Of course they're cults.
>I could never figure out their gig. It wasn't dope. It wasn't sex. It
>wasn't fun. It sure wasn't the food or social scene. Definitely not
>the liquor. It wasn't the clothes. It wasn't the cars. It wasn't the
>crap they read.
It *is* sex I think. As well as money of course. But they only tease and never come across. The missus still hates all Baptists because of something that happened to her as a teenager, when the Baptists invaded her home town in Queensland. She swears they use attractive people of the opposite sex to attract converts.
She won't let our kids anywhere near Baptist youth activities in Bracknell.
I don't hate them, but I do find them oddly alien. I can see why someone might thing they are X-Files type alien pod-people.
>Their politics are as bad as their breath, their
>eyesight, and their figures. They are a little like some Morons, I mean
>Mormons, I knew on my mother's side of the family, but they are a
>whole lot nastier. I noticed my sister's kids all rebelled the minute
>they got away from home. My oldest niece has been marriage a couple
>of times and she is still in her twenties. My oldest nephew joined the
>military (don't know what branch. My suggestion was the Navy, since
>Iraq resistance has no navy). My sister is a Fundie, but I think she went
>to a cult in the early 80s in Oregon and came back a pregnant
>pod-people imitation of who I grew up with. It's true I did torture
>her a lot when she was little. Maybe that had something to do with
>it. Maybe Schully can look into it. Strange shit happens in Oregon.
My youngest sister was beamed into a Christian fundamentalists sect too, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I tortured her as a child. (Though she does accuse me of this and many other things I have no recollection of.)
Oddly enough, it was sex that allowed her to escape. The "Pastor" of the sect (some obscure American sect calling itself "Potters House" I vaguely recall) forbid her marriage to the bloke she wanted to marry. The fact was that he wasn't much of a catch, being a penniless South Korean visa over-stayer whose interest in the sect was transparently a polite pretense. But her love (sex) was stronger than the pastor's avarice. My sister still tells us stories about the culture of the sect, like how frustrated the pastor was that she failed to get a good paying job and that he had to content himself with tithing her dole cheque.
So, its sex AND money. Or in other words a sort of fraudulent prostitution.
The rest of her family simply ignored the sect for years, on the principle that if you ignore it, it might go away. It worked!
>I see no reason to have anything to do with them. Whenever I meet one,
>something inside me shutters with horror (Did you every notice that
>dogs instinctively growl wherever one Them is in the room?). I smile
>and chat politely and then look for a door. I am thinking of getting
>dog to keep me safe at night...
I've never met one that I found in the slightest bit sexually attractive either. There was always something vaguely disconcerting, something in the eyes I think. A sort of intense yet vacant, mesmerised look, something like the look you get from game animals when they stare into the spotlight as you take aim at them.
Come to think of it, I suppose that's why I have never found them in the least attractive. That would be akin to being attracted to a species of game animal. For all intents and purposes it would be bestiality. Not into that either.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas