When Did You Realize You Were Part Of A Cult?

children born into cults and left what was your oh moment when i read a book about our sect that told its actual history even though the leaders always said it was created in the time of jesus and passed down over the millennia in the same form i always thought it was funny that anyone could believe the true sect of a 2000 year old religion was founded in the united states lol one of my best friends today was raised into a freaky afro-islamic cult he and his mom left when his dad was sent on a mission to sudan as it turned out he was sent to fight in a civil war on behalf of the local tribe cult they never heard from him ever again they assume he was killed in action he described his childhood as animal sacrifices usually goats every friday and he was forced to eat the heart roar and drink the blood elsie would be beaten the cult owned a house turned apartment building in detroit where he lived and said that his mother was never permitted to leave the building he described how female genital mutilation was mandatory for all girls which is especially fricked up crazy to think of these kinds of things happening in the united states when he was eight he and his mom managed to escape the cult by stealing thousands of dollars in cash and fled in the middle of the night and paid a truck driver to smuggle them into canada they stayed in the country illegally for a month slowly making their way from ontario to british columbia where they smuggled themselves back across the border into washington there they got support from a mosque who set his mom up with a place to live in a job at a restaurant and helped get my friend back into the school system and back into society for years they were paranoid as frick because they thought that the cult was going to hunt them down and kill them but being dressed head to toe in a burka has its advantages i guess she was able to hustle at the job and through financial support from the mosque he was able to attend college where we met he's working at a bank now and doing really well for himself he is getting married soon and he's fully supporting his mother as well the pastors got involved in the prepping movement suddenly there was this huge focus on the end times one day she starts tearing into me about not stockpiling more food the pastors had joined the mlm scam for dried food most of the members were dirt poor but suddenly god wants us all to buy expensive prepper stuff my pastor had a very strong anti-mlm stance and this was before it really got big via the social networks he actually kicked people out of the church for marketing in the congregation after being told that wasn't cool here guy went bonkers with the end times stuff but he was a good person overall and just got confused i don't think i ever truly believed but the moment that was cemented for me was when the i had the unfortunate experience of going on a mission trip to cambodia long story short two teams from the church i had previously attended were sent for the first two week the teams were sent to different locations during this time we helped the local communities and it was actually pretty nice normal prayer sessions etc etc however during the last couple days of the trip both teams met up and stayed in the same location it was then that stories from the other team about being possessed by the devil spiritual enlightenment tongues becoming a vessel for god to speak through and being struck down by the love of god were mentioned by the other team keep in mind till that point our team just had your good ol a regular fashion prayer sessions surprise surprise later that night when both teams held a joint prayer session members from my team started hysterically yelling crying out for god passing out on the ground and it was at that moment when i realized that it was all bulls and pretty much mass hysteria mixed in with an enlightenment dong measuring contest i knew a guy born into a fundamentalist mormon sect on the montana idaho border his oh crap moment was his 18th birthday when his dad and the other men kicked him out of town and told him never to come back they keep the girls and marry them off to the other men in town but boys gotta go so they don't take the precious girls i was raised in the family radio apocalyptic christian cult i guess the biggest oh crap moment was when the world didn't end on the 21st of may 2011 my whole life was building up to that day and i had no other purpose and then the 22nd of may came and i figure out how to live in a world that i was taught to reject welcome to the real world brother sister choose your own adventure wait it's been seven years tell us what you did my aunt uncle and their five kids were in a cult in the 80s 90s they were faith healers and the leader basically preached that if you got sick it's because you didn't love god enough their oh crap moment was when the cult leader died of gangrene they immediately founded their own church after the cult disbanded though so they definitely still have some weird beliefs not even kidding sounds like my uncle he believes that same weird crap and writes a blog on it pretty sure his only serious reader is his wife who calls him master and my lord because he told her it's sinful not to true story can't make this stuff up when i was 19 and by orders of the pastor my mom took my bedroom door off the hinges they were doing everything in their power for me not to leave the church she would do random searches and pat downs to see if i had any communication to the outside world there were so many signs that i started seeing when i go older i was raised into the religion but i was terrified to leave due to the shunning the fear and being ashamed of leaving the truth also my mom didn't want me to go to a therapist even after knowing i was having panic attacks because she was afraid that the therapist would take the fear of god out of my life pm me if you wanna know more just tell us you left and cut off your parents please let there be some justice in this world i grew up in a church that was one compound and a bulk order of kool-aid away from being a cult they mostly focused on the end times and how much and when to tithe for me there were two the first when the preacher preached a sermon on how god doesn't care about how good or evil you are only if you believe the correct things so yeah you could be a baby debaucher cannibal and so long as you believe what the church and only that church believes you're going to heaven the second was when he preached a sermon about how babies children and yes even the mentally disabled go to heck unless of course they believed the correct way of course as he put it most of them were in heck the idea that god is all knowing and all loving and tortures babies in the mentally handicapped for eternity was abhorrent to me when my mom said a relative had educated himself right out of it i realized that something you can educate yourself out of might not be the source of all truth and enlightenment after all yeah when my mom dropped the old you're a product of too much education on me i knew i'd been fed a lot of bs throughout my life it was then time to start tweeting through it it was a sunday sundays we'd usually go during the day and afternoon but after the first part when my parents sat me down they told me that we were leaving i recall being sad because i was playing a game with my friends at the time i was confused my friends that i grew up with ignored me like i didn't exist i felt like everything i knew was gone later on i slowly pieced together what went on there was not normal i noticed the manipulative tactics such as showing us graphic videos of people dying and being ripped up because they didn't follow god they told us that if we didn't ask the pastor for permission and relationships we'd end up being abused they made us have no tv to isolate us but there's more but it was very difficult leaving it felt like my entire life was a lie and everything i had learned for 12 years was taken away and i was left clueless as ever and couldn't relate to anyone there was a pregnant woman in our congregation who found out her baby hadn't developed lungs and was going to be stillborn she was not allowed to get an abortion a few of us stayed with her during the home birth and we all watched the baby basically be born and then suffocate a few minutes later i couldn't ever forget that that woman she was never the same but the church shamed her for her depression because they viewed it as her rebelling against god's plan i ran away not long after and found out about how fricked up my life actually was holy crap i can't imagine bearing a child for months knowing that it'll just die i hope that woman got the help she needed and bounced back had a very intelligent friend she also grew up in this cult i remember her telling me one day how much she was struggling in science class because evolution made sense to her but she knew it conflicted with her faith but she was in tears over it saying that she needed to block it out yeah the crap sucks believe it or not darwin himself actually faced the very same dilemma there really wasn't one concrete oh crap moment but the first time i remember thinking this is bs was how often people would be sentenced to hack for the most trivial reasons everything from an impure thought to cursing to sleeping in late so one day i was discussing future marriage with my mother as all 11 year olds in the sec do and the topic of what i would do if my husband potentially abused me came up having witnessed frequent mistreatment and power play relationships by that point but me then divorce is okay right her no divorce is never okay me but what about if he beat me really really bad and i was hurt with bruises her it's still not okay me well then what do i do her you pray for him and ask the lord to help him see the error of his ways the lord can always work and it's blasphemy to try to interfere with his plans by divorcing that's when i remember thinking bulls this is quiverful and iblp allow the duggars dang i can't imagine telling my 11 year old daughter that she has to stay with a man who is abusing her and that all she can do is pray i'm sorry that you went through that but i'm glad you got out of it when i was at a yearly conference at a mega church in my state when i was 15 there were fog machines and laser lights during worship and the power mysteriously went out as we took communion which was an obvious indication that god was in our favor instead of just an overloaded circuit or someone pulling the plug that's around the time i realized that you can trick anyone into believing anything and started doing research officially denounced the church when i was 17 and had seen enough not me but a friend of mine lived in a bridahof community in the uk it's not technically a cult it is very cult-like and they basically live like most cults after leaving the cult he told me about many oh crap moments like discovering basketball computerized music video games etc my favorite was when he told me about discovering cartoons he had no idea that it was possible to make drawings move for him seeing a cartoon for the first time at 17 was like a drug trip not quite cult but when the pastor started talking about how god was sending hurricane katrina and all these mass shootings as punishment for legalizing gay marriage and not praying in schools that was it for me don't forget abortion i grew up in a not quite cult but close too and they love to say god had turned his back on america because of gays and abortion was part of one for 20-plus years we had a serious no contact rule we always thought the ones who left got kicked out for doing something wrong because the ministry manipulated us into believing that when in reality they were against the no contact rule and just left we were not allowed to have any contact whatsoever with people who had left the church cult even if it was your own family we were also told not to have any spiritual conversations with them to just keep it short and physical at least that was the rule before but eventually they changed it to the point where you can't even live in the same house as them whether it be spouse kids parents etc that really ruined and broke up a lot of families and relationships my mum grandma and more of my family left and they wanted to split us up and send me away somewhere else to live despite the fact that i was the only child in that family household and was working to support them frick that crap i was out of there in no time no contact and breaking up families is a large part of how cults work this is important in establishing control over the members i grew up in a crazy baptist church what started my doubt was the fact i waited months and months to get baptized but it never happened because they were always too busy for baptism classes they pushed this fact you had to be baptized but it's no big deal to push it off what if i die tomorrow then one day came when i had to rush to a youth meeting after a softball practice they handed out the fundraiser chocolates and i had to bring them with me into the meeting so i slid them under my chair the pastor's wife called me a heretic and accused me of some bible story where jesus came in and found people making a market in the church she said some stuff like i should be stoned to death then she dragged in the fact my mom sold evan and gave ladies in the church their orders after services i never went to church again for me my osh moment was when i came forward about dating a girl outside of my cult and the leader told me that if i wanted to date he would provide me with a list of girls in the church i could go out with that was the final straw for me and so a week later when i was 18 i was kicked out homeless and disowned raised jehovah's witness here i remember even when i was very young being weirded out by living forever in paradise after armageddon it just didn't make sense and living forever seemed really unnatural i was also raised to get married and have children but all the guys i grew up with were my brothers and so i just wasn't into any of them left the religion at 16 but officially at 18. born and raised calvary chapel when i realized my debut was using the bible to justify him the man having control over me as a woman because of his interpretation of a bible verse and then when my family member a calvary pastor had to exorcise their own home from their child who was being apparently bringing demons home [Music] not a cult but when the priests started talking about how we are all sheep in god's flock and sheep shouldn't be smart or question what god says they should just obey god without question or doubt during his homily that was the beginning of the end for me it made me take a hard look at the faith i grew up with and the closer i looked the less i liked x mennonite here my moment was when i finally counted up the number of sermons specifically directed at the unmarried young adults telling women to submit to men an average of 1 in 3.5 when i went to the principal of the bible school and talked to him about this bizarre percentage he explained to me that one of this biggest problems in the church was when women don't know their place i wrote my big final paper as a biblical criticism of this idea and left the church faith about six months later i was born into a radical pentecostal church during the early 80s and 90s when exorcism was a thing they would perform these during church and home groups on sunday nights it was always interesting to watch because the people would go all out talking in a different demon voice are shares needing to hold them down and convulsing on the floor it was sunday night and i was at our youth pastor's house for home group i was 14 after the singing and praise the youth pastor started his speech there's someone here who's been back sliding away from god they've changed and seemed to have blah blah blah i remember thinking oh who's it going to be today and that's when i heard my name called end can you please come to the middle definitely took me off guard but like a good sheep i went everyone gathered around me started putting hands on me and speaking in tongues then the youth pastor placed one hand on my back and the other on my stomach as it started to kick off getting louder and louder that's when the youth pastor started to give me the heimlich basically getting his hand all up under my rib cage it hurt and only got worse i was thinking to myself how the heck am i going to get out of this so i faked being slain in the holy spirit and fell to the ground i stayed still and everyone backed off and continued praising the lord what felt like an eternity i was grabbed by the arms and they moved me to a different room i waited a bit longer and finally got up and left i haven't been to church since i'm 39 i always imagine a cult as people wearing dark robes and chanting around an altar for something a little sinister so i'm not really sure what qualifies as a cult but this might qualifies right now i'm a methodist which is a pretty low-key christian denomination i've never been to a church with a priest always a preacher i dated a girl a while ago whose family were long-time members of what one might label a very fundamentalist christian sect as far as i know the only members of this group are in this one city in texas where we both lived at the time and it's a very christian city with a little bit of a history with extremist christian groups her stepfather was normally pretty kurt to her mother whenever i saw them together and according to her he was pretty verbally abusive to her when others weren't around her group's priest when she went to him for some counselling on leaving him told her to just love him and suffer through it because that's what their scripture said their whole group was pretty heavily in on women remained subservient to men in all scenarios now for the definitively cult why things their scripture was the bible the cherry picked to get rid of some things and with a few extra books added that their priest had stuck in because he'd had visions that told him to do so the members needed permission from the priest to leave the church and they had to do a period of counseling with him before even looking into a separation much less an actual divorce they had a few homes where college-age kids in the church could live together while going to the local university the students who were around when i was in school weren't bad people as far as i can tl just a little hipster why they did have mandated worship and prayer time every single morning my girlfriend lived there for a year before we dated because the rent was super low and she later said that they really freaked her out com of their scripture was the bible the cherry picked to get rid of some things the first thing that came to mind is the verse that basically demands men to love respect and care for their wives the same way they would care for themselves so yeah a lot of cherry picking was done here i brought my own kids up in culty pentecostal type churches i don't know what their oh crap moments were but they all realized fairly early on that they didn't believe any of it as soon as i started to listen to my own doubts which is tricky when you think they come from the devil they started taking to me about thinking more clearly and honestly that led directly to my own moment when i realized the only reason i still went to church was that i liked singing i can honestly say my own kids helped me escape that crap and i'm forever indebted to them senior year of hs i guess we were finally old enough to talk about something interesting in theology class so our teacher talked about cults now any time another religion was mentioned it was 10 education 90 smear peace propaganda but on this afternoon as the teacher was talking about how satanic cults rob you of the truth and how mormons believe the most insane things my thought process went something like this one row they all have some such strong faith to even die for their religion two it's incredible that they had such faith and yet they were ultimately so mistaken i guess that feeling really certain about something isn't good enough even just a bit of skepticism could have saved them three oh crap am i in a cult yes young you unfortunately you were i didn't grow up in a cult but i did grow up cult adjacent my parents were long-term missionaries meaning they did it all the time not like six-month or even two-year stints and part of a missionary team there were three other families on their missionary team two were culty one was normal i mean normal for someone who is dedicating their lives and their children's lives in part to living in a foreign country to indoctrinate the natives but you know it's all relative the first time i clearly remember thinking bb crazy was when i was in second or third grade the mom of one of the crazy families was teaching sunday school sunday school that day consisted of the mum me my sister and maybe another boy she was lecturing us about secular music versus godly music except it wasn't about the lyrics it was about the actual music not like rock music or drums are bad nope that i would have been like well that's disappointing but okay instead she was going on and on about how songs that didn't definitely end i guess songs that faded out would get stuck on your head and you'd repeat them over and over without meaning which was bad because chanting i think chanting was of the devil and spells used chanting and the devil would control your mind that way and then there was a whole thing about a certain number of beats being sinful but as i was very young tone deaf and literally don't even like music i just fully zoned out at this point and just smiled and nodded at the appropriate points but i distinctly remember thinking she was insane just well and truly nuts i was pretty concerned about a level of crazy because i told my dad about it and he was like don't worry about it you don't have to believe that which of course leads to the thought if we don't have to believe that what else do we not have to believe turns out a lot of it when you've grown up to be a heathen when my parents told me they would let me die if i needed a blood transfusion when i was never allowed to play with any worldly kids at school when i was not allowed to celebrate my birthday or any other holiday in 1998 i was told to throw away final fantasy 7 because i would become demonized in 1995 my mom threw away my entire comic book collection when my daughter was physically shamed by another member of the cult and i was not allowed to call the police when i was told i could not talk to my brother because he had fricked before he was married when i had fellatio for the first time in my life after being married for 15 years i can't banned it even if you were married finding out i had a cousin who was 25 my uncles left 40 years ago and we were not allowed to talk to them i could think of some more i had ventured onto the internet and googled the seventh day adventist church i saw that one of the search suggestions included the word cult and it went on from there it was eye-opening and comforting to know that my doubts could be validated my parents church does not recognize divorce ever you marry once and that's it remarriage is living in adultery and is no different than sleeping around a man joined the church who was happily married with two young children except she was his second wife the church elders actually convinced this guy to leave his wife because she wasn't his true wife just torpedoed that family to heck frick that bulls wwcg here they had said people who follow all the rules in the bible but weren't members of that particular church would still go to heck there were plenty other wtf teachings but that's the one that really made me call bs if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video so bye for now

Channel: Updoot Everything

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Keywords: born into cults, cults, cultists, culture shock, getting out, manipulation, mind control, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: H5emgVyDwxM

Length: 24min 56sec (1496 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020