Listening to the replay of Anderson Cooper on CNN. They just said Warren Jeffs has 79 WIVES.

[Tx4obama]

Only ONE legal wife.

And the majority of them are under age!

Time for America to draw a line between normal religions and CULTS.

Investigate all of them, and the ones that are CULTS should lose tax exempt status and all welfare payments.

Actually they should ALL lose tax exempt status unless the 'majority' of their donations are used for the poor, homeless and down-trodden. Too many mega churches are spending their money on HUGE buildings, TV airtime, and on overhead: salaries/benefits/expenses.

[Armstead]

1. Heck, I can't even find one

[Blue_Tires]

37. you and me both!!

[krispos42]

2. I think the combined ages of his wives is 79

Which would be great.. if he didn't have about 7 of them.

[Angry Dragon]

3. I feel that any church that says their god wants you to

believe in him/her should have to open all their records,
all their books, because a true god would not have anything to hide.

[Cerridwen]

4. Child abuse, child abandonment, welfare fraud, birth defects due to

"inbreeding", sexual assault, rape, incest, brainwashing, and I think, tax fraud. The flds has it all.

Did you know orrin hatch is aware of the flds, as are the politicians in Utah and Arizona and they do little to nothing about it?

Yet they're voted into office and turn a "blind eye" to the flds.

These are the people who "lead" our nation and write our laws.

[murielm99]

10. I don't know if you were posting at DU a few years ago,

when the authorities rounded up a group of women and children from the Yearning for Zion settlement. They were trying to get to the bottom of the Jeffs situation, how many women he was married to, how many children he had fathered.

The women were so brainwashed it was pathetic. But I was very surprised by the reaction of the DU community. Suddenly, I was getting arguments from people with 1000+ posts, but they were people I had never seen before. They did not seem to care one bit about sexual assault, rape of children, abuse, incest, tax fraud, or any of it. It was all about religious freedom, and how we were persecuting these poor people.

WTF? I argued with them anyway.

I don't care what any group, religious or otherwise, does, as long as it does not harm children, abuse women, or defraud the government. If they want to live out in the desert and be polygamous, fine. As long as everyone is of age and is exercising their own choice, it is not my business. But that is not the case here. Jeffs is evil. I hope he stays in prison for a long time.

[Cerridwen]

12. Oh, I was here.

"The Polygamy Diaries" - a decade of reporting and investigation

Infanticide, rape, physical abuse, child abandonment, incest, genetic deformities

[murielm99]

22. The one in your thread was tombstoned.

Not all of them were.

There are various types of sleepers and spinners here. When they come out of the woodwork, they could invent their own brand new dance craze.

[Cerridwen]

26. Yeah, only one. Many of the others have just left this board because of

the bullying and amazingly horrific things they saw posted here. Not just during the flds dust-up; but many other issues.

Many of the rest are still here.

[murielm99]

29. That is General Discussion.

People just don't know how to behave. They get too involved and invested in their own point of view. Most of them would never act that way in a face to face situation.

I have to take a break from it sometimes. But it is not worth it to be thin skinned.

And we know that there are people who come here only to disrupt this board. Some of them may be paid, but what difference does it make? They just want to cause trouble. I don't let them get to me.

DU is much, much better regulated than most discussion boards. I can think of a few I used to visit that are now uninhabitable. They did not even have anything to do with politics, but the right wing lunatics wrecked them by screaming about liberals, Clinton and Obama all the time. The topic could have been photography or golf, but they would find a way to yell about Democrats. Childish.

On the whole, I will take DU.

[Cerridwen]

31. Thick skinned people are the most compassionless people I've ever met.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks "bleeding heart", i.e. compassionate, is a bad thing. Looking around this country, we could use a lot more "bleeding hearts".

Because the US perversion of 'stoic' means people lose to compassion-less interests.

[pnwmom]

28. And at the end, they were minimizing the fact that "only"

a certain number of men had been convicted of child rape (I don't remember the exact number) even though these men had fathered a large fraction of the children in the community. There was good reason, as it turned out, for the authorities in Texas to investigate this cult, and to separate the children from their parents while they did so. It was the only way to get to the bottom of this and to bring those men to justice.

[NJCher]

35. I remember that

I don't know if you were posting at DU a few years ago,when the authorities rounded up a group of women and children ...

But I don't remember too many people coming out on their behalf. I don't read DU thoroughly, though, so you could be right.

There is nothing like the Mormon church to make me sick to my stomach. The Catholic Church is a close runner-up. What I particularly abhor are those TV shows like Sister Wives or whatever they're called. Actually, I've never watched one but the idea alone is repellent.

Religion: blech.


Cher

[Blue_Tires]

38. i remember that, too

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. The difference between a cult and a "normal religion" is social acceptance and political power

Look at the relative acceptance of (mainstream) Mormons since they gave up polygamy at the insistence of the US government as a condition of Utah statehood. Tell me that a religion based on a conman claiming to have discovered a secret testament inscribed on gold plates, that teaches that god is an alien from a distant planet called Kolob, and that you and your wife will get a planet all your very own to populate and rule over in the life to come ISN'T a cult. Or Scientology (which has tax exempt status). Yet the only real difference between these and Judaism, Christianity or Islam is that the latter three have been around much longer and thus have the respectability of age, and Christianity and Islam account for, probably, two billion plus adherents...and their legitimacy depends to a large degree on the legitimacy of Judaism whose tradition they are based on.

[pnwmom]

7. No, there's a difference you're forgetting about.

What makes a cult different from a "normal" religion is the degree of mind control involved, and the degree to which the adherents are kept isolated from the outside world. This is why both Scientology and Jeff's fundamentalist offshoot are cults, and the more conventional religions are not.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Not really, that tends to be directly related to acceptance by wider society

Christianity was the same until the declaration of Constantine. And Scientologists are no more "isolated from the outside world" than Orthodox Jews; is Orthodox Judaism a cult?

[Cerridwen]

11. Actually, scientologists are encouraged to break ties with anyone,

family, friends, co-workers, who do not believe the same as they.

They may interact in public, but their entire world-view is dependent upon only other scientologists. Anyone outside of scientology is considered not worthy of note or influence.

They are very...parochial in their approach to the wider world.

They are very insulated when it comes to their values system.

[pnwmom]

13. You're wrong about Scientology. They go to great lengths

to force their adherents to stay inside the cult, which you'd know if you'd studied it at all. Many of their former members have testified to this. They've kidnapped some members to keep them from leaving; one woman was held in Florida and died in captivity. They've also blackmailed people trying to leave the cult, with information they obtained during their sessions. And if a parent leaves, they're denied any contact with their children.

On the other hand, they have kicked other people out -- after years of low paid service -- with virtually no resources. I personally know an elderly woman who was kicked out after thirty years because she couldn't work for them anymore. She didn't have any Social Security because they don't pay into it. Fortunately, she still had relatives who loved her-- after all those years away -- and took her in.

There is nothing comparable to this in Orthodox Judaism.

This excerpt is from the New Yorker, but the claims made here are similar to those made by many other former Scientologists:

According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. “There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time,” Rathbun said, in the declaration. “We were required to do group confessions all day and all night.”

The church claims that such stories are false: “There is not, and never has been, any place of ‘confinement’ . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement.”

According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses “were not participants would have their marriages terminated.” The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart.

Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: “It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down.” Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver’s license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear.

SNIP

“The thing that was most troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape,” Rathbun told me. (A few nights after the musical-chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didn’t stop for thirty miles.) Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1U8ets57j

[indurancevile]

19. like the outside world is any more "normal".

[pnwmom]

27. Some of the practices of the Scientologists would be considered

criminal in the "normal" world. Practices like blackmailing, based on the information obtained in counseling sessions; and holding people against their will.

[indurancevile]

32. iow, the scientology world is just the same as the real world.

[pnwmom]

33. No. It's practices put it in the category of a "cult"

as opposed to a more mainstream religion that does not seek to control its adherents through brainwashing and force.

[trotsky]

34. "mainstream religion that does not seek to control its adherents through brainwashing and force"

Some would disagree about that.

[indurancevile]

40. real life = brainwashing

[NJCher]

36. ahem

I don't have any geezers molesting girls in my neighborhood and calling it God's will.

And I truly hope you don't, either.


Cher

[Modern_Matthew]

6. Polygamy is fine by me...if the brides are not doing it against their will. nt

[Tx4obama]

8. I agree.

I've been watching the series "Sister Wives" and all of those folks are consenting adults.
Those folks are much different than what's going on in 'cults' like the one that Warren Jeffs was the head of.
But I still think that the women on the 'Sister Wives' show must have been taking advantage of food stamps, etc in order to put food on the table and pay the bills (which I think is wrong) - at least before they got the extra income coming in from being on the show.

[Capitalocracy]

25. As long as we're not talking about underage folks...

which apparently we are, in this case. But he can call them whatever he wants, his wives, his harem, his whatever, he still just needs to go to jail for it if they're underage, and not if they're not.

[indurancevile]

14. I think it's great the networks found something to replace casey anthony now that we're entering

recession again.

it's good to keep people's minds of this stuff by filling them full of sex, murder, & pedophilia.

[Cerridwen]

15. I'm so happy women, girls and children are so unimportant to you.

How do *you* define liberal?

[indurancevile]

17. sorry, i don't play that stupid game.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[indurancevile]

20. got my rocks off? jeez. you may think you've called me on something but you are

clueless as to what game i am referring to.

[Cerridwen]

21. As I've proven time and time again. (edit)

In the 3-dimensional world, there are things happening outside your little on/off, black/white, right/wrong, world.

When you catch up, we'll talk.

Until then, women, girls, children and what happens to them, has a meaning in this three-dimensional world.

eta: I should edit to reflect your edit but your original post escapes my mind as it was so...pedestrian so I can't edit to address your edit as your first post was so...<deleted due to DU rule> <-------for all the hall monitors here.

[indurancevile]

23. further demonstration of the whoosh.

ps, you may have the last word but i won't be reading or responding to it.

[Cerridwen]

24. Well, bless your heart. n/t

[Name removed]

16. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MessiahRp]

30. Drop tax exempt status for ALL churches/religious institutions with one exception...

If they have a food pantry/distribution set up or a homeless shelter attached to their expenses and they offer their services WITHOUT proselytizing... then they qualify for exemptions. Otherwise there's no reason churches deserve any sort of tax exemption.

Rp

[Odin2005]

39. Religions are just cults accepted by society. They all suck.