February 12, 2025 • 51 mins
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In Part 2, "Trust Me, Bro," Seth Forrestier dives deeper into his journey of leaving the cult and the struggles that came with breaking free. He reflects on the impact of his past and shares where he stands now on religion, faith, and spirituality. This conversation is an honest look at rebuilding life after high-control groups.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for updates, and support the podcast on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee to help us continue sharing these important stories!
#thecultnextdoor #podcast #truecrime #cults #cultawareness #truecrimecommunity #crimepodcast #realstories #survivorstories #mindcontrol #darkhistory #cultlife #truecrimeaddict #psychologicalthriller #mystery #cultleaders #brainwashing #escapefromcults #unsolvedmysteries #spiritualabuse
In Part 2, "Trust Me, Bro," Seth Forrestier dives deeper into his journey of leaving the cult and the struggles that came with breaking free. He reflects on the impact of his past and shares where he stands now on religion, faith, and spirituality. This conversation is an honest look at rebuilding life after high-control groups.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for updates, and support the podcast on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee to help us continue sharing these important stories!
#thecultnextdoor #podcast #truecrime #cults #cultawareness #truecrimecommunity #crimepodcast #realstories #survivorstories #mindcontrol #darkhistory #cultlife #truecrimeaddict #psychologicalthriller #mystery #cultleaders #brainwashing #escapefromcults #unsolvedmysteries #spiritualabuse
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The last sermon that we got well we were members
of Belsie Chip was a headquarters sermon from Weston and
he literally said, why should we help the world now
when they're all going to burn.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
The world tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
The Worldwide Church of God presents Bert w.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Armstrong and I am here to bring you the truth.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No one else is telling you the things that God
is telling you through me.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
He's speaking through.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Me the Lord.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Let me experience what it is to be a new bride.
You know, I'm not worried about what I'm about to say,
though it may be graphic. We're coming to the Lord
and if you can take it. Beyond the veil is
the chamber. That's the wedding chamber. The Lord told me that.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cult Nextdoor podcast.
I am Maddie Lasser, as always, joined by my sister
Ashley Teeter. Before we get started with today's episode, I
want to remind everyone to follow us on our socials
so Facebook, Instagram, TikTok threads. Post a lot of good
stuff there, reels and other posts and things and announcements.
Also want to do our Double Portion Club shout outs.
(01:22):
Chase and Shanda Heather Bartlett and Carla thank you all
for supporting the podcast. Speaking of supporting the podcast, if
you would like to sign up on our Patreon, you
can get AD free episodes to all paid members. So
it's five bucks a month to support the podcast and
listen to AD free episodes, or you can upgrade it
to ten dollars a month get those AD free episodes
(01:44):
and the double portion club shout out. I will also
send you a holographic Cult Nextdoor sticker. I think we
posted that on our Instagram. I should probably do that
again to remind everyone. It's pretty cool. I have it
on my car, and other people put it on their
water bottle and computer and other stuff. It's pretty cool
little sticker of the door logo that we have. And
(02:04):
without further ado, let's listen to Ashley and Seth Part two.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I grew up doing a lot of work parties and stuff.
My mom would organize those. I joined up with loots
and groups to do work parties, all this kind of stuff.
I was very big into outreach.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That message was.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Unusually explicit, but it was the message that we had
always heard.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Yeah, we were never involved in our communities, at least
not in any of the organizations I was in Worldwide Living,
and it was we had the Joplin tornado, you know,
which just basically mowed through half of our city and
so many displaced people and just the wreckage of all
(02:57):
of that, and you know, I was no longer affiliated
with LCG at that point. I had since left, but
they had this big church building that they owned, and
I just was like, Okay, so you guys literally are
not opening that up for anybody or trying to get
resources to anyone. And I did ask someone about that,
(03:23):
and they said, you know, like they were taking care
of the brethren, and you know, any there were a
couple of members that were impacted and they took care
of them, and that was like their concern.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
During the big tornado they hit Mayfield, Kentucky, we were out,
we weren't living at the time, but the next morning
we had I think by noon the next day, we
had gathered about fifty thousand dollars at donations here and
(03:56):
we drove up chainsaws and generators and fuel and food
and all that kind of stuff. And lcg's response to that, now,
it took us less than twenty four hours to get
about fifty thousand dollars in donations. Lcg's response was to
go through their subscriber lists and send an email to
(04:19):
anyone on the subscriber list, and they offered them if
they were a subscriber, they would send them a check
for two hundred dollars. And that was their that was
their extent, and that only came after a lot of
people were asking like, hey, can we can we go
do something? That's That's one thing, you know, especially being
(04:42):
this podcast, I don't want I don't want anyone to
think that I'm putting all of this on the membership,
even that even the friends that left us and everything.
This is a structural problem and this is there. There
are still some one wonderful people wrapped up in the
(05:03):
middle of it. And I would go as far as
to say there are some wonderful people doing horrible themes. Well, the.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Doctrination starts with this is God's true church, right, so
as once you establish that foundation, there is no other path.
It's just this, and so then you you really have
no choice. If you believe that you have no choice,
(05:33):
then to fall in line and do what's expected. Otherwise
you know your eternal salvation is on the line, at
least you think it is, and so you trust the ministry,
you know, you just like trust that this God is
leading and it's all going to work out in the end,
(05:54):
because I've heard that a lot too. Like my dad
is like, well, we'll work it out in the Kingdom. Ah,
just like want to scream. I'm like, okay, so right
now you are gonna cut me off from everyone I
love and my solace. Like the thing I'm supposed to
hang on to is like someday in the Kingdom, if
(06:14):
I get to be there, like then we're gonna be family.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It really hurts me to see people that I still
very much like and love just trapped in this this
very nonsensical place. Yeah, I really really hope that more
(06:41):
people come out. And I don't have a podcast like
you do, but I do everything I can to lay
some bread crumbs out. And it's very difficult because you're
if you try to help someone out, you're fulfilling an
internal profit. See like yeah, yeah, And you know, there's
(07:05):
there's a few people that I'm working very hard on
right now, and.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
All I can do.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Is say, no, what if you read this unrelated story,
there's of all things you know like Animal Farm is
a good it's a good short read. You can just
see that, hey, who is kind of is interesting and
(07:33):
if you can if you can get those plots kind
of into your head where you can interchange names and characters.
I sent I sent someone last week. I just sent
her on the Armstrong website Armstrong Library.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I guess I just sent her a link.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
To about eight different articles where they say the opposite
thing back and forth, depending on you know, context.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
The it was.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
These were about the structure of government.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
And it's funny when the minister.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Is justifying why he left there's no organization in the Bible.
When other ministers are leaving his church, there's all the
organization in the Bible and back.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
The only thing I can the only thing that I
think I can help with is just to contemplate things
outside of the cult, just just to show that there
is a world outside of this really small bubble. It's
it's amazing what one layer outside of that.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Can do.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Is this will be a great, great story for a
short I had a big lifted Ford van, big twelve
passenger van, and I a hand painted sharp teeth on
the front of it, and I had on the rocker
down on the bottom of the van. I had a bomb,
(09:09):
a vinyl bomb for each one of my kids. We've
got six and we had lost two, so there's got
six big black bombs and two little red bombs, and
then we had Zaan.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So I just got this long.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Line bombs in all of the stuff through twenty one
and twenty two. When I'm getting in trouble for stuff,
the minister made me take all of that stuff off
the van. At the time, I had no idea why,
(09:46):
and he wouldn't explain why. And it was only till
after I was It was only after I was out
when I realized what was actually going on. And it
was literally just punishment. It is just it was just
trying to get me back into control. I see people
(10:08):
still in it who are being put through the same thing.
A good friend of mine was made He's a he
was a deacon, and his daughter and grand new son
in law had gone with this new church and they
(10:28):
were in town visiting and the pastor made him walk
his own granddaughter out of the building and he did it.
And I see things like that still happening, and that's
just it's the most despicable form of control. We have
(10:50):
all of these internal justifications for it, but there is
there is no valid justification for that. There's no good
reason to disassociate with your.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Granddaughter, like that's just that's just not a real thing.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
But it happens all the time. I think about, you know,
in the first season where you're talking about your dating life,
you know, and yeah, that same kind of thing just
happens to this day, and it's absolutely horrible.
Speaker 5 (11:26):
It is. And you know, one of the things that
you mentioned when you first reach out to me how
to do with financial and economic abuse, which we haven't
even touched on. But yeah, you made a really good Yeah,
you made a really good point that it's they are
basically perpetuating generational poverty.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yes, very much so. So obviously third generation.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
We grew up with first, second, and third tith, and
my family was a little bit out of the ordinary
that we didn't send third Tithe to headquarters. We actually
used it in the community, mostly the church community, but
(12:22):
a good bit outside as well. We had it for
we had a new member one time and Tabby and
I were in third tith year, so we went and
we took them to a store and we bought suits
for him. It was we just used it for that
sort of thing, or helping people get to the feast.
But I'd started a business right before I got married,
(12:44):
and you know, first year of business is you're never
going to get rich.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
We're pretty poor.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
And I think the second year of business was a
third tith year that was very difficult, and we got
into the habit of taking loans out to pay tithes
because that's, yeah, thirty is a lot of money, especially
(13:11):
you know at the time. I think that year we
probably made thirty or forty thousand dollars, Like, yeah, there's
just no extra, uh. Taby and I were for the
first two years we were married, we pretty regularly bought
groceries with change, like you know, the change jar on
(13:33):
the counter.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
We learned to.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Eat really really liked, and we regularly for years and
years and years had to take out basically capital loans
on the business just to have some money to pay tithes.
And that will destroy you, like, that will financially destroy you.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Because there's no.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
You take out alone when you have at least the hope,
if not the promise of income in the future, you know,
above and beyond that amount and we never did, like
as we wanted a family early on, so we have
a lot of mouths to feed and thirty of the
(14:26):
money just it doesn't work. And you know, early on
we were taught to tithe the gross and in my
adulthood I didn't do that, only tied tie's net. But
it was still that's still a lot, and it still hurts.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
And you just can't catch up.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I never can. We We were always in debt and
if if it weren't for a generosity of other people,
like we would have been bankrupt. Probably are fourth year
or fifth year into marriage, because there was just it
(15:07):
just wasn't possible. One of the one of the things
that Tabby talks about.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
My wife this we.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
You know, buying groceries with change and what we never
had napkins or paper towels or anything like that. We
didn't we didn't have snacks in the house or but
when we would go to a minister's house they had
paper towels.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
That that's a very very big deal to her.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
She gets very emotional thinking about the fact that they
had paper towels the whole time. You know, Armstrong had
gold plated silverware at the in Pasadena you know.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
There's private jet. I mean, like it's just those aren't
those aren't cheap. I don't know if you've if you've
looked into that.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
That's and then like every world leader, he's like handing
them a ten thousand dollars Stuben Crystal right, you know,
and that and and then there are people who don't
have electricity in order to pay for that.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And at the same time, while not helping, while the
minister class has you know, their two cars and their
paper towels and there their salary, they will go out
and they will have to go to counsel fathers to
(16:36):
leave their jobs before the feast.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And just trust God.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Like that's yep, that's bordering on criminal. That's a horrible
thing to go to go tell a father who has
children and mouse to feed that he should forego that
that responsibility and just hand that over.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
By by quitting his job.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
And people did that.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
People do it all the time.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
I have some very good friends, and this is not
quite to the same level. She was going to school
to be a nurse and her finals were on a
holy day or something, and she was being counseled to
just drop.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Everything for that.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Nursing schools not cheap. You've put years and years into
this and you're going to you're going to throw that away.
That's that is a horrible thing, and people do it
all the time. The the apocalysm and in the imminent
(18:02):
threat of the tribulation starting, we have had that used
on us to not get married and do not have
kids and to these are absolutely horrible things and they
have no theological justification whatsoever. You have to do some
(18:25):
serious gymnastics to make a scenario in which that's theologically sound.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Yeah, Ryan and I were literally just talking about this
last week that you know, Armstrong has been saying from
the very beginning of Worldwide Church of God that the
end is imminent, and how are they still believing that
all these years later. I remember RCG saying, sorry, RCM saying,
(18:57):
you know this is going to happen in my lifetime,
and he was an older man, and I was just like, oh,
my goodness, should we have a third child? You know,
it's just because woe to those who are with child.
So it is like amazing to me that, like you said,
the mental gymnastics that have to take place to somehow
(19:20):
justify that that now actually, now it's time, like.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, the toll that takes on people too. In LSCH
I'm trying to think of what year this would have been,
Probably about two thousand and three, two thousand and two,
two thousand and three, maybe four. Sometime around that time period,
they had a booklet, not a booklet, but the the
(19:52):
Bible Study Course. I'm very good friends with the man
that wrote.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It all mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
He had done some biblical prophecy calculations and he wrote
this lesson of the Bible Study Course that said Christ
was going to return in twenty seventeen, and the ministry
the headquarters sent a minister to summer camp and actually
(20:19):
gave a sermon about that. What at summer camp with
all the to all of the teams, Oh my gosh,
I don't have to explain on what that did to people,
that the terror, that that imposed.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
The terror because and also I always felt conflicted as
a child, because I felt guilty because I didn't want
the world to end just yet. You know, It's like, oh,
but I still I want to experience these things. But
then it's like, oh, you shouldn't want that.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, every every teenager in the building was like no,
I want to have sex and I.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Want to be a human. Yeah, it's just the but
that's abusive.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
It really is not wrapped my mind around the logic
of bringing that particular topic to summer camp, Like, that's it.
That's just a wild thing to do.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
Don't you think it has to do with just maintaining
the membership, you know, because I think that's what the
summer camps are for anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
It's just absolutely absolutely, It's just I kind of have
this wall in my head where it's hard for me
to imagine people being so cool.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Like I've read.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
History of the twentieth century. I know, I know people
are capable of cruelty, but it's it's so wild that
the majority of the cruelty comes from the most religious right,
in the name of God and in the name of peace,
and in the name of the future and the Kingdom
(22:15):
and the and and to claim that the constant claiming
that you're more loving than the rest of the world
because you're willing to watch them burn.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
You know that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
It's a very very just mind blowing thing. And like
we like we've been saying, the further away from it
you get, the more comical it looks.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
You know, I wonder if that summer camp experience, I mean,
did that what were the long term repercussions of that?
You know, did some of the those kids give up
on plans that they had for I make college and career.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I know some of them did. I don't know to
what extent, But.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
And again there's there, we are back to the maybe
they're not going to be in poverty, but it's still
you know, if you if you don't think there's a
reason to build a career doesn't have to be college,
but if you don't think there's a reason to like
build something, build your life, then you're gonna be without.
(23:33):
You're going to struggle economically.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
In my in my own position, you know, starting starting
a business. I'm and as I previously said, I took
the theology very very seriously.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I was.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I was a zealot and I still get when I
meet up with old people, old friends from way back
to after like I wouldn't expect you to not be there.
But I didn't want to be in a position this
is this is the level of my zealotry. I didn't
(24:14):
want to be in a position where I owed people
money at the at the second coming, you know. And
so I never took any business expansion loans out or anything.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I didn't. I didn't. I didn't stretch.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Myself at all. And it was specifically biologically based. And
so I don't know, I don't know to what extent
other people you know did or didn't do things because
of that, but I note that it's a sum greater
(24:56):
than zero mm hmm.
Speaker 5 (24:59):
And I don't think we always know why we are
doing every little thing that we do or every decision.
It's just so baked into everything about yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
So I mean, we know that stress has a very
very that health and generalist tied to stress.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
I mean that accounts for something.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
What is what is being stressed out as a teenager
do to you? What is being stressed out as a
child do to you? It can't be good, no, and
that I.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Mean, I don't know what your perception of God was,
but I was very afraid of God. So you know,
I always had these fears like if I don't pray
every day, like something bad is God is going to
allow something bad to happen to me or perpetrate something
(26:00):
bad upon me. I wonder if you you know, like
what your perception I was.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I didn't have that perception.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
There was a there was a church friend, an older
guy that I've known since I was born, and he
used to always get in trouble when I was a
kid because he'd start every prayer with howdy howdy Lord.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
That'd be way too afraid to do that. I mean,
this is this is going back. The reason I brought
this up is the stress. You know, I was under
a lot of stress all the time.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
That this guy was probably more influential to me than
than socially would be expected. But I had a very
familiar fatherly perception of God, so I didn't I didn't
perhaps have that stress, but I was because my family
(27:08):
and later on myself had been in trouble so many times.
I was in constant stress of being in trouble with
the organization.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Hmm. And I found the organization too not be merciful.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
There was no soft edge to any organizational discipline.
Speaker 5 (27:47):
Oh that was. That was.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
There's another thing with the the lack of right soft
edge or compassion or or caring concern. When when Tabby
and I were getting married, we got in a lot
of trouble because we didn't do the pre engagement counseling,
(28:13):
and that's that's just a wild subject in and of itself.
But we eventually we got married. We were told we
weren't supposed to, but we got married and our first pregnancy,
uh started kind of going bad. Tabby started bleeding one morning.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
And we.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
I grew up around around the ministry, and so you know,
everybody's got people that they're just more close to, and
so we called very close family friend who is an
elder and asked for annoying and he said, no, that
you have to go talk to your pastor. Well, the
(29:02):
pastor was the one that had been giving us literal hell.
And then we called a different family friend and he
also said, no.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You have to go to your pastor.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
We're kind of losing it at this point.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
And and that at.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That time, as many times later, they completely broke my will.
And we went to that pastor and got anointed, and
we were praised for you know, being repentant and doing
the right thing and all those things, and we still
(29:42):
lost that baby.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
You know that's uh, that that's that's there's two people
that I have that I that I haven't forgiven and
have no intentions of ever forgiving.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Right the two ministers that.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Said, no, that's you know, it's it's neither here nor
there now. But I don't I don't see any reason
to forgive that. That's that's something that just lacks humanity.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
I'm sure some people will listen to that and say, well,
you know, it was God's will that the baby didn't live.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
You can't blame him for that. But if.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Repentance is, you know, the most righteous thing you can do,
and following the government is the most righteous thing you
can do.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
And all I did all those.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Things and there was nothing to be gained for it.
So I am not religious anymore. The last two years
as we left CGI, I found too many things.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
My wife is.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Probably mainline Christian.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
As much as anyone is, but.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
I I can't do any of it anymore. I've found
too much, too much fault with it. And then the
more the more that I've read a lot of people
when they're when they're having a church trouble, let's say,
(31:44):
I've found this to be the case. A lot of
people read enough to contextualize their denomination or group and
then leave that group or whatever, But very.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Few people.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Continue turning rocks over past that level. And for me,
I'm a very curious person by nature and obsessive, so
I just kept looking at where concepts came from.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
And I have a.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Perhaps because of my background, I have a very strong
aversion to faith in general, because faith, in my estimation,
is nothing more than trust.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Me, bro, and I don't I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It would appear in my experience that everyone who says
trust me bro is out to get you.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
There's an ulterior motive underneath.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yes, yeah, And so that's that's that's been very different.
Speaker 5 (33:03):
What's that a crisis for you? I mean for me,
I wanted to believe, and so I thought, I've got
to go back down to the foundations. I just need
to prove that the Bible is the Word of God,
and then I can go from there and figure it out.
And then but then I couldn't. I couldn't prove that
(33:24):
I got the old church booklets. I desperately wanted to.
I wanted to read something and be like, okay, okay, good,
I can I can at least have that foundation. And
so it was a crisis for me for a while
to like really acknowledge this is not holding up none
of it is for me at least.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That was It was very painful.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Like I said earlier, I had a very familiar relationship
with God when I when I started studying the history
of canonization for end since, yes, that is a very
very hard thing to justify, and it's even harder to
(34:09):
try and justify that within the context of divine intervention
because you have to.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You have to put divine.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Blessing in the hands of so many enemies as canonization happens.
And then you have.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You have things you know I don't.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I don't want this to get too much into a
hating on religion, but you have things like the Book
of Job that have our entire understanding. The armstrong perception
of Satan is nothing without that book. And we don't
(34:53):
know who wrote that book. We don't know when, where who,
and and the church father who included it in the
cannon didn't know where it came from. I have a
problem with that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
That was a very hard thing to get used to.
I have a very strong sense of propriety and I
don't fake things. I don't role play or pretend or
anything like that.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
So not having.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Prayer is I'll give them the troll some food here,
but I miss prayer, I really do, but I can't pretend,
and I don't want to pretend, And so there's there's
(35:49):
definitely a good amount of crisis involved in leaving religion altogether.
One of the things that I found to be a
very common misconception. Though I'm not an atheist and I'm
not necessarily a humanist, but that doesn't mean that I'm
(36:16):
a hedonist or you know, I didn't go I didn't
go straight intoto, debauchery or anything. I find that there are,
for lack of a better term, there are intrinsic morals
to things.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
I agree with that. And you did you ever watch
the show with Ricky Gervais. I think it was The Afterlife.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yes, there was lots of clips of it.
Speaker 5 (36:46):
Yeah, I watched that. I loved it. But you know,
a coworker was like, well, if you don't believe in got,
in the Bible or in God, then why don't you
just go around raping and murdering as much as you
want to? And he's like I do. She's like, what
do you mean? I do rape and murder as much
as I want to, which is not at.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
All exactly yeah, there's I consider myself, you know, accurately
or not a pragmatist. Things have intrinsic value. And I
read a lot of Jordan Peterson as I was coming out.
It was very helpful because my family was falling apart
(37:26):
and it helped with a lot of things. And you know,
he wrote to consider yourself as a multiplicity. You now, you,
a day from now, you, a week from now, you
ten years from now, and do.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Things that benefit that whole community.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And you know, I don't rape and pillage because I
don't want to.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
It's not a good thing. Nothing good comes from it.
Speaker 5 (37:53):
But I think that is such a huge deception that
the churches per portray on people that this is where
you get your morality and without it, like you're just
gonna descend into absolute debauchery. And I have found the
opposite to be true, that my inherent goodness or which
(38:18):
is another concept, Yeah, which is another concept that's hard
to even grasp because we were told we were inherently bad.
So I've worked so hard to embrace like no, like
I I'm good inside, you know. But I feel like
that was only like highlighted or elevated in a sense
(38:39):
because whatever I do that maybe considered a good deed
or kindness, it's because I want to It is not
has nothing to do with like I'm storing treasures somewhere
that later I'm gonna get or I'm pleasing this entity.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Which it's just that the whole laying up treasures and
head and concept to me is really humorous because there
is nothing more hedonistic I know, right, It's like.
Speaker 5 (39:15):
It says, it's easier, you know, for a camel to
go through the eye of the needle than a rich
man enter the Kingdom of God. But we're all going
to be like mega like rich in the kingdom, right.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
That's the the dissonance there is really strong.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
I don't it was.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
It was a very big deal to not be religious anymore,
and it was definitely a crisis. Yeah, I think I'm
more or less through the cristage crisis stage. I'm pretty
pretty comfortable with my position currently, probably going to change
(40:01):
all the time.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
But now you have the room for that. I think
that's what the skin is.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Yes, And now I have a I have a desire
to put things in order. And one of my friends
in CGI I I tell him I want to go
back and give one sermon and basically, have you ever
watched the car show Top Gear. No, they have this
(40:30):
magnetic board, or they used to have this magnetic board,
and they'd write the car and the lap times on it,
and they would stack up all the lap times of
all the hypercars and everything, and how fast did you
go around the track. I want to do that, and
I've been trying to talk him into doing it. I
want to do the same thing with doctrines and ideas
(40:52):
and just have everyone write things that are important and
then take the sermon time for everyone to just bracket
every thing and start stacking them in word.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
And I have it. I want I do that in
my old life.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
And that's I don't feel like, obviously I'm mispraying, which
is a very strange thing to say. But I also
I don't want to be schizophrenic like we have. We
we literally have a diagnosis for when you make an
(41:31):
imaginary figure and converse with that imaginary figure, that's it's
not healthy, that it's something something breaks. But I don't
find myself to be like wandering in some depraved desert.
In my estimation, depraved people do depraved thingans regardless of
(41:57):
whether or not they're in an organization. Maybe a little
less if they're in an organization that punishes them. But
I don't know, I'm perfectly happy. I tend to lean
towards the reincarnation side. I have my own theory about
that that's worth you know, the paper that I would
(42:19):
write it on. We were taught, and I'm sure you
were to that outside of the truth is just I
don't know, nothing expands horror, terror, being lost, all that
kind and.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Leaving.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Definitely you experience those things, but that's not the that's
not the end. And I think the I think the
desert that you have to cross coming out is not
actually real. It's just that we were now ever taught
how to be human. And so it's not that there
(43:06):
is nothing outside of the church. Is that you know
nothing outside of the church.
Speaker 5 (43:12):
Oh yeah, and you're trained to be afraid of what's
out there.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Too, right, And so you know, for anyone who's listening
to this podcast, where this podcast is maybe just the
very slight edge of the Overton window, go read just
read anything you can get your hands on. Doesn't even
(43:38):
have to you know, you don't have to go read
books about colts. Just read about the world. It's a
big place. A lot of things have been tried, a
lot of things were tried and written down. If not
a it's not a horrible place.
Speaker 5 (43:54):
That's right. One thing that like was eye opening to me.
I think it was a world literature class that I
took one of my first couple of years of college,
like right after I got married, before I had kids.
But that was the first time I had ever really heard, oh,
(44:16):
there's a flood story in all of these different civilizations,
and you can see these parallels. And we did study
the Bible as literature and not in a religious you
know context, and that was really eye opening. It didn't
change me, It didn't change like what I did for
(44:39):
the next you know, ten years after that, but it
definitely shook something loose.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Mind.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
A very similar experience reading a recent translation of gilgamesh mm.
And then just to kind of wrap your mind around
the age of that because that that creates the Old Testament.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
By a lot. Yeah, and to realize.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
That, oh, wait, these concepts are kind of old.
Speaker 5 (45:14):
Have you read any of bart Erhman's work, like How
Jesus Became God?
Speaker 1 (45:19):
No, I've I've studied probably a lot of the literature
that he sources references, yes, from from another writer that
I frequent a lot of his videos. There's a very
interesting things out there about the history of the Judeo
(45:40):
Christian God, and it's the fascinating thing to me is
that it's not no history. There actually is a history
mm hmm, and it's rather detailed in a lot of places.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
Yeah. Yeah, that that was really eye opening for me.
That was one of the first book books I read.
I think when I was like really ready to dive
in and understand, and I was not quite as scared
to know or to learn something that might shake me,
because I think at first, you know, I uh, I
(46:15):
had a lot of fear, you know, just like I'm
afraid of what I'm going to find out. I'm afraid
if I read this and I'm not going to believe
what I've always believed. And it is like, you know,
you talk about the desert that you have to walk through,
and you're right, it's like a figment of our imagination
(46:36):
in a sense, it's not real, but that's that is
what it feels like, and you have to get through
that part of your journey to get to the other side.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
The reality is that the next door neighbor that you
don't know has a whole life. Yeah, like he's not
an NPC somewhere, right, That's right. And all you have
to do like that that that desert when you're when
(47:08):
you're leaving your church or your faith or whatever it is,
is literally only as long as the space from your
door to your neighbor's door. Now you can you can
zigzag that one hundred foot for twenty years if you want,
or you can just walk over there, say hi to
(47:32):
your neighbor, say hi, you know, my name is so
and so. Do you guys want to come over? That's it.
That's that's the length of that void, or the from
the church's perspective, from the administration's perspective, that's the thickness
(47:53):
of that buffer zone that keeps you in. It's very
very short, it's very thin. The space is your own ignorance,
not an actual thing.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
That's right. And I guess that would probably be your advice,
Like if you were going to leave listeners with anything, My.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Second to last sermon that I gave and ceed you,
I was that just go go meet people, walk across
the street, go meet your neighbors, go talk to them,
figure out who they are, learn some things about then
you can't be ignorant anymore once you cease being ignorant,
(48:34):
once you start learning.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Yeah, I mean it's a you know, one of my
favorite quotes. You know what travel does for a person
like it? Really it really broadens your view of the world,
and you just can't stay in the same narrow mindedness
(48:56):
after you after you go and you see how other
people live, and this in a sense is obviously closer
at your next door neighbor maybe, but it's the same concept, yep.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
And the upbringing.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I think the more academic listeners probably don't realize the
level at which we were taught that the world does
not exist outside that's right. Perhaps no one ever gave
a sermon and sat there's no world outside this, but
(49:31):
they might as well have that was nothing existing.
Speaker 5 (49:35):
Now I was gonna say that quote was Mark Twain.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Yeah, you can't. You can't avoid it, even even for people.
I doubt there's a lot of listeners who are you
still in churches?
Speaker 2 (49:49):
But if you know, if you're.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
One of those people, there's nothing healthier that I could recommend,
except for just go meet people. U join a local community. Yeah,
join the rotary club or something. Go go do something
that's not religious, and realize that there are people and
(50:14):
the people outside of the church also have consciences. They
have they have things that they fight, they have things
that they are good at, they have questions and concerns,
they have fears, they have they have hopes. They're not
all out, you know, having orgies every day.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
That's there's it. We were We were.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Taught such that black and white strong dichotomy that we're righteous,
everyone else is not. If you like this episode of
The Cult next Door, please leave us a positive review
and rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen,
and don't forget to subscribe to be notified of new episodes.
The last sermon that we got well we were members
of Belsie Chip was a headquarters sermon from Weston and
he literally said, why should we help the world now
when they're all going to burn.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
The world tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
The Worldwide Church of God presents Bert w.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Armstrong and I am here to bring you the truth.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No one else is telling you the things that God
is telling you through me.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
He's speaking through.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Me the Lord.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Let me experience what it is to be a new bride.
You know, I'm not worried about what I'm about to say,
though it may be graphic. We're coming to the Lord
and if you can take it. Beyond the veil is
the chamber. That's the wedding chamber. The Lord told me that.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cult Nextdoor podcast.
I am Maddie Lasser, as always, joined by my sister
Ashley Teeter. Before we get started with today's episode, I
want to remind everyone to follow us on our socials
so Facebook, Instagram, TikTok threads. Post a lot of good
stuff there, reels and other posts and things and announcements.
Also want to do our Double Portion Club shout outs.
(01:22):
Chase and Shanda Heather Bartlett and Carla thank you all
for supporting the podcast. Speaking of supporting the podcast, if
you would like to sign up on our Patreon, you
can get AD free episodes to all paid members. So
it's five bucks a month to support the podcast and
listen to AD free episodes, or you can upgrade it
to ten dollars a month get those AD free episodes
(01:44):
and the double portion club shout out. I will also
send you a holographic Cult Nextdoor sticker. I think we
posted that on our Instagram. I should probably do that
again to remind everyone. It's pretty cool. I have it
on my car, and other people put it on their
water bottle and computer and other stuff. It's pretty cool
little sticker of the door logo that we have. And
(02:04):
without further ado, let's listen to Ashley and Seth Part two.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I grew up doing a lot of work parties and stuff.
My mom would organize those. I joined up with loots
and groups to do work parties, all this kind of stuff.
I was very big into outreach.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That message was.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Unusually explicit, but it was the message that we had
always heard.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Yeah, we were never involved in our communities, at least
not in any of the organizations I was in Worldwide Living,
and it was we had the Joplin tornado, you know,
which just basically mowed through half of our city and
so many displaced people and just the wreckage of all
(02:57):
of that, and you know, I was no longer affiliated
with LCG at that point. I had since left, but
they had this big church building that they owned, and
I just was like, Okay, so you guys literally are
not opening that up for anybody or trying to get
resources to anyone. And I did ask someone about that,
(03:23):
and they said, you know, like they were taking care
of the brethren, and you know, any there were a
couple of members that were impacted and they took care
of them, and that was like their concern.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
During the big tornado they hit Mayfield, Kentucky, we were out,
we weren't living at the time, but the next morning
we had I think by noon the next day, we
had gathered about fifty thousand dollars at donations here and
(03:56):
we drove up chainsaws and generators and fuel and food
and all that kind of stuff. And lcg's response to that, now,
it took us less than twenty four hours to get
about fifty thousand dollars in donations. Lcg's response was to
go through their subscriber lists and send an email to
(04:19):
anyone on the subscriber list, and they offered them if
they were a subscriber, they would send them a check
for two hundred dollars. And that was their that was
their extent, and that only came after a lot of
people were asking like, hey, can we can we go
do something? That's That's one thing, you know, especially being
(04:42):
this podcast, I don't want I don't want anyone to
think that I'm putting all of this on the membership,
even that even the friends that left us and everything.
This is a structural problem and this is there. There
are still some one wonderful people wrapped up in the
(05:03):
middle of it. And I would go as far as
to say there are some wonderful people doing horrible themes. Well, the.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Doctrination starts with this is God's true church, right, so
as once you establish that foundation, there is no other path.
It's just this, and so then you you really have
no choice. If you believe that you have no choice,
(05:33):
then to fall in line and do what's expected. Otherwise
you know your eternal salvation is on the line, at
least you think it is, and so you trust the ministry,
you know, you just like trust that this God is
leading and it's all going to work out in the end,
(05:54):
because I've heard that a lot too. Like my dad
is like, well, we'll work it out in the Kingdom. Ah,
just like want to scream. I'm like, okay, so right
now you are gonna cut me off from everyone I
love and my solace. Like the thing I'm supposed to
hang on to is like someday in the Kingdom, if
(06:14):
I get to be there, like then we're gonna be family.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It really hurts me to see people that I still
very much like and love just trapped in this this
very nonsensical place. Yeah, I really really hope that more
(06:41):
people come out. And I don't have a podcast like
you do, but I do everything I can to lay
some bread crumbs out. And it's very difficult because you're
if you try to help someone out, you're fulfilling an
internal profit. See like yeah, yeah, And you know, there's
(07:05):
there's a few people that I'm working very hard on
right now, and.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
All I can do.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Is say, no, what if you read this unrelated story,
there's of all things you know like Animal Farm is
a good it's a good short read. You can just
see that, hey, who is kind of is interesting and
(07:33):
if you can if you can get those plots kind
of into your head where you can interchange names and characters.
I sent I sent someone last week. I just sent
her on the Armstrong website Armstrong Library.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I guess I just sent her a link.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
To about eight different articles where they say the opposite
thing back and forth, depending on you know, context.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
The it was.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
These were about the structure of government.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
And it's funny when the minister.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Is justifying why he left there's no organization in the Bible.
When other ministers are leaving his church, there's all the
organization in the Bible and back.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
The only thing I can the only thing that I
think I can help with is just to contemplate things
outside of the cult, just just to show that there
is a world outside of this really small bubble. It's
it's amazing what one layer outside of that.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Can do.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Is this will be a great, great story for a
short I had a big lifted Ford van, big twelve
passenger van, and I a hand painted sharp teeth on
the front of it, and I had on the rocker
down on the bottom of the van. I had a bomb,
(09:09):
a vinyl bomb for each one of my kids. We've
got six and we had lost two, so there's got
six big black bombs and two little red bombs, and
then we had Zaan.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So I just got this long.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Line bombs in all of the stuff through twenty one
and twenty two. When I'm getting in trouble for stuff,
the minister made me take all of that stuff off
the van. At the time, I had no idea why,
(09:46):
and he wouldn't explain why. And it was only till
after I was It was only after I was out
when I realized what was actually going on. And it
was literally just punishment. It is just it was just
trying to get me back into control. I see people
(10:08):
still in it who are being put through the same thing.
A good friend of mine was made He's a he
was a deacon, and his daughter and grand new son
in law had gone with this new church and they
(10:28):
were in town visiting and the pastor made him walk
his own granddaughter out of the building and he did it.
And I see things like that still happening, and that's
just it's the most despicable form of control. We have
(10:50):
all of these internal justifications for it, but there is
there is no valid justification for that. There's no good
reason to disassociate with your.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Granddaughter, like that's just that's just not a real thing.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
But it happens all the time. I think about, you know,
in the first season where you're talking about your dating life,
you know, and yeah, that same kind of thing just
happens to this day, and it's absolutely horrible.
Speaker 5 (11:26):
It is. And you know, one of the things that
you mentioned when you first reach out to me how
to do with financial and economic abuse, which we haven't
even touched on. But yeah, you made a really good Yeah,
you made a really good point that it's they are
basically perpetuating generational poverty.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yes, very much so. So obviously third generation.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
We grew up with first, second, and third tith, and
my family was a little bit out of the ordinary
that we didn't send third Tithe to headquarters. We actually
used it in the community, mostly the church community, but
(12:22):
a good bit outside as well. We had it for
we had a new member one time and Tabby and
I were in third tith year, so we went and
we took them to a store and we bought suits
for him. It was we just used it for that
sort of thing, or helping people get to the feast.
But I'd started a business right before I got married,
(12:44):
and you know, first year of business is you're never
going to get rich.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
We're pretty poor.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
And I think the second year of business was a
third tith year that was very difficult, and we got
into the habit of taking loans out to pay tithes
because that's, yeah, thirty is a lot of money, especially
(13:11):
you know at the time. I think that year we
probably made thirty or forty thousand dollars, Like, yeah, there's
just no extra, uh. Taby and I were for the
first two years we were married, we pretty regularly bought
groceries with change, like you know, the change jar on
(13:33):
the counter.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
We learned to.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Eat really really liked, and we regularly for years and
years and years had to take out basically capital loans
on the business just to have some money to pay tithes.
And that will destroy you, like, that will financially destroy you.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Because there's no.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
You take out alone when you have at least the hope,
if not the promise of income in the future, you know,
above and beyond that amount and we never did, like
as we wanted a family early on, so we have
a lot of mouths to feed and thirty of the
(14:26):
money just it doesn't work. And you know, early on
we were taught to tithe the gross and in my
adulthood I didn't do that, only tied tie's net. But
it was still that's still a lot, and it still hurts.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
And you just can't catch up.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I never can. We We were always in debt and
if if it weren't for a generosity of other people,
like we would have been bankrupt. Probably are fourth year
or fifth year into marriage, because there was just it
(15:07):
just wasn't possible. One of the one of the things
that Tabby talks about.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
My wife this we.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
You know, buying groceries with change and what we never
had napkins or paper towels or anything like that. We
didn't we didn't have snacks in the house or but
when we would go to a minister's house they had
paper towels.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
That that's a very very big deal to her.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
She gets very emotional thinking about the fact that they
had paper towels the whole time. You know, Armstrong had
gold plated silverware at the in Pasadena you know.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
There's private jet. I mean, like it's just those aren't
those aren't cheap. I don't know if you've if you've
looked into that.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
That's and then like every world leader, he's like handing
them a ten thousand dollars Stuben Crystal right, you know,
and that and and then there are people who don't
have electricity in order to pay for that.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And at the same time, while not helping, while the
minister class has you know, their two cars and their
paper towels and there their salary, they will go out
and they will have to go to counsel fathers to
(16:36):
leave their jobs before the feast.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And just trust God.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Like that's yep, that's bordering on criminal. That's a horrible
thing to go to go tell a father who has
children and mouse to feed that he should forego that
that responsibility and just hand that over.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
By by quitting his job.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
And people did that.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
People do it all the time.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
I have some very good friends, and this is not
quite to the same level. She was going to school
to be a nurse and her finals were on a
holy day or something, and she was being counseled to
just drop.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Everything for that.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Nursing schools not cheap. You've put years and years into
this and you're going to you're going to throw that away.
That's that is a horrible thing, and people do it
all the time. The the apocalysm and in the imminent
(18:02):
threat of the tribulation starting, we have had that used
on us to not get married and do not have
kids and to these are absolutely horrible things and they
have no theological justification whatsoever. You have to do some
(18:25):
serious gymnastics to make a scenario in which that's theologically sound.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Yeah, Ryan and I were literally just talking about this
last week that you know, Armstrong has been saying from
the very beginning of Worldwide Church of God that the
end is imminent, and how are they still believing that
all these years later. I remember RCG saying, sorry, RCM saying,
(18:57):
you know this is going to happen in my lifetime,
and he was an older man, and I was just like, oh,
my goodness, should we have a third child? You know,
it's just because woe to those who are with child.
So it is like amazing to me that, like you said,
the mental gymnastics that have to take place to somehow
(19:20):
justify that that now actually, now it's time, like.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, the toll that takes on people too. In LSCH
I'm trying to think of what year this would have been,
Probably about two thousand and three, two thousand and two,
two thousand and three, maybe four. Sometime around that time period,
they had a booklet, not a booklet, but the the
(19:52):
Bible Study Course. I'm very good friends with the man
that wrote.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It all mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
He had done some biblical prophecy calculations and he wrote
this lesson of the Bible Study Course that said Christ
was going to return in twenty seventeen, and the ministry
the headquarters sent a minister to summer camp and actually
(20:19):
gave a sermon about that. What at summer camp with
all the to all of the teams, Oh my gosh,
I don't have to explain on what that did to people,
that the terror, that that imposed.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
The terror because and also I always felt conflicted as
a child, because I felt guilty because I didn't want
the world to end just yet. You know, It's like, oh,
but I still I want to experience these things. But
then it's like, oh, you shouldn't want that.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, every every teenager in the building was like no,
I want to have sex and I.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Want to be a human. Yeah, it's just the but
that's abusive.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
It really is not wrapped my mind around the logic
of bringing that particular topic to summer camp, Like, that's it.
That's just a wild thing to do.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
Don't you think it has to do with just maintaining
the membership, you know, because I think that's what the
summer camps are for anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
It's just absolutely absolutely, It's just I kind of have
this wall in my head where it's hard for me
to imagine people being so cool.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Like I've read.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
History of the twentieth century. I know, I know people
are capable of cruelty, but it's it's so wild that
the majority of the cruelty comes from the most religious right,
in the name of God and in the name of peace,
and in the name of the future and the Kingdom
(22:15):
and the and and to claim that the constant claiming
that you're more loving than the rest of the world
because you're willing to watch them burn.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
You know that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
It's a very very just mind blowing thing. And like
we like we've been saying, the further away from it
you get, the more comical it looks.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
You know, I wonder if that summer camp experience, I mean,
did that what were the long term repercussions of that?
You know, did some of the those kids give up
on plans that they had for I make college and career.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I know some of them did. I don't know to
what extent, But.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
And again there's there, we are back to the maybe
they're not going to be in poverty, but it's still
you know, if you if you don't think there's a
reason to build a career doesn't have to be college,
but if you don't think there's a reason to like
build something, build your life, then you're gonna be without.
(23:33):
You're going to struggle economically.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
In my in my own position, you know, starting starting
a business. I'm and as I previously said, I took
the theology very very seriously.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I was.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I was a zealot and I still get when I
meet up with old people, old friends from way back
to after like I wouldn't expect you to not be there.
But I didn't want to be in a position this
is this is the level of my zealotry. I didn't
(24:14):
want to be in a position where I owed people
money at the at the second coming, you know. And
so I never took any business expansion loans out or anything.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I didn't. I didn't. I didn't stretch.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Myself at all. And it was specifically biologically based. And
so I don't know, I don't know to what extent
other people you know did or didn't do things because
of that, but I note that it's a sum greater
(24:56):
than zero mm hmm.
Speaker 5 (24:59):
And I don't think we always know why we are
doing every little thing that we do or every decision.
It's just so baked into everything about yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
So I mean, we know that stress has a very
very that health and generalist tied to stress.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
I mean that accounts for something.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
What is what is being stressed out as a teenager
do to you? What is being stressed out as a
child do to you? It can't be good, no, and
that I.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Mean, I don't know what your perception of God was,
but I was very afraid of God. So you know,
I always had these fears like if I don't pray
every day, like something bad is God is going to
allow something bad to happen to me or perpetrate something
(26:00):
bad upon me. I wonder if you you know, like
what your perception I was.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I didn't have that perception.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
There was a there was a church friend, an older
guy that I've known since I was born, and he
used to always get in trouble when I was a
kid because he'd start every prayer with howdy howdy Lord.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
That'd be way too afraid to do that. I mean,
this is this is going back. The reason I brought
this up is the stress. You know, I was under
a lot of stress all the time.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
That this guy was probably more influential to me than
than socially would be expected. But I had a very
familiar fatherly perception of God, so I didn't I didn't
perhaps have that stress, but I was because my family
(27:08):
and later on myself had been in trouble so many times.
I was in constant stress of being in trouble with
the organization.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Hmm. And I found the organization too not be merciful.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
There was no soft edge to any organizational discipline.
Speaker 5 (27:47):
Oh that was. That was.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
There's another thing with the the lack of right soft
edge or compassion or or caring concern. When when Tabby
and I were getting married, we got in a lot
of trouble because we didn't do the pre engagement counseling,
(28:13):
and that's that's just a wild subject in and of itself.
But we eventually we got married. We were told we
weren't supposed to, but we got married and our first pregnancy,
uh started kind of going bad. Tabby started bleeding one morning.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
And we.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
I grew up around around the ministry, and so you know,
everybody's got people that they're just more close to, and
so we called very close family friend who is an
elder and asked for annoying and he said, no, that
you have to go talk to your pastor. Well, the
(29:02):
pastor was the one that had been giving us literal hell.
And then we called a different family friend and he
also said, no.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You have to go to your pastor.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
We're kind of losing it at this point.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
And and that at.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That time, as many times later, they completely broke my will.
And we went to that pastor and got anointed, and
we were praised for you know, being repentant and doing
the right thing and all those things, and we still
(29:42):
lost that baby.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
You know that's uh, that that's that's there's two people
that I have that I that I haven't forgiven and
have no intentions of ever forgiving.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Right the two ministers that.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Said, no, that's you know, it's it's neither here nor
there now. But I don't I don't see any reason
to forgive that. That's that's something that just lacks humanity.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
I'm sure some people will listen to that and say, well,
you know, it was God's will that the baby didn't live.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
You can't blame him for that. But if.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Repentance is, you know, the most righteous thing you can do,
and following the government is the most righteous thing you
can do.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
And all I did all those.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Things and there was nothing to be gained for it.
So I am not religious anymore. The last two years
as we left CGI, I found too many things.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
My wife is.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Probably mainline Christian.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
As much as anyone is, but.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
I I can't do any of it anymore. I've found
too much, too much fault with it. And then the
more the more that I've read a lot of people
when they're when they're having a church trouble, let's say,
(31:44):
I've found this to be the case. A lot of
people read enough to contextualize their denomination or group and
then leave that group or whatever, But very.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Few people.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Continue turning rocks over past that level. And for me,
I'm a very curious person by nature and obsessive, so
I just kept looking at where concepts came from.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
And I have a.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Perhaps because of my background, I have a very strong
aversion to faith in general, because faith, in my estimation,
is nothing more than trust.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Me, bro, and I don't I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It would appear in my experience that everyone who says
trust me bro is out to get you.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
There's an ulterior motive underneath.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yes, yeah, And so that's that's that's been very different.
Speaker 5 (33:03):
What's that a crisis for you? I mean for me,
I wanted to believe, and so I thought, I've got
to go back down to the foundations. I just need
to prove that the Bible is the Word of God,
and then I can go from there and figure it out.
And then but then I couldn't. I couldn't prove that
(33:24):
I got the old church booklets. I desperately wanted to.
I wanted to read something and be like, okay, okay, good,
I can I can at least have that foundation. And
so it was a crisis for me for a while
to like really acknowledge this is not holding up none
of it is for me at least.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That was It was very painful.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Like I said earlier, I had a very familiar relationship
with God when I when I started studying the history
of canonization for end since, yes, that is a very
very hard thing to justify, and it's even harder to
(34:09):
try and justify that within the context of divine intervention
because you have to.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You have to put divine.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Blessing in the hands of so many enemies as canonization happens.
And then you have.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You have things you know I don't.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I don't want this to get too much into a
hating on religion, but you have things like the Book
of Job that have our entire understanding. The armstrong perception
of Satan is nothing without that book. And we don't
(34:53):
know who wrote that book. We don't know when, where who,
and and the church father who included it in the
cannon didn't know where it came from. I have a
problem with that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
That was a very hard thing to get used to.
I have a very strong sense of propriety and I
don't fake things. I don't role play or pretend or
anything like that.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
So not having.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Prayer is I'll give them the troll some food here,
but I miss prayer, I really do, but I can't pretend,
and I don't want to pretend, And so there's there's
(35:49):
definitely a good amount of crisis involved in leaving religion altogether.
One of the things that I found to be a
very common misconception. Though I'm not an atheist and I'm
not necessarily a humanist, but that doesn't mean that I'm
(36:16):
a hedonist or you know, I didn't go I didn't
go straight intoto, debauchery or anything. I find that there are,
for lack of a better term, there are intrinsic morals
to things.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
I agree with that. And you did you ever watch
the show with Ricky Gervais. I think it was The Afterlife.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yes, there was lots of clips of it.
Speaker 5 (36:46):
Yeah, I watched that. I loved it. But you know,
a coworker was like, well, if you don't believe in got,
in the Bible or in God, then why don't you
just go around raping and murdering as much as you
want to? And he's like I do. She's like, what
do you mean? I do rape and murder as much
as I want to, which is not at.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
All exactly yeah, there's I consider myself, you know, accurately
or not a pragmatist. Things have intrinsic value. And I
read a lot of Jordan Peterson as I was coming out.
It was very helpful because my family was falling apart
(37:26):
and it helped with a lot of things. And you know,
he wrote to consider yourself as a multiplicity. You now, you,
a day from now, you, a week from now, you
ten years from now, and do.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Things that benefit that whole community.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And you know, I don't rape and pillage because I
don't want to.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
It's not a good thing. Nothing good comes from it.
Speaker 5 (37:53):
But I think that is such a huge deception that
the churches per portray on people that this is where
you get your morality and without it, like you're just
gonna descend into absolute debauchery. And I have found the
opposite to be true, that my inherent goodness or which
(38:18):
is another concept, Yeah, which is another concept that's hard
to even grasp because we were told we were inherently bad.
So I've worked so hard to embrace like no, like
I I'm good inside, you know. But I feel like
that was only like highlighted or elevated in a sense
(38:39):
because whatever I do that maybe considered a good deed
or kindness, it's because I want to It is not
has nothing to do with like I'm storing treasures somewhere
that later I'm gonna get or I'm pleasing this entity.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Which it's just that the whole laying up treasures and
head and concept to me is really humorous because there
is nothing more hedonistic I know, right, It's like.
Speaker 5 (39:15):
It says, it's easier, you know, for a camel to
go through the eye of the needle than a rich
man enter the Kingdom of God. But we're all going
to be like mega like rich in the kingdom, right.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
That's the the dissonance there is really strong.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
I don't it was.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
It was a very big deal to not be religious anymore,
and it was definitely a crisis. Yeah, I think I'm
more or less through the cristage crisis stage. I'm pretty
pretty comfortable with my position currently, probably going to change
(40:01):
all the time.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
But now you have the room for that. I think
that's what the skin is.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Yes, And now I have a I have a desire
to put things in order. And one of my friends
in CGI I I tell him I want to go
back and give one sermon and basically, have you ever
watched the car show Top Gear. No, they have this
(40:30):
magnetic board, or they used to have this magnetic board,
and they'd write the car and the lap times on it,
and they would stack up all the lap times of
all the hypercars and everything, and how fast did you
go around the track. I want to do that, and
I've been trying to talk him into doing it. I
want to do the same thing with doctrines and ideas
(40:52):
and just have everyone write things that are important and
then take the sermon time for everyone to just bracket
every thing and start stacking them in word.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
And I have it. I want I do that in
my old life.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
And that's I don't feel like, obviously I'm mispraying, which
is a very strange thing to say. But I also
I don't want to be schizophrenic like we have. We
we literally have a diagnosis for when you make an
(41:31):
imaginary figure and converse with that imaginary figure, that's it's
not healthy, that it's something something breaks. But I don't
find myself to be like wandering in some depraved desert.
In my estimation, depraved people do depraved thingans regardless of
(41:57):
whether or not they're in an organization. Maybe a little
less if they're in an organization that punishes them. But
I don't know, I'm perfectly happy. I tend to lean
towards the reincarnation side. I have my own theory about
that that's worth you know, the paper that I would
(42:19):
write it on. We were taught, and I'm sure you
were to that outside of the truth is just I
don't know, nothing expands horror, terror, being lost, all that
kind and.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Leaving.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Definitely you experience those things, but that's not the that's
not the end. And I think the I think the
desert that you have to cross coming out is not
actually real. It's just that we were now ever taught
how to be human. And so it's not that there
(43:06):
is nothing outside of the church. Is that you know
nothing outside of the church.
Speaker 5 (43:12):
Oh yeah, and you're trained to be afraid of what's
out there.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Too, right, And so you know, for anyone who's listening
to this podcast, where this podcast is maybe just the
very slight edge of the Overton window, go read just
read anything you can get your hands on. Doesn't even
(43:38):
have to you know, you don't have to go read
books about colts. Just read about the world. It's a
big place. A lot of things have been tried, a
lot of things were tried and written down. If not
a it's not a horrible place.
Speaker 5 (43:54):
That's right. One thing that like was eye opening to me.
I think it was a world literature class that I
took one of my first couple of years of college,
like right after I got married, before I had kids.
But that was the first time I had ever really heard, oh,
(44:16):
there's a flood story in all of these different civilizations,
and you can see these parallels. And we did study
the Bible as literature and not in a religious you
know context, and that was really eye opening. It didn't
change me, It didn't change like what I did for
(44:39):
the next you know, ten years after that, but it
definitely shook something loose.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Mind.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
A very similar experience reading a recent translation of gilgamesh mm.
And then just to kind of wrap your mind around
the age of that because that that creates the Old Testament.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
By a lot. Yeah, and to realize.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
That, oh, wait, these concepts are kind of old.
Speaker 5 (45:14):
Have you read any of bart Erhman's work, like How
Jesus Became God?
Speaker 1 (45:19):
No, I've I've studied probably a lot of the literature
that he sources references, yes, from from another writer that
I frequent a lot of his videos. There's a very
interesting things out there about the history of the Judeo
(45:40):
Christian God, and it's the fascinating thing to me is
that it's not no history. There actually is a history
mm hmm, and it's rather detailed in a lot of places.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
Yeah. Yeah, that that was really eye opening for me.
That was one of the first book books I read.
I think when I was like really ready to dive
in and understand, and I was not quite as scared
to know or to learn something that might shake me,
because I think at first, you know, I uh, I
(46:15):
had a lot of fear, you know, just like I'm
afraid of what I'm going to find out. I'm afraid
if I read this and I'm not going to believe
what I've always believed. And it is like, you know,
you talk about the desert that you have to walk through,
and you're right, it's like a figment of our imagination
(46:36):
in a sense, it's not real, but that's that is
what it feels like, and you have to get through
that part of your journey to get to the other side.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
The reality is that the next door neighbor that you
don't know has a whole life. Yeah, like he's not
an NPC somewhere, right, That's right. And all you have
to do like that that that desert when you're when
(47:08):
you're leaving your church or your faith or whatever it is,
is literally only as long as the space from your
door to your neighbor's door. Now you can you can
zigzag that one hundred foot for twenty years if you want,
or you can just walk over there, say hi to
(47:32):
your neighbor, say hi, you know, my name is so
and so. Do you guys want to come over? That's it.
That's that's the length of that void, or the from
the church's perspective, from the administration's perspective, that's the thickness
(47:53):
of that buffer zone that keeps you in. It's very
very short, it's very thin. The space is your own ignorance,
not an actual thing.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
That's right. And I guess that would probably be your advice,
Like if you were going to leave listeners with anything, My.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Second to last sermon that I gave and ceed you,
I was that just go go meet people, walk across
the street, go meet your neighbors, go talk to them,
figure out who they are, learn some things about then
you can't be ignorant anymore once you cease being ignorant,
(48:34):
once you start learning.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Yeah, I mean it's a you know, one of my
favorite quotes. You know what travel does for a person
like it? Really it really broadens your view of the world,
and you just can't stay in the same narrow mindedness
(48:56):
after you after you go and you see how other
people live, and this in a sense is obviously closer
at your next door neighbor maybe, but it's the same concept, yep.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
And the upbringing.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I think the more academic listeners probably don't realize the
level at which we were taught that the world does
not exist outside that's right. Perhaps no one ever gave
a sermon and sat there's no world outside this, but
(49:31):
they might as well have that was nothing existing.
Speaker 5 (49:35):
Now I was gonna say that quote was Mark Twain.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Yeah, you can't. You can't avoid it, even even for people.
I doubt there's a lot of listeners who are you
still in churches?
Speaker 2 (49:49):
But if you know, if you're.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
One of those people, there's nothing healthier that I could recommend,
except for just go meet people. U join a local community. Yeah,
join the rotary club or something. Go go do something
that's not religious, and realize that there are people and
(50:14):
the people outside of the church also have consciences. They
have they have things that they fight, they have things
that they are good at, they have questions and concerns,
they have fears, they have they have hopes. They're not
all out, you know, having orgies every day.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
That's there's it. We were We were.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Taught such that black and white strong dichotomy that we're righteous,
everyone else is not. If you like this episode of
The Cult next Door, please leave us a positive review
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