God bless u

The strength of divine conviction is certainly not to be neglected and seeing people leave the community is complicated…

Recently I had my trust visibly broken, tbh it’s not like something you’d see in movies, with the wife calling for adultery or something like that. Here, it had to with something a bit more complex and insidious - it was about truth. And who to trust. A certain someone in our community was accusing another of something really dark and twisted. Like the kind that you couldn’t really make up, but then again, things have been weird. When it came to the person that was being accused, I couldn’t ever see myself believing that they did what they did.

And so, like any believer - i think it came down to showing the truth. When you think about it, there’s plenty of ways to get the truth out - trust, torture, even brainwashing or lie-detectors. But I think the strongest is public humiliation - think about it, even Father Phelps talked about it - we’re social animals, we live to flock together. When you want to distance yourself from a group, from society - its not out of spite. It’s really just a call for help to strengthen ties. In a sermon last month, we talked about destroying the ego of the individual because that is where sins abound:

by dissolving the individual, he returns to the flock.

It’s really not something that’s uncommon, when you think about it, it’s really present in both Western and Oriental cultures. Even in our good old US of A, check out this video i found about weird rituals that you go through when you go to college:

Now why would you go about doing something so dehumanizing? Simple: people will debase themselves for attention, but also for approval. Maybe this was just a way to find a way for us to connect again after all that was happening these past few months.

So this is what we thought of this last Sunday: we all stood in a circle around our fellow brother then recited biblical passages, pointing at him and shouting words: “blasphemy”, “liar!”, “unbeliever” in order to help him to expel his sins and the devil within him.

Now I know what you guys could say, but the fact of the matter is we didn’t want to scare him! That wasn’t the point at all. Above all, you have to atone for the devil in him…