Come to Jesus Meeting

from exister - Wednesday, December 27, 2006
accessed 1117 times

A first hand account of the lates FGA denial algorithm.

I finally managed to corner me mam, and have the "Come To Jesus" conversation. A couple of points are worth discussing.

My friend Don mentioned a while back that Family leadership know that Berg was whacked and are basically in damage control mode. Based on this recent conversation I believe this to be true. Once she realized that I wasn't going to buy the standard denial line, she basically admitted that Berg was a de facto pedophile (not her words) but that he was sorry for what she described as his grand social experiment gone horribly wrong. Laughable!

Basically the steps of denial and capitulation go something like this.

Mom: How do you know you can believe all of those abuse stories?
me: I was there, I was in the culture, I read the literature. As a man of science these stories ring true.
Mom: OK, bad shit happened, but Berg retracted and everyone said sorry.
me: If apologies were enough there would be no one in prison.
Mom: Well now we have child protection measures in place.
me: That's lovely, but it has no bearing on the pressing need for justice.

and on, and on, ad nauseaum. It wasn't so much an argument as my personal manifesto distilling 15 years of contemplation into 30 minutes.

As mentioned above, the biggest revelation for me is that basically all FGAs know that the Family was a cesspool of child abuse for decades. When unable to deny that they go into damage control mode and use some cowardly cop out along the lines of "well, it was the 70s, hippy culture, blah blah." I pulled no punches and yielded no slack on this point. I don't give a shit if it was the Middle Ages, those fuckers are still going down.

As icing on the cake I informed Mom that I believe in Nothing, and that I have taken up my moral stance against The Family just because I can. This final part of the discussion highlighted what I have long believed to be at the core of this conflict. There is not all that much disagreement over what happened (how can there be with such overwhelming evidence?). Rather, what we have is a culture war: persons of science who demand justice and accountability vs. religious pplz hoping to skate by with useless apologies and talk of redemption.