We Always Had Beer (eBook)

Angela & quote; Red& quote; Wright (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
328 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-3360-4 (ISBN)

Infos

An autobiography of how a young girl growing up in a doomsday cult, with an abusive mother and very little education, came out on the other side to fulfill her dreams of traveling the world, writing, and living life without the emotional terrorism and deep depression and guilt that cults lay upon you. Seeking peace and true happiness while leaving the conditional love of religion, family, and friends behind.

---

An autobiography of a young girl whose life was quickly turned upside down by an event that took her mother not only down a path of deep depression but right into the hold of a doomsday cult that would in the end be her mother's undoing and the undoing of her family. Living years of uncertainty inside the cult, never good enough as a daughter, wife, and sister, a series of events led her to a path that walked her right outside the doors of the cult and into a whole new world. Sadness, uncertainty, and some guilt were followed by hope, health, love, and an awareness of a whole new happy shiny world. Transitioning into a whole new life and seeing the deep scares a cult, abuse, and lies can do and how to come out of it, bent but not broken.

Textauszug

Jehovah’s Witnesses

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

~ Thomas Sowell

If you were asked to define or describe the word cult, what would you say? I want you to really think about that for a moment. A word you may just pass over in conversation or make fun of or never even use in a sentence.

And some religions, that you may think you are familiar with, would never even consider themselves a cult. Perhaps they think they are mainstream, but taking a deeper look, you will recognize the behaviors of a cult.

Think about its detrimental effects on people, what people do for a cult, how do they get involved in one, how people are trapped, or misguided, how they change their lives to bend to the demands, and how some take their lives, for this word.

We see it not only as religious but recently we have seen it deeply touch the politics of America and all around the world.

You have probably understood what you thought the word cult meant. And in your lifetime, you have most likely been aware of some, especially ones that enthusiastically made the news. Or maybe you or a family member know someone who is part of one, or you have been part of one yourself.

There are some that are incredibly famous, but not famous in a good way.

You might remember The Branch Davidians in Waco Texas, controlled by David Koresh. Ending in tragedy. April 19, 1993, 80 people lost their lives because they chose to remain brainwashed by a man who claimed to be the Prophet of God.

You may remember or have read about Jim Jones and his cult of followers, called the Peoples Temple, that also ended in tragedy. November 1978, 909 people took their own lives by drinking Cyanide, all at the behest of Jim Jones, their cult leader.

Or Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven’s Gate, March 26th, 1997, where 39 people also took their own lives in a mass suicide, in anticipation of something greater. At the word of what the papers called, a mentally unstable mad man.

You might think of some cults being controlling, women being abused, men having more than one wife, young girls being married off, families being torn apart. Maybe they live in their own compounds, have their own schools. You might think of brainwashing, or people isolated from others, even their family members. Perhaps you think of rape, or incest or molesting, or perhaps you do not think much about cults at all. Perhaps a cult has never been something that affected your life. But I am here to tell you about a cult that on the outside seems caring and warm and friendly, kind, but is literally killing, raping, emotionally torturing and abusing its people every day.

Being outside it for 17 years I call it the “cult of Kindness”, (though a friend of mine coined that phrase) but you have heard of them, most likely even spoken to them, and know them as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

One of my sisters would begin this story differently, as she likes to do to undermine my life or memories, and she likes to pretend some of my life did not actually happen, as if our memories with a 13-year age difference will ever be similar, but because I was there, I will begin it with the facts as I know them and have put together, especially since my mother’s death. Our age differences can make telling stories of our past different and even sometimes make it seem as if we were not part of the same family at all. But it diminishes neither my memories nor hers.

In 1972, a few years after the accident, my mother was once again on her own. She was divorcing my father, Gene. Custody battle for me had been taking up her time and her heart. Reeling from the loss of her husband, her friends, and having to move back in with her abusive, alcoholic, father and alcoholic stepmother, my mother needed, as I recall, something to help her find peace, to find her balance. She was still incredibly young, 24 years old, with a 4-year-old and a divorce almost under her belt. She was lost and sad.

At that time the religion, or as I am going to refer to them, the cult, Jehovah’s Witnesses arrived at her door one day. Her stepmother had been studying the bible (their version of the bible) with them and had introduced them to her, but it was not until she was approached by a couple of ladies, with a book, called The Truth book, that she began to take the church seriously. There was a woman named Myrna who studied the bible with my step-grandmother, Jan, and she also studied with my mother. My mother embraced the cult, my step-grandmother just uses it to this day as an excuse to abuse people and to make excuses for her own narcissism. She left it in the 70’s because she did not like something someone did. Let us be clear she never likes something someone did or does. It is a lifelong pattern of hers.

My mother was in an unbelievably bad place. Though it would not occur to me until many years later, and I cannot put too fine a point on this, the church made my mother worse, not better. Their empty promises and their total control of her brain and heart and her life. Every decision she made was to please the cult.

If you are not familiar with this cult let me fill you in. And emphasize that though some of my firsthand experiences in the cult may have varied from what others experienced, the foundation teachings that they push are consistent around the globe.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have this disguise of being truly kind, balanced people. They say there is no greater love than their love. They pretend to be generous and devoted. You may be familiar with some of their beliefs or things they do not do, they do not celebrate holidays, or birthdays, or participate in Military service, or vote and they do not take blood transfusions. That is only a small part of it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are a (sort of) large group of “Christians.” They started in the 1870’s and changed over time with their name and beliefs. As of this writing they have a bit over 8 million publishers, as they call them, those active in the preaching work, going door to door, all over the world. They have over 120,000 congregations worldwide and as of this writing have once again been banned in a country, this time it is Russia. But they are restricted or banned also in Singapore, China, Vietnam, and many Muslim majority countries. Sometimes for their refusal to be part of military service sometimes because they want so badly to think they are better than others by their beliefs therefore making themselves seem superior in their teachings and dismissing or ignoring governments and or laws. Russia told them that they must follow the laws of the land, they did not like that, so banned they are. Norway has just restricted them because of their abusive shunning policies. Policies that are so abusive that people even take their own lives over it.

You may have met them at your door when they have come to preach to you, to show you god’s good news, you might have seen them on a street corner peddling their literature, or you may have gone to school with one, you may work with one, or you might even have one in your own family.

What you might know about them you think is small and harmless but what I am about to tell you is far from that. It is neither small nor harmless.

My mother came into the cult to save herself. She felt that she needed to bring some peace into her life and the cult happened to get to her at the most vulnerable time.

She became so obsessed with the cult, with its teachings, with its belief in a Paradise on Earth, a new world, the resurrection of the dead, that she did not see the harm it was doing to her and her family. Her obsession led her to forget that world around her and sometimes the people around her and to focus on her and her alone and what she believed was true. No one else, nothing else seemed to matter but the hold that the cult had on her. It was as if she was possessed by ignorance and false hope. Sometimes it did seem as if she was in a trance. This cult had a deep and tight hold on my mother.

She began to easily dismiss members of her own family because Jehovah’s Witness discourage you from having contact with your family members who are not part of the church. She even stopped speaking to her father and her own brother, believing that the church was her family now. Do not get me wrong, her biological family were not all worthy humans. They had their problems, Norman Rockwell paintings they were not. But dismissing them as if they do not exist is part of the control and abuse the cult has on people.

Sometimes we make those decisions because our family is toxic to us. And I agree with dismissing those things from your life and those people. But if you believe that god is so weak that he cannot allow you to speak to or be part of your family simply because your beliefs are different, than you worship a different god than the one I have studied to understand. Though I do not believe in god today, I know that there are different definitions of god for many people. And for most people, god is love, period.

This caused many years of tension between her family and herself. But she managed to banish most of them from her life. For the cult. She would banish anything if it got in the way of her salvation. Anything and anyone. Salvation that the cult dangled over us like a carrot. And there was no greater hope than this Paradise on Earth salvation. Perfection, no war, no hunger,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.12.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-3360-4 / 9798350933604