The Huffington Post - March 11, 2011
On Writing 'The Informationist' and Coming from a Cult Background
by Taylor Stevens
I'm often asked which came first, plot or character. The answer should hint toward how clueless I was when I first set out to write: I had no plot, or characters--not even an idea of the story--only the place.
I'd spent four years living in Africa--over two of them in Equatorial Guinea--and when I made the decision to "write a book," all I knew was that it was going to be fiction, and I would set a good portion of it on Bioko Island, off the west coast of Africa. At the time, I didn't quite understand the concept of genre, but I figured my book should be something like what Robert Ludlum wrote. Turns out, Robert Ludlum wrote thrillers, and now, so do I.
It might be easy to think that I'm self-deprecating and attempting to be funny, and while I would happily settle for funny, the truth is, I really was that clueless.
My life, up until that point, had been anything but traditional. Born and raised in the Children of God, an apocalyptic religious cult that believed education beyond 6th grade was a waste of time, I'd lived on four continents and knew how to cook for a hundred people at a go, but only had a splotchy grade-school education that left me unfamiliar with a few fundamental concepts. Like the parts of speech, for example, and proper punctuation, and math beyond decimals: on the whole, not very helpful for entering the real world as a mother of two babies, and trying to forge a career.
One of the few upsides to coming from nowhere and knowing little, is being acutely mindful of your own ignorance. That was me: determined to write, fully aware that I knew absolutely zero about publishing or for that matter, about writing fiction. But I did know how to use a search engine. The Internet was my lifeline to knowledge, and a used writing guide my trusty Bible.
I wrote more--and re-wrote a lot. I was halfway through the first draft of THE INFORMATIONISTby the time I finally began to grasp what my writing guide had taught; half-way through, I'd found my voice, but more triumphant it seemed at the time, I finally understood what the heck they meant when they kept going on and on about that thing called "voice."
And then, two years into the writing process, one day to the next, THE INFORMATIONIST was finished. If I'd plotted the story ahead of time, maybe I would have seen the end looming, but I was winging it.
Having worked so long on learning to write, on learning the industry, and on writing the book, finishing was rather frightening. I expect it might be a bit of what life feels like after spending four years in college and being thrust out of the womb of academia with the need for a real job--although, I really wouldn't know much about that.
I scoured blogs from agents, editors and professional writers in order to understand the publishing industry, and quickly realized that, like everything else, I would be forced to go the hard road. I wasn't in a position to attend writers' conferences to meet agents in person to pitch a book. Neither was I well read enough to track down the agents or editors of authors whose books I liked. I didn't know anyone who knew anyone even remotely connected to publishing: I had no referrals, and no foot in the door. My only option, really, was to cold query agents by email, which, if you believe the naysayers, is impossible.
People ask what compels me to write, and this always makes me smile, because although the reasons are many--some of them even sappy, ultimately it boils down to this: I have no plan B.
Taylor Stevens is the author of THE INFORMATIONIST (Crown, on-sale March 8, 2011).
This article was found at:
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New York Times - March 12, 2011
An Unorthodox Life Yields a Novelist of Promise
New York Times - March 12, 2011
An Unorthodox Life Yields a Novelist of Promise
By CHRISTOPHER KELLY
Unlike a lot of other headline-grabbing debut novelists, Taylor Stevens did not graduate from a prestigious creative-writing program. In fact, she attended school only sporadically until sixth grade, when she stopped going entirely.
Ms. Stevens does not pepper her conversations with literary references or philosophical musings about her “craft.” She estimated that she had read only about 30 novels in her life. She cited Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne Identity” as the primary influence on her new novel, “The Informationist.”
What this Dallas-based divorced mother does have, however, is the sort of bizarre, twist-filled back story that makes everyone who hears it pay attention. She was born into and raised as a member of the cult Children of God (now called the Family International), founded by David Berg. Growing up, she bounced from city to city, often living in cramped and impoverished conditions, rarely spending more than a few months at a stretch at one of the cult’s dozens of communes around the world.
She said she repeatedly saw physical beatings as well as a practice called “flirty fishing,” in which female members would be prostituted to earn money for the cult. (She prefers not to talk about whether she experienced such abuse herself.)
After Mr. Berg’s death, in 1994, the cult changed its rules, allowing members newfound independence. Ms. Stevens and her husband at the time moved to Africa, where they set up a small commune in Equatorial Guinea. They remained there until the late 1990s, when they left the cult. In 2001, they moved to Texas, figuring it would be an inexpensive place to try to build a new life.
All of this sounds like ripe material for a lurid, confessional memoir, yet Ms. Stevens — who took to writing because it was something she could do while at home with her two young children — ended up going in an entirely different direction.
“The Informationist,” which was published this week by Crown, is a globe-trotting thriller centered on Vanessa Munroe, a multilingual expert in information gathering who is hired by a Houston businessman to track down his missing daughter in Africa. Ms. Stevens drew on her experience in Equatorial Guinea, where much of the novel takes place. But otherwise it contains no references to her experiences in Children of God.
“People are always like, ‘Don’t you want to write about your story?’ ” Ms. Stevens, 38, said recently over breakfast at a cafe in Grapevine. “I tell them no. Because as exotic as it seems to you, it pales in comparison to what some of my friends had to go through when they left the cult.”
Despite the author’s lack of formal education, “The Informationist” is an accessible, crisply told tale. Ms. Stevens has a knack for both evocative details, especially in her depictions of village life in Equatorial Guinea, and strangely compelling character traits (the androgynous Munroe sometimes appears in public dressed as a man).
A second book featuring the same character, titled “The Innocent,” has been finished and is set for publication next year. Crown felt confident enough in the first two books in the series that it recently signed Ms. Stevens for a third.
“You can never predict what talent comes from,” said John A. Glusman, Ms. Stevens’s editor at Crown. “You can find people with pedigree educations and advanced degrees, and they can’t write their way out of a paper bag.”
“The Informationist” has already secured gushy blurbs from brand-name thriller writers like Tess Gerritsen and Vince Flynn and the inevitable comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which also features an offbeat, spunky heroine and — in the first novel in the series — a plot involving a missing heiress.
Yet in a publishing industry struggling with declining sales and easily distracted audiences, Ms. Stevens’s dark personal history is proving to be her most useful marketing tool. Vogue published a nearly 3,000-word profile of the author in its March issue — something virtually unheard of for a debut novelist.
“It is very difficult to publicize fiction,” said Anne Hawkins, Ms. Stevens’s literary agent. “If the author went and got their M.F.A. and has been writing and editing, is anyone really interested in reading about that?”
For her part, Ms. Stevens is struggling to strike a balance. She is eager to speak out about her past, especially after many years of cult superiors’ deriding her individual achievements. But she also remains nervously guarded. While being interviewed, she made frequent requests to go off the record. She is especially adamant that none of her family members be contacted or written about in the process of promoting “The Informationist.”
(Asked about concerns that any part of Ms. Stevens’s difficult-to-verify story might be fabricated, Mr. Glusman said, “I don’t think any publisher goes through the kind of background check that an intelligence agency will, but when I talked to Taylor and heard her speak, it left absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was a very painful chapter of her past.”)
Ms. Stevens said: “If writing doesn’t work out for me, I’m still back at the bottom of the heap as far as education goes. So right now, I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself, to be good enough and to keep people coming back.”
Christopher Kelly is a film critic for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
This article was found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/us/13ttstevens.html
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Rose McGowan: How She Survived and Escaped a Cult
ReplyDeletehttp://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20522622,00.html
Rose McGowan's first nine years were anything but traditional. They were spent in the Children of God sect, a group that extolled the virtues of free love and prepared for the second coming of Jesus.
Although it proved a harrowing experience – she fled with her family, she says, once the cult began advocating child-adult sexual relations – as the setting at first "was really idyllic," remembers the actress, 38, who rose to fame on TV's Charmed and now stars in Conan the Barbarian 3D.
"I grew up in pastoral settings" – specifically, the Italian countryside, where her parents were members of the local branch of the Children of God. But McGowan, who was born in Florence, knew instinctively that she didn't belong in such a place.
"I've always been who I am," she says, explaining that while she did believe in God, she wasn't in accord with the hippie lifestyle, and certainly not with their aesthetic or the subservient role of females in the sect.
Even at her tender age, McGowan rebelled. "I did not want to be like those women. There were basically there to serve the men sexually," she says.
When her father began to fear that Rose might be molested, she says, "My dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south."
She fled the Children of God with her father and siblings and moved to the U.S. McGowan recalls that "it was not an easy assimilation" into the mainstream way of life. "My brothers and sisters, we thought everyone was boring."
Many years later, she returned to the small town in Italy with her then-boyfriend, rocker Marilyn Manson. "We created quite a stir," she admits.
Looking back at her early experiences, McGowan deflects with humor some of the dangers and difficulties she faced. In contrast to the dressed-down hippie look of the cult, she says, "I came out of the womb waving red lipstick."
Still, the remembrances left quite an impression. While expressing gratitude to her father, who died in 2008, McGowan tears up. Mostly, though, she realizes the experience is all she ever knew and made her who she is.
"There are people who will read this story and think I had a strange existence," she says. "I think they've had a strange existence!"
For more on McGowan's time in the cult and photos of her childhood, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday
Cult wonder
ReplyDeleteBy marke, San Francisco Bay Guardian 12/06/2011
... [Stevens is] back with the same series character (Vanessa Michael Munroe), the same edgy but brilliant prose, and a plot that takes us into the real — and chillingly autobiographical — world of an abusive apocalyptic cult.
That's where Stevens grew up: she was born into the Children of God, where nobody was allowed more than a fifth-grade education, adults took sexual advantage of teenagers, young women were forced into prostitution (all in the name of recruiting new members), and adults were almost as frightened to leave as to stay.
There's a bit of a J.K. Rowling story here: Stevens started writing The Informationist when she arrived in Houston with her then-husband and two kids. With no job skills, just out of the cult, her family was living on minimum-wage jobs, barely scraping by — and after buying a Robert Ludlum book at a garage sale, she decided to write a thriller. "I was really, really just scraping by, it was horrible," she told me in a recent phone interview.
"Selling The Informationist changed everything." Although the money from the bestseller hasn't fully trickled down to her, "if I want to buy something for the kids, It's actually possible now."
The Informationist introduced the world to Monroe, who is slight, sexy, and moves back and forth easily between male and female appearance. She kicks serious ass, speaks 22 languages and peddles black market information. Her childhood was harsh; she spent her teens living with a violent gunrunner in Africa, but the wildness and the pain were the only elements of Stevens that made it into the first book.
Yet Stevens told me she had to write about the cult world at some point. "People keep asking me what my life was like," she said. "So I can tell them — if you want to know what it was like growing up, read this book, that's what it was like."
The characters, she said, are fictional, "but everything that happens in the book happened to someone."
The Innocent is set in Buenos Aires. A five-year-old girl named Hannah is snatched and brought into the world of The Chosen, led by a charismatic figure known as The Prophet who refers to the world outside the cult at The Void.
Hannah's father has been searching the world for her, and discovers that the cult is hiding her in Argentina. He convinces Munroe to go in and get her. That involves slipping into the world of the cult herself — and in the process, Stevens shows us a life that very few people have ever experienced. Among the most painful elements: Once Hannah is rescued, she isn't sure she whether she wants to go back.
Along the way, of course, is vintage Michael Monroe action, including an escape from four armed men in a locked warehouse. (Munroe is better with a knife than most mob thugs.)
The Innocent, for whatever reason, isn't as raw as The Informationist. There's less blood and less intense violence. And Monroe is developing as a character — the cold face that she showed us last time is mellowing a bit, and in The Innocent, she even kinda, sorta falls in love. Maybe.
There's always a challenge in continuing-series characters, and writers have struggled with it since the advent of the modern pop-culture novel. Ian Fleming got bored of James Bond after a few books, and you could tell. John D. MacDonald let Travis McGee get old before his time. Robert. B. Parker never let Spenser change much, but he was Spencer, and that was always enough. Lee Child is struggling to keep Jack Reacher from becoming a caricature of himself.
Stevens is still in the early stages; she told me she's not even sure where Monroe is going next. Which is why, I think, The Innocent works, and the next one will work, too — you really sense that the writer is growing with her protagonist in this, the best thriller series in a long time.
http://www.sfbg.com/2011/12/06/cult-wonder
Susan Justice: From Cult Escapee and Subway Busker to Major-Label Artist
ReplyDeleteby Dave Steinfeld, Spinner Canada March 20th 2012
Every musician has a unique story, but Susan Justice's is more interesting than most. The singer-songwriter's parents are members of a religious sect called The Family -- sometimes known as Children of God -- and Susan, the second oldest of 10 kids, was born into this group.
Her childhood was spent moving from place to place, not only in the States but also Europe and South America. During their travels, Susan and her siblings often performed music on the streets of whatever city they were in. The good news is that she was encouraged to be musical at a young age. The bad news is that she was only allowed to listen to music that was sanctioned by The Family. As she entered adolescence, Susan felt increasingly stifled by the limitations that were imposed on her. "Any time you have this sort of group-think mentality, where it's like 'us vs. them,' it's very dangerous," she explains. "[The Family] is Christian but they think that they're fighting against the established Christianity of the day."
In 2001, Susan worked up the courage to run away from both her family and The Family. She traveled from Europe to New York, where she began performing music in subway stations with only a guitar. Despite being "kind of homeless," as she put it in her bio, she made both a decent living and some impressive contacts. In 2007, under her given name of Susan Cagle, she released 'The Subway Recordings,' which was compiled from two sets she performed in the stations at Times Square and Grand Central. A year later, she caught the attention of Spin Doctors drummer Aaron Comess. He introduced Susan to manager David Sonenberg who in turn introduced her to veteran producer Toby Gad (Alicia Keys, Fergie, etc.). Together, Susan and Toby crafted her studio debut, 'Eat Dirt,' which arrives March 26 on Capitol Records.
Despite having such a unique and potentially scary background, Susan comes across as quite personable and grounded, and her music is radio-friendly. "I was such an emo teenager," she says. "I was listening to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. Those were my favorites [but] I also liked Tracy Chapman. And Whitney, obviously. Her voice and her attitude, I felt, translated beyond race. She wasn't a hip-hop R&B black girl. She just did good music, and that's what I wanted to do."
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ReplyDeleteThen there's Bob Dylan, the prototypical singer-songwriter, who inspired one of 'Eat Dirt''s best tracks, 'Born Bob Dylan.' "I had a huge Bob Dylan phase," Justice admits. "I just love people who go against the grain. Dylan has such an intricate and amazing vocabulary, the way he expresses himself."
As for the title track, which is also the album's first single and video, Susan explains, "I wanted to write something about [how] what doesn't kill you makes you stronger but I didn't wanna use those words. So instead, I said, 'What doesn't kill you makes you sick'/And if you're sick you learn a lesson/And with every lesson, you get wiser/So I figured that it pays to cross the line/And eat a little dirt sometimes.' It's about how, in my case, curiosity is a good thing and curiosity saved the cat. You have to be curious, be the one who goes out and experiences life for yourself if you want to be happy. So many of us have jobs that we hate or [are] trapped in, situations with our families that we hate. And we feel like we have to just take it but we don't. We can do whatever we want. It's not like we're in a physical pen, you know? Although in my case, I was kind of like in a physical pen!" she adds with a laugh.
And how does Justice feel about religion these days? "I love religion," she says. "I consider myself to be gnostic -- not agnostic but gnostic, gnosis, the teaching of knowledge. I'm fascinated by that. I wish I could study theology just because I've been so close to it. I can see the effects of it. So it's more of an intellectual fulfillment rather than practicing any type of religion. I just want to find the truth in all things."
view music video at:
http://www.spinner.ca/2012/03/20/susan-justice-eat-dirt/
Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Inside the Secret World of Cults
ReplyDeleteby LUKE MCKENNA, Bullet Magazine CULTURE / SPRING 2012 March 02nd, 2012
Across the world, millions of everyday people subscribe to the teachings of magnetic cult leaders, many of whom spread the gospels extolling the virtues of incest, child abuse, and rape. Luke McKenna meets some of the victims who eventually escaped-and one cult enthusiast who's just getting started.
Peter Frouman was only 10 years old when, on December 31, 1985, in a small, run-down house in Corrientes, Argentina, he sat naked among 25 members of the Children of God, waiting to become a man. He watched as a candle and a worn-out green T-shirt, a totem meant to represent truth, were passed from person to person, each of them unclothed and confessing their sins to the group. It was the first time Peter had been invited to take part in the adults-only ritual, his first taste of the sect's twisted take on coming of age. He could barely contain himself.
Children of God, the apocalyptic sex cult that famously raised Rose McGowan and River Phoenix, is just one of countless high-intensity religious factions hiding in the shadows of conventional society. Rise International, a nonprofit organization that specializes in helping children raised in "restrictive, isolated, or high-demand communities," puts the global population living as part of these groups in the millions. In America alone, there are said to be more than 3,000 functioning cults, ranging from the quaint and quirky to possibly destructive, each with its own rites and rituals to mark transitions from passive observer to active participant, outsider to insider, and youth to adult.
"The idea was to break me down with nudity and confessions," Frouman, now 36, says of that fateful night in Argentina. When it finally came time for him to wear the T-shirt, which was steeped in sin and reeking of sweat, the young boy admitted to pride and independence-vices, according to COG. "I considered it an honor to be allowed to participate considering I was still 10 years old," Frouman says of a time when he didn't know life any other way. "I have never forgotten this warm moment from my childhood."
Frouman currently runs xFamily.org, a Wikipedia-like online resource that documents the lives and experiences of former child members of COG, since renamed The Family International, which has had up to 35,000 members pass through colonies in 15 countries. Formed in California in the 1960s, the cult and its deceased founder, David Berg, capitalized on the blossoming hippie movement with its promises of spiritual revolution and sexual freedom. Beneath the group's quiet, communal exterior, however, hid a particularly bawdy brand of evangelical Christianity.
Alongside entries about Family music and art, xFamily carries graphic descriptions of pedophilia, incest, and violent beatings. Frouman watched while sexual boundaries were abandoned within immediate families. Once members reached the age of consent, considered to be 12 years old until well into the 1980s, they were encouraged to share their bodies with the group, imagining they were having sex with Jesus as they did it. (Males were instructed to visualize themselves as females while engaging with the Lord, since homosexuality was a no-no.) Young women were prostituted, luring outsiders into the group via the bedroom, a practice that became colloquially known as Flirty Fishing or FFing. Christian notions of sexual guilt and repression were bent over and defiled. This was sex for salvation.
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ReplyDeleteThe Family, whose numbers have sagged dramatically over the past decade, was forced to publicly sanitize its teachings after a series of raids, investigations, and testimonies by escapees exposed the cult's more sordid practices. Most communes have been disbanded and members are now permitted to make decisions for themselves. But these changes came too late for Frouman, who escaped the cult around the time of his 14th birthday, after he'd already endured years of sexual and mental abuse.
Months after Frouman's New Year's Eve awakening, the boy's virginity was put to a Family vote. It was decided that a 28-year-old mother of five, who was visiting from Brazil, would deflower him. The encounter took place in a darkened room, next to the woman's sleeping children and the boy's own mother. "At the time it seemed fairly normal to me," says Frouman, who had seen kids younger than him with adults older than she was.
Juliana Buhring, who also grew up in COG, works with Rise International to help children escape similar cults. "All these groups have almost identical dogmas or ways of operating," she says. Charismatic cult leaders are deified, their ideas treated as gospel, while the outside world and nonmembers are portrayed as evil and dangerous. "Cults are naturally secretive, so society at large has no idea," Buhring says. "But there is a very large group of ex-cult kids who all struggle with the same problem: trying to reformulate an identity outside what they believed, or what they felt, or how they thought about things."
Donna Collins was the first Western child to be born into the Unification Church, an international Christian sect headed by charismatic Korean businessman Sun Myung Moon. A "blessed child," as she was labeled, Collins became a powerful, white poster child for the predominantly Asian religion, which seeks to unite all religions under Moon. They said she'd been born without sin. They said she was perfect.
Moon, the self-anointed Second Coming of Christ, separated Collins from her family when she was 11 years old, moving her from home to home. Her travels took her to Korea, where she studied the language and UC teachings at the church's Little Angels School. Collins was instructed to devote herself entirely to God, Moon, and the UC. "There weren't a lot of boundaries," says Collins, who, as an 8-year- old girl, doled out relationship advice to followers who would also confess to her intimate details about their sex lives. "They would come and say, 'My marriage isn't working, what do I do?' In one case, I remember telling a man, 'I don't think you'll ever be happy with your wife-she's not a very nice person."
Collins, who left the church in her early 20s, was always skeptical of the Moonies, as Unificationists are unhappily known to the outside world. "I saw through the church from a very young age, but I also wanted to be a good Moonie, and to be loved and accepted like any other person," she says. "It took me a very long time to leave because I was afraid. It was all I knew."
While the young Collins was struggling with questions about her faith and her leader, he was matching her peers-some as young as 16-for marriage. Unificationists believe that Moon has divine insight into their spiritual compatibility, and so they submit to his decisions with the understanding that they are, quite literally, matches made in heaven. Early on, there was talk of Collins being betrothed to one of Moon's supposedly sacred sons, perhaps in one of the giant ceremonies that join masses of Moonies in a single afternoon. The biggest even in the West, at which Moon blessed 2,075 couples, took place in New York's Madison Square Garden in July 1982; some ceremonies blessed as many as 30,000 couples.)
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ReplyDeleteThe ritual, which participants consider to be as much a commitment to Moon as it is to each other, is a vital part of growing up in the church. Ahead of the ceremony, couples strike each other with sticks to rid themselves of sin, before vowing to live their lives for others and to create a family that contributes to world peace. A commitment to "sexual purity" precedes a "separation period," where couples are directed to go without sex for 40 days following the ceremony. You can sweep the rose petals off the bed -there's nothing hot about a honey-Moonie.
Collins observed the dissolution of many Unificationist marriages, but she says some do prosper. Either way, she doesn't fault the followers. She says that unlike their leader, the Unificationists who support Moon's religious and business empire, which was valued at more than $100 million at its peak in the late '90s, are some of the kindest people she has met. "They're very idealistic," she says. "They genuinely want the world to be a better place."
According to the International Cultic Studies Association, the majority of people who devote themselves to these fringe groups are as well-adjusted as they are educated; most of them come from stable families and have college degrees, a statistic that's not lost on many sects, such as Scientology, whose disciples notoriously target university campuses. The UC even went so far as to make a formal investment in Connecticut's University of Bridgeport in 1992. (The institute regained financial independence in 2003, but a number of Moonies still hold administrative positions there, and followers are urged to attend the school to be educated among their own kind.)
Leaders want people who are intelligent enough to contribute to the group and, in the future, to win over the minds of others. Curious youths, living away from home and searching for answers in those tender years, are ripe for the plucking. It's Cult Recruitment 101.
Daniel Maldonado was first introduced to Rael, leader of the Raelian Movement, as a teenager growing up in the grimy housing projects of New York's Upper West Side. The atheistic extraterrestrial sect, which believes that every prophet from Moses to Mohammed was a visitor from a superior alien race called Elohim, first attracted the boy because it filled in so many of the mystic gaps in his Catholic education.
Raelians argue that Elohim, through science, created life on Earth about 25,000 years ago. The group believes in using similar technology to revolutionize the human existence, including cloning for immortality and the betterment of mankind. The science behind the teachings fit with Maldonado's own rigorous education about the universe, physics, and humanity. "Little by little, it all added up to the Raelian philosophy," he says.
Elohim officially acknowledged Maldonado, now 21, on a sunny autumn day in New York last year, at an intimate gathering in a gay support center downtown. The date, December 13, was significant: It marked the anniversary of Rael's first encounter with the extraterrestrial race at a volcano in France in 1973. The 4-foot-tall green creatures reportedly told the sportswriter and racecar driver, then named Claude Vorilhon, that he must change his name to Rael and prepare the world for their imminent return. So far he has reached roughly 55,000 people, according to the group's own estimates.
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ReplyDeleteTen Raelians watched as a trained bishop, or "guide," baptized Maldonado and another convert in a ceremony called "the transmission of the cellular plan." At exactly 3pm, when the Elohim were said to have their antennae facing the east coast of the United States, the regional leader dipped his hands into a plastic bowl of water and placed them on the front and back of Maldonado's head, which then became a conductor to beam the boy's unique genetic code to the all-seeing beings above. "Elohim has recognized you," the guide whispered, leaning in for a charged hug from the newest member of the group.
After the ceremony, the endearing assortment of New Age sensualists and Trekkie types discussed "paradism," their belief that in the near future a new class of clones and robots will perform all labor. According to Raelians, not only will this harmonize society, but it will also leave plenty of time for some of their more hedonistic pursuits, such as the Cosmic Orgasm, a kind of sexual nirvana achieved through meditation and erotic massage, and Go Topless Day, which is exactly what it sounds like. Nothing is taboo, so long as all parties are satisfied-and Raelians strive for universal satisfaction.
"It wasn't no normal day," Maldonado says of the baptism, which could only happen once he was deemed mature enough to choose the religion for himself, and to sign an Act of Apostasy renouncing all others. "I've been thinking a little different, a little less selfish, like I need to fix things."
Maldonado's situation is different than most in that his group membership was voluntary. "People who join cults can go home to their families and friends, and live like they did before," says Collins, who was born into the UC. "Those of us who grew up in cults, we had no other life. When I left, there were none of these online support groups. You were out on our own, you would lose the majority of your friends, and the cult would often demonize you."
At first, Collins relied on a handful of friends she met while attending an independent college. It wasn't until she married outside of the church, in a Methodist ceremony to a man she loved, that the fallen Moonie truly found herself. It was the first step toward creating her very own stable family. "And there was no beating the sins out of each other," she says, laughing.
Buhring, of COG, spent her formative years away from her parents, surrounded by sex. After a childhood of enduring the worst kinds of adult encounters, she discovered what it really meant to be a grown-up in the simple splendor of outside life: opening a bank account, renting an apartment, savoring a warm cup of coffee alone in a cafe, free from the regimented schedule of the cult that stole her innocence. "I felt this incredible sense of maturity and freedom," Buhring says of the first year following her willful excommunication. "It's like being blind your whole life, and suddenly you see. At first you don't understand what it is you are seeing, but as you start to understand, the beauty of it all becomes overwhelming. You can sit for hours and just smile, taking it all in. That, I think, was my coming of age. That's when I finally became an adult."
http://www.bullettmedia.com/article/lead-us-not-into-temptation-inside-the-secret-world-of-cults/