In Reply to: Re: Where did Smith get his ideas? posted by kinda gentler on May 13, 2004 at 12:47:55:
I am aware of the letter that those quotes came from and the context that they are written about at the Sword site. Berg borrowed from many different groups. But that did not mean he sat in councils with them and was directly associated with them. He wasn't.
I never said he was. Like I said, you really need to focus and stay within the context of my comment when debating it.
Sword of the Lord and others call Mormons and JW's a cult. In the earliest days, Berg did too, but later he related to them. In the earliest days he was pro-Israeli, and then when his kibbutz dream was shattered, he became avidly anti-Jewish. Berg wrote one letter where he said the family had the best of everything, multiple wives of the mormons (which they no longer have officially), free sex of the hippies (which was never really free in the family for most and certainly not with minors)
And berg then scapegoated his own followers to save his own perverted neck by blaming his doctrines on the "hippies" those dirty hippies.<i/>
I agree that Berg was wishy washy and scapegoating. Those are trademarks of pathological cult personalities. Woroniecki was the same way, morphing his doctrines and image to its most manipulative advantage. He blamed Rusty and Andrea for the deaths of their children, despite the fact that his manipulative, condemning, exclusivist preaching traumatized this mentally fragile woman. His twisted sayings became the motivation behind her psychotic reasoning that resulted in her children's drownings.
I understand from Deborah that Aaron committed suicide under similar manipulative pressures. Andrea tried twice and hoped that Bush would follow through with execution because of her previous failures. Whereas i don't believe Aaron was psychotic at the time, I know of two of Woroniecki's converts that weren't either when they were on the verge of suicide themselve. Fortunately, I bailed out before it got that bad for me. I was only in for 4 years, whereas Andrea was in for 15, De La Isla for 14 and Wilhelm for 18.