The Alternative Thinking of the Children of the Cults

The effects of alternative thinking on the lives of young people has been one of the most extensive influences on my life as part of an end-time doomsday cult. One instance that came to mind this morning finally linked to the intensive research into my past to figure out exactly where I came from, fully what I was a part of, as steps of healing in my ongoing journey of de-programming and cult recovery.

There was a season in my young life as a second and third grader that, for whatever reason, I had to convince my classmates that I had supernatural abilities that I did not have. For many of the classmates, it simply did not work. But for one, it did work. It validated my "powers" and my "abilities".

One might consider this perfectly normal for the imagination of a small child in his first years of primary school. Imagine the kid pretending to be Superman, jumping off a small rock and "flying" all the way across the back yard. Or the small child on his tricycle, imagining he's zooming in and out of asteroids on a "star trek" through the neighborhood's church parking lot. Those are the imaginations at work - healthy and part of a brain's natural development.

In my environment, I was taught "not" to engage in "pretend" - or unrealistic imaginations on paper, like coloring the sky purple or the grass red. "pretending" was wrong - as wrong as reading fiction, or listening to different varieties of music. Adherance to realism was paramount. Pretending was to engage in a lie. And lying, after all, was a sin. My family took Armstrongism literally, and seriously.

Enter in the belief system that I had as a child, directly from all of my information sources. I was told I was in training to be God. I was told I would get my own planet. I was told this would happen in just a few years (I didn't quite grasp the fact that my parents were the ones to be converted into a spirtual superpower, and I had to remain on Earth because I was not baptized - this happened a little bit later.) Of course, I was also fully indoctrinated with the whole mother-load of Armstrongism dogma, including the Bible Story imagery from Basil Wolverton. Those who were a part of the cult, or take the time to study into it, can get a good grasp of what that contained.

The difference between the young child pretending on the street - and what my episode in elementary school was - is a matter of belief.

The young child playing superman understood the difference between "pretending" to be Superman, and the thought of actually becoming Superman. It was play, and pretend-time. Once the young child was done "pretending", the mind switched to the next event - peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a glass of milk before running out the door for a full afternoon of more playtime (in the summertime, of course).

The young me believed what he was told. He was going to be God. He was going to have powers and his own planet. He was excited that in a few years, he was going to be one of the pioneers of the Wonderful World Tomorrow. And in the next year or two, our going home from the Feast would be the last physical Feast we would ever experience. For me, this was not pretend. This was real life. It was going to happen. Herbert W. Armstrong said so. And what he said was reality.

I thought of myself as superior to the other children - a higher standard. I thought of myself as different and set apart. I had to set the example. I had to be as perfect as I could possibly be, because I did not want to make my parents, or God, mad at me.

I had spent decades wondering exactly why I acted in the way I did back in the second and the third grade. I attributed everything to an overactive imagination - a normal part of growing up. However, when you have an intentionally stifled imagination and a grounding from pretending - and then actual imagination turned into an alternative "reality" - then you've got a very messed up and abnormal psyche and way of developing as a child. Add on to that weekly meetings of fiction turned into an alternative reality - and again - you're just feeding the brain delusions.

This is one reason how the Church is responsible for the psychological harm and abuse of the children of the Church - from Herbert Armstrong to the ministry to the regular people to their children - weaving a wave of deception from the top down with pure goals of self-centered greed. The methods that Armstrongism used to infiltrate it's members with alternative facts - blatant misuse of mind conditioning and cult psychology to achieve an agenda - were criminal.

I know that those in Armstrongism will turn right around and say that that's what "the World" always does, with teaching about Santa and the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy. These things that we were taught were not fairy tale stories that you grew out of. These thngs that we were taught were not metaphors such as puppets and Sesame Street that teach a lesson and are understood as people grew older and could understand the concepts as an adult. These were beliefs that stuck with you and were reinforced week after week, and year after year. No child grows up to believe Santa is real, or that the Easter Bunny will hop around when you are 30. Those in Armstrongism built a whole religion on one man's fairy tale of becoming Gods and rulers in a universal real estate development program and ruling the whole agri-centric world based on a wholly racist and wholly physical interpretation of the plan of God - where people to this day still believe it, and mess up their children's lives to this day in the process.

Not only do I talk about this for my personal healing - but to show others how whacked and how deep of a con-job the whole mess was, and what it did to the psyche, the imagination, the centers of logic and reasoning, and the faith and belief of God himself. It is incumbent on those who were and have been a part of the entire scam to realize the depth of the deepness of the cancer of Armstrongism, that metastasized itself to delusional psychosis in the worldviews of so many.