The Lord Our Righteousness Church Cult

[RichardParticipant]

This is a series of blogs I did on this cult because it emerged from a Seventh Day Adventist group.  I wanted to point out how the same reasoning process used to promote mainline religion is used to promote messianic delusions and pedophilia.

Included in the blogs is the video of the British Documentary and dialog in the comments from actual cult members.  One of them eventually went on a hunger strike as I predicted.

Wayne Bent, the leader who claimed to be Jesus, is now in prison for having sexual contact with a minor.  He actually convinced the cult members to give up their wives to him as fulfillment of prophecy.  He also included a number of underage girls to be included in his 7 virgins.  This included his own daughter in-law.  In the documentary you can see the deep grief of his son when he talks about the loss of his wife to his own father.  Some of the dialog in the comments is in regard to this clear commission of adultery by a man who claims to be Jesus.

I posted links to each blog in the order I wrote them.  You will find dialog with cult members in the comment section.

http://whatisspiritual.blogspot.com/2008/05/cult-think-abuse-of-spirituality.html

http://whatisspiritual.blogspot.com/2008/05/watch-out-for-newspeak-about.html

http://whatisspiritual.blogspot.com/2008/06/according-to-wayne-bent-michael.html

[RichardParticipant]

Here are the videos for the British Documentary

[Anonymous]

I watched the whole thing, all 5. It’s both sad and scary. How we all manage to stay balanced is a mystery to me. Believe too much or too little and you are nutz. Finding the middle will drive you nutz. Pass the cool aid. (just kidding, sorta)

The mind is a story machine, we are all caught up in some story or other. Even as we try to make adjustments, to move away from things we no longer believe, we’re just rewriting our story, trading beliefs. Even as we abandon certainty to live in the question, we make the question, or the quest, the story.

The take away from these videos is not how stupid these people are, rather how deeply people can believe in a story.

I’m going out to work in my garden, my 7 acre garden, my spiritual retreat.

[RichardParticipant]

@Wayner  The take away from these videos is not how stupid these people are, rather how deeply people can believe in a story.

This is exactly what I took from it.  In Waco and David Karesh there were lawyers and college graduates.  This mystification is something I experienced directly and is one of the main reasons I am a skeptic.

Belief can take one down some dark pathways.  That is why I have learned to embrace mystery and not hold on too tightly to my own beliefs.

[HughParticipant]

@Richard these were interesting videos. It is amazing how susceptible we humans can be. Funny how the SDA’s seem to spawn other cultic groups. There seems to exist some kind of doomsday mentality with some people that triggers compliance to authority.

I left the SDA’s after four years when I got more ‘truth’. Had some exposure to a charismatic leader in a cult-like group for another four years until I realized things just didn’t line up with reality. We found that we were losing our independence and had to run everything through the leader and his wife. The whole leaving thing was very stressful. Livin an learnin

[RichardParticipant]

@Hugh You’re right that the SDA church has been consumed with a doomsday mentality.  It was basically started as an apologetic because Jesus didn’t return in 1844.  Once people make assumptions it can lead to a whole chain of events that is driven more by ego than evidence.

[David HaywardKeymaster]

So the question is: Is it possible to be apocalyptic without being a cult?

[HeleneParticipant]

@David, brilliant question. And would you ask the reverse question also?

I saw this documentary some time ago now, I can’t watch it twice. He is utterly gross inducing (to me) – the kissing, the holding hands, the “loving glances”, ugh. We’ve got our very own version of “Jesus” here in Australia too, he has been on 60 minutes.

[RichardParticipant]

Atheists have a concern about an apocalypse.  It is a real one.  There are a number of asteroids that are going to have a close pass with the earth.  There is a distinct possibility of a large asteroid hitting the earth in the next 50 years.  It would be in our best interest to develop technology to either destroy these are redirect them into the Sun or out of the solar system.

One of the concerns I have with religion is its incursion into government and the setting of policies related to exploration and science.  I have heard Christians say things like this.  “Since Jesus is going to come and destroy the earth eventually, why should we waste money on going to Mars or stopping asteroids from hitting the earth?”

And eventually our Sun is going to expand and the shrink and the earth will be destroyed.  In about 1 billion years the sun will have heated up and expanded to the point where all the water on earth will have boiled off.  The sun is about half way through its life span.  It will expand in diameter to about Mercury and then shrink to a white dwarf in about 5 billion years.

If we don’t figure out how to exit our solar system and colonize the galaxy the human race or whatever we evolve into with cease to exist.  The better we learn to co-operate and the better we educate ourselves, the better chance we will learn how to advance our technology to the point where we are no longer bound to the earth.

When I see our human brain trust wasted on studying religious texts instead of expanding and exploring the human potential it makes me a little sad.  If we continue to let our religions teach violence and attack each other then maybe we don’t deserve to leave earth.

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