Ask me about growing up in a cult

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about growing up in a cult

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swamp waste: Nov 4, 2009; There is some very sensual touching going on in the cutscene there. i don't actually think it means anything sexual but it's cool how it contrasts with modern ideas of what bad ass stuff should be like. It even seems authentic to some kind of chivalric masculine touching from a tyme longe gone

Coolguye posted:

Religion as a whole is about the search for purpose. It attempts to answer questions like "Why are we here?", "Where are we going?" and "How can I best use the cosmic nanosecond of consciousness I have?"

There are people who earnestly attempt to answer these questions (most priests, rabbis, imams, yogis, etc) and they are generally held in regard because these questions are hard, and every person who asks them ends up with a different answers. These people have attempted to answer these questions as best they can for a substantial part (if not all) of their adult lives, and that has value. The tradition is to ask for donations as opposed to a retainer (most churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples do not, in fact, force tithing), but people generally recognize the value.

There are people who callously manipulate others' attempts to answer these questions (cult leaders, politicized priests/rabbis/imams/yogis/etc) and they are generally held in disdain because people naturally attempt to ask experts (as opposed to their family or the closest person at hand) when attempting to get something done. If an expert is not available they will default to family/closest person at hand, but people prefer an expert. And someone who is manipulating that position is, well, not respectable. At their core, they're not providing the value they claimed they would provide, and are frequently charging exorbitantly for it.

To call these two groups the same is absurd.

Incidentally, you can apply the same standard to science.

Science as a whole is about the search for truth. It attempts to answer questions like "What is this?", "How does it work?" and "How does it interact with the things around it?"

There are people who earnestly attempt to answer these questions (most scientists) and they are generally held in regard because these questions are extremely hard and every person who asks wants a terse, unifying, easy to understand answer, which is extremely difficult to provide and be correct.

There are people who callously manipulate others' attempts to answer these questions (such as corporate shill scientists for asbestos, cigarettes, etc, and fad scientists who violate the scientific method by quoting a study as support when that study's hypothesis had nothing to do with their assertion) and they are generally held in disdain because of the same expert-preference exploitation that follows from religious authorities.

Is there no distinction between those two groups of people as well?

I know it's been a minute but as someone with professional experience here I wanted to address this last part; they are often exactly the same people, because most drug studies are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and the funders are simply under no obligation to release results that don't favor them. Scientists who earnestly try to produce the most objective answers possible end up serving the interests to whom they're beholden, whether they like it or not, especially since access to corporate money gives you the ability to do bigger, and therefore significantly more powered, studies. You could say it limits your ability to even ask big questions outside the framework of a particular institution that provides the material and financial contingencies of the investigation. So, poster who assumes the mantle of authority by talking like the guy from Bioshock, this makes your comparison accurate in a way different way than you thought.

# ? Sep 16, 2015 19:16

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 16:48

Eien Ni Hen: Jul 23, 2013

I'm curious about how your family and others dealt with medical stuff.

Did your family have health insurance? What happened if someone had a life-threatening illness (pneumonia) or chronic condition (Chrohn's Disease)?

# ? Sep 29, 2015 00:59

froward: Jun 2, 2014; by Azathoth

In my family, doctors were shunned. My mother didn't "believe" in them. We only went to the doctor when bones were broken. Everything else was treated holistically. I was not vaccinated as a child (I am now vaccinated). Mental disease was ascribed to Demons and Toxins rather than treatable inheritable disease.

One weakness was our teeth: we didn't go to the dentist regularly or learn proper dental hygiene. I couldn't chew properly for years, and didn't know it was abnormal (my teeth didn't line up properly). I still don't enjoy chewing steak.

Another weakness was malnutrition and weak bones. I'm pretty sure we didn't get enough calcium as children; many of my siblings broke bones by falling over.

We did not have health insurance. I did not learn about health insurance until the news of OBAMACARE and honestly was pretty confused about it. I'm really glad OBAMACARE exists and made minimum standard of care required for all plans; otherwise I would've certainly been one of the people who got scammed by a supercheap plan.

My mother still suffers from a host of mental illnesses she has never admitted to, much less gotten treatment for. My father has, in his old age, finally gotten some treatment. My siblings embrace modern medicine fully and talk about our mental health on the reg.

--

I'm considering closing this thread because of other, more exhaustive threads (which I have linked in the OP) which are doing a much better job about exposing how hosed up the whole system is.

# ? Oct 1, 2015 15:50

blackguy32: Oct 1, 2005; Say, do you know how to do the walk?

Not to get too personal, but was the cult ultimately the reason that your parents divorced? Just a yes or a no will suffice.

# ? Oct 2, 2015 02:48

artsy fartsy: May 10, 2014; You'll be ahead instead of behind. Hello!

I'm curious about your ALERT training. Did you go to the place in Big Sandy, Texas?

As a child I attended the church (Worldwide Church of God) that previously owned that campus (called Ambassador College, then eventually Ambassador University.) It was an oddball religion that some ex-members also refer to as a cult, although it wasn't nearly as strange as your cult.

# ? Oct 2, 2015 03:45

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

froward posted:

I did not learn about health insurance until the news of OBAMACARE and honestly was pretty confused about it.

This is sort of a tangent, but how old are you? You mentioned in your OP that you got out ten years ago, and I'm just trying to figure out how an adult could have absolutely no concept of health insurance.

What's your family/cult's opinion on other religions and other christian sects? Also according to the Wikipedias Bill Gothard resigned as president after a sexual harassment scandal, do you know how that impacted things? Sounds like he had done similar stuff before.

# ? Oct 2, 2015 16:24

froward: Jun 2, 2014; by Azathoth

blackguy32 posted:

Not to get too personal, but was the cult ultimately the reason that your parents divorced? Just a yes or a no will suffice.

artsy fartsy posted:

I'm curious about your ALERT training. Did you go to the place in Big Sandy, Texas?

As a child I attended the church (Worldwide Church of God) that previously owned that campus (called Ambassador College, then eventually Ambassador University.) It was an oddball religion that some ex-members also refer to as a cult, although it wasn't nearly as strange as your cult.

no; I was only a cadet. I never got sent anywhere because I was too busy running the family farm. dolla dolla y'all

kedo posted:

This is sort of a tangent, but how old are you? You mentioned in your OP that you got out ten years ago, and I'm just trying to figure out how an adult could have absolutely no concept of health insurance.

What's your family/cult's opinion on other religions and other christian sects? Also according to the Wikipedias Bill Gothard resigned as president after a sexual harassment scandal, do you know how that impacted things? Sounds like he had done similar stuff before.

I'm in my late twenties.

I think catholics were only Somewhat Misguided; Jews were Gods Chosen People but Confused. Like god's autistic children; to be treated gently. islam was never mentioned. I do remember reading Chick Tracts that claimed catholics were evil blood drinkers.

Nowadays I look favorably towards Catholics as they run most of the charities in my town, and unlike evangelicals they give charity freely without demanding someone convert or listen to a sermon. Most of the homeless outreach is run by Quakers, and I've started going to their meetings because they seem like genuine Good People who come together over common deeds, not common beliefs.

I'm told third hand that Gothard's resignation is the death knell of his group. It'll probably struggle on for another decade, but ultimately fragment with a disagreement over dogma (if this hasn't happened already). Whoever holds the purse strings will become the new figurehead.

# ? Oct 4, 2015 00:43

froward: Jun 2, 2014; by Azathoth

kedo posted:

I'm just trying to figure out how an adult could have absolutely no concept of health insurance.

you have to realize that homeschooling is very sheltering: the parents are the gateway to their child's world and any concept which isn't explicitly presented is never learned. Homeschooling parents protect their children from the evils of the world; which means the children have to learn basic social coping skills as adults.

You see this a lot with the [urlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa]Amish rumschpringe[/url], which tends to select dumb & unambitious children to return to the fold.

# ? Oct 4, 2015 00:53

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 16:48

Coolguye: Jul 6, 2011; Required by his programming!

swamp waste posted:

I know it's been a minute but as someone with professional experience here I wanted to address this last part; they are often exactly the same people, because most drug studies are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and the funders are simply under no obligation to release results that don't favor them. Scientists who earnestly try to produce the most objective answers possible end up serving the interests to whom they're beholden, whether they like it or not, especially since access to corporate money gives you the ability to do bigger, and therefore significantly more powered, studies. You could say it limits your ability to even ask big questions outside the framework of a particular institution that provides the material and financial contingencies of the investigation. So, poster who assumes the mantle of authority by talking like the guy from Bioshock, this makes your comparison accurate in a way different way than you thought.

I completely forgot about my post for about a month afterward and when I came to look at froward's reply he'd done the classic cherry picking bullshit that entirely dodged the point I made to replace it with his own limp-wristed nonsense so I ignored it.

You're conflating a bunch of different concepts here so I'm having difficulty following everything you're implying here. So apologies in advance if I'm not quite on the same page, but my post was supposed to be a pretty straightforward parallel to introduce the concept. If conflating it with a bunch of details makes it meaningful for you in a way I didn't initially intend then that's interesting, but I'm curious how much professional experience you have since as far as published works go you're completely ignoring that corporate shill assholes have a very, very powerful opponent - the public university system. Great science comes out of basically every Western public university and most Eastern ones as well because graduate programs work the way they do and grants detach institutions from the lifeline symptom you're talking about to a large extent because each grant is for a specific project, as opposed to some ongoing thing. If the grant gets cut for whatever reason, generally speaking it's not the entire institution (or company) that goes down, just that one project. That might still be super painful but it's completely different than, for example, a chemical company reporting on itself and being actively disincentivized to push science forward by creating new chemical detection techniques, etc (this is the story of Toms River, NJ, basically).

Further, as much as pharma corporations fund bullshit studies, scores of other industries actively fund good science because they need it to get ahead. Sensor design is one that's caused a bunch of really promising 'pure-science' leaps forward in chemistry and physics just in the last 30 years. We understand the chemical properties of aqueous iron far, FAR better now than we did two decades ago because Hawk Industries needed to be able to detect it in condensed water for their ductwork, and ended up funding a bunch of pure science research to get it done. You just never hear about that because most real science is boring as poo poo and good news is more boring still.

It's the same reason you never hear about any of the folks in inner-city monasteries and convents (most folks don't even know that the strict majority of these organizations are inner-city in the USA, because that's where the people who need help are) or that nearly the supermajority of charitable GDP activity comes from religious organizations. Helping the poor is dirty, boring, and frequently frustrating for an entire slew of reasons. And that's the most interesting thing 'good religion' does. You absolutely WILL NOT hear about people who are better-adjusted people because they've got coping mechanisms given to them by a priest or imam, or calibrated their moral compass properly enough to be decent people at work due to a rabbi or yogi. You will, however, hear about douchenozzles like Creflo Dollar, who is basically the IRL version of Aaron Magruder's Rev. Gibmo Dinero every goddamn day if you don't work to avoid it because he's loud and terrible and that makes him not boring to people who like to report stuff.

Coolguye fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Oct 13, 2015

# ? Oct 13, 2015 16:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me about growing up in a cult

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