SOURCE
https://thewisesloth.com/2012/09/02/15-signs-your-church-is-a-cult/


1. Mandatory, regular attendance

Mind control techniques and hypnosis don’t last forever. Perpetual manipulation requires perpetual renewal. That’s why Coca~Cola won’t let you turn around without seeing a Coca~Cola billboard. Of course, no cult could send their followers to basic training every single week for a full re-indoctrination, but they don’t have to; all they need is one hour a week for refresher training.

2. Big, fancy, majestic buildings

A Catholic once told me that the reason Catholic churches are so majestic is because it helped illiterate peasants understand the majesty of the Lord. Even if that were the intention (which I’m sure it wasn’t), the reality is that churches are artistic masterpieces meticulously designed to overwhelm the senses and make the viewer feel euphoric and humbled. Just standing in an empty cathedral can put you in a trance state.

If you’re surrounded by images of people who made bigger sacrifices than you to the in-group and were justly rewarded then you’ll feel pressure to conform with their ideology without anyone having to say a word to you. Also, your instinctively going to transfer your awe and respect for the building to the building’s owner or spokesperson.

3. Hierarchical leadership

Every cult has a hierarchical leadership structure because the point of having a cult is to have followers who will revere the leaders and give them all their money. Cult leaders get people to follow them by claiming to be envoys of God. Every church does this.

Many churches won’t allow you to officially join until you undergo a ritual that symbolically changes you from a member of the lost, miserable outsiders into a saved, superior member of the in-crowd. But you’ll only be allowed to be a follower at the servile end of the pyramid shaped authority structure. The only way to become a leader is to either start your own cult or work your way up the ranks. This stacks the ranks with true believers who will defend the leader and give his social authority legitimacy.

4. Charismatic leaders

The biggest red flag you might be involved with a cult is if the organization revolves around a professional charismatic leader. When you go to church you’ll sit down and listen to a charismatic marketer give a 45 minute infomercial. Even if everyone from the preacher to the congregation have the best intentions the end result is the same. Poor people are swindled out of their money, and the charismatic leader gets to live like a demigod surrounded by obedient followers.

5. Trance stimulation

When you enter your ornate church on Sunday morning, one of the first things that’s going to happen is you’re going to sing hymns with the congregation. The majestic music, combined with the majestic building and the thrill of performing an action in unison with other members of the in-crowd will work you into a trance state that will make you susceptible to hypnosis. If you’re singing about being willfully obedient then you’re just hypnotizing yourself, and you’re hypnotizing the people standing around you listening to you sing about the virtue of willful obedience, servitude, sacrifice and faith. Even if that’s not the intent, that’s the outcome. Even if you don’t know it’s happening, it’s happening. Even if everyone was forewarned and knew it was happening it would still work on some of the participants.

6. Repetitive drills and consequences for nonconformity

In addition to singing, a good cult would require its victims to perform rote physical drills like marching, dancing, kneeling or clapping. The moment you participate in a drill you’re being obedient. You didn’t just kneel or march or clap. You followed an order without thinking about it, and the more you do that the more likely you are to do it again. Eventually the charismatic leader won’t be asking you to do calisthenics. He’ll be asking for money or a favor. What’s more interesting than that though. If you can get a group of people used to following your orders and acting in unison you can eventually give the whole group an order, and they’ll act in unison. That would give you the power to tell a group of people to go build a house or go burn a house down.

7. Separating the in-crowd from the non believers

It’s common practice for cults to tell their recruits that the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who are inside the group and those who are outside the group. The people inside the group are always saved and admirable. The people outside the group are always lost, unworthy and detestable.

If you believe this, then you’ll base your identity on your affiliation with the group, and you won’t want to spend time with people whose clearer perception of reality could endanger your faith in the group.

8. The call to action is to entrench yourself in the group and base your life on its doctrine.

Church can be a lot of fun, and you can experience a lot of genuine moments of happiness with the people you love, but the Sunday morning agenda always centers around the sermon. The point of the sermon is to deliver a message, and the message is that you need to base your self-worth on your membership in the group and demonstrate obedience to the group’s ideology. You’re told this will bring you closer to God. Mostly it brings you closer to the group and the offering plate.

9. The charismatic leader manipulates your emotions

Charismatic leaders will try to mesmerize you with the way they dress and talk. They guilt trip you. They make impossible promises and horrific threats. They get the crowd worked up into a vulnerable, irrational frenzy right before they deliver an ultimatum.

10. You’re pressured to take your commitment to the next level

The point of every cult service is to build up to the moment where the charismatic leader makes a call to action. The call for action is to either give money, take your commitment to the cult to the next level, humiliate yourself or at least honor those who do. This is brazen manipulation, and it works. Creepy cults leaders know that, and quaint suburban pastors know that.

11. You’re encouraged to confess, humiliate yourself and mimic others

If a cult leader can convince his flock that he has more spiritual authority than them and they are unworthy in the eyes of God, then his control over them is almost guaranteed, Then the followers will have total trust in their leader when he tells them that the only path to salvation is to do whatever the cult asks of them.

The more guilty a cult leader can make their followers feel, the more righteous it will make them look. When followers confess and fall to their knees in front of others, it makes the experience more real for the confessor and the audience.

12. You’re asked for money, and your worth is tied to the amount of money you give

Most church leaders don’t expect every member of the congregation to devote their lives to the church like a hard core cult. Many preachers are happy if they can just get everyone to put money in the collection plate every week. That’s as unethical as selling people fake lottery tickets.

If anyone asks you for money…they probably just want your money. If they demand money from you and threaten you and your family for not paying up, then you’re can be even more sure they just want your money. If the person asking you for money is wearing a suit that cost more money than what you’re wearing…then don’t give that person any more money.

13. Socializing with the in crowd

The most effective way to control the minds of a group of followers would be to lock them in an isolated compound together where the charismatic leader could control every aspect of their lives like the military does to its members. In suburbia that’s just not possible. So the trick is to keep your in-group together as much as possible and get them to willfully ostracize themselves from the rest of society as much as possible.

I’m not saying that if you hang out with your bowling buddies when you’re not bowling then that means you’re forming a cult. But when a charismatic leader organizes constant events that keep his donors together…you can predict the outcome.

14. Using self-study, indoctrination techniques and policing your peers in your own time

The amount of Coca~Cola advertisements you’ve seen in your life attests to how quickly the effects of manipulation can fade and thus how important it is to constantly top-up your message in your victim’s short term memory. One way television commercials do this is by getting a jingle stuck in your head. If you walk around all day repeating the advertiser’s custom-designed message in your head then you’re doing the advertiser’s job of reminding you of the message.

Churches tell you to read the Bible constantly and to fill your house with Biblical themed merchandise. If they can get you to eat, sleep and breath church doctrine then you’ll become your own snake oil salesman. Then you’ll do the charismatic leader’s job of manipulating you for him. If you police your peers, then you’ll practically force people to keep giving the cult money and obedience.

15. Recruitment

Cults need a constant stream of new victims in order to finance the charismatic leader’s lifestyle. So…if you run into an organization that is constantly having recruitment drives to get people to come listen to an infomercial where they’re asked to give money at the end…don’t go there. You know what’s going to happen, and it only ends well for the charismatic leader…assuming he doesn’t get too drunk on power and do something crazy.

SOURCE http://theleavingbethelproject..co.uk/2011/04/mind-control-and-manipulation.html


Your journey into this circus could well begin the minute you run into an evangelical Christian. Depending what level of evangelical (congregational to preacher/pastor) you will be confronted with the first seed that will be sown into your subconscious. That seed is “You have sinned and are separated from God”. For most of us that is going to mean Jack Shit to youat that time, but whether you like it or not, that seed is in there and at a certain moment in the future, it will start to grow roots in your mind. That is along with the other seeds of “You are going to hell unless you accept Jesus into your heart” and “You must repent of your sins”.

The moment you are drawn into the circus of faith will happen the moment the shit hits the fan in your life. It could be a divorce, a life threatening illness, the loss of a job or business, extreme poverty or hardship and you will find yourself drawn to the “sowers” of the seed. If you are unfortunate to have friends who are evangelicals, their continuous attempts to convert you will speed up the process. I now fully understand this when my late Mother in Law hit me every single time with her “gospel” and it was this and the fear of being locked in a police cell for the night that were the driving force behind my conversion to this cult.

To be fair to my first church, a very “traditional” Pentecostal church organ driven hymns and choruses (aka hypnotic mantras), it was a very laid back place. However; my late mother in law was being drawn by the bright lights of the charismatic form of Pentecostal. She was now teaching me the prosperity gospel and was very influential in my voyage into the worlds of healing and deliverance aka exorcism. The more I got into this world, the more confident in my “charisma” I became. All the talk of “I am the head not the tail” and “No weapon formed against me will prosper” I was beginning to feel invincible. The trouble was that I was being programmed to be a good “soldier of the Lord” and a bloody brutal one too.

My second church is where the real programming began. From the beginning I was exposed to “repetition”. Scriptures, choruses, declarations are spoken or sang and you soon find yourself deeper and deeper into this make believe world of the Pentecostal Christian. I did some strange shit in this church...going on prophetic prayer walks all over the town which included standing outside "significant" locations and just blurting out senseless stuff that at the time sounded really spiritual. I must of been feckin nuts!

In my fourth and final church, the emphasis was on the worship...I mean lots of it!!! Oh yes there was a hell of a lot of indoctrination however: what is strange about this is that the indoctrination just did not really work on the people. I have now put it down to the fact that most of them were from my first church where they had all been there for 20 years or so and being subject to a far more "laid back" version of Pentecostalism, something I now look back on as being pretty innocent. These people did not get the whole "SUBMIT" programming. Maybe there perception of church life was too ingrained into the "turn up when I feel like and give what I feel like). In this respect the pastor of my first chruch was a bit of a success despite being a bit of a control freak.

Those at the top want to make sure that you stay where you are and these preachers/pastors begin to indoctrinate you into the “fear of the Lord”. This evil process put you into the place where as much as you want to see God as this all loving deity, at the back of your mind there is that fear that if you walk away from him you will be destroyed by him.

Here is a list of the thing I have heard from the pulpit to keep you in check:

“If you walk away from the man whom God has put over you, you will lose your destiny and have to answer to Jesus for it”

“If you leave for ****** you will be out of the will of God and everything in your life will fail”

“God has put you here to serve the vision that God has given me, your purpose is to serve that vision and reap the blessing of serving your leader. You can’t afford to leave”

“Silas left Paul and he must have failed, he vanished, he forfeited his destiny. So the blessing went to Mark. He inherited the glory that was meant for Silas, but Silas left his leader”

That last statement leads you into the next dark tactic they use to keep you in check…Do not go against your leaders.

“If you disagree with your leaders, you are telling God that he does not know what he is doing”

“I have known people go against the pastor of a church a die the day after”

“Touch not the Lord’s anointed”

Then there are those hypnotic choruses and the endless mantras coming from the worship leaders and prophets to:

“Let go and Let God”

“If you want more of Jesus you need to die to self”

“I surrender all”

“Lord I give you my life”

“Fill me with your Spirit; possess me with your presence”

“Less of me and more of you”

The list goes on and now after years and years of this brainwashing and manipulation you are now a fully conditioned soldier for Jesus…well the leadership. They want your complete compliance. They cleverly equate obedience to the pastor on the same par as obeying God and if you disobey or question you are punished by exclusion are be labeled as “rebellious”

Not happy with all that, they want your money. That can become easy when you have conditioned followers whom you just have to click your fingers to get an offering but this takes time and I have been in two churches where every bloody meeting there was “offering messages” where we went about “encouraging” the people to give God (my arse!) their money and convincing them that this is a spiritual thing and you will be better off. After many years there are people who are still in the same old pit but they still give, because they have been programmed to and they dare not question.

The “holy ghost” experiences you will experience are all in the mind and they have been brought on by firstly impression. You have seen others raise their hands and mutter out during times of worship “praise Jesus”, “glory to God” and “we love you Lord”. You are exposed to choruses. Always fast and very uplifting and positive and while you are bopping around, unbeknown to you; you are being induced into a state of hypnosis so eventually when the time is right you will have a religious experience. I will deal with the precise workings of this very important tool in their spell casting over you in another section, but all I can say is that it works and because you feel that you have seen and felt it, it is absolutely real.

What will break this spell for you is that at some point you will begin to see that something is just not right. It may be that you have been to many churches and the same issue persists, you can’t settle

To bring home what I have been advising you here are two extracts from the Leaving Bethel presentation which may explain this use of hypnosis and suggestion:

The Birth of Conversion

Conversion is a "nice" word for Brainwashing...and any study of brainwashing has to begin with a study of Christian revivalism in eighteenth century America. Apparently, Jonathan Edwards accidentally discovered the techniques during a religious crusade in 1735 in Northampton, Massachusetts. By inducing guilt and acute apprehension and by increasing the tension, the "sinners" attending his revival meetings would break down and completely submit. Technically, what Edwards was doing was creating conditions that wipe the brain slate clean so that the mind accepts new programming. He would tell those attending, "You're a sinner! You're destined for hell!"
As a result, one person committed suicide and another attempted suicide. And the neighbors of the suicidal converts related that they, too, were affected so deeply that, although they had found "eternal salvation", they were obsessed with a diabolical temptation to end their own lives.
Once a preacher, cult leader, manipulator or authority figure creates the brain phase to wipe the brain-slate clean, his subjects are wide open. New input, in the form of suggestion, can be substituted for their previous ideas. Because Edwards didn't turn his message positive until the end of the revival, many accepted the negative suggestions and acted, or desired to act, upon them.
Charles J. Finney was another Christian revivalist who used the same techniques four years later in mass religious conversions in New York. The techniques are still being used today by Christian revivalists, cults, human-potential training, some business rallies and the U.S. armed services.
Let me point out here that I don't think most revivalist preachers realize or know they are using brainwashing techniques. Edwards simply stumbled upon a technique that worked, and others copied it and have continued to copy it for over two hundred years. And the more sophisticated our knowledge and technology become, the more effective the conversion. I feel strongly that this is one of the major reasons for the increasing rise in Christian fundamentalism, especially the televised variety, while most of the orthodox religions are declining.

How Revivalist Preachers Work

SOURCE http://theleavingbethelproject..co.uk/2011/04/mind-control-and-manipulation.html

If you'd like to see a revivalist preacher at work, there are probably several in your city. Go to the church or tent early and sit in the rear, about three-quarters of the way back. Most likely repetitive music will be played while the people come in for the service. A repetitive beat, ideally ranging from 45 to 72 beats per minute (a rhythm close to the beat of a human heart), is very hypnotic and can generate an eyes-opens altered state of consciousness in a very high percentage of people. And, once you are in an alpha state, you are at least 25 items as suggestible as you would be in full beta consciousness. The music is probably the same for every service, or incorporates the same beat, and many of the people will go into an altered state almost immediately upon entering the sanctuary. Subconsciously, they recall their state of mind from previous services and respond according to the post-hypnotic programming.
Watch the people waiting for the service to begin. Many will exhibit external signs of trance -- body relaxation and slightly dilated eyes. Often, they begin swaying back and forth with their hands in the air while sitting in their chairs. Next, the assistant pastor will come out. He usually speaks with a "voice roll.“
A "voice roll" is a patterned, paced style used by hypnotists when inducing a trance. It is also used by many lawyers, several of whom are highly trained hypnotists, when they desire to entrench a point firmly in the minds of the jurors. A voice roll can sound as if the speaker were talking to the beat of a metronome or it may sound as though he were emphasizing every word in a monotonous, patterned style. The words will usually be delivered at the rate of 35 to 60 beats per minute, maximizing the hypnotic effect.
Now the assistant pastor begins the "build-up" process. He induces an altered state of consciousness and / or begins to generate the excitement and the expectations of the audience. Next, a group of young women in "sweet and pure" chiffon dresses might come out to sing a song. Gospel songs are great for building excitement and involvement. In the middle of the song, one of the girls might be "smitten by the spirit" and fall down or react as if possessed by the Holy Spirit. this very effectively increases the intensity in the room. At this point, hypnosis and conversion tactics are being mixed. And the result is the audience's attention span is now totally focused upon the communication while the environment becomes more exciting or tense.
Right about this time, when an eyes-open mass-induced alpha mental state has been achieved, they will usually pass the collection plate or basket. In the background, a 45-beat-per-minute voice roll from the assistant preacher might exhort, "Give to God ... Give to God ... Give to God ..." And the audience does give. God may not get the money, but his already wealthy representative will.

Source: FOR YOUR MIND, Persuasion & Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The Public Today by Dick Sutphen

Posted by Woody Woods aka darklight 1963 at 16:29 Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
75 comments:

Pat Dendy26 May 2013 at 22:58

My experiences within the "Church of God," a Pentecostal religion were extreme. It was a rural community in the deep south filled with mostly Baptist churches with a few Methodist churches dotting the landscape prior to the Pentecostal Church of God tent revivals in the mid to late 1930's. That timeline was provided by an aged aunt whose family converted from Baptist to Pentecostal when she was a child. The conversion was easily accomplished by hypnotic programming. My aunt continues to use hypnotic trance anchors. It was only through threat that this information was provided. At age 12 my parents at my father's family's urging attended a revival at their church and baby that was all she wrote. My family or origin was sucked in and we all went down the Pentecostal road. As time went on and I grew up, I abandoned the church because of the severe restrictions imposed upon the membership. I no longer wanted to dance the Pentecostal dance, sing the chosen repetitive songs, talk the unknown tongues or pass out after running myself in the ground with this anxiety filled set of circumstances, I wanted to share in the life that my friends were living. I wanted to wear clothing that was appropriate for the times, wear makeup, wear jewelry and listen to Rock'n'Roll music and dance the dances of the times. This was in 1965 and by 1966 I had taken a part-time job while in high school and had the liberty to forego the religious services. After high school I got married and never looked back at those times until 1996 when my father died. It was then that I was called back into the church but refused to return and at that point all hell broke loose within my own family, my family of choice. I am now alone, divorced with a restraining order against me filed by my daughter with wording that is in the manner of speech of my family of origin. Pentecostalism is only a part of the problem. The Baptists and the Methodists that had witnessed the break up of families and churches that Pentecostalism had caused took their revenge. There is one thing that has become totally clear from my experiences, all religion is programmed whether traditional or nontraditional, whether by hypnosis or early intervention into the life of children through training and with the accompanying ritualism. Yes, I can read the Bible, not just what the lessons the churches choose for me to learn and know. I can read all of the biblical insanities. According to biblical text, the Apostles were awaiting the return of Jesus almost 2,000 years ago and Christians today continue to await his return. That is extreme within itself. I did some reading on all of the world religions and find them mostly insane beliefs. It is damn near impossible to change ingrained, programmed beliefs. When examining Pentecostalism, I too must examine some of my other experiences within other churches and the mesmerizing affects and the ritualism that is standard in all religions.