Moving On - Children of the Children of God

I like this web site because of the empowering discourse. Empowerment is a slippery concept, so I won’t waste space here trying to pin it down. Just keep bringing your realities to light and the shadows you cast will become trusted companions.

Odd that I find myself posting on this website on Christmas Eve 2002, when it has been close to 30 years since I joined and left the COG. I have had a whole lifetime—and raised two children to adulthood—outside TF.

Much of my older adult life (since age 33) has been concerned with studying the problem and treating the effects of child maltreatment. No doubt that is why I find this web site so fascinating. I have followed Family developments online since the early 90s. This is by far the most hopeful and empowering website I’ve run across.

I left TF right about the time FFing was published. Nothing about that epistle surprised me or particularly offended me. I think, therefore I left. It was my general impression that there wasn’t much of a role TF for brainy women. I wasn’t cut out to be a breeder or professional sex object, and the interesting work (to me) like media production was pretty much reserved for the guys. From what I can tell, that gender bias in TF appears to have held up over time.

Seeds (and even young saplings)of the perverse sexual preoccupation and irrational thinking that expressed in the MLs of the late 70s and throughout the 1980s can be found in the very earliest MLs of the late 60s and early 70s, when TF was supposedly closer to its Christian roots. When I used to communicate with the exCOG FGAs who first went online, many of them would hark back to the halcyon days before Berg lost his way. I thought Berg was a sociopath from the get-go, and when Deborah Berg Davis published her story of paternal incest in 1985, I knew there would be hell to pay from the next generation.

While sociopaths are not necessarily totally evil human beings, they are by definition dangerously sick muther-fookers. I’ve never been one to think that TF as an organization could be cleansed and reborn, largely because its foundations and patterns of communication are fundamentally flawed.

Human relationships are constructed by the ways in which we communicate with each other, and the rules that govern communication processes (discourse) among TF leadership and the flock perpetuate a “power over” dynamic that does not lend itself to fundamental change.

For example, the celibate Roman Catholic clergy has sexually abused women and children for centuries and no amount of organizational reform or external pressure has significantly altered that dynamic. Systems theory provides some good explanations for why this is so.

Is there hope for FGAs? I don’t know. Is there such a thing as free will for people enslaved by ignorance and fear? I believe in the concept of grace, although not in the idea that grace emanates from a personal, anthropomorphic deity (e.g., a father god or savior son). This "grace" is like a black box—-stuff happens for no apparent reason and suddenly one’s life does not seem so chaotic and meaningless