[aron]

Originally Posted by awareness

Critical thinking will make you undesirable to cults like the local church, resulting in freedom of both body and mind. Think for yourself. Cults hate that.

This person's Berkeley LC experience was probably doomed as soon as he refused to wear the "God-Man" baseball cap. The number one rule of the Hive is: Conform to the Hive. Mr. Muno's nonconformity signaled that he wasn't a program robot, in violation of Rule Number One, and would therefore be soon ejected.

What made it pernicious in the LC case was that Conformity to the Hive was sold on pseudo-spiritual terms, like "oneness" and "fellowship" and "the feeling of the Body" and "the flow from the throne" and so forth. But at its root, it was conformity to fallen humanity, not to God. One can discern the operational spirit here in that whenever the Hive Program and Scripture conflict, the Program wins every time. One's conscience may be violated, reason and common sense abandoned, scriptures panned as "natural" or explained away by false (usually abbreviated) context, or ignored, and two thousand years of Christian understanding rejected by the novelty of Maximum Brother's latest teaching. But the Hive Program - "Obey" - "Conform" - "Don't Question" - can't be threatened.

A Deputy Program Leader's whim ("Hey! Let's all wear 'I'm a God-Man' baseball caps!") is taken as "life" by the Program Robots, as tantamount to the breath of God, to living water from the rock, and any reticence is deemed unbelief, and deviation as treason against Heaven.

Originally Posted by Muno

Eventually I moved to a different "brother's house'', to make room for another "babe in the Lord'' and to give myself a respite from the silent conflict I was experiencing. Yet my junior year was more troubling. The gospel move gained more momentum after a student at Berkeley was strongly saved and wanted to tell everyone about it. Shouting, which had always been a part of "touching our spirit'' in the meeting, moved on to campus, as a small group began to preach in the main plaza. The theme became "losing one's face'', that painful shyness that got in the way of most people talking to strangers about Jesus. The move was coincident with a conference at which Witness Lee declared strongly that "God became Man to make Man God'', a line taken from the early church Fathers as a summary of doctrines that had been taught by Lee for years. Out of this teaching came the term "God-man'', which was actually printed on baseball caps (along with "Jesus is Reality'') and distributed to the students for them to wear as a testimony of the Lord on campus.

I didn't like the hats at all--- I thought they were a silly gimmick, an embarrassment, and I refused to wear one with the sheepish excuse, "I don't wear baseball caps''. I also didn't like the turn the gospel had taken: they were shouting "God became man to make man God!'' and other "catchy'' slogans on campus, to attract attention and "lose face''. They encouraged us to stand up before lectures and preach to the class, or at the very least wear the hats to class. The persecution, the funny looks the hats attracted, was a glory to us and the Lord. They even organized a couple "sweeps'' of Telegraph Avenue during a Labor Day conference at the church, during about a hundred people marched haphazardly up to campus handing out flyers and shouting "Oh Lord Jesus!'' at the top of their lungs. They said it was exhilarating, full of the Spirit. I participated once. I felt silly. Apparently this brought back many memories of the younger days of the "Lord's Recovery,'' in the sixties.