Download or read book Moonwebs written by Josh Freed and published by Signal Editions. This book was released on 1989 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: n Moonwebs, award-winning journalist Josh Freed penetrates the complex and frightening world of modern day cults. He describes the incredible efforts made by friends to extricate their friend Benji Miller from the grasp of cult leader Sun Myung Moon. When friends and family risked thousands of dollars and criminal charges to kidnap Benji and deprogram him, author Josh Freed was with them. He conveys the terrifying power of the Unification Church by describing their harrowing brainwashing techniques. When first published Moonwebs sold 70,000 copies. Véhicule Press is pleased to bring this gripping case study, which reveals the growing political and financial empire of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, back into print.
Download or read book Journey into a Cult written by Kathleen Y. Rattigan and published by BalboaPress. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innocence, inexperience, curiosity and free willWhen the Goddess meets the male ego, a power struggle of frightening and dramatic proportions leads to abduction and forcible confinement. Follow me into the realms of meditation, visualization and spiritual, mystical awakening. Who knew this journey would lead me from mind-numbing terror to awe inspiring grace and love? Did I ignore the danger signs? The escalating struggle for sanity and safety tells a tale of honor and courage who, me? From this surreal experience I emerged metamorphosized into truth, light and love, behold, a Light Worker.
Download or read book Apocalypse Child written by Flor Edwards and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be thirteen years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her. Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex. Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.
Download or read book Spiritual Blackmail written by Sherri Schettler and published by . This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Spiritual Blackmail" is a timely story in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Vatican II and the recent dual canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. While the changes brought about by Vatican II were welcomed by many Catholics, they caused a great deal of consternation for others, including Sherri's parents. Their well-meaning choice to escape from what they believed was the "corruption" of their beloved Church and to join a renegade traditionalist group and its charismatic, abusive leader had significant, long-term effects on Sherri - effects that she continues to deal with as a Catholic in the 21st Century. "Spiritual Blackmail" testifies to the triumph of the human spirit in the face of spiritual turmoil, but also to the powerful truth that it is possible to find the good and a reason for gratitude even amid seeming abandonment and betrayal by those most trusted.
Download or read book From Cult to Country written by Michael Ricks and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cult-to-country is about country musician, Michael Ricks, growing up in a household where his parents were rabidly devoted to a religious cult that, among other things, preached against the use of modern medicine to the detriment of over 100 church member deaths in under twenty years. The eldest of nine children, Michael suffered the brunt of emotional, psychological and physical abuse meted out by his ardent father who worked thoroughly to instill suffering as a normal way of life. Michael describes how music helped him cope through the abuse and well into his adult years.Musically gifted by the age of 12, Michael took a paddle his father used to hit the children and turned it into a makeshift guitar. Thus began Michael's lifelong love affair with the banjo and guitar and country music. After years of attacks of stress-induced asthma, Michael began a personal journey to ferret out the roots of his anxiety: a journey which has taken him into the world of country music. Michael's story is a story of ongoing anxiety-remission through his love of country music and his knack for taking instruments of pain into instruments of redemption.
Download or read book Practice And All Is Coming written by Matthew Remski and published by Embodied Wisdom Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we co-create safer yoga and spiritual communities? Through dogged investigative work, careful listening to survivor stories of assault and abuse, and close analysis of the cultic mechanisms at play in the sphere of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga community, Matthew Remski’s Practice and All Is Coming offers a sober view into a collective and intergenerational trauma. It also offers a clear pathway forward into enhanced critical thinking, student empowerment, self-and-other care, and community resilience. Concluding with practical tools for a world rocked by abuse revelations, Practice and All Is Coming opens a window on the possibility of healing— and even re-enchantment. While Mathew Remski is the courageous, insightful, and compassionate author of this informative, challenging, and thought-provoking book, this book is clearly a group effort. Equal parts theory, training manual, expose, and memoir, Practice and All is Coming ... is a foray into the difficult topics of personal agency, spirituality authority, and cult dynamics. In addition to his clearly articulated understanding of the problems inherent in many spiritual schools, Mathew provides hope for healing the confusion and anguish that arise in the heart of sincere practitioners when they are betrayed by the revered powers in which they have placed their trust. If you practice or teach yoga, please consider this book an essential companion on your path. Christina Sell, author of Yoga From the Inside Out, My Body is a Temple, and A Deeper Yoga.
Download or read book Moonwebs written by Josh Freed and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Girls in the Cult written by Esther Royer Ayers and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girls in the Cult is a journey into understanding the Old Order Mennonite religion. The book provides answers for "free thinkers" who ask: Why would people of a religion systematically program their children to fear the outside world? Why would the people of a religion limit a child's education to eighth grade? Why would people of a religion make their members live in the past? What could prominent Dr. Erik Erikson and his "Eight Stages in Life" say about the people of my childhood religion? How does the Amish in the City television show fit into this book? Girls in the Cult is a first-hand account of my Old Order Mennonite childhood. As a little girl, I asked my mother who I was. Her reply that we were just pilgrims passing through this world on our way to our heavenly home didn't satisfy me. Years later I searched to learn the answer, which comprises this book. My surprising self-discovery is told with clarity, honesty, and in good old-fashioned storytelling.
Download or read book An Everyday Cult written by Gerette Buglion and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal memoir and a wake-up call for society to recognize and reject the erosion of critical thinking, An Everyday Cult is an essential read for understanding how people fall prey to mind control and cultic manipulation. Buglion's true-life story follows her through eighteen years under a trusted teacher's unethical tutelage and shows how her innocent quest for meaning was answered by a man who ultimately eroded her capacity for critical thinking. Through a treacherous narrative, she lays bare the hallmarks of cultic manipulation-mind control that flies under the radar of human awareness-and implores society to wake up to its ever-present abuses of power. It is a redemptive book of self-awareness and self-discovery. An Everyday Cult imparts a universal story, demonstrating how recognition of cultic membership-largely riddled with preconceived notions-may be an essential key to human evolution.
Download or read book Cult A Love Story written by Alexandra Amor and published by Fat Head Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Educated, Captive, and Leah Remini's Troublemaker comes the gripping true-life story of one young woman's accidental journey into a cult. And her escape a decade later. It's rarely obvious when a group is a cult. Most cults don't advertise themselves as such: they are groups of people who look and act just like you and me. Not dangerous. Not deranged. At least, not at first. The slide toward complete control of your personality, your thoughts, and your life is slow and virtually unnoticeable. Until it's too late. Cult, A Love Story has been studied in university classrooms, featured in an audio documentary and on podcasts, and read by cult survivors and their families all over the world, from remote British Columbia, Canada to Australia, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. In this award-winning memoir, Alexandra Amor shines a light on cults so that others might learn from her heartbreaking experience. Amor gracefully and sensitively explains how ordinary and intelligent people get seduced into joining cults, why they stay despite the emotional and psychological abuse, and what the long process of recovery looks like once someone leaves a cult. Amor's transparency about her decade-long involvement with a Vancouver, Canada cult makes this powerful and gripping book an excellent resource for those wanting to know more about how the mind control of a high demand spiritual or religious group works. In this page-turning, personal memoir you will learn: - how normal, intelligent people can, without knowing what's happening, get sucked into a cult's grip - why it's so very difficult for those in high demand groups (cults) to leave - how to evaluate whether a group you belong to is a cult - what the recovery period after a cult looks like - resources and recommendations if you know someone in a cult, or if you are in recovery from a cult yourself "This excellent memoir reveals how a charismatic, manipulative spirit medium can use love for God and neighbor as a hook to drag a small group of devotees into her cynical web of impossible goals for self-perfection. After a heroic struggle for insight, Alexandra Amor was one of the cult members who broke the abusive spell." Joesph Szimhart, Cult Information Specialist
Download or read book Dad Scares Me God Scares Me written by Vera Laree and published by Vera Laree Jones. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into a polygamist cult in Mexico in 1971, Vera LaRee was one of fifty-seven children her father had with his eleven wives. Constantly told that women were inferior to men and God was to be feared, from an early age she experienced manipulation, brainwashing and sexual violation. Married off to her deceased sister's husband at the age of sixteen, she helped raise her sister's children and gave birth to three of her own--truly believing what she had always been told: That a woman could not get to Heaven without a man. But hard as she tried to live "celestial marriage," to please her husband and make peace with her life, she never felt loved, respected or valued. However, every time she silently (and secretly) dared to question the beliefs of the cult, she found herself overcome with guilt, shame, and fear. So, for years, the control that her father, husband, and their polygamist God had over her continued--but it all began to change when the seed of a single idea she read in a hidden book slowly started taking root. THE TRUE STORY OF ONE WOMAN'S QUEST FOR FREEDOM, THIS IS A BOOK YOU WILL NEVER FORGET!
Download or read book Whispering in the Daylight written by Debby Schriver and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1960s in California, erstwhile music producer Tony Alamo became interested in authoritarian religion and, along with his charismatic wife, Susan, began gathering followers. By the 1970s, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries had established particularly strong footholds in Arkansas, as well as maintaining outposts in California. The ministry gained a legion of followers, with branches not only in the USA but in places as diverse as Africa and Sri Lanka. Even through their leader’s eventual imprisonment under federal charges (related to transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes), Alamo’s vision survived—and his community survives him today. Whispering in the Daylight: The Children of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries and Their Journey to Freedom is based on numerous interviews from group members and, more importantly, on interviews with the children—second and third-generation followers. Author Debby Schriver chronicles how this group was formed, documenting its many abuses and its gradual adoption of cult-like behaviors and practices. Like many cult leaders, Tony Alamo had different faces. The public saw him as a somewhat self-important but harmless music promoter and designer of bedazzling denim jackets. Schriver chronicles firsthand the condemnation, rejection, and torment that the second-generation survivors of Tony Alamo’s abuses experienced. Schriver’s interviews, particularly those with children, illuminate the real horrors of the Alamos’ behavior, ranging from economic exploitation, extreme forced fasts, and beatings, that resulted in permanent injury. Schriver’s extensive research—including interviews with Tony Alamo himself, harrowing visits to Alamo compounds, and witnessing gut-wrenching confrontations between freed children and their unreformed parents—tells the story of a closed group whose origins and history are unlikely ever to be definitively unraveled.
Download or read book Cult Following written by Bexy Cameron and published by Manilla Press. This book was released on 2022-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you ever escape your childhood?
Download or read book Cult Fiction written by K. Gordon Neufeld and published by Virtualbookworm.com Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would an aspiring young writer of fiction and poetry such as author K. Gordon Neufeld join an extreme religion like the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon? How did Neufeld's involvement in this group impact his creative writing, and how did writing impact his involvement? After leaving the group, how did Neufeld process his experiences through creative writing? Finally, what value can writing have for other survivors of extreme religions? These are the questions this book explores, while providing samples of Neufeld's creative writing from 1973 to 2013. The four questions are explored in a series of four academic papers presented at conferences of the International Cultic Studies Association. The sample writings range from highly intense personal reflections to zany and irreverent spoofs, and include many sensitive, thoughtful short stories and poems. This collection will be of interest to academics wanting to understand the psychological roots and effects of cultic involvement, and also to general readers who just want to read a good story.
Download or read book Cult Escape written by John Spinks and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cult Escape. It is the personal story of a boy born into a tyrannical religious Exclusive Brethren cult in England, and the tormenting journey of planning the escape to eventual freedom. The price of freedom was to be cut off from all his friends and family who were forbidden from having any contact with him. Now, after escaping, what does a 22 year old boy, who had been hidden in a box like a coiled spring do, when suddenly he finds he can explore all his fantasies with no religious restraint? Like the proverbial kid in the sweetshop, he goes wild. He loses his virginity within days, goes evil by buying the forbidden TV, radio, video and 'fills his boots' experimenting with the 'big bad world'. That boy was me.Cult Escape has three sections; IN, OUT and SHAKE IT ALL ABOUT. The story starts with being born into the cult, the lifestyle, the rules, the coercion, the confessions, the disciplining, and the separation from the evil world. The IN chapters cover how it felt having to grow up in a strict religious cult, the laws we were all under, the difficulties of school life, the challenges of work life, and the coping mechanisms for 'us young ones' during the excruciating boredom of eleven meetings every single week! One of my distractions was, believe it or not; I ate myself. I still have the scars. In that particular chapter called Funny Memories..."...Such was the dry monotony for most of us young ones, we were always on the lookout for anything to break the boredom. The following are a few memories and funnies of such happenings, which though may sound ridiculously insignificant to you, were some of the highlights of our life of conformity, restrictions, rules and regulations.Here you will read about Sandy Huckley's buns, the fate of all those who watched Charles marry Diana, the passage we could look up and the Yawn Show. Yes, all weird stuff, the things intelligent people can get up to when they allow a man they call The Universal Leader to control their hair length, their shaving habits, their house drains and convince them it would be wicked to have a cup of tea with their neighbour."The OUT chapters describe the new and exciting world I was now free to explore, how my head got free from the cult indoctrination, how my beliefs changed and three major healing experiences that I hope will help many who read this book.The controversial SHAKE IT ALL ABOUT chapters examine serious issues that seek to position religious controlling cults under the scrutiny of the public eye. Though religious cults are legal, how does society really feel about the splitting up of families, coercive indoctrination and brainwashing? What actually defines a cult? Why do they all believe they are the 'right' church? How can a person successfully leave a cult, even if they were born into it? Can anything be done to stop the control and abuse that goes on today? I believe that there is something the government can do and I make a legislation proposal in the penultimate chapter called The Religious Warning. Finally, the Conclusion which I offer for due consideration. In the words of Paul McCartney, 'There must be an answer, Let It Be'. What will be the next big cult story to hit the news? Another suicide cult? Another family separation story? A friend of mine once testified in court that the cult he had been a member of had not informed him of his mother's death, till three months after she was buried. The judge put his head in his hands and shook his head in disbelief. Something needs to be done about this. Let's get on with it.John Spinks
Download or read book An Unusual Journey written by William Smith and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When You Join a Cult You Shall: You Lose Your Freedom: Recognize leader's authority For satisfaction Never doubt his command To your basic rights Work tirelessly To know the truth Achieve perfection To sexual morality Never be emotional To be sensitive Never indulge yourself To be yourself Punish yourself To be joyful Sacrifice yourself To love Follow orders blindly To feel Never think for yourself To read Deny your friends To write Deny your family To speak Never complain To care Never cry For pride
Download or read book Passionate Journeys written by Marion S. Goldman and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passionate Journeys explores the fascinating stories behind the Bhagwan Rajneesh phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on women who left families, careers, and identities to join the community of Rajneeshpuram. Rajneesh was a spiritual leader for thousands of young Americans, and in rural Oregon his devotees established a thriving community. Marion S. Goldman's extensive interviews with women who participated at Rajneeshpuram provide a fascinating picture of the cultural and social climate that motivated successful, established women to join such a movement. Passionate Journeys will appeal to specialists in feminist theory and women's studies, sociology, religious studies, American studies, and the history of the Northwest. Marion S. Goldman is Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon. She is also the author of Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode.
