A blog for people who seek alternative approaches to kiruv and the baal teshuvah experience.
Monday, February 22, 2021
is this the diff between the Manalim and Chassidim?
Do you see this fine thing?
Do you admire the humanity of it?
Because the Human Beings, my son,...
...they believe everything is alive.
Not only man and animals,...
...but also water, earth, stone.
And also the things from them,...
...like that hair.
The man from whom this hair came,...
...he's bald on the other side,...
...because I now own his scalp.
That is the way things are.
But the white men,...
...they believe
everything is dead:...
...stone, earth, animals,...
...and people,
even their own people.
If things keep trying to live,
white men will rub them out.
That is the difference.
Did the Manalim pick this up from the goyim?
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
fear based kiruv
fear shuts down frontal brain function. you can no longer think, examine, process, question. you accept what you hear and do it with certainty.
you give up your autonomy and are furious with yourself for not trusting your instincts, you got snuckered
when you follow false gods, whether they be doctors, politicians, leaders of any kind, academia, whatever, all hell breaks loose
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
i begin with the experiential side
i begin with the experiential side. that take roots in a person and the likelyhood is that something of Elokis will come in a take that person further.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
what to live for
guest writer
George Carlin: You need something to live for.
Seems obvious no? I felt that being frum had taken that away from me. I was told why I should live and I felt nothing towards that? I should live to study Gemara? That didn't work for me as I really didn't know how to do it and yeshiva didn't help that at all. Live to serve God? To be a slave? I don't want to do that as the God that had been presented to me was a tyrant. Nobody told me He loved me. Just that He loved to punish. The rabbis projected their bullying onto God. The world was bad, non-religious Jews were bad, baal habatim were acceptable if they gave all their money to yeshivas. That was the picture I saw. So I was left with nothing to live for. And that is dangerous.
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
tolerance
“The source of tolerance is the recognition that none of us have the absolute truth. There can be no tolerance without humility.”
― Milton Friedman
― Milton Friedman
Cults
Breaking sessions are when one, two or more cult members and leaders attack the character of another person, sometimes for hours on end. Some cults will not stop these sessions until their victim is crying uncontrollably.
Cults know that if they can control your relationships then they can control you. Whether we like it or not we are all profoundly affected by those around us. When you first go to a cult they will practice “love bombing”, where they arrange instant friends for you. It will seem wonderful, how could such a loving group be wrong! But you soon learn that if you ever disagree with them, or ever leave the cult then you will lose all your new “friends”. This unspoken threat influences your actions in the cult. Things that normally would have made you complain will pass by silently because you don’t want to be ostracized. Like in an unhealthy relationship love is turned on and off to control.
Cults also try to cut you off from your friends and family because they hate others being able to influence you. A mind control cult will seek to manoeuvre your life so as to maximize your contact with cult members and minimize your contact with people outside the group, especially those who oppose your involvement.
People in a mind control cult will also hide their true thoughts and feelings, and instead wear a mask which presents them as a perfect cult member. This mask is a defense against being reported to leadership and being punished for not measuring up (cult members never feel like they measure up to the cult’s ideals, and yet often believe the other members around them do, when in reality the others feel the same as them). Hence cult members are trained not only to deceive outsiders, but also to deceive their fellow cult members. Rarely can close friendships form in cults, and if they do the cult’s leaders may see them as a threat and move those people away from each other. Nothing is allowed that can be more powerful than the cult members’ allegiance to the group and it’s leaders.
Mind control cults keep their members so busy with meetings and activities that they become too busy and too tired to think about their involvement.
Time control also helps the cult keep their members immersed in the manufactured cult environment.
And time control helps keep cult members away from friends and family.
Hyped Meetings
Rather than explain to you what the group believes or what their programme is up front, they will instead insist that you can only understand it if you come to a group meeting. There everyone around you will seem so enthusiastic that you will start to think there is something wrong with you. They create an environment where you will feel uncomfortable and the only way to become comfortable is to join them. This is an application of controlled peer pressure.
Intense Unrelenting Pressure
They call repeatedly. Meet you on campus or outside your work. Trick you into coming for only an hour and then lead you into a long study, meeting or talk. They have to keep the pressure on, otherwise you might snap out of the mind control environment they are trying to immerse you in.
They tell you that they are not a cult.
This is a preemptive strike against the warnings from friends and family members which they know will come. In fact some cults go as far to tell you that Satan will try and dissuade you by sending family members and friends to tell you it is a cult. When this tactic is used then often a warped form of logic occurs in the recruits’ mind, the “agents of Satan” do come and tell them that it is a cult. So since the group predicted that would happen, the group therefore must true! Basically if any group tells you that they are not a cult, or that some people call them a cult, then for goodness sake find out why!
Authoritarian cult. Deception recruitment. Controlling people's behavior, thoughts, and emotions. Disconnecting their ability to reality test. Installing phobias in their minds that the enemy is here and the only hope is to follow the grand leader. If all you are hearing is cult messaging and not other things, hard to get people to take a step back and hear other things. Get away for a few days: walk in the woods, music you used to like, reconnect with family and friends.
True leader is compassionate, open to questions. You telling me God is going to use a cult. Quote from Moon that how could this be a cult, Americans are very smart. Yet behind the scenes always condemning them. This woke Steve up. He cried for 3 hours because had given his all for 2.5 years.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)