For the past few months, my girlfriend has been hanging out with a friend from work and her church group on the weekends. She says she has been learning a lot that has changed her views on things, but doesn't go into a lot of details. She says the things she has been taught would "sound crazy" if she told me because she isn't well versed enough to really back them up with evidence but that she is impressed with how much this church seems to have answers to questions. She also has not told her parents about these things. Strange, but no biggie. I try to be open minded about things as I am not religious at all, but I don't claim to have any big answers either about god or anything like that.
Tonight I found out she has some "special meeting" with someone important in the church. With further probing I found she is meeting with someone from Korea in the World Mission Society Church of God. I know very little about this group, but from what I can tell they are relatively culty and tend to aggressively recruit young vulnerable/lonely women going through a big life change. There are some past controversies with the group possibly being a doomsday cult, but idk how big that plays into their belief system really, they seem far less scary of a group than Scientology but something gives me the impression that they are manipulating her. I am already trying to tow a fine line of not pushing her away as we have been struggling with other relationship/mental health issues, but I really don't want to let her go deep down a rabbit hole here if it is something that is dangerous. FWIW, it also looks like this group does a decent amount of legitimate charity work.
Really good point, thanks for highlighting that. Debating a cultist is like debating an anti-semite, they’re not going to engage in good faith and they’re also going to already have extremely rehearsed responses to any arguments you might have.
Exactly. I was raised very Evangelical and there were never any conversations I had with people from Atheists to Wiccans which I would have ever taken their arguments even if they were perfectly logical. People who were raised Christian but had no interaction with religion beyond Christmas and Easter were people who could easily be pressured into 'accepting Jesus' just because it sounded close enough to what they knew, and they were the people most easily pushed to fundamentalist ideas, too.
Similar vibes, except devout catholic. Now agnostic bordering on pagan, but I'm thankful for having that religious background. I wish it hadn't been with the catholic church, but whatever.
It taught me to pull at threads and build an internal "theology". Running into someone with a conversion mindset now raises the hair on the back of my neck. Most people with those goals are selling something, and it's rarely harmless.
A person with only a passing familiarity might be more vulnerable to someone mimicking parts of different religions, you're right. With that said, it really can still happen to anyone. You've got to stay aware and trust the people in your life if they flag something you've missed.
I feel where you're coming from- I'm a Taoist now and enjoy the extensive religious knowledge I have because of my past but really wish the initial spark wasn't so awful. It is nice to have that sixth sense of someone who is trying to sell something while pretending not to.
Fully agree, nobody is beyond getting their buttons pressed and when we aren't sure the best move is to run it past other people
Yeah, I came back to the Catholic Church after some time as a reddit atheist and then a Pagan, but a proper familiarity of the internal theological structure of Tradcaths and other zealot-style groups (and why it's deeply flawed) is a good inoculation to have.
Really? My impression of antisemites is that they're some of the dumbest people out there.
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Memorizing a specific response to any argument out there can't be easy though. If it were the same response to every argument that would be different, but I think he was implying they were verbose.