Battle Scars of the Republic

 They said we'd be so secure

Taxing blood from the poor

Settle the Neo Con Artists' Score

Whaddya Know 

What the oilman found

A trillion dollars a power in the ground

And guess whose companies come to town

Stackin' prisoners and robbin riches

From the Junkies' clowns

They put their pets on the thrown

And Gave 'em golden bones

As broken bodies come home

from the combat zone

We prayed, with all our suckers' faith

that this disaster wouldn't go to waste.

But they keep pouring more souls

Down the killing hole

And sending orphans to the martyrs' fold.

Children in the storm

Pray "Watch Over Us."

The Universe says "I am."

Daddy's at the front

He wants to stay alive

A body does the best that it can.

Commander's orders push the forces

crost the battlefield

but the home town team wont yield

They take a booby-trapped mountain

but nobody's countin'

as the hummer burns to crumpled stee.

In his dreams

Before forever's sleep

Holdin' his babies

As their mama softly weeps.

Before his mind turns to black

In the final attack

Wondering what the hell he's doing here.

We cant afford

To save

Another president's face.

Because the War

Isn't righteous anymore

Victim-Soldiers in American Religious Cults and Terrorist Groups

Terrorist leaders use cult mind control techniques to recruit, condition and deploy their ranks.  Economic, social or emotional desperation often combine with a failure, inability or unwillingness to critically analyze recruitment and conditioning tactics.

Skilled psychomanipulators transform the desperate to create victim-soldiers who unquestioningly obey every command of their leaders.  Both modern religious cults and the Islamist terrorists sweet talk prospective recruits, then steal their personal freedom.  In the mainstream religious cults, a battlefield of the godly versus the worldly helps polarize the decisions of new member, where each choice must be made within the context of a godly war.  The victim-soldiers are commissioned to aggressively distribute religious literature, collect donations, and recruit more members.  In the case of the terrorist cults, bright young men and women strap on explosive vests, or commandeer jets to kill civilians they consider enemies.  Terrorists are no less victims, but devastatingly more literally soldiers.

 Terrorist groups and religious cults are very similar in use of classical mind control techniques in their methods of recruitment, indoctrination and behavior control.

Both types of groups concentrate their leadership in the hands of a charismatic individual or small group who uses a claim to speak for god to control or direct the daily activities of the members through a hierarchical system.

Both types of groups have well designed programs to advertise to their target market, and well trained “salesman/missionaries” who skillfully convince prospective members to make the decision to join.

This abusive practice is hardly new.  Bible writers claiming to speak for god have inspired devastating vengeance upon enemies for thousands of years, including the most disgusting of genocides,  “Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities,” the ancient Jews are commanded in Isaiah 14:21.

This blog, and soon, an extensive paper, will examine aspects of the social psychology of religious mind control.  We will look at some neurological processes in the brain during the emotional distress often preceding the moment of commitment join a religious cult, and find out if this may weaken one’s ability to resist the warped logic of cult recruiters.  We will review innovators’ successes in defining the psychology of recovery of victims from mind control cults, as well as an example of one Islamic terrorist who left the group spontaneously.  Finally, I shall propose an extension to the foregoing which can be used to prevent terrorism at its roots, in the weakness and vulnerable confusion of a desperate human mind.

Western Religious Proselytizers and Islamist Terrorists

Part I: Attraction and Justice... I call it Incultrination

Along with our 5 physical senses, we also have a sense of “connectedness,” which is stimulated pleasurably by positive engagement with another person. We know when we are snubbed by an individual, and are silently aware of whether we are included in or excluded from at least one societal group or another.  Many, hungry for connection, are unable to consider themselves valuable as ends in themselves.   Some resort to frantic searches for a thread of emotional connection to others, desperate for the feedback of fellowship.  For a few, their scrambling search for this self-affirming connection leads them to abusive fringe groups promising them the sense of belonging they crave.

Terrorist groups and religious cults promise a package of friends, fun, and worship, and capitalize on the basic human need for connection, made vulnerable by mental confusion caused by emotional distress.  What they deliver is “incultrination.”  This well-defined process to recruit and condition members is common to both terrorist groups and religious cults.  Incultrination causes a freakish form of false spiritual connectedness, enslavement to the terror group or cult leaders.  The weak and confused then get their sense of belonging.  They now belong to an elite corps of religion marketers or killers.

What brutal evil, in the name of religion.  Religious leaders steal freewill, by obligating subjects of their “theocracy” to “obey god,” for whom they claim to speak. Their commands falsely enslave and imprison those vulnerable needy, who are further tormented by their own inhibitions against questioning the commands and statements of their leaders, whom they call “the anointed” or “imam.”


Thus imprisoned, the leaders coerce “remainment” by threatening a pronouncement of “spiritual death” to any “apostates”  (what it really is is religious execution)  Not that the religious leaders would not choose to impose physical execution, if only the laws allowed:

In the case of where a father or mother or son or daughter is disfellowshiped, how should such  person be treated by members of the family in their family relationship?  We are not living today  among theocratic nations where such members of our fleshly family relationship could be  exterminated for apostasy from God and his theocratic organization, as was possible and was  ordered in the nation of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai and in the land of Palestine. 'Thou shalt surely kill him; thy hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him to death with stones, because he hath sought to draw thee away from Jehovah thy God, .. And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is in the midst of thee.'-Deut. 13:6-11, AS.  Being limited by the laws of the worldly nation in which we live .. we can take action against apostates only to a certain extent..2”

Here, the Watchtower - the semimonthly magazine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses- whines about their inability to use stoning as their execution technique to deal with apostates. This attitude naturally flows to the men charged with dispensing the justice.  In a personal conversation with an elder who had just disfellowshipped a woman for adultery, he lamented, “When I saw Karina (not her real name) sitting in the chair as the announcement that she was disfellowshipped was read, I just wanted to beat her out of her seat.”

Re-introduction. Welcome back!

Lovolution Autobiography

While I still don’t know what I want to be –should I grow up— it has been a lot of fun figuring out the following: Courage, diligence and creative use of one’s curiosity go a long way toward the attainment of enlightenment, adventure and joy, which are among my most cherished objectives.

I grew up drinking the mental “kool-aid” served up by my faithful religious leaders in the Jehovah’s Witness/Watchtower cult. Memorable policies? ‘Be a “Jehovah’s Witness” (JW) or Jehovah will destroy you, along with the other 5 billion non-JWs,’ and ‘Don’t go to college, where you may learn that most, if not all of their ridiculous doctrines are extremely difficult to defend in any context, spiritual, biblical or other.’ Despite, or perhaps due to their puritanical behavior and mind control, by kindergarten, I had experimented with amulets, smoked my first cigarettes and become what my teacher called “a vivid liar.”

Not that my real life was not exciting enough. During one ferocious, late-afternoon thunderstorm, I coaxed my younger brother to join me in a little ride, to use our wading pool as a raft through the rapids that formed along the curb of the hilly street in front of our house. To overcome his fear of the lightning bolts detonating in our neighborhood, I convinced him that he would be immune from getting struck if he kept batteries in the pockets of his yellow slicker. Mom had recently taken off to Arizona with my new half-brother, so I didn’t have the inconvenience of contradiction, and we were off to the races. Our improvised log flume ride soon wasn’t quite challenging enough, so we dragged the little blue plastic shell with bright green fish-designs down to Shark River, back about 50 yards through the soggy trail behind our yard. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough flotation to buoy a four year old boy, so he started sinking along with the rapidly-filling vessel as I watched from the marshy riverbank. The good news was that it was low tide, so even with his thrashing around, his feet finally rested on the river floor just as he had sunk into the water up to his chin. Whew… those batteries didn’t just work on lightning, they also prevented drowning!

My curiosity, though, did not protect me from mind-numbing compliance with the Watchtower, and I did obey the religious decree to forego college. So, right out of high-school I went to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Submarine Systems division. My first job in that organization was to construct and test fiber-optic cable and termination packages to failure, simulating the stresses of shipboard installation during severe ocean weather (sea state 6, the equivalent of a 20’ wave 7 times per minute). As my technical skills improved along with my understanding of the esoteric world of submarine cable engineering and cable ship operations, I took on assignments of progressively greater complexity, including designing the procedures for installing the structural components that comprised the most technically advanced communications systems of the time. Some of my work resulted in great improvements to the reliability of the trans-Atlantic communications systems now in use. I also was able to convince myself that some college coursework was necessary to maintain my job. In addition to external courses in design of experiments, quality control and total quality management,

I pursued an engineering degree at Brookdale Community College, attending classes part-time until 1991 when my life and career paths saw a bit of a shakeup. Although in six years I had used a good high-school education to excel in a very challenging and competitive research and development environment, I discovered that I was not going to get the fulfillment I needed from a career in engineering.

I also realized that I was a people-person, and was being kept intellectually alive inside the JWs by constantly meeting new people in the door-to-door solicitation work they compel. Most JWs hate it, but submit because they’ll be blackballed and harassed into compliance if they don’t. I was not a big fan myself, but used the opportunity to meet people and find out about their thoughts and experiences instead of hawking as many magazines and books as I could. The joy was in people, not pushing religion. Was there any way to use this to my advantage?

At that time I married Patricia, whom I had met online in 1986, while acting as a Watchtower apologist on what then passed for the internet. She was also a JW, and made a pretty convincing case against the divinity of Jesus (supporting the doctrine of the Watchtower) in a news group called “net.religion.christian” on the Usenet. The internet would later hold the key to our departure from the Watchtower religion.

As I searched for ways to utilize my public speaking and solicitation skills, I came across an ad for “Stockbroker Trainees” in the local newspaper. Candidates could attend a seminar held by Dean Witter and learn whether they had the tools to pursue a career as a stockbroker. These tools turned out to be the art of persuasive dialogue and dogged persistence in the effort of cold-calling—at the rate of 60 dials per hour—for interest in mutual funds and stocks touted by Dean Witter research analysts. I had these, so I got the job, but I also had a conscience. In this case, my training as a Jehovah’s Witness paid off greatly. Years of training in public speaking before large groups in the congregation, and further training in the techniques of face-to-face religion sales more than prepared me for the intensive campaigning I now faced. Fortunately for our household income, by the time I realized that a mutual fund transaction did not constitute a complete financial plan, I had developed a client base large enough to support the lower revenue per client that comes from a truly ethical business. Fortunately for my clients, the great stock market of the 90’s made just about any stock market related purchase look like a successful financial plan.

As I became more experienced in the investment markets, I also intensified my efforts in providing quality financial advice for my clients. I developed my own computer models to simulate a client’s investment life-cycle, and even inter-generational wealth-transfer issues. The ultimate goal, which I repeatedly achieved, was to make sure that my clients were better off for dealing with me, despite any fees my company charged.

By mid-1995 Patty and I thought we were ready to face the challenge of raising children, and soon Anton was on his way. While Patty was pregnant, however, I struggled deeply with the thought of raising children in the wacky cult that was just offbeat enough for me, but was too onerous to impose on anyone I really liked. It might be a good idea to have my children a bit more socially integrated than I was during my primary school years. I also could not allow my children the intellectual suppression at the hands of religious dogma that I had suffered.

In February 1996, an elder from our congregation approached us with a new form to sign. It was a checklist for “allowable blood components.” This was puzzling, since up until this point my understanding of the JW policy was that no blood whatsoever could be taken in any way for any purpose. This form—a health care proxy—

allowed a few “blood fractions,” such as clotting factors, most often used for hemophiliacs, but also vital in case of childbirth hemorrhage. As I did my research on this new policy, I found that it really was not that new. The Watchtower leaders had quietly allowed hemophiliacs to take these life-sustaining blood compounds for decades, while total abstinence from blood products was the standard supported in all their public literature. However, a locally well-publicized incident in California forced Watchtower lawyers to re-evaluate their policy. A woman who the doctors believed would have been saved by clotting factors refused these when hemorrhaging during childbirth. She died, quite likely because she was not aware of the nuanced policy the Watchtower had quietly adopted to prevent all JW hemophiliacs from dying.

About this same time I had been researching other doctrinal points I felt were indefensible, and discussed them with Patty. Each time her response was, “but where are we going with this?” The sad fact was that we would lose all of our friends, and probably all our family, due to the Watchtower requirement that anyone who persistently questions JW doctrine is considered an apostate, and treated as spiritually dead—shunned. Soon after Anton was born in May 1996, she read the account of the woman in California. The painful result of the Watchtower’s sneaky, death-dealing double-speak shook her viewpoint like no other doctrinal foolishness did. She then commenced her own research on the subject of Watchtower doctrine, policy, and the deception that forms the basis of them. We began to plot our escape, together, from the mind control of the Watchtower. Surprisingly, I felt more severely than expected the suffering from the loss of lifelong friendships. For a time, my attitude was so poisoned by this transition that it put our marriage in jeopardy. All the research in the world did not prepare me for the years of attempting to invent an identity that was independent of the milieu controlled by the Watchtower. The feelings of despair, anger and self-pity climaxed about the same time the stock market began to crash. New forms of meditation I had undertaken could not soothe my psyche. Three different mental health professionals said our marriage was not salvageable.

Somehow, we worked it out. Using a patchwork of self-help, psychology and time management books, along with some self-hypnosis I learned while trying to improve the precision of my conversation for professional purposes, I recovered a sense of self that made me a bit easier to live with. As I became a better husband, I also became a better father, now to our two children Anton and Mason.

In 2002, well before the difficult fall from grace of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter CEO Phil Purcell, I began to find fault with a number of key management decisions that affected my day-to-day activities. Most importantly, the company had plenty of money to face off against our head-to-head competitors, but we on the front line were not getting the financial support to effectively compete. To the contrary, management actually cut funding to the troops at a time when adequate funding would have enabled brokers to excel against competitors who were facing the same difficult environment. Around this same time, Morgan Stanley admitted that they had improperly encouraged brokers to sell their own brand funds using lavish parties and other enticements, and settled an SEC matter. Curiously, they left in place a compensation system that perpetuated the same improper activities they were found to have committed. I could no longer work there in good conscience.

My aim was to work on a team that was less proprietary product dependent and more insightful in how they spent money to support their sales staff. I thought I  found that when I switched firms. The key benefit to their model seemed to be that in addition to a quality support staff, I also had the opportunity to work with numerous bankers in many areas of the bank to cultivate referrals, the lifeblood of a stockbroker’s business. At the same time, the compensation plan was such that the most important factor is “what is best for the client.” This allowed me to put greater emphasis on my own proprietary research and due-diligence which results in a relationship that really benefits my clients.

Soon I'll update this document to reflect what has happened between 2004 and today.  Meanwhile, I Am enjoying copious opportunities to research the cause and effects of the intellectual suppression, so that I could make some contribution to a more enlightened life for some who suffer that plight. I have also received the added benefit of broadening my skills in my chosen profession

I have been fortunate work in an ppl enjoyable job that has allowed me to gain a good understanding of many complex subjects. My spiritual path has also kept me learning, and seeking more information. My hope is continuing to cultivate relationships with great thinkers, especially in the areas of intellectual freedom and spiritual/religious ethics, where I would like to continue to focus my life’s efforts.

 this bulletin-board format discussion forum is now maintained by Google in their “Groups” area.

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