Currently reading "Cults,Faith-Healing and coercion". Very informative info on many cults, sects and behaviors. Reading different books on cults I personally gives me the knowledge to better understand the behavior and thoughts inside ones who are in a cult;which gives me a better handle on how to help wake them up without them going into denial. Also I love reading . Just sharing some lines for you to analyse too.
"In some religious cults, as shown in Debbie's experience, converts are introduced to the group's ideology only after they have affiliated. Once they have identified with the group's general orientation, though, they accept the particulars of belief quite readily when these are spelled out (jdumb strategy at work is it not).
Members of these groups tend to be intensely concerned about each other's well-being, and are deeply committed to joint activities. Their social cohesiveness, essential to the group's integrity, is reflected in the close intertwining of the individual's life circumstances with those of all group members. Meetings are frequent; they serve as a focus for group functions and articulate their cohesiveness. Members often express their need to associate regularly with each other by developing joint activities such as minor group tasks and rituals, which in turn justify such meetings."
"A different scientific perspective—a systems approach—can be used to analyze a group's structure and functioning. 1 0 In looking at a system, we do notfirst ask what motivates an individual member to act. Instead we say, "How are the group's needs met by the overall behavior observed in its membership?" From this viewpoint many observations of individual behavior can be synthesized into a model that can help us to better understand motivations. We may consider these individuals' behavior as it is generated by the needs of the social group, even when it seems to run contrary to their interests and personalities. This enables us to see how strongly they can be influenced to conform to the system's need to stabilize and carry out broader objectives.
Many years ago I saw a striking example of how this influence filters the impact of events within one group on another. On a Sunday in November 1978 a banner headline in The New York Times read, "GUYANA TOLL IS RAISED TO AT LEAST 900 BY U. S., WITH 260 CHILDREN AMONG THE VICTIMS AT COLONY." It was rapidly becoming clear that a bizarre and frightening situation of historic proportions had arisen in the past week among the followers of the cult leader Jim Jones. A mass suicide of American citizens had occurred in an isolated South American encampment where members of this group had sequestered themselves. Ironically, Jones was a Protestant minister who had been an esteemed member of the San Francisco Bay Area religious community only months before.
I wondered whether some shock wave might have struck the group by now. I knew the young man at the reception desk, and remarked how unfortunate it was that events in Jonestown might be used against his church. He said, "It's sad it happened to them. But no one would compare us to that terrible group."
The Moonie members, functioning as an integrated social system, had somehow developed a psychologically defensive perspective. Their denial of the implications of the Jonestown affair apparently protected the group from being confronted by the similarities that might be drawn between their own cult-like structure and that of the Peoples Temple. Members of this social system had obviously arrived at a consensus that, above all, assured the system's equilibrium by quashing potentially threatening self-examination."
So many things resonates with cults and the jdumbs; their refusal to believe news about child abuse cases, lawsuits Shunning etc . Anything critical is persecution and lies by the apostate. It is a self-preservation syndrome/tactic.
Zing