> The Dukhobors, at least until their communities were socially
> and culturally destroyed by the governments of Canada and
> British Columbia in the 1950s.
>
> http://www.igs.net/~koozmataras/
> http://www.doukhobor-homepage.com/
> http://www.iskramag.org/
>
>
> -- Gordon
>
Ummm. I WILL go read the Dukhobor websites to see what they say for themselves, but...
I once made the mistake of telling an officer at the Canadian border that I was on my way to Vancouver to hear a concert put on by a bunch of old Dukhobors because someone had given me a ticket.
I was travelling alone. My allergies were busy turning into a head cold. I had been moving. Basically I was a MESS and in these War on Terroism times I would probably get roundly sent back to my cave in Seattle. The border guard looked me up and down and asked me several times was I really going to hear the Dukhobors. I must have managed to seem benign because the guard let me cross, but you can bet when I got home I went marching off to the library to read up.
Before that I only knew of Dukhobors because they declared themselves religious pacifists and refused to fight in the Russian tsar's army, They eventually were allowed to migrate to Canada. The Dukhobors went through a phase of being quite cult-like, and this despite a theological commitment to live as God revealed it without too much constraint by doctrine or structure.
They lived according to the dictates of one leader who did the typical cult leader thing of being paranoid and having many problems interacting with local authorities. During this phase many Dukhobors took to stripping off all their clothes, parading around naked and setting fires to their own buildings. I have know plenty of people with fringe tendencies, but I would find those behavious alarming no matter how much I support someone's right to exercise them.
This is not to say that motives and actions on the other side were benign at all, but between the cult-like following of one leader and a certain tyranny of theological structurelessness, I do not think the Dukhobors are an entirely positive example. So keep trying.
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