Cults/New Religious Movements

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
OK, get ready for a bit of a :powerlevel:.

I was involved with this group years ago. In a very dark time in my life, my sister (she gets sucked into everything) talked me into attending a seminar for a group called "ESP" which stood for "Executive Success Program". This was a five day intensive seminar, essentially running from like 9:00 am to 5:00 PM, although the group would often go out together for dinner after the seminars.

It was, at the time, basically an amalgamation of self help stuff, little tricks for helping concentration, with a big dose of unlicensed psychiatry. The big thing (at least at the time) that set it apart was a therapy technique they used, essentially structured as a flow chart, intended to get to the root of a psychological issue. The underlying theory basically being that these issues are mainly caused by cognitive dissonance, and that once you dig down and get to the contradiction causing you the dissonance, the issue basically goes away. It seemed like they approached problems logically, and there wasn't some sort of silly magic tricks involved.

I will say this seemed to work pretty well, I came out of it a better adjusted, happier person than when I entered, and I really do feel I cleared up some of my issues. However people with bad PTSD could get triggered hard by this approach, so there was a bit of irresponsibility there, in my opinion. I still contend that this technique (I forget what they called it) was and is a valuable tool, and hope that somehow it can be separated from the rest of this mess, although I doubt it will happen.

At the time, my opinion of the group was that they were charging an awfully high price for what they did, but that it seemed legitimate, if perhaps a bit dangerous for those with severe issues.

A couple of years later, I started having some issues with anxiety. My sister was still involved with this group, and she talked me into signing up for a weekly meeting.

Well I did, and by that point it had changed quite a bit. It had become much less interactive, and more about watching videos and sort of going along with the group think. While they were still talking about logic and ethics, there really wasn't much in the way of intelligent discussion. Basically I feel the people running the meetings just weren't that bright overall. So at this point my opinion of them was lower, but still, I felt that they were legitimate, although the warning signs that it was getting culty were beginning to show.

They had become pretty obsessed with structure and hierarchy, and would refer to people in the group by their "rank" rather than their name. Keith Reneire, the leader, was the "Vangaurd". The lady who was initially his partner was the "Proctor". There was a correct way to shake hands depending on the rank of the people doing the hand shaking, with the higher ranking person's hand on top. They had also changed their name from ESP (What an awful name....) to Nxivm (Pronounced nexium, you know, the antacid? I don't know which name was worse)

I stuck around for a little while, but I was fairly disillusioned with them. Whatever bottled lightning they had the first time seemed to be gone. Plus they had a multi-level marketing approach to recruiting people (a huge red flag). My sister was heavily involved in this, she used some duplicity to get my brother and father to sign up (My father signed up just to debunk it), where she initially claimed it was a free trial, but then they were on the hook for the entire price, and of course she got some % of that.

During this, I went with my sister to the group's headquarters in Albany NY. It was rather like a college campus, very professional atmosphere, people hanging out together watching videos about brain plasticity and discussing it afterwards, basically it seemed like a group of intellectuals interested in digging into logic and ethics. But the push toward groupthink was strong. While people were friendly, you were obviously supposed to go along with the group opinion. This was also when I found out lots of members of this group were buying big houses and basically creating dormitories for people in the group. So... getting cultier....

During this trip I met Keith himself, the mighty "Vanguard". He seemed like a fairly regular dude, for the most part, playing volleyball with the group. He struck me as a bit of a narcissist, but he didn't seem to act like he was above everyone else. He didn't seem like much of a cult of personality to me. However people would talk about him like he was the savior...

So: the man, the legend, the vanguard, Keith Reneire. Like I said, from what I saw he presented himself as a pretty normal guy. However, within the group, he was talked about like he was some kind of savior. According to the people in the group, because he had eliminated so much of his cognitive dissonance, his brain was not tied in knots over anxiety, had less stress, therefore he didn't have to sleep much. Other people in the group would emulate this behavior, sleeping 3-4 hours, so now you've got people who are sleep deprived, but kind of by their own choice. I'd hear about how he had such a high IQ they had to come up with special tests to test for it. I'd hear about how he "proved" the solution to happiness mathematically (I honestly just laughed at the person who told me that).

So what I was seeing, from my own point of view, was that while this guy wasn't explicitly trying to, a cult was forming around him. Now I don't know what went on with the higher ups, it's quite possible (probable even) that he was driving this narrative himself, purposely, but I never felt pressured to sleep less, to join the wierd dormitory housing, etc. So to me, while it was really getting culty, I still didn't consider it a cult.

So after my second experience with the group, I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I appreciated the good that had come out of it for me, but was beginning to think that maybe I had just absorbed the good parts of it and ignored the bad parts (I've never been one to just go along with things). At this point I certainly wasn't going to recommend anyone join them, but I'd defend them against being called a cult. To me they were still way better than scientology.

Jump to the present. Now I see this dude has somehow got a harem of sex slaves, who are being branded with his name, malnourished, and he's taken over their finances. He's got people recruiting more sex slaves for him, trafficking people, etc... All I can say is "WOW, I did NOT see this coming!". Luckily my sister didn't seem to have been pulled into this dude's harem, even though she seemed to be the type he collected...

Sorry, huge powerlevel, but hopefully someone finds it interesting.
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A lot of cults have some good to begin with. A lot of former Scientologists say they found auditing helpful if nothing else. The People’s Temple started out as a Christian sect that preached racial equality. It’s one of the ways intelligent people get lured in.
 
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I can write a lot about cults - they were very big in the 1990s and still can be found if you look carefully.

The collapse of the USSR severely affected many people, especially in Russia. Many people lost their life savings by currency wipeouts, many were displaced by war and nationalist strife. The economy completely collapsed, and scientists and people of other formerly respected professions had to sell Chinese garb in makeshift marketplaces just to survive. Such a situation was obviously a perfect breeding ground for doomsday cults and other sects. Instead of stereotypical sex cults from America, they were often get-rich-quick schemes for their creators, who swindled desperate people out of their money using brainwashing. Such organizations are typically labelled with the term "totalitarian sect" (тоталитарная секта) in Russian.
There were a lot of such cults back in the day - too many to list in one post. Foreign fanatical movements like Jehovah's Witnesses, various Evangelical cults from the USA, Moonies and even Aum Shinrikyo also rushed into the newly independent countries to spread their propaganda. I actually used to have a shitload of JW paraphernalia and even a single Chick tract ("This Was Your Life!", translated into Russian).

Actual examples of cult brainwashing from the 1990s:


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Save the Loli said:
I like the Universe People cult. It was founded by a Czech guy named Ivo Benda, and is also popular in Slovakia. I'll let this image sum things up.

According to these guys, the Saurians are trying to enslave us with RFID chips, and we need some help. Fortunately the great alien (or should that be Aryan?) commander Ashtar Sheran, with his assistants Ptaah and Jesus, want to help us out and will lead their fleet UFOs to help evacuate Earth.

They also like to spam their CDs and pamphlets everywhere, and this got one of the buildings of the Slovak Ministry of Defense evacuated. They're also monitered by the Czech government so they don't go all Heavens Gate to get Ashtar Sheran's fleet to hurry up.

There's an old thread here with lots more information on them.
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These guys used to be an obscure meme on old Russian imageboards in mid-late 2000s. They tried spamming their bullshit on the Russian Internet in very, very broken Russian, immediately attracting ridicule.
 
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Russia also had the Gadget from Rescue Rangers cult:


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Tragi-Chan said:
A lot of cults have some good to begin with. A lot of former Scientologists say they found auditing helpful if nothing else. The People’s Temple started out as a Christian sect that preached racial equality. It’s one of the ways intelligent people get lured in.
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I have heard about some scientology stuff that's actually not bad, it's mostly recycled self help stuff, the thing is those little tricks really do work. The other thing is, just talking to someone about what's going on and having them act like they want to help is more than a lot of people have, so it's easy to see why people get sucked in to various stuff. I find the whole e-meter thing beyond ridiculous, but we've all got our blind spots.
 
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So I’ll power level a bit here since I was raised in an Apostolic Pentecostal Church that has been on a few cult watch groups. They aren’t considered an actual cult but do have cultish behaviors and are labeled as potential for concern.

The Church seemed pretty standard, run of the mill, contemporary non-denominational Christian until you started to dig into their theology and beliefs.

The Apostle was the Church preacher/leader who had been chosen/ordained by god to interpret his message and word for church members. What the Apostle said was law. He believed in a very strict Old Testament family structure, but women didn’t have to stay at home. They could definitely work and tithe into the Church coffers, but women who chose the highest calling (motherhood) were upheld and honored more than working mothers. There were a lot of sermons extolling the virtue of full quivers and encouragement to have children to build up gods army, but there were only a handful of mega families. Most families had 2-3 kids, with our 4-kid family holding full quiver honor. The more kids, the more status in the Church.

The Apostle taught that dating was wrong and a godly courtship was the only way to a successful marriage. He even wrote a book and last I’d checked you could find it on amazon (How to Find a Mate if You Aren’t Going to Date). They believed that there should be NO physical contact and that even looking at someone of the opposite sex hike lead to sinful thoughts. Once the sinful thoughts happened, it was just as bad as if you’d engaged in the physical act of sex. It was nuts.

To find a mate, god would reveal to you through prayer the person he intended for you. You were to pray on it and read the Bible for a bit of time before going to your parents to reveal who god had chosen for you. Then your parents would pray and read some scripture themselves and then reach out to the person god told you to marry. While this is all going on, god is working his will on your future mate and his family so the two sets of parents should meet halfway as they come to discuss the betrothal. After a short betrothal, where you are never alone or allowed physical contact you get married and start having orgasmic Christian sex.

I could go on for days about this cultish Church. It was bad and I mark those years of my life as very dark. I think the Apostle cherry picked the most damaging and spiritually abusive beliefs he could find and promoted them as the only way to be a Christian. Think the Duggar beliefs but we got to dress cool and normal. It took about ten years of therapy to overcome the programming they put us through and I still have some pretty disordered thinking and am a raging atheist. If anyone wants to ask questions I’ll be happy to answer honestly.
 
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@snuffleupagus A lot of modern Protestent beliefs (the Rapture, courtship != dating, unconditional election/grace) have no historical/scriptural basis.

"The thought of sin is as bad as the phydical sin" is IMO an admonishment against rumination... the guilt tripping is the exact opposite direction from where you should be encouraged to go. It leads to all-or-nothing thinking, which spirals downward.

Christianity is best when authority is earned by example (making a non-dysfunctional marriage and family) and via IQ tests (mastery of Latin or Greek). You rarely find dysfunction or rapid decline within one or two generations (pastors kids strung out on dope is so common it's a meme) in churches led by such people, especially if they are an organic, locally-rooted community.

If you look at what people did hundreds of years ago, it looks like dating, albeit of the sally-is-kissing-johnny elementary school type. Though in those days both kids didnt need 15+ years of school to work at starbucks and could afford kids.
 
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The people who go on about crystalline DNA and saying they operate on the 5th and 7th dimensions are interesting. The Pleiadian people are fun. I kind of miss old school Hare Krishnas. There are still some around but they are more like Hipster Krishnas. Did you know you can buy voodoo potions, powders, etc on Amazon.com?
 
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Shiba Inu Strike Force said:
https://www.thelittlevolcano.com/
We've got a fresh one, seems like it's got a little bit of everything. View attachment 5762394
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OH. These are always the best ones. Now it's a matter of whether or not this is the most absurd they get, or if they go off the deep end.
I didn't really see much yet from what a basic search could yield. I did find this article that gives some insight into their family dynamics:

'I'm a Trans Man Trying To Get Pregnant'​

Published Feb 20, 2022 at 8:00 AM EST
Updated Feb 22, 2022 at 6:20 PM EST
By Kit Volcano

Rosie and I met close to 15 years ago. She was introduced to one of my friends and remained on the periphery of our friendship circle for a really long time. She would be in a relationship when I wasn't in one and I'd be in a relationship when she was single.
I was a wild, unruly, beer-drinking football player and she was incredibly mature, really amazing and a total babe. She had her life together and it felt like she was completely out of my league.

Growing up, I didn't really have a lot of trans people in my life or many displays of people transitioning. But when Rosie and I had been married for three years, someone close to me had a friend who was trans and went to have top surgery, and I followed their entire journey through social media.

I was always pretending to be a boy when I was very little, back in the '80s and '90s, but until you're introduced to a possibility, you don't really know it's a possibility. Although I had had minor preoccupations with people who were trans, when I finally got a closer introduction to that journey, I realized, "Woah, this might be me."

What I love about my wife and our relationship is that we really came to each other from a place of total self acceptance and love. We've always given each other the freedom to be exactly who we are. It was the same when I came out as trans in 2015, her attitude was, "This is not really a surprise. I love you for who you are."

I wanted to take it slowly and give myself permission to say "yes" or to change my mind, so I started taking testosterone and experimenting with different names. The name was actually the hardest to land on, but as the physical changes started happening, I realized this was who I had been all along. It felt incredible. It felt like home.

My favorite story about communicating that I'm trans comes from my mother. At the time, Rosie and I owned a yoga studio in North Carolina, and we were struggling financially. I thought telling my mom might be a big, emotional conversation, but that's not really my family and I wanted to meet them where they were at; I realized it could be a casual, easy conversation like all the other conversations my family have.

So I called my mom and asked her what she would have named me if I was a boy. She asked me why and I said, "Because I'm thinking about becoming one. Are you surprised?" Her response was that she was only surprised that I could afford it. And that was that.

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Kit and Rosie Volcano have been together for a decade.
Back when we had first gotten married, Rosie had been an egg donor and talked about being a surrogate. She had always wanted to be a mother but I wasn't quite ready. During those early years of marriage, someone came into my hair salon who wanted a child, and a conversation about Rosie being a surrogate for him happened. Many years later, in 2019, we ended up creating a baby together with that man and his partner. Rosie and I now have a child who we co-parent with two other gay men. He's three years old and we are a four parent family where each set of parents has 50 percent custody.

When Rosie had our baby I caught him as he was born. As soon as I felt his life in my hands I got this sense of knowing that I had never had before; that I was supposed to give him a sibling. I remember the moment so clearly, because I knew that his sibling needed to come through me.

Rosie and I began trying to rearrange our lives to make space for another baby and I stopped taking testosterone. It was hard for me; the shift in my body and the hormonal changes were really challenging. Although I enjoyed the ability to feel more sensitive and connected, it was like going through a third puberty. There were a few months where it was like the worst PMS you could imagine. I went from being a muscular fit dude to having a curvy feminine body, and now when I have my mask on or people see me from behind they tend to register me as a woman.
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Rosie Volcano with the couple's son. They co-parent their son with another couple.
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Kit Volcano with his son. Volcano is now trying to get pregnant to give his son a sibling.
During all this, I was imagining carrying a child and it being intense. Rosie, meanwhile, still wanted to carry another baby herself. She loved being pregnant. All I was really attached to was the idea of having a baby that was genetically my child, so six months ago, I suggested we retrieve my eggs and put an embryo in Rosie's body. As soon as I said that we both clicked.

After that conversation, we began researching the IVF process and different IVF clinics. We live in San Diego and Mexico offers cheaper IVF and we found a clinic in Tijuana that meant we could save more than $10,000 and only had to drive around 40 minutes to get there. It felt like a smart move because the money saved could be put towards this baby.

The IVF process actually took around two weeks during January 2022 and when it got to the point in my menstrual cycle that I would normally ovulate the egg retrieval procedure took place. During that time, Rosie's dad became extremely sick and she had to fly to Delaware and back, and then when we went in for egg retrieval, no eggs were retrieved. It was pretty devastating news, but I think the hardest part was how difficult it was to manage my emotions while on the IVF hormones.

At the end of the appointment, the doctor told my wife, through a translator, that I had no chance of ever having a baby. It was not the best experience overall. We're not going to completely write off IVF, but now, I feel my only option is to do what I do when I feel lost: reassess where we stand, reassess what our desires are and proceed with the new information.

After the IVF hormones wore off, we went back to the drawing board. I decided that I'm going to support myself naturally and spend a year trying to get pregnant with artificial insemination using a sperm donor. This means I will carry the baby if I am successful in getting pregnant.

The next steps are to begin taking supplements, get in incredible shape and find an amazing doctor who can match my level of faith in being able to have a biological child. I'd love a girl but I'd be happy with a boy, too. My son, when we ask him what he wants, says, "I just want a baby." He loves babies so much that he chases their cries in stores so he can see them.

I was going to begin taking testosterone again right away after the IVF process was complete, because my more feminine form was getting kind of hard to live with. But now that our plans have pivoted, I have got to go on a deeper journey of accepting and loving my body as it is, and support it to be able to carry a baby.

This IVF journey, and what it has now become, was about discovering what was important to me, honoring and loving that and also believing it was a possibility. To me, it was important to have a genetic child and not to shame myself for wanting that. A lot of people say we can adopt, and I'm sure we will adopt at some point, but there is a knowing inside me that I have to have a genetic child.

Rosie and I lost our yoga studio in 2016 and went from being pretty much homeless to building a successful business in a couple of years. For a long time, I subscribed to the narrative that I would never be successful as a queer person; that money, wealth and a very comfortable lifestyle were things I couldn't have because it seemed that opportunities for that to happen would be limited by being queer. Now, I believe it's about making yourself right for your desires and believing that those desires can be possible. When you have that combination a world of opportunities can open up to you. That has happened in my life, in this journey, in my marriage and the home I own. So as a human being, I just want to be an example to others that anything is possible.

Kit Volcano is a business and life coach living in San Diego with his wife, Rosie and their son. Kit and Rosie co-founded coaching business The Little Volcano. You can find out more at thelittlevolcano.com or follow Kit @kitvolcano on Instagram and TikTok.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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There isn't much remarkable about the article, but the culty feeling makes it a new dynamic for me. I could already tell that Rosie is more than likely the one calling the shots instead of a shared leadership, and I found it interesting that they don't mention Kit being trans on the website. Might not be relevant to them, but that would be a new take if so.
 
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Every post before and after this one can be summed up with these words: Schizoid convinces numerous guardless tards that they won't get into (insert heaven/heaven substitute here) if they don't give said schizoid all their shit, including and up to: all their worldly possessions, other people's possessions, their buttholes, other people's buttholes, their lives, and/or other people's lives.
 
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A lot of cults are just repackaged free stuff. When I first moved to NYC some girl from work invited me to come to I think Vanguard? She was like oh these classes are amazing I'm letting go of all my resentments etc.

It was mostly repackaged 12 Step stuff. My mom's an addict and I had tried Al-Anon. I was like, "You can get this all for free," but she either didn't believe me or just liked the structure of it. She even had something akin to a sponsor, this woman from the program who was a little older came to work to have lunch with her a few times.

They just found a way to charge people for something you can get free/for $1 a session.
 
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