Tag: cults
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Religion: A Tool for Constructing Meaning, but not for Discovering Truth
“Don’t confuse meaning with truth.” — Thucydides I have a religion. Hell, I have a few of them. Honestly, if there was something akin to a “Jam of the Month Club” for religions, I’d join; $120 a year and every month I’d get a new religion to sample—I’d be all over that shit. Yummy yummy,…
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There is Obvious Danger in Believing Bullshit…
“In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality…
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Reflections on the OTO: Part III — The Slandering
After I left the OTO, a malicious campaign was launched to teach new members in the Atlanta area that I was not to be trusted, was prone to violence, and was an abuser of women. Specifically that I was guilty of sexually assaulting a woman during an initiation. Me. The guy who put the “Ho”…
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Cult-Like Ideation & Social Media
Today, a friend of mine posted a cartoon. It advocated that men should transform themselves to be more like Steve Irwin, Carl Sagan, Bob Ross, and Fred Rogers. It’s a modified image I’ve seen before, though the initial image contained a reference to John Denver and not Sagan. I made a comment and soon had…
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Cults & Cult-Like Organizations: Ideation, Identity, and Ostracism
When I left the cult called Ordo Templi Orientis and began to speak the truth of its dysfuntional leaders and internal problem, I wasn’t exactly stunned when people I’d never even known began to attack me personally. Threatening emails, random phone calls in the middle of the night, and even efforts to get me fired…
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Confession of an Occult Cultist
Abstract The author’s decade-long experience in a cult ostensibly devoted to the practice of the individual will and the liberty of the individual produced a state of cognitive dissonance in him which forced his departure in the late 1990s. The rationale for remaining despite abusive treatment from superiors coupled with his eventual decision to leave…
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Cult Mentality
So, the website of Marco Visconti–a cult survivor who got out of Ordo Templi Orientis–is under a denial-of-service attack after his most recent revelation. This is an organization that claims to promote the freedom of man. The upside to this is that, whoever is doing this, will eventually experience cognitive dissonance–a feeling of malaise that…
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Cults and Psyche
Perhaps one of the best ways I can think of to describe a cult is that the cult demands the individual abandon his identity and self-preservation in order to accommodate the in-group. This sort of behavior is unnatural and damaging to the psyche. If and when the natural desire to preserve the individual psyche kicks…