Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger
You see, if a member could be deprogrammed, then it must be that they were programed in the first place. If you are having "Christ dispensed into your being" as they claim, that is something that can't be deprogrammed out of you.
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Setting aside for the moment how much Christ may or may not have been "dispensed" during trainings and other Local Church activities, "deprogramming" is nothing more than counter-brainwashing and I'm not aware of anything that would necessarily make such normative-values programming superior to those generally espoused within the Local Church Christian subculture. I also don't know why authentically spiritual Christians would necessarily be immune.
These articles are excellent examples of the naive approach to alternative religions that was popular at the time. Until Jonestown, the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas were the go-to comparisons, which were actually intended to be self-proving judgments. The Local Church at the time protested being included in cult books along with those religions on that basis alone. Once Satan accomplished Jonestown as a pseudo-Christian suicide cult, the game was all the more serious and urgent to the popular culture, particularly among the evangelical denominations and free groups. But that doesn't mean the game wasn't exactly the same.
I found these articles a very interesting read, however, primarily for that very reason. The cult books themselves don't adequately capture this aspect of the popular sentiment which drove the "counter-cult" movement for so long.
But it isn't 1977, and hasn't been for a very long time...
