Word: cults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cults issue was thrust into harsh focus by last November's carnage at the Peoples Temple commune in Jonestown, Guyana. The most dramatic moments of the four-hour hearing came from Jackie Speier, a legislative counsel who accompanied the late Congressman Leo Ryan on his fatal visit to the Rev. Jim Jones' headquarters and survived gunshot wounds. Speier stated that there are 10 million cult members in the U.S. and warned: "The most important fact about Jonestown is, it can happen again...
...bulk of the witnesses were anticult, however, and though they were openly, and understandably, hostile to the Moonies and other groups under discussion, they were unable to offer hard evidence of criminality, much less Jones-type mass murder. Nor did they define precisely what distinguishes a "cult" from an acceptable religion...
Patrick, of course, is the creator of "deprogramming" for cult converts, and he was on hand also. He works with family members to abduct converts and subject them to nonstop ranting by teams of operatives until they renounce their new faith. Warning that "there is a conspiracy to turn [the U.S.] into a totalitarian state," he stated that he has personally deprogrammed 1,600 people, ranging in age from 13 to 81. In a forthcoming Playboy interview, Patrick includes First Sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, a neoPentecostal "memory healer," on his list of cult leaders who bear watching. Another witness, Author...
Slaughter contends that the anticult network in which she was so active is itself a kind of "cult" and that Patrick's technique is psychologically "destructive." She said that it "scarred me," stirred up resentment and violent dreams, and that an anticult psychiatrist told her she came close to a psychotic break during her deprogramming. She freely admits that Moonies use high-pressure indoctrination methods, but she compares them to Zen-like spiritual disciplines. She also denies Patrick's theory that converts are "brainwashed...
...farsighted, television series will be treated at the box office next Christmas is also a puzzling question. Despite the immense success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, science-fiction movies are often a fragile film commodity whose only sure audiences are cult enthusiasts. To make a profit, Star Trek must reach out far beyond them. Monsters aside, that may be the most difficult enterprise confronting the creators of the starship Enterprise...