No Regrets: by Ralph Crayon

from Ralph Crayon - Wednesday, October 27, 2004
accessed 5400 times

Possibly the best article in the world.

No Regrets: by Ralph Crayon

I have just read No Regrets in its entirety for the first time and really felt like writing a reaction to it, and since I can do what I want, I am.

Copying and pasting it onto a word document and then printing the whole thing out takes about 50 pages or so. It’s certainly worth putting the kettle on the boil, making a nice cup of tea and getting comfortable* in your armchair for an hour or two to read over.

The first thing that came to mind when I had finished was “Jesus, I wonder how many people have actually read this in full ”. I had skipped through it a number of times reading bits and pieces on the computer but had never gone through it from start to finish. I’m glad I did.

It is very clear to me that James Penn is extremely intelligent and articulate, and I can only wonder over the course of his 27 years in the Family (19 in WS) how valuable he must have been to the group.

Penn worked directly (as a member of personal staff) with Mo and Maria in the early eighties, and was chosen to testify on their behalves in the UK court case in 1995. He managed the Family’s media strategies in the persecutions (Australia and Argentina) and helped set up the FCF in 1997.

It is no surprise, considering Penn’s gift for language that he edited, translated and compiled publications and letters penned by Mo, during his time in the Family. Ironically, Penn the ultimate “backslider” is the author of the tribute to Mo, which currently appears on the TF website: http://www.thefamily.org/about/davidberg.php.Is anything ever straight forward with TF?

He describes why he left by using a phrase to describe what was going on in TF in the eighties and early nineties: “mindless insanity”. Apt, I believe. “Mindless” in the sense that because the FG weren’t using their minds they couldn’t see the “insanity” that they were involved in.


Sexual abuse: Penn’s first topic

It’s no surprise that Penn begins with the issue of sexual abuse of children within TF. It needs to be set straight for the record that Penn is saying the following:

Mo, Maria and Peter promoted and THEN COVERED UP the sexual abuse of children.

In fact on the subject of sexual abuse he later quotes Peter’s admission to the Judge in the UK case in 95 and in this instance it appears that Peter at least agrees that he, Maria and Mo were responsible for the sexual abuse of children:

“Father David wrote a series of letters concerning sexual behaviour. The Judgement refers in particular to “The Law of Love” and “The Devil hates sex” and we accept that as the author of ideas upon which some members acted to harm minors in the Family he must bear responsibility for that harm. Maria, and all of us in World Services Leadership, also feel responsibility for that burden.”

Note: Berg must “bear” the responsibility yet Maria and WS just “feel” it.
Very convenient as Berg is dead.

Penn chronicles the process whereby Maria, Peter and Berg deny, then accept (only conditionally), then justify, then deny again, then accept again the fact that children were sexually abused within the Family.

He quotes some very interesting publications, such as “Child Abuse?!” from 1988 which, according to Penn, was the first Family document to address accusations that the Family promoted adults having sexual relationships with children. In it Berg describes the accusations as lies by anti-Christ enemies.

According to this “Child Abuse?!” document:
“The [Davidito Book] is only the writer’s account of her own personal experiences and opinions. AND IT IS BY NO MEANS ANY KIND OF POLICY SETTING OR INSTRUCTIONAL TEXT. Such intimate relationships between minors and adults have never been officially encouraged or condoned within our fellowship.”

--Caps are my emphasis

Penn then quotes from “The Devil hates sex” to show that Berg saw no problem with adults having sex with infants or children in 1980. However a clearer example that the Davadito book WAS intended to be an instructional text can be found in the Judge’s commentary on that very subject:

4. The index is interesting. There is a cartoon of Berg saying:

"Davidito, do you know what you are doing? You are teaching the whole world how to take care of babies!"

There followed a very detailed index including a number of references to sex experiences and education, in addition to the entries on masturbation and penis. There is a cartoon. It shows Davidito on top of Davida as if having sexual intercourse with her.

The Judge also points out:

2. In chapter 45 when Davidito was 2 years 4 months old, comment was added to Sara's entries by Berg himself. The fact that his views are recorded makes it difficult for The Family to distance him from responsibility for its publication. He said:

"God made children able to enjoy sex so he must have expected them to! I did! All my life! Thank God! I love it…

See The Davidito Book or http://www.exfamily.org/art/misc/justward_ver1.html

I will cut Berg’s rant there. I am sure you can do the math yourself. Penn calls all this carry on “Back flipping, double thinking and mind bending”. Most people would simply call it lying.

Penn also quotes the 93 publication “Why do ye stone us” where Berg claims:

“We have never allowed actual child abuse of any kind, as we would never think of harming our children! We are completely against any kind of child abuse, not only because of the system but because we love our children.”

I would ask you to hold onto your head as we flash back to 1987 “The Last State” GN 278

Paragraph 36:

… from the very first beginning of this Family, from my own children, I have beaten them with the rod, I have beaten them until they cry for mercy.

Paragraph 64:

“….If you’ve got to slap her to wake her up and get her out of that kind of spirit, slap her! Slap her good! Knock her around! Let her have it!.”

This of course a description of the treatment of a Mene Berg. Which as Penn illustrates was then denied by Maria in the January 1993 letter “False Accusers in the Last days”

“She’s crazy. How can you believe anything she says”

It doesn’t take a genius to see who the crazy one is since it was actually Maria who saw fit to tell the whole Family what Berg was doing to Mene through volumes of publications just a couple of years previously.

Going through this section of No Regrets clears up a lot of the mental fog surrounding these issues, I found it useful to get a clear and referenced presentation of the Family’s lies on the subject of child sexual and physical abuse. It’s worth reading and, as I say, it is referenced so either it’s true or it’s not.

If it’s not true then let the truth be known.

The Mene Story

“From now on I’m going to knock the devil out of you if I have to..”

Penn goes on to describe Mene Berg’s (Granddaughter of Moses David) ordeal in Berg’s house, is like reading a Stephen King novel or watching a horror movie: an old man sexually abuses his grand-daughter; she resists and he claims the devil has possessed her and proceeds to beat her for months on end while the old man’s half blind wife and her lover watch on. The child can’t escape because this is all happening in a secretive doomsday cult that by the randomness of nature the child has had the tragic misfortune of being born into.

“What Mene Berg went through was a form of torture”

“Maria and Peter stood by and watched it happen and approved of what was happening”

-The Judgement of Lord Justice Ward

Penn quotes quite a number of paragraphs from “The Last State” and it is just from this that the child was brutalised and despised by Berg at that point.

But Maria obviously lost all memory of the situation because in GN 653 published in mid 95, she says:

“It hurts me deeply, though to hear about what some of these kids claim to have gone through. If any of this is true, it is a reproach to the Family and a reproach to the cause of Christ.”

Mental illness must be considered when objectively analysing why Maria or more accurately Karen Zerby actually makes these completely contradictory and bizarre statements, or more importantly why she is part of the incidents in the first place that need to be denied later. Penn proposes further on in No Regrets that Maria is a control freak, the question then which must be asked is: what great psychological malady is this need for control a symptom of? Family members undoubtedly would propose that she is serving the Lord. How torturing little girls, making child pornography videos, and performing oral sex on aging hippies serves the Lord I really don’t know.

Penn’s recounting of the Mene story portrays a typically bizarre TF situation, unsettling and upsetting to read. It leaves you with tears in your eyes for the child, repulsed and raging at the vicious hypocrisy of Father David, Queen Maria and King Peter.

Penn quotes Lord Justice Ward:

“I have perhaps dealt with MB [Mene] at inordinate length. I do so because of the central role she plays not only in the Family’s past but in it’s present”

I personally believe that this statement about Mene playing a central role in the Family’s past and it’s present is an extremely important point.

The Mene story tells anyone interested (or brave) enough to inquire, everything they need to know about TF. For what type of a man would do that to a child and what type of people would stand by and watch?

“Goddamn anti-Christ Jews”

Probably the most amusing thing I find about TF is the fact that Berg hated Jew’s and blacks and yet the family is full of blacks, and quite a number of Jews who love Berg. I think something’s being lost in the translation.

The blacks were according to Mo: cursed, heathen, demonic, devil worshipers. God rose Hitler up to exterminate the Jews and it would have been better for Europe if the Nazis won the 2nd world war etc. etc. You’ve heard it all before haven’t you? So what made Father David see the errors of his bigoted and racist ways:

Penn describes how

“in the years before Mo died we regularly performed a similar role in trying to tone down his caustic diatribes about the ‘Goddamn antichrist Jews’ or the Savage Blacks’ with the persecution, Peter finally realised that Mo’s racist views could destroy the Family. In 1993 he asked Apollos and I to do some research and suggest to Mo that maybe his interpretation of the “Sons of Ham” issue needed to re-examination. Mo eventually recanted, blaming his skewered views on his mothers teachings. I remember thinking, though , that an end-time prophet, who claims to hear directly from God, should have taken a little more care about teaching that an entire race is inferior and cursed”

Since this is a topic of major interest to me I was a little disappointed that No Regrets didn’t go further into Berg’s prejudices.

The gift of *&%f#rophecy

It seems Penn’s ordeal with the British Court case, really made him reflect on the true nature of the Family, It was at this point (post October 95) that he decided that he would no longer swallow whole everything that Maria and Peter were saying.

“Beginning in late October 1995 Maria and Peter increasingly used the “new wine” of prophecy to shape Family doctrines and prophecies”

As Maria was dreaming up the idea of contacting dead celebrities, Penn was slowly coming to grips with reality. It got too much for Penn when the spirit of Berg returned to carry out spot checks on Family members homes.

“I’ve just completed a tour of the homes in the US”
-The ghost of Mo quoted in “Stop the Gossip now”

Clearly ridicules letters such as “Eat right” & “Stop the Gossip now” where supposed prophecies from Mo telling of his surprise visits and tours to Family homes in order to check that no one was eating junk food or bad mouthing the Family made the whole situation clearer in Penn’s mind. As he say’s in No Regrets:

“It was hard to even pay lip service to such insanity”

All this prophesising was obviously coming from the imaginative minds of the “prophets” and not Jesus or Dad or anybody else for that matter. Penn illustrates the incident where he himself, a man who would turn out to be a massive pain in the ass for the Family leadership, was given a birthday prophecy from “Dad”.

“For me the ultimate example of this idiocy came six days after I emailed my letter of resignation to Maria and Peter, bluntly explaining everything. It was my birthday and a member of Maria and Peter’s staff, who I knew well, sent me a file containing a birthday prophecy from Dad”

Penn actually includes the prophecy in No Regrets. Even though he has resigned from the Family and voiced his doubts, concerns and disowned Berg as his prophet almost a week before, Dad still tells him on his birthday that he is a “mighty Man of David” and that “you’ re one of my mighty warriors of the word”.

The prophecy also goes on to say that Berg is watching over him and helping to steer him in the right direction.

Penn comments “The scary thing is, these are the prophets who dish out the policy making-making prophecies that appear in the GN’s and affect Family Members the world over.”

Loving and jerking off to Jesus: More gifts for the Family

Penn is obviously quite annoyed and perturbed that after everything that the Family went through trying to stay alive during the UK case, including the raids and all the persecutions in the early nineties, Maria would then go and jeopardise it by introducing the Loving Jesus revelation. Especially by introducing it to children.

The “Loving Jesus for Junior Teens” series of 1995 that is quoted at length in No Regrets further supports the hypothesis that Maria is suffering from acute mental illness:

Maria claims that Jesus has channelled the following through her so as she could tell it to the 14 years olds in TF:

“Do not be afraid to say that you want me to fuck you and to love you and to kiss you.”

Maria further claims that “In a prophecy on the subject of masturbation, Dad explained that the climax is not the thing that matters; what matters is the humility you demonstrate by saying the love words to Jesus and touching yourself”.

Penn points out that in 1996 Maria again directly lies to the Family by denying the alleged prophecy from Jesus quoted above:

“We do not want our children saying sexually graphic love words to Jesus” (ML # 3033:Par.60)

Last time I checked “Fuck” was a sexually graphic word, anyway it seems that Maria had to be convinced not to give the young teens the full graphic adult version of loving Jesus which really could sell well as a homo-erotic fantasy. “Jesus, I want to feel your penis inside of me and go all the way. And then I want to suck it until it falls off.”

“SUCK IT UNTIL IT FALLS OFF”??!!

Yes sir, No sir

Where do you find elevated in that Charter of Rights some expression that the child is entitled to grow up as an individual, feel free from pressure to conform to your religious views which are imposed upon them?

-The Judgement of Lord Justice Ward

Some nice quotes from the UK case included in the part where No Regrets briefly covers self-determination for children. Though it’s fairly obvious that you can’t allow people, be they teenagers or adults, to think and decide for themselves in a cult: the cult would disintegrate. Surely it’s the People who have done the most thinking about TF that have left and the people who have done the least that stay. Thinking = leaving and as Penn points out

“If the young people and SGA leave, why who will wash the dishes, pay the tithes and support Maria and Peter and WS?”


All that glitters is not Gold

“He doesn’t entice you with things that seem or look bad—otherwise you’d never fall for it.”

- Maria and Peter speaking on the “devil’s” method of manipulation in Wham! Bam! Junk the Punk (#3179) 1998

The Family’s constant efforts to portray any type of life outside the group as rotten, shallow, pointless and doomed is dealt with briefly in No Regrets. I always think it’s amazing that people who have spent the last 30+ years in a secretive cult are such experts on what goes on in the lives and communities of billions of people across the entire planet. Anyway Wham! Bam! Junk the Punk! (#3179), written in January 98 is provided as an example of this effort to control members and to prevent them from leaving. It is a glaringly obvious and crude piece of propaganda.

The title Wham! Bam! Junk the Punk! says a lot. It says to me at least that Maria and Peter, WS, Gary etc are stuck in a sixties time warp and just can’t let it go.

As with an unlimited amount of material that comes from the blind witch’s grotto, if you substitute the words “the Family” for “the system” or put in “the Family” where they have “enemy” or “devil” you get a shockingly accurate picture:

41…..Talk about routine and having to fit into someone else’s mould. Talk about no freedom. That’s what the system’s all about—Bondage. It’s bondage of the worst kind under the guise of freedom.

Just put Family where they have system. It’s not rocket science.

Penn says that: “I grew to hate Maria and Peter’s attempt to control, manipulate, indoctrinate and mould the impressionable and often trusting children and young people in the Family”

The End is nigh..

“people are going to have to go through boot camp whether they like it or not. They’re going to have to toe the line like it or not. They’re going to have to yield and obey like it or not.”

-The year of the Bottom Line 1998

Penn describes near the end of No Regrets what sealed his fate. It was a letter by the name of “The year of the Bottom Line”. The letter, which is reproduced in No Regrets, is an obnoxious and arrogant demand that Family members do what they’re told.

“As I read this letter I knew my time had come to leave. I could no longer stomach the insanity of Maria and Peter’s weird doctrines and pernicious policies”

So he left along with 3 other WS staff: Apollos, Jac and Heather.

Penn’s letter to Maria and Peter

What surprised me most when reading through the excerpts of the letter is that it is quite tame compared to what I thought it would be. I thought it would be aggressive and, to use TFs popular choice of word more “bitter”. Surprisingly from the extracts reproduced in No Regrets the letter just seems to be telling them the situation as he sees it. It could hardly be considered an attack.

After describing everything he loves about TF and telling Maria and Peter that he loves them (and who could deny that after everything he had done to spread their message and save their skins over the course of 19 years in WS?) he says:

“I can follow but not unquestioningly, and not without retaining the right to disagree with you.”

And so James Penn’s No Regrets comes to an end. He has an after word section where he briefly explains why he didn’t leave sooner and a couple of other things like what he plans to do in the future etc. Essentially Penn came to see that the Family had turned into everything that it had set out to oppose. It had become what Mo denounced the Churches for: hypocritical, controlling, rigid and of course spiritually abusive.

Grumblers don’t get out

We now know that TF paid Penn to work for them EVEN AFTER he had written this letter, a letter that politely spits in the face of The year of the Bottom Line. But Maria and Peter just wiped the spit off their faces and went on with business as usual.

See: http://www.movingon.org/article.asp?sID=4&Cat=4&ID=2130

So grumblers don’t need to go?

It seems that what Maria and Peter say is only true if you believe it, if you don’t believe it and it’s not true for you then they will try something else that you might believe.

What stands out in the Family is the amount of contradictions, one day the Lord says its ok to fuck kids, the next day he says it isn’t, one day the Lord tells the Family that America is going to slide into the sea, the next day it’s going to be an atomic bomb that ends the world. But the one thing that has remained constant over the past 36 years is that no matter what is said you are expected to believe it.

When Mo first declared in 1972 “To ignore the Word of the Lord through His Prophet is to ignore the Voice of God Himself. . . God made me your shepherd and you had better follow.” he set in motion the central principle that the Family would work from throughout every different stage of it’s existence.

Mo, I am sure, would call Maria, Peter and WS old bottle backsliders for denouncing his word so many times, the most notable example being in GN 653:

“If we had known then what we know now we would not have published this material”

But Mo is dead and buried and can’t say anything.

The science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson once wrote “reality is what you can get away with”. It sure is.

The End

* For as long as that lasts
** The Laws of Moses Feb: 1972