In Reply to: yes, good post posted by Lyle on March 23, 2003 at 19:20:19:
I think both yours and Lydia's views are valid. First of all yours is valid because many of us come to know God because of individual Family members witnessing the gospel. No glory to Berg. By the time they were on the streets telling us the pure simple truth Berg had moved on to bedding every young hippy girl he could, and singing drunken gypsy songs and utterind David-glorifying prophecies about himself. The good that happened happened despite how astray Berg himself had become and the credit goes to God.
As far as Lydia saying God would not have told anyone to join the Family, I'm pretty much in agreement with that, for the reasons she gave. I mean, even in the very earliest days of the Family when the outer majority were still doing "good" and only the inner core had begun to seriously rot, even before the sexual abuse began, the group was infamous for beguiling individuals into joining through a combination of guilt, withholding information and operating like slick used-car salesmen. Then people were defrauded of their possessions, contact with their parents, mail was illegally opened and read, people were smuggled around, etc. There was a harsh, judgmental attitude, a holier-than-thou condemnation of everyone not in the group or not favorable to the group.
There were red flags but many of us joined because the red flags were deliberately hidden, information was deliberately distorted or withheld.
On the other hand, individuals were saved from lives of heavy drugs and had not thought of going anywhere but in the group that had brought them to God. For them the issues are not so easy to state in black and white terms. I suppose they should only have stayed as long as the rot wasn't working its way out from the inside. But again, the cult mind conditioning held them in. Still, in the final analysis, I don't think it was God telling them to join, nor to stay in. They were just deprived valuable information that would have helped them make a better decision.