shun it and to abandon their hearts and minds completely to the worldview the cult they've joined demands they embrace. It more insidiously weighs them down with a view of themselves as people incapable of thinking or believing for themselves apart from a complete reliance upon some prophetic authority figure or organization to dictate to them how to live and think, how they can feel approved or holy, how they might be "saved."

This is one of the reasons why cultic movements are societal scourges whose legacies are ultimately some of the most hideous of evils in our world today. "Spiritual direction" such as these groups "suggest" is irresistible when the fears they've indoctrinated their followers to be vulnerable too, "direction" that often plays upon their purely human weaknesses and frailities. It compels them to shed personal goals and self-esteem as casually as one might pull off dirty socks, to distance or cut-off any longstanding personal relationships out of a perverse zeal, and to generally become completely mind controlled slaves to the ideology their cult preaches as the ultimate truth.

It's then that the truly warped and evil nature of antichristian and antisocial cultism becomes most apparent. When you are convinced that the world is owned by Satan and will be destroyed and that the only ark of safety is under Group X's covering, your thinking will change to an unimaginably relentless black and white way of thinking and your values, your lifestyle choices, your destiny as you are permitted to follow it will change as well. You will learn to enjoy feeling a part of the only "true" people of God on earth and will, inexorably, find yourself settling into a security based upon belief that everyone else is wrong, evil and beyond any worth.

Such is the thinking of the Watchtower Society, a classic case of cultic misanthropy on a towering scale that has spanned the globe for over a century via its Jehovah's Witness constituency using its phobic preaching of its own false prophesies and false gospel. This outstanding new video created by an ex-Jehovah's Witness so completely demonstrates how cultism's usage of fear will lead compassionate people into becoming merchants of fearmongering who actually gain pleasure in the horrors of life in our fallen world.

The dry, trenchant observations made in this video about the fear mongering and joy in human misery found among many Jehovah's Witnesses can be found easily in places like Remnant Fellowship .. or, sadly, too many churches around us.