SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
BBC TV’s brilliant and brave Panorama series recently featured a documentary examining the incidence of the sexual abuse of children within the religious group known as The Jehovah’s Witnesses. This harrowing programme offered up first hand testimony indicting the ‘Elders’ and leaders of this supposedly Christian faith in covering up and effectively condoning the sexual exploitation of both girls and boys. Numerous individuals spoke on camera of the ordeals that they had suffered not only at the hands of their abusers but also when they officially complained to the senior officials of their Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, as their places of meeting are called. Some described years of physical molestation suffered in silence because the ‘Elders’ to whom they reported the offenders refused to accept their statements. Police Officers on both sides of the Atlantic were interviewed and gave tellingly similar accounts of their experiences in attempting to prosecute sex-offenders within the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It seemed, to the Police Officers involved, that the ‘Elders’ were effectively obstructing justice and protecting the Witnesses that abused children.
True Life Story Of The Jehovah Witnesses Treatment Of A Young Vulnerable Boy.
Religious cults are notorious as breeding grounds for sexual perverts who seem to thrive within such exclusive groups, like pernicious weeds upon a dunghill. There have been many such minority movements in the past that have at their very core the rottenest, vilest and most corrupt individuals. For example in the mid-1970’s there was the horror of ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones and his ‘People’s Temple’. Jones gathered about him a group of seemingly well-educated people whom he indoctrinated into believing that he, the ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones, was communicating the word of God. All who heard Jones speak, and by many accounts he spoke for hours upon end, were told that they were hearing the voice of The Almighty God. So when Jones began giving obviously deranged orders to his followers they simply obeyed without question because this, they thought, was the will of God incarnate in the physical body of Jones.
The ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones was not just a control-freak who demanded absolute obedience to his commands he was also a sexual deviant who abused men, women and children. At one point Jones handed out pre-printed forms that asked the question: ‘Do you want to have sex with Father’ father being Jones. Shortly after receiving numerous positive responses Jones instructed his followers that sexual relations were banned except with him, that is ALL such relationships whether in marriage or not. Jones’s own sexual activities increased with him openly indulging in homosexual encounters with male members of The People’s Temple.
'Reverand' Jim Jones: False Prophet
The strange thing about this kind of abuse is that those who succumb to it are frequently educated and otherwise seemingly sane individuals. However, once within a cult such as Jones’s the escape routes are limited. The horrific end of The People’s Temple is well documented; Jones took his followers to Guyana where he had a compound that he called ‘Jonestown’ located in what he euphemistically named ‘The Promised Land’. There his abuses continued until in 1978 the USA Government ordered an investigation. Jones had the leader of this enquiry, Leo Ryan, shot and killed as he attempted to board his plane back to America. Following this murder Jones ordered all members of The Peoples Temple to drink fruit juice laced with cyanide. Armed guards enforced this and even the babies had the poison squirted into their tiny mouths. By the end of Saturday, November 14th 1978 over nine hundred of Jones’s followers, including the man himself, were dead. All because they believed that the ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones was God.
THE FOLLOWING VIDEO CLIP IS EXTREMELY DISTRESSING AND FOR AGE 18+ ONLY: BE WARNED!
Dead Bodies at Jonestown.
Jones is far from being the only messianic maniac to die amongst his converts. During the early 1990’s one David Koresh announced to all who would listen that he was ‘King David’ and also ‘The Son of God’. Surprisingly quite a number of people not only listened but also believed. Koresh began his new career as a rogue messiah at the age of twenty-seven by seducing Lois Roden the sixty eight year old female leader of The Davidian Christian sect. He told her that he had received ‘divine’ guidance and she was to be the mother of his child. With the sect leader as his mistress Koresh quickly assumed control and convinced the members that he was, in effect, God incarnate.
Koresh then proceeded to use the Davidian sect members as his personal chattels and took his pick of the pretty young children as sexual partners. First he ‘married’ Rachel Jones, a fourteen-year-old girl and then seduced Karen Doyle her friend of similar age. Koresh stated that he had been divinely guided to ‘give his seed’ to these children. One of his younger conquests was a twelve-year old girl called Michele. Koresh claimed that God had shown him a passage in The Bible from the Song of Solomon about a girl with no breasts and this he took as a sign that he was to take this pre-pubescent child as his ‘wife’. Koresh actually impregnated twenty-two of his young female followers.
David Koresh’s abuse of children did not stop with the gratification of his sexual urges; he was also physically abusive towards innocent young people. In one particularly horrible incident Koresh demanded that Cyrus his own three-year old son acknowledge another sect member as his true mother, she wasn’t. When Cyrus refused, as any child would, Koresh removed the boy’s clothing and beat him naked in public for twenty minutes then forced this baby to sleep in a rat infested garage. When the child still declined to agree that the wrong lady was his mother Koresh starved him for two days.
WACO TEXAS: The Burning Of The Dividian Sect's Houses.
The Davidian sect ruled by David Koresh came to a bloody end on the 19th April 1993 when USA forces stormed their headquarters in Waco, Texas. Fire swept the buildings and Koresh, along with all but nine of his followers who escaped, was found dead. When the authorities searched the burnt out remains they discovered that many of the corpses were lying face down in the ashes, the typical position of fire victims, but others had been either shot or poisoned. The survivors said that Koresh had decided they would all men, women and little children, commit suicide.
DAVID KORESH : False Prophet
It seems obvious to Spiritualists that individual human beings have absolutely no authority, divine or otherwise, to proclaim that they are God incarnate. Nor do sects or cults, be they Christian or otherwise, have any authority to interfere in the Personal Responsibility that we all have to our own immortal soul. As a man said, ‘to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, you can then be false to no man.’ In other words, deep inside, we know what is right and what is wrong. The hard part is being strong enough to stand up and speak the truth when all around are bowing their heads.
COLIN WILSON
For further information on false prophets read: Rogue Messiahs by Colin Wilson published by Hampton Roads Pub. Inc. ISBN 1-57174-175-5