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Have you ever been religious?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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They didn't treat me that much differently. I was eight and nine at the time, so it only really came up a couple of times. I only had one prophecy, and it was true, but it was true because my parents made it true. It took me a long time to realize that. Or rather, I realized it immediately, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
I was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school graduation, so I never got any experience being in classrooms, and I didn't have any friends that weren't family or other preacher families. The main way it affected me is that I learned how to teach myself things, so I went into college with almost no knowledge of a lot of topics that conflicted with my religious background, and then learned everything on the fly, basically.
I wouldn't consider my family a cult, except in the casual sense that all religions are cults. We did live with a cult in West Texas for a while. Although it was debatable whether their leader was charismatic lol they had a compound and guns, and they were prepared for the government to try to take them away. My dad ended up disagreeing with them on religious grounds, and we eventually left. But I seem to remember that they were listed as official cult on some sort of watch list at one point.
I don't want to hit you with a 5,000 word essay, so if you would like me to elaborate on any particular point let me know.
That's really interesting and I appreciate you going through that with me. Could you tell me more about the cult you lived with?
They had a scattering of buildings and bunk rooms, and a central rec room. They raised horses and a few other animals. Everyone was carrying guns all the time because there was a wild dog/wolf problem in the area. Some guy a few miles away had been raising them, and then his girlfriend and her side guy killed him and let them out. So it wasn't safe to be out by yourself after dark.
There were maybe 10 or 15 people living there while I was there. The land was cheap because there was no good water (The aquifer under that part of West Texas is brackish) so a lot of weirdos move out into the desert and become hermits. Both the weirdos and the cult were constantly planning for when the government came to take their guns and put them in camps. Which, in retrospect, is hilarious.
The cult had some weird religious beliefs about pre-adamic races. They thought that humanity was actually a second try, and that the first Adam was originally married to Lilith. I don't remember most of the details. They really wanted more people to live out there with them, so they were pretty intense about trying to get myself or my siblings to marry into the cult. I went through there years later, and the original leader had died, but his wife and daughter was still out there trying to convince people to come live with them. They offered me some land to stay.
I'm using text to speech, so if you see any weird typos that's why.
Thanks, I'm a DV outreach worker so this is really useful for my work. That sounds pretty scary from the outside. Was there much abuse of members? And how controlling where they?
Not super controlling, and no abuse that I was aware of. We had a couple of people almost get into a shootout until the cult leader broke it up with a shotgun, but there wasn't any child marriage / bigamy bullshit.
Thanks that's reallg interesting and I really appreciate you taking the time to answer this ๐
No worries. I'm glad you found it interesting. If you have any other questions feel free to hit me up anytime.