By Actaeon
This is in response to Former Member: The Way International Biblical Ministry Was Rife With Sexual Excesses Just Like Other Cults – where the author writes, “the real agenda was to propagate sexual acts we would ordinarily find abhorrent”
This post, and the one immediately preceding it, L. Ron Hubbard, Keith Raniere & Jeffrey Epstein Compared are remarkable for their Puritanism.
In fact, much of the criticism on this blog seems to be obsessed with sexual misconduct. It’s bizarre.
What are the “abhorrent” sex acts in this article?
“Flirty” behavior.
Being “touchy-feely”.
Hinted-at marital infidelity – seems to be the most serious accusation.
That’s all? This is supposed to be abhorrent sexual acts? Damn. I was disappointed.
Yeah, a married person shouldn’t be flirty with other people. And, yes, it’s hypocritical for a person who claims to be chaste for Jesus to be screwing around. But really, that’s all you got? I was hoping for something juicer!
Jesus cults, like cults in general, make me want to puke. But it’s the money-grabbing, the lies, the obsessive behavior and mob belief in stupid principles that get to me. Not that the leader is having sex. Sex is neither immoral or illegal. Fraud is both. Cults are primarily frauds.
The post immediately preceding this one, regarding Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, is as Puritanical as this one. Scientology, in my opinion, is a gigantic fraud, hostile and isolating, that takes gullible people’s money and sucks them in and won’t let them go. I think it’s illegitimate from top to bottom. But I couldn’t care less about L. Ron having had courier girls dressed in shorts and go-go boots. Nor do I care that he drank to excess or took amphetamines. If he wanted to blow out his liver, it was his liver to ruin. I say go for it, L. Ron.
Sometimes I get the impression that the gold standard around here is to be a teetotaling virgin.
I have long loathed Keith Raniere, I’m glad he was finally caught and convicted and I hope he rots in prison. Not because he had sex with various women and had one of them buy BDSM stuff online but because he was running a scam. Nxivm was not a legitimate business. He was defrauding people. He also was evidently having sex with underage girls, which is both immoral and illegal. He was blackmailing people with the so-called collateral, and that is also both immoral and illegal. But the threesomes, his stable of (adult) women… it may have been seedy and gross but it’s not illegal.
As for Jeffrey Epstein, who is prominent in these pages, he was an old rich guy who liked young women. Distasteful, yes, but hardly difficult to understand. He was rich and wanted sweet young things, they were sweet young things who were attracted by a rich and powerful man. Where the merely distasteful crossed into the illegal was Epstein messing around with jailbait. Some of these girls were underage. That’s illegal, as it should be.
But a lot of the news coverage I see about Epstein condemns him for his taste in young women and confuses this with criminal behavior. Women who are adults. Young adults, but adults nevertheless. There’s a good deal of hypocrisy in this condemnation. And irritating Puritanism. Sex is not dirty. Sex is not something to be ashamed of. This is not Victorian England.
Actaeon…….
Every action has a consequence, either good, bad or indifferent.
Actions affect ones physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual well being.
You are free, so far, to choose how you behave, what morals you live by, as am I.
Fortunately, during my time in the Way, I never compromised my core values. I did not recruit anyone, thank God, nor did I violate my personal standards.
Unlike the woman who was sold out to the Way, who went WOW, was Way Corps, married a Way believer, et., I never did probably because I refused to give up my career, throw caution to the wind and depend on the kindness of others.
I know what it is to be poor, have a quarter in my pocket and nothing more. Thus, early on, I found the cognitive dissonance hard to reconcile with what I saw or suspected.
She spent 17 years of her life, in the Way, investing everything. For her to be Way Corps she had to have taken every class offered.
I took PFAL at least 5 times in less than a year, the Acts class and they still owe $35 for Christian Family and Sex.
Frankly, I would like my money back, not the class, since I am not into porn and I have been told VP gets graphic and smutty.
I feel for anyone who gets swept up in any cult whether it be religious, ideological, political, self help, etc.
But let me tell you, the cognitive dissonance is so rampant in these groups it’s hard not to be fooled.
You would do better to concern yourself with your life and not ridicule others.
You make yourself look a fool.
Quite evident you wrote this just to be contrary and Frank published it for the same reason.
G,
I am starting to be of the opinion that Acteon is just a troll with a dry sense of humor.
You really need to reeducate yourself regarding Scientology, you have not skimmed the surface on their crimes. And you summarize as if you know.
Murder, child labor, forced abortions, lawsuits, family forced disconnection..just to name a MINUTE amount of the shit that Scientology is about. Their ace in the hole is their IRS church exemption, attained by threatening IRS personnel back in the day. If it wasn’t for that exemption, David Miscavige would be convicted like Keith Raniere.
Just as there is a lot of space between Adolph Hitler and Mother Teresa, there is also a lot of space between a teetotaler virgin and Raniere/Epstein/Hubbard. AND there can be disagreements in that middle space. For example, my opinion is that f*cking more than one person while married is immoral. It is also illegal if the person f*cking more than one person while married if the person is in the U.S. military. As usual, Actaeon offers an extreme view that simply doesn’t hold water.
Once again Acteon ignores the rape, sexual assault, and child molestion and focuses in on his outrage on the usual inevitable overreaction of society…..
And the by product being puritanism and as Acteon sees it the #metoo movement.
Yes Acteon…. Men should be able to set up cults to trap other men’s wives and daughters and sisters into being sexual concubines and sexual conquests…… (sarcasm)
Hey Acteon !!!!
Want to know how a woman probably feels after she’s been raped or how a child feels after they are molested?
Just take a broomstick, then break it in half and shove it up your ass.
Society always overreacts at times like these then it subsides.
Acteon,
You are outraged? Did you get raped or molested or have your life ruined?
If the answer is no…..then shut the fuck up!!!
You are a pseudo-intellectual douche bag.
You should be locked up along with Raniere and a bunch of Mexicans and get ass raped and fucked raw.
Then maybe you would be more sensitive to women and children you dumb fuck.
Puritanism that’s what you’re angry about? Society slightly overreacting for a short period of time.
Fuck you you dumb ass.
I am outrage that that’s what you are outraged about….
You should be out raged about all the suffering that women and children of been put through by all these assholes.
What’s the matter Acteon? Is your favorite escort services out of business?
Gotta say, Niceguy, you told him off nut good!
Bravo!
I’m responding to the information about Craig Martindale, the 2nd president of The Way International, who resigned/was dismissed after a second lawsuit for alleged sexual misconduct.
First, the photo above with the caption about Martindale under it, is not a photo of Martindale. It is a photo of Victor Paul Wierwille, the founder of The Way International.
In my view, based on my seventeen years of experience in The Way and on research I’ve done since, The Way was fraudulent primarily because Wierwille, the founder, asserted two things. 1) He claimed God told him He would teach him The Word like it had not been known since the first century if he would teach it to others. “The Word” is a phrase Wierwille used to refer to the Bible. In my view, that claim to special revelation from God was bogus (fraudulent). It was bogus, because the New Testament, the contents of half the Bible, (the Bible is what Wierwille meant by The Word), was not established until AFTER the first century. It evolved between 250-300 A. D. So, if God really had spoken those words to Wierwille, either God forgot those facts, or Wierwille was playing fast and loose with them.
The second reason The Way was fraudulent, in my opinion, is that Wierwille plagiarized the work of others and passed it off as his original work. For instance, his book, “Receiving the Holy Spirit Today” is a very close reproduction of a book by J.E. Stiles titled, “The Gift of the Holy Spirit.” You can do an online search for more examples and you’ll find them.
I have published a memoir of my experiences in The Way. I show how I was recruited and how Wierwille used psychological manipulation to gain and keep followers. My book is a very personal story of how Wierwille personally trained me, and how Martindale eventually betrayed me. These topics and more are in my book titled, Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International. It’s available in paperback and eBook at major booksellers. Read about it at https://charleneedge.com.
I personally like how his gross sexual activity can and does play in to people’s perception of him. Especially the Judge and Jury. He’s disgusting. It’s not illegal, but being the pig that he is, and for his illegal behavior, I hope he rots in prison for the rest of his days, which I still maintain will be short. Once sentenced and the full weight of his grim future sets in, he’ll off himself.
I took G’s piece about The Way to be criticizing the group for its hypocrisy – holding out one standard, and operating by another, particularly at the leadership level. And, G is apparently still a believer of sorts, and have their right to their opinions about a group that lured them based on false pretenses.
I’d agree that there is the taint of a sort of Puritanism in a lot of the coverage of NXIVM, Raniere and Epstein – but it’s widespread in the media.
Anony – Are you saying that G is similar to Barbara Bouchey? In that she still sees good in her cult but criticizes the bad?
No, I’m saying that if G. is criticizing her cult because it didn’t live up to puritanical standards, then we should give that some respect because it is presumably what they promised (or at least implied), and that is and apparently still is her worldview. There is no apologism or hypocrisy on her part.
NOOOO! I am not like Barb.
I detest the fact the Way still exists, that off shoots abound teaching the same falsehoods and using women as mere sexual chattel.
As for my belief, they did not kill that.
I believe in the Judeo Christian God yet am more a deist.
Geez, you guys just want to be contentious.
Actaeon:
You are right that Raniere’s behavior with consenting adult women, as abhorrent as it was, was not in and of itself illegal.
And even the dim-witted Allison Mack knew that she was the equivalent of a Mormon sister wife.
Raniere’s behavior veered off into the illegal with the brandings, the blackmail and the pedophilia.
As for Mr. Epstein there is reason to believe that he was involved in blackmailing people particularly the girls but also the businessmen and politicians found in his little black book.
That’s how a poor kid from Brooklyn amassed a 550 million dollar fortune.
And Epstein and his Gal Pal Ghislane Maxwell might have been working for an intelligence agency.
As for L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology scam, there is reason to believe that Hubbard’s group collected blackmail information on his members, many of whom were celebrities.
Scientology subjects its members to primitive lie detector tests to elicit embarassing facts about their private lievs.
And everyone can be blackmailed.
And in his private business dealings Hubbard swindled the famous rocket scientist/ cultist Jack Parsons in a boat deal.
“Soon afterwards, Parsons, Hubbard and Sara agreed to set up a business partnership, “Allied Enterprises”, in which they invested nearly their entire savings—the vast majority contributed by Parsons. The plan was for Hubbard and Sara to buy yachts in Miami and sail them to the West Coast to sell for a profit. Hubbard had a different idea; he wrote to the U.S. Navy requesting permission to leave the country “to visit Central & South America & China” for the purposes of “collecting writing material”—in other words, undertaking a world cruise.[100] Aleister Crowley strongly criticized Parsons’s actions, writing: “Suspect Ron playing confidence trick—Jack Parsons weak fool—obvious victim prowling swindlers.” Parsons attempted to recover his money by obtaining an injunction to prevent Hubbard and Sara leaving the country or disposing of the remnants of his assets.[101] They attempted to sail anyway but were forced back to port by a storm. A week later, Allied Enterprises was dissolved. Parsons received only a $2,900 promissory note from Hubbard and returned home “shattered”. He had to sell his mansion to developers soon afterwards to recoup his losses.[102]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard#Occult_involvement_in_Pasadena
“And even the dim-witted”
And you are well placed to use that wording? you are the biggest idiot around here.
“And you are well placed to use that wording? you are the biggest idiot around here.”
Anonymous:
You act so offended by my comment.
It’s as if you were personally offended by my calling Allison Mack “dim-witted.”
I do apologize to dim-witted people everywhere by comparing them to a sadistic monster like Allison Mack.
Most dim-witted people are not deliberately cruel and mean like Allison Mack is.
I thought this was entertaining and hard to disagree with.