Quote:
Originally Posted by kumbaya
Fear is a good control tactic. I've said it before but it wasn't until years after I stopped meeting with the church that I looked anything up online.
What was I so afraid of? I was afraid subconsciously of being confronted with information that would "ruin" my outlook and make me uncomfortable. It's so much easier to just go with the flow.
I really feel like people in the LC think the boogeyman is going to jump out of the computer and poison their minds if they dared to look anything up for themselves. I wouldn't admit it to myself then, but I was too scared I would read something that would "change" me. What happened to being able to defend your beliefs?? I mean, what was I thinking?? It's so interesting to think back on my mindset then. This is why I truly believe thought reform is strongly in play. I would like to say that my whole life, I could defend my beliefs and faith to some extent to someone either outside the LC or an unbeliever. But I can't say that bc I never read or knew anything about the group I met with, other than what was told to me by the elders.
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Fear goes hand-in-hand with control. It's interesting to note that when the LC makes reference to groups, individuals, or material that is not pro-LC, they will use generic terminology such as negative ones, negative speaking, etc. They won’t qualify what is ‘negative’ about it. Even in the instances where they do get more specific (such as literature produced by the DCP), the defense of LC positions or teachings always comes from an ‘official’ source, rather than it being represented as something that any member could defend.
For years, I was completely aware that there are many people out there who weren’t supportive of the LC. It didn’t concern me much, and I didn’t really want to know anything about it. I swallowed anything that I was told - they had complete control on the information that was available to us. Ironically, what eventually changed, is that it became more relevant to me to understand why outsiders weren’t interested in the LC. In the area I’m from, some of the local elders and Andrew Yu started making a push to re-attempt implementing WL’s “vital groups.” In particular, there was a big emphasis on gaining “new ones.”
Of course, such a push failed miserably, however, it left a single lingering question in my mind –
why are people so resistant to the LC? That kind of question could normally be ignored, if there were no particular pressure to be trying to recruit new members, but the question became an important consideration since I didn’t want to fail at what the elders were expecting us to do.
I was disappointed when I noticed that the elders made no attempt to equip us to address people’s concerns about the LC. I then became more interested in finding out for myself what was out there on the internet. The information didn’t change my mind overnight, but what eventually did change my mind was when I realized how much that is out there that has gone unaddressed by the LC and its leaders. It could be said the facts were what ‘poisoned’ me. I had lived in fear of information. The same information that the LC was incapable of addressing. Once I realized that the LC had no interest in addressing the concerns and information that really mattered, it made such information all the more meaningful.