Cults

Tonight my younger daughter who is about 20 came home from college for the weekend. She goes to school about 2 1/2 hours from home by car so she lives there. She put a program likely from Netflix on Deprogramming and Cults on and I was sort of horrified she wanted to watch this thing because I had had a lot of experience with cults of various kinds. So, I'm sort of an expert on cults and psychological programming.

I had carefully kept my daughter from cults as much as I could while she was growing up and now I realized she knew nothing about them as a result which might not be the best.

First of all, what is a cult?
 Often they are between 10,000 and 100,000 members
worldwide or around this number and they could believe in anything including "The moon is made of Green Cheese". But here in America they are more likely to be Christian or Mormon based or universal based (all religions) like the Moonies which came from South Korea (Sun Myong Moon).

The problem for parents of children caught into these religions is they might not see their grandchildren or their own children because they will be busy working for their cult and not allowed to leave to visit their parents ever, especially if they are "Moonies".

Other cults are "Scientology" and others which are more Science Fiction based I think might be the right term for it.

But, my experience was growing up in a cult.

Was my experience good or bad?

I would have to say both.

Like most religious experiences they can be both.

So, this is why I say religion is a good discipline but if you are a truth seeker
it is better to head towards philosophy.

Because if you delve deeply enough into any religion they start asking you to stop delving. This is universal in all religions. So, if you actually try to understand everything scientifically they usually get upset at some point. So, this is why philosophic inquiry is better because this is the basis for all scientific knowledge.

Religions are not scientific for better or worse. They are mostly about you having something to hang onto when you are dying or things go bump in the night. It is mostly to give you something so you don't run screaming off a cliff one day when the world nukes out or your whole city or country burns down or blows up in a nuclear holocaust.

Could you psychologically survive without anything electronic if there was no cell phones, no TV, no family, no friends, no food, no computers, no cars?

I likely could because I have studied how and practiced this psychologically and physically especially in the 1970s and 1980s.

At this point in my life I would likely need Armour Thyroid and Lisinopril at the least or an organic equivalent to survive but you never know what you can survive until you have to.

And I have already survived in the wilderness with no water or food for 96 hours and stayed psychologically balanced to walk 4 miles downstream after that to get to a friend's home on the Trinity River. This was 1983.

So, why are people attracted to cults?

I would say the main reason people are attracted to cults is if they were abused as children either psychologically or physically. This is my thought on all of this.

Otherwise, people don't need cults or even religions that much. But they might need a personal experience with God or nature that they can count on at all times.