#destructive cults

[amaliazeichnerin]

July 4, 2025 For quite some time, I researched destructive cults (for two fiction projects) and it's always a pleasure to see a cult finally get legally investigated.

"Twin Flames ‘Cult’ Under Fire from the Feds" (This is about the cult known as "Twin Flames Universe". There are also documentaries about this, one on Netflix)

The Netflix documentary:

Escaping Twin Flames (Miniserie 2023) ⭐ 6.7 | Dokumentarfilm, Biografie

58m | TV-MA

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Una McManus & John Cooper (edited by Anne Severance and Evelyn Bence) - Dealing With Destructive Cults - Zondervan - 1984

[queersatanic]

"first of all, i'm too smart, too savvy, and not enough of a LOSER to ever be in a cult. Secondly, you obviously don't understand how MLM works"

that meme is evergreen content but is inspired most immediately by the recent "Love Has Won" news.

It's, uh, real dark, so we're going to go ahead and post the article after the break. No content warning other than death and cults; the headline will basically do all the rest.

Mummified remains of Love Has Won cult leader found in group’s Colorado home

A woman who led a controversial Colorado religious group is dead and seven of her followers are under investigation after Saguache County sh

A woman who led a controversial Colorado religious group is dead and seven of her followers are under investigation after Saguache County sheriff’s deputies found the leader’s mummified body in a sleeping bag and wrapped in Christmas lights inside a home in Moffat.

Deputies discovered the body on Wednesday inside a home where followers of Love Has Won lived, according to court records. Investigators believe Amy Carlson’s followers had driven her body to Colorado from California, according to a Saguache County Sheriff’s Office arrest affidavit.

A follower told deputies the body belonged to Lia Carlson, and a Saguache County sheriff’s corporal wrote in the affidavit that, “Ms. Carlson is believed to be the leader of ‘Love Has Won’ and goes by the name ‘Mother God.'” It’s not known why the follower gave the name “Lia” to deputies.

Saguache County Coroner Tom Perrin confirmed he had received a body in connection with the investigation of the Love Has Won group but said he had not yet confirmed the identity.

Perrin said the body belonged to a middle-aged woman and it appeared she had been dead for awhile. “Must be a couple of weeks or more,” he said.

A follower posted a video message on Love Has Won’s Facebook page on Sunday to say that Amy Carlson “has ascended.”

Amy Carlson has been identified as Love Has Won’s leader in previous reports on the group, which some law enforcement officials have called a cult. Carlson, 45, was known as “Mother God” and “Mom” to the followers of Love Has Won, which made headlines in September when members, including Carlson, were forced to leave Hawaii under a police escort.

People whose family members have been involved in Love Has Won say Carlson led a cult and was abusive to her followers.

Seven people who were at the home where the body was discovered were arrested Wednesday for investigation of abuse of a corpse and child abuse, according to an arrest affidavit from the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office.

Two children were inside the home. A 13-year-old girl was placed in the care of the Saguache County Department of Social Services and a 2-year-old boy was returned to the custody of his father — a member who reported the death to authorities.

More in link above.

Some images for flavor.

Anyway, nobody here should read any of that stuff and come away with the idea, "I will never be like one of them."

As with Midsommar, the lesson is not that "stupid" or "crazy" people fall into these sorts of things. The appeals work on nearly anyone who is at a place of emotional need like that, and it's not solely Christian, or "religious", or "spiritual", or anything you would recognize as shaping you that way until you're so deep into it, you rely on it for a thousand different things you don't think you could do without.

[candicewright]

@daemoninfluff do you really want me to go off about Scientology on main?

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon’s ultimate truth is ... absolute obedience

Allen Tate Wood, author, lecturer and consultant on the cult phenomenon.

Interview with Allen Tate Wood at North Texas State University in the mid 1980s.

Hello, I’m Tom Waldren and with me today I have Allen Tate Wood, former chief political officer and former state leader of the Unification Church, commonly known as the Moonies. He has been working to inform the public about the dangers of destructive cults since 1975. Some of the public has probably forgotten about Sun Myung Moon.

Tom Waldren: Was this training center type approach, was that Moon, or was that something that grew out of everybody?

Allen Tate Wood: I’d say it’s both. I’d say it comes out of Moon, out of his experience, out of his understanding of the world, out of his understanding of his own life. It also grows out of the teaching, which is essentially dualistic. It gives you a psychology [with an] adversary. For instance those of us who are inside a cult group, we are the chosen people, we are the special people, we are the remnant of God. We are the ones that God has placed his trust and faith in. Anybody who is outside of our group who is critical, they are the adversaries and they are the enemy. So Moon, like other demagogues and dictators before him, has become very adept at identifying an external enemy. For Hitler it was the Jews and the communists. For Mr Moon, it’s the communists and/or anybody who is opposed to his movement. Once you have that adversary setup then it’s much easier to control and manipulate people.

I think that when one goes inside the cult group one is initiated into its rituals, its teaching, its experience, its language, its world-view and that becomes fixed and absolute. Anything which serves that image or that picture, or those goals, is defined as good. By definition anything which is critical of it, is satanic and wrong. So the person who goes into that system has entered a kind of never-never land in which they don’t have access to alternative sources of information. You know this notion that we have [or used to have] in the United States, in our political system, of the loyal opposition. Inside totalist social systems, or destructive cults, you do not have any concept of a loyal opposition. There is total unity. It’s monolithic.

TW: Getting back to when we were talking about Moon being the messiah, and you are not being made aware of that until later on. You talked about an inner circle, or a protection from knowledge. Can you explain how that works.

ATW: Sure. I think that the Unification Church, and other totalist social systems, wind up participating in this mystique of this inner circle. Or this mystique of the, what I like to think of as the gnostic character of the organization. That word gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. And if you study the history of the Christian church you find that, in the period of early Christianity, there were many gnostic heresies. These splinter groups off of Christianity felt that they had special revelation. That God had spoken to them specially. They had a special connection to the truth. And the idea that is most apparent in gnostic groups is this idea that you can’t be saved, you can’t get to heaven, you can’t realize the purpose of your life unless you in contact with that special secret revelation. That idea is very prominent inside the Unification Church. Also this idea of the inner circle is manifest in the Unification Church in the sense that when you hit the borders of the Unification Church, you hit one level of understanding and knowledge. If you join the church and you go in for another year, you hit another level. If you are in for two or three years you hit another level.

It is like the skins [or layers] of an onion. It goes all the way and you get into the center and there is nothing inside. It is vacuous. It is empty. So an example of that would be, for me, meeting the Moonies and hearing on the surface of things that Moon was a pure virgin at the age of 40. That’s one story. After a year I hear he had an earlier wife. That’s another story. After sixteen months I hear that he’s actually had three wives. That is another story. So in effect the cult member who enters this system never really knows what the truth is. He or she always has the sense that the truth is just one level deeper into the organization. As I go deeper in, as I mount up the hierarchy, little bits of truth are dribbled down to me as a reward for performance and obedience. So in the end I’ll get in closer and closer to the circle and I’ll be hearing all kinds of dirty laundry, or facts about the organization that are unsavory. But in so far as I am participating in the mystique of the organization, I now hear that knowledge or that information as divine truth.

TW: When do you reach absolute knowledge? …

ATW: Yes, you are in contact with the truth, but you find out that actually there’s more. There are hidden teachings.

TW: So it is not absolute.

ATW: No, it is not. And your point here is wonderful, because it’s leading to a kind of transformation of terms. What happens at the first as you’re told you’re going to be initiated into the absolute truth. Further down the track all the terms change, and what you find out is, is that absolute truth is not knowledge. Absolute truth is total obedience. And that that is the path to the truth and understanding. So the highest knowledge is total obedience, with a suspension of the critical faculties, with the suspension of the imagination, with a suspension of the independent functions of the conscience. So one of the men who was a Unification Church trainer and leader up at Barrytown, at the Unification Church Seminary, at a place where they had 120 day training sessions from about ’75 to ’77, he said in a speech to the 120 trainees, he said many of you imagine that you can follow Master, that you can understand him, that you can follow him if you understand him. And what this guy said is, those of you who think in this way, Master cannot use you. Master wants the ones who are willing to follow even when they don’t understand it.

TW: But still have absolute knowledge. [laughs]

ATW: There is a contradiction there.

TW: Right, OK

ATW: The real disciple is the one who can follow even when he has no understanding.

TW: How did you feel about that? The whole hierarchy, the whole circles, it just seems to me to be a mass of contradictions. Why, if you have absolutely knowledge, absolute truth, did Moon put so much control over the individuals?

ATW: Well one of the things that the teaching embodies is this idea that the problem with the world has been man’s disobedience to God. And he uses a lot of Old Testament references to buttress that. He says, now the project of God’s dispensation at this time in history is to re-establish obedience. And the Unification Church is at the center of that dispensation, and our job is to find people who will begin to follow Mr Moon no matter what he does. Because throughout history men have been disobedient to God. Now at this time of restoration, men have to demonstrate total, absolute, obedience to God’s representative, Mr Moon. And there are lots of stories from the Old Testament that he uses to buttress that—the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Noah and his sons. He also uses the New Testament to buttress this idea.

But in the space of an interview, I don’t think I can make a plain to you. I think that really what is necessary is a lecture like the other night. The talk in which there is a systematic explanation—number one, of the variables that constitute a totalist social system, and number two, an exposition of the variables that are at play inside the training session. Those variables, all working together, produce a situation in which somebody leaves the world that you and I inhabit now, in which we believe in things like shooting from the hip, honesty, basic integrity, and you enter that magical world where the end justifies the means; where you have become one of the elect. You are not just a normal human being, but now you’re one of the chosen people, and you’re not just a servant of mankind, but you are one of the architects of history. And as such you have the right to lie, to cheat, to steal, to deceive, in order to accomplish the sacred mission.

TW: When was that clear? When did it become clear that that is what it came down to? I take it that’s what happened when you finally got into the inner circle. You realized this.

ATW: Yes, I began to accept the idea that it was our job to follow Mr Moon no matter where he went. In effect, since he was the messiah, he could not make a mistake.

TW: But then as you’re following, you see all the mistakes he’s making and the contradictions.

ATW: Yes, but you understand that what he’s doing is correct. And the story I would give to illustrate that is the story of Esau and Jacob. And this is the way Mr Moon explained to us how it was alright for us to deceive people either in recruiting or fundraising, and what Moon says is, take Esau and Jacob, the twin brothers in the Old Testament. Esau is the elder brother and Jacob is the younger brother. Esau’s out in the fields doing something. He comes home into the kitchen. There’s Jacob fixing some food. Esau says, ‘I’m hungry, give me some food’. Jacob says, ‘No I won’t’. Esau says, ‘Come on, I’m very hungry. Please give me some food’. Jacob says, ‘No’. Esau says, ‘Come on, give me some food’. Jacob says, ‘I’ll give it to you if you give me your birthright’. Esau, thinking it’s a joke, says, ‘Go ahead, you can have my birthright’. Later Jacob, the younger brother, puts lamb’s wool on his arms. He takes a special dish of food. He approaches his half-blind father, Isaac, and says, ‘Father, here I am, Esau your first son, please bless me’. Isaac says, ‘You don’t sound like Esau. You sound like Jacob.’ Then he touches Jacob’s arms which have lamb’s wool on them, and Esau was a hairy man. Isaac says, ‘Well, you must be Esau because you’ve got these hairy arms’. Then Isaac blesses Jacob. Jacob is very important in Old Testament history. He’s very important for Christians also. Jews pray, ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’. Out of Jacob come the twelve tribes of Israel, and ultimately Moses, King David, and Jesus. 

Who is Jacob? He’s a man who lied to his father and stole from his brother. 

Mr Moon says, I, inside the Unification Church, am the universal Jacob. Everyone who stands inside the church with me is Jacob. What’s our relationship to the outside world? They are Esau. Our job in relationship to Esau is to steal the birthright from him. Every single person inside the Unification Church exists on a different moral level than anybody on the outside. People on the inside have the right to cheat and to steal. Mr Moon says, in one of his speeches, ‘God lies’.

Note: The above text is a couple of extracts from an interview. It has been slightly edited for readability.

Sun Myung Moon: “Your unity is the measure of your love, and the source of your joy.”

The full interview, with links to the original videos, is HERE

Sun Myung Moon’s theology used to control members

[amaliazeichnerin]

Over the last couple of years, I watched some films with Hugh Jackman. Didn't know much about him. However, I won't watch his films anymore.

What changed my mind? A video by Rebecca Watson: "Inside Hugh Jackman's Weird Cult"

Btw, I researched cults for quite a while (for two novel projects and because of personal interest) and I cannot stand anyone in a position of power who supports any type of cult.

[amaliazeichnerin]

Two Disturbing AI trends I have recently seen discussed on Youtube

1. Some People form religious belief systems around AI, claiming for instance that the AI itself is a spiritual entity that can be worshipped or has helped them to become „awakend“ and such. This is not a joke. I guess it won’t take long until some new cult will found an AI church or something like that. If you think that's unrealistic, let me remind your that destructive cults are stranger than fiction.

Here are two videos discussing this topic:

by Vanessa Wingårdh („Developer exploring the dark side of tech“) and

by Taylor Lorenz, Tech Journalist

2. Some people use AI systems like ChatGPT as a substitute for psychotherapy. Yes, this is also not a joke.

Here is a video by an actual psychotherapist discussing this - and warning about it:

[lilyginnyblackv2]

Growing Up Quiverfull - The Duggar's Destructive Cult I honestly don’t even know how I eventually stumbled upon this on Youtube, but I did. It is about two years old now, but this is an absolutely fantastic interview. It really goes very in-depth on the Quiverfull Movement and Cult. It’s about an hour long, but I definitely recommend giving it a watch! Trigger Warnings: Mentions of child abuse (physical, mental, and sexual), though the large focus is more on physical and mental abuse, since the interviewee never experienced any sexual abuse. However, there is a moment in the interview when some very disturbing video footage is played on “how to discipline your child.” The video footage was used to show the type of “teachings” that take place during Quiverfull seminars.