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The Human Cost of Cultic Control · Hank Unplugged

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  Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Hank Hanegraaff, and this is Hank Unplugged. On
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  Speaker 1: today's Hank Unplugged, I want to highlight the sociological deviances
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  Speaker 1: of a prolific cult a cult known as the Church
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  Speaker 1: of Almighty God, a cult that is led by a
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  Speaker 1: supposed Chinese Christ, one who shamelessly asserts that the words
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  Speaker 1: of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that he spoke
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  Speaker 1: during his Olivet Discourse apply directly and specifically to her.
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  Speaker 1: namely that the lightning that comes out of the east
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  Speaker 1: and shines even to the west points prophetically to her
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  Speaker 1: reincarnation in the east and to the reality that this
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  Speaker 1: eastern lightning, which is her mission and ministry, is going
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  Speaker 1: to radiate to the west and then to the rest
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  Speaker 1: of the world. Now from a theological perspective, A cult
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  Speaker 1: frequently referred to as Eastern Lightning is a pseudo-Christian group,
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  Speaker 1: a group that compromises, that confuses, and that contradicts the
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  Speaker 1: essentials of the historic Christian faith. How? Well, it replaces
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  Speaker 1: the Old and New Testaments with incoherent ramblings. In this case,
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  Speaker 1: of an alleged female reincarnation of our Lord. This is
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  Speaker 1: a counterfeit Christ. One who envisions herself to be the
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  Speaker 1: Jehovah of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New.
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  Speaker 1: The very Jesus by whom all things were created. This
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  Speaker 1: is a false Christ who brazenly asserts that the Trinity
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  Speaker 1: of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simply does not exist.
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  Speaker 1: That had Christ only come in incarnation as a man,
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  Speaker 1: not even a single woman could be saved. Moreover, this
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  Speaker 1: is a false Christ who asserts that most humans have
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  Speaker 1: to incarnate as animals seven to 12 times. And yet
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  Speaker 1: that overview is just the tip of a proverbial iceberg
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  Speaker 1: because added to the theological perversions of the Church of
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  Speaker 1: Almighty God, of Eastern Lightning, is the matter of sociological deviance.
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  Speaker 1: And that's what I want to address on today's podcast.
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  Speaker 1: sociological deviance. From a sociological perspective, a cult is a
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  Speaker 1: religion or a semi-religious sect whose followers are controlled in
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  Speaker 1: virtually every single dimension of their lives. And as such,
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  Speaker 1: the devotees characteristically display a displaced loyalty for both the
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  Speaker 1: guru and the group and then are galvanized together through
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  Speaker 1: physical and or psychological intimidation tactics. Sociologically deviant cults always, always,
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  Speaker 1: always seem to promote a we-they siege mentality and then
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  Speaker 1: cut off their devotees from all former associations and that
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  Speaker 1: includes from their immediate families. A lot of examples could
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  Speaker 1: be given, like the People's Temple cult, which hopefully is
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  Speaker 1: still emblazoned on the consciousness of millions worldwide, because it
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  Speaker 1: got so much press. You'll recall the infamous Jim Jones,
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  Speaker 1: the leader, who in 1978 presided over the coerced suicide,
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  Speaker 1: over the murder of almost a thousand men, women, and children.
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  Speaker 1: And that's but one example. Another well-known sociologically deviant cult,
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  Speaker 1: was under the charge of the late Indian guru, Bhagwan
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  Speaker 1: Sri Rajneesh, and that pernicious cult was so prolific and
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  Speaker 1: so popular that it attracted well-known personalities, people like Diana
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  Speaker 1: Ross or the sister of Jimmy Carter, President of the
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  Speaker 1: United States. And in full view of the fact that
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  Speaker 1: Congressman Leo Ryan had been murdered by the direct order
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  Speaker 1: of Jim Jones, Ryan's daughter, Shannon, she traveled to Pune,
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  Speaker 1: India to offer Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh money that she had
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  Speaker 1: collected from her father's life insurance policy. And she candidly
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  Speaker 1: acknowledged that she'd heard people say that if Bhagwan Sri
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  Speaker 1: Rajneesh had asked them to kill themselves, they would have
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  Speaker 1: done it. If he had asked them to kill someone else,
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  Speaker 1: they would have done it. She said, I don't know
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  Speaker 1: if my trust in him is that total. And then
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  Speaker 1: she added, however much I'd like it to be. Her
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  Speaker 1: forthright admission is shocking, but it's not unusual. Cult leaders
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  Speaker 1: like Jones, Rajneesh, and many others gain control over their
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  Speaker 1: devotees through social psychological manipulation methods. The first is an
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  Speaker 1: altered state of consciousness. The objective of achieving an altered
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  Speaker 1: state of consciousness is always the same. It's to dull
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  Speaker 1: the critical thinking process. Why? Because the mind is seen
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  Speaker 1: to be the obstacle to enlightenment. And then there's peer pressure.
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  Speaker 1: Cultists routinely employ the psychology of peer pressure. Why? To
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  Speaker 1: conform followers to predictable patterns of behavior. And then there's
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  Speaker 1: the exploitation of expectations. In this regard, there are times
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  Speaker 1: in which the expectations of cultic crowds are heightened to
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  Speaker 1: such an extent that they are no more capable of
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  Speaker 1: resisting the proper hypnotic suggestion than Pavlov's dog was capable
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  Speaker 1: of resisting the stimulus to salivate. And then finally, sociologically
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  Speaker 1: deviant cultists employ the subtle power of suggestion. And they
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  Speaker 1: do that to trap their subjects in a dangerous web
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  Speaker 1: of subjectivism. Now I've heard cynics who write off the
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  Speaker 1: use of altered states of consciousness, peer pressure, exploitation of expectations,
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  Speaker 1: the subtle power of suggestion as mere social, psychological manipulation.
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  Speaker 1: But authentic Christians ought to comprehend a far more significant threat.
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  Speaker 1: And that is that these manipulation techniques are fertile soil
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  Speaker 1: for satanic and spiritual deception. The list of sociologically deviant
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  Speaker 1: cults and their cults, cults that employ these kinds of
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  Speaker 1: contrivances are myriad. They are appallingly long. They obviously do
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  Speaker 1: not all employ precisely the same techniques. But what they
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  Speaker 1: do is they entangle their devotees in a dangerous web
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  Speaker 1: of subjectivism. the kind of subjectivism that seduces devotees to
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  Speaker 1: embrace the sociologically deviant and the dangerous notion, almost unthinkable notion,
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  Speaker 1: that a female born in China is the reincarnation of
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  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ and that she is to be afforded total
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  Speaker 1: obedience as the very God who spoke and the universe
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  Speaker 1: leapt into existence. And yet, as with Jonestown, Guyana, and Pune, India,
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  Speaker 1: there are millions of devotees who continuously swallow spiritual cyanide.
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  Speaker 1: And not only that, significant religious studies specialists continue to
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  Speaker 1: uphold the Church of Almighty God as a genuine Christian movement. Well,
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  Speaker 1: in the image of the People's Temple and the Rajneesh cults,
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  Speaker 1: the Church of Almighty God brashly trumpets their founder as
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  Speaker 1: though she were an omnipotent deity, one that demands total
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  Speaker 1: submission in everything. So there's this document that she produces,
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  Speaker 1: the 10 administrative decrees it's called. Decrees that must be
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  Speaker 1: obeyed by God's chosen people in the age of the kingdom.
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  Speaker 1: The female Christ makes plain that she is to be
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  Speaker 1: worshiped and exalted in this document. that the offerings of
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  Speaker 1: her devotees are for her personal enjoyment because she's God.
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  Speaker 1: And that if anyone else enjoyed them, they would be stealing.
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  Speaker 1: And that she, the almighty God of the entire universe,
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  Speaker 1: is the one who is to be afforded absolute compliance
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  Speaker 1: and total submission. Now this is a cult that we
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  Speaker 1: at the Christian Research Institute have done first-rate primary research on.
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  Speaker 1: I personally have allotted significant time to visiting the very
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  Speaker 1: victims of the Church of Almighty God. Let me give
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  Speaker 1: you some examples. One of them is a spiritual leader
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  Speaker 1: of a small group of churches. It's a group of
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  Speaker 1: churches in a rural expanse of a place known as
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  Speaker 1: Hunan Province. It's often talked about as the epicenter of
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  Speaker 1: Chinese culture. And I remember sitting on a small stool
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  Speaker 1: in his village church. I was surrounded by his family.
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  Speaker 1: When he began to recount what he went through, The
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  Speaker 1: fact that he was savagely beaten with rods. That he
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  Speaker 1: was left for dead by devotees of the female Christ.
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  Speaker 1: I'll never forget him raising his pant leg and showing
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  Speaker 1: the scarring left by broken bones. And when I asked
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  Speaker 1: him what the motive for the beating was, the pastor
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  Speaker 1: forthrightly communicated that he had been incapacitated for a reason.
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  Speaker 1: Because if he would have not been able to walk
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  Speaker 1: to surrounding villages and tend to his flock, they would
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  Speaker 1: not have had the opportunity to resist the devotees of
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  Speaker 1: the Church of Almighty God. And had he been killed,
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  Speaker 1: the sheep would not only have lost a shepherd, but
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  Speaker 1: they would have become easy prey to cultic wolves in
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  Speaker 1: sheep's clothing. Now during the interview process, I spoke with
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  Speaker 1: many people. One was a young man, I'll just call
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  Speaker 1: him Shee. a young man who dropped out of school
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  Speaker 1: after being convinced by Eastern Lightning devotees that the current
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  Speaker 1: world order was about to end. Four years later, an
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  Speaker 1: Eastern Lightning leader persuaded him to serve full-time in the
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  Speaker 1: multimedia divisions of the Church of Almighty God. As he
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  Speaker 1: moved through the ranks, he was required to produce handwritten vows.
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  Speaker 1: In some, he produced five. And in all five, he
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  Speaker 1: promised never to divulge the inner workings of the Church
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  Speaker 1: of Almighty God. And, should he do so, to gladly
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  Speaker 1: succumb to the temporal and eternal retributions of the reincarnated Christ.
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  Speaker 1: And in his case, that meant to be killed and
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  Speaker 1: thereafter suffer the horrors of an alleged 18th level of hell.
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  Speaker 1: Within the confines of the cultic configuration, she said that
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  Speaker 1: his critical thinking processes were systematically undermined. He may not
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  Speaker 1: have achieved an altered state of consciousness in the classical
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  Speaker 1: cultic sense, but as with devotees in similar cultic communes,
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  Speaker 1: his critical thinking abilities were inescapably destabilized. Only years after
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  Speaker 1: being arrested by a public security officer and then subsequently
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  Speaker 1: quarantined by the Church of Almighty God did he realize
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  Speaker 1: how significantly his rational thinking processes had been affected. In time,
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  Speaker 1: he embodied the counterfeit Christ's mandate to become absolute in
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  Speaker 1: his compliance, to refrain from analyzing right from wrong, to
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  Speaker 1: relinquish the ability to think rationally and critically. In short,
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  Speaker 1: he followed a horde of other devotees on the broad
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  Speaker 1: road of demonic deception. Having largely set aside his ability
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  Speaker 1: to think rationally, to think critically, to exercise his will.
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  Speaker 1: He had become hyper-suggestible. What that means, this has been
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  Speaker 1: well said, is that he was likely to accept any
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  Speaker 1: spiritual truth that would enter his mind. And even more remarkably,
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  Speaker 1: he was primed for mystical experiences and for attaching great
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  Speaker 1: spiritual significance to virtually any event or thought, no matter
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  Speaker 1: how mundane or outlandish. Added to the horror of relinquishing
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  Speaker 1: the ability to analyze right from wrong, he, like other
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  Speaker 1: devotees of the Church of Almighty God, fell prey to
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  Speaker 1: the destabilizing power of peer pressure. And over time, He,
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  Speaker 1: like other devotees, abandoned virtually all social obligations. And they
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  Speaker 1: commit themselves to little more than spreading the culturally subversive
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  Speaker 1: message of their counterfeit Christ. And this heartbreakingly extends to
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  Speaker 1: the rending apart of the very fabric of civil society.
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  Speaker 1: The rending apart of the family unit. In some of
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  Speaker 1: my interviews, I listened. I listened to the tragic accounts
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  Speaker 1: of devotees leaving home, leaving family, and then becoming traveling missionaries.
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  Speaker 1: Missionaries for a destructive distortion. There was one former cult
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  Speaker 1: member who explained to me that his wife had left
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  Speaker 1: the family And that's shortly after their baby stopped nursing.
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  Speaker 1: That child, now many years later, is still devoid of
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  Speaker 1: the nurturing care of a mother. And yet, as documented
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  Speaker 1: in our journal, well, I'll talk about that later, there
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  Speaker 1: has been redemption and reunification not all that long ago.
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  Speaker 1: because he remained committed to his wife. And yet it
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  Speaker 1: was sad, because due to a lack of education, he
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  Speaker 1: felt ill-equipped to reason with her when she was in
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  Speaker 1: the cult. The village, he said, is replete with devotees
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  Speaker 1: of the Church of Almighty God, and the peer pressure
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  Speaker 1: to conform is simply enormous. He also said that the
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  Speaker 1: peer pressure that caused his wife to participate in the
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  Speaker 1: first place kept her from coming to grips with the
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  Speaker 1: heartbreaking reality that she was a willing accomplice to pernicious deceptions.
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  Speaker 1: And these demonic deceptions are overtly exploited by the counterfeit Christ.
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  Speaker 1: In no uncertain terms, she not only exploits them, But
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  Speaker 1: she exhorts her devotees in the process to leave their
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  Speaker 1: families and to wholeheartedly commit to the mission of gaining
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  Speaker 1: new converts. And those who fail to do that, she
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  Speaker 1: has a word for. She calls them worthless. As seductive
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  Speaker 1: as the female Christ is at employing peer pressure to
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  Speaker 1: break up families, and through that to unravel the fabric
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  Speaker 1: of civil society. She's perhaps even more adept at the
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  Speaker 1: exploitation of their expectations. Devotees are systematically seduced into believing
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  Speaker 1: that the female Christ is about to overthrow the current
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  Speaker 1: social political milieu. That she is about to exact vengeance
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  Speaker 1: upon the great red dragon of Chinese civilization and that
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  Speaker 1: she is about to transform her devotees to be the
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  Speaker 1: metaphorical head of the dragon rather than being ignominiously relegated
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  Speaker 1: to its tail. Even now, the promise of messianic lightning
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  Speaker 1: that came from the east is becoming increasingly bright worldwide. Why?
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  Speaker 1: Because Eastern Lightning devotees accelerate their migration, and they've done
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  Speaker 1: that globally, to places like South Korea and Taiwan, the
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  Speaker 1: United States and Canada, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, the place
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  Speaker 1: where I was born, the Netherlands. Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Finland, Spain, Hungary,
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  Speaker 1: and other countries. Let me begin to wrap up this
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  Speaker 1: Hank Unplugged podcast, this podcast on Eastern Lightning or the
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  Speaker 1: Church of Almighty God, with a word about the subtle
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  Speaker 1: power of suggestion. Why? Because pagan religions and pseudo-Christian cultists
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  Speaker 1: have long capitalized on the power of suggestion in order
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  Speaker 1: to promote their pernicious practices. And the Church of Almighty
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  Speaker 1: God's leadership has followed in this tradition. The effect in
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  Speaker 1: China has been nothing short of societal devastation. Added to
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  Speaker 1: what I mentioned before, the litanies of sociopsychological manipulations, the
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  Speaker 1: consequences of the subtle power of suggestion appear virtually without constraint.
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  Speaker 1: It can make black appear white. It can obscure reality.
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  Speaker 1: It can enshrine absurdity. It can cause people to kill
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  Speaker 1: other people, and it has. In sum, the mythological narrative
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  Speaker 1: that the Church of Almighty God is just another well-intentioned
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  Speaker 1: Christian ministry originating the East and unjustly persecuted by the
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  Speaker 1: Chinese Communist Party can't remain unchallenged because this cult is
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  Speaker 1: neither Christian nor is it in responsive dialogue with other Christianities. Instead,
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  Speaker 1: it's a subversive movement that has damaged and is damaging
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  Speaker 1: the lives of millions within its own cultic commune and
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  Speaker 1: in the broader culture of the world. The evidence for
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  Speaker 1: all of this and more is chronicled in a special
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  Speaker 1: edition of the Christian Research Journal, a journal that is
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  Speaker 1: dedicated to equipping you to exercise truth and experience life.
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  Speaker 1: By the way, the cover of this journal, you can
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  Speaker 1: see the female Christ or an image of her, something
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  Speaker 1: that is meant to portray her, and she's holding up something.
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  Speaker 1: It's the Word Appears in the Flesh, which supposedly is
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  Speaker 1: the new Bible to replace the Old and New Testament.
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  Speaker 1: But this journal, some three years in the making, is
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  Speaker 1: now available in both English as well as a combined
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  Speaker 1: English-Chinese version. So on one side you have the English,
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  Speaker 1: turn it over and you have the Chinese. And by
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  Speaker 1: getting your copy, you will not only understand the dangers
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  Speaker 1: of cults like Eastern Lightning, But in the process, you'll
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  Speaker 1: become so familiar with the truth that when cults like
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  Speaker 1: this appear on the horizon, you will be able to
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  Speaker 1: identify them instantaneously. Just like Jesus told his disciples not
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  Speaker 1: long before his death and resurrection, false Christs and false
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  Speaker 1: prophets will appear. And they will perform great signs and miracles.
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  Speaker 1: and that they will even deceive the elect if that
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  Speaker 1: were possible. And what was true then in the time
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  Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ is most certainly true today. And perhaps
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  Speaker 1: no more terrifying example can arise than a woman from China,
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  Speaker 1: presumably now living in New York, masquerading as the reincarnation
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  Speaker 1: of the very one who spoke and the universe leapt
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  Speaker 1: into existence. Again, this special edition of the Christian Research
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  Speaker 1: Journal is available to the Ministry of CRI. You can
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  Speaker 1: check it out on the web at equip.org. You can
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  Speaker 1: also write to me at Post Office Box 8500, Charlotte,
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  Speaker 1: North Carolina, zip code 28271. Remember, our ministry is designed
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  Speaker 1: for not only to expose error, but to make you
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  Speaker 1: familiar with truth. Why? Because our Lord is the way,
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  Speaker 1: the truth, and the life. And we need to be
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  Speaker 1: ambassadors for Christ, willing to do for the authentic Christ
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  Speaker 1: what cultists, who are part of the Church of Almighty God,
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  Speaker 1: are doing all over the world for a counterfeit. We
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  Speaker 1: need to make a difference while there's yet time. This
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  Speaker 1: ministry is committed to doing that, and we're asking people
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  Speaker 1: to stand shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle
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  Speaker 1: for life and truth. Please support our ministry. This ministry
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  Speaker 1: is making a difference while there's yet time. And thanks
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  Speaker 1: for tuning in to this edition of Hank Unplugged. We
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  Speaker 1: look forward to seeing you next time on a future podcast.