Author: matthew

I recently have been reading some essays and books by Steven Hassan, a well-known therapist who deals primarily with the victims of destructive cults like the Heaven’s Gate group or the Moonies. Although I do not consider myself an expert, I wrote a reply to an individual on a message board who asked “Is Mormonism a Cult?”.

It looks like a simple question. I don’t believe, however, that a black-and-white answer is adequate. Different people at different times have had vastly different experiences. Mormonism has spawned over 11,000 splinter groups which may or may not be destructive cults, and among all these groups are individual congregations which vary dramatically.

Note that Hassan’s use of the word “cult” differs from that used by Evangelical Christians, for whom “cult” appears to refer to any organization with heretical or blasphemous beliefs compared to mainstream Christianity. Hassan’s approach deals mainly with the use of personal influence in destructive, unhealthy, or controlling ways. (See: “Influence: Science and Practice” by Robert Cialdini) Hassan also distinguishes between cults and “destructive cults”, and appears to be very picky about when he uses which term.

Picture a triangle with a circle in the middle touching each side. The circle within the triangle represents the experience of the average member of a group. Those outside the circle at the top represent the leadership, whose experience in the organization is dramatically different than that of the average member. To the bottom left are the experiences of those who are not very active in the group, and to the right are those who are extremely active. The experiences of these four groups within a large organization are sufficiently unlike one another that they can be considered individually. Even if the rest of the group is not this way, the outliers may exhibit symptoms of being in a destructive cult. Many groups — even some corporations — have sub-groups which exhibit cult-like behavior.

As an example, I point to the coercive interviews I experienced as a teenager. The bishop of the ward would pull me into his office and question me explicitly about my relationships with my girlfriends, personal sexual and cleanliness habits, and basic worthiness. This was done twice a year. It included lines of questioning which, due to the family-oriented nature of this site, I’d rather not delve into. Accompanying these were demands for confession of other sins, and information about these transgressions became common knowledge among the ward leadership.

My wife, on the other hand, remembers no such explicit questions while growing up. Her family went to church most of the time, and she recalls having worthiness interviews prior to going to the temple to do baptisms for the dead or advancing in the Young Women’s program. For her, these were not bizarre or sinister experiences, and they were not terrifically detailed examinations or demands for confession. And as far as I know, her leaders maintained the sanctity of the confessional.

The mission field is a special case within the church. In my opinion, there is no question those in the mission field have mind-control methods used on them, and are taught principles of personal influence with the goal of gaining converts. Many of the worst abuses symptomatic of destructive cults, however, are absent in the field. A distinguishing feature of the mission field is one shared by the U.S. Military, and Hassan considers it reason enough to exempt the military from being considered a destructive cult:

There is a way to honorably exit.

For soldiers, it’s to serve your tour. For missionaries, it’s to serve your two years (or eighteen months). Hassan gives organizations which have a method of honorable exit a “pass” on being considered a destructive cult because they have a job to do which requires mind-control methods.

Here’s a list from Hassan’s book to evaluate whether a loved one is involved in a destructive cult:

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF A MIND CONTROL ENVIRONMENT

Exclusivity/isolation

* manipulation, deception, dependency and isolation * all the other churches are dead and unspiritual * demanding a one-over-one discipling relationship * has turned his back on all his friends. * spending more and more time with her * secret meetings * moved into the group’s headquarters * the cult member refuses to respond to letters and phone calls * the family doesn’t even know where their loved one is

Abuse of power

* psychological blackmail * threatening prophecies * gives her large sums of money * the group will extract as much money as it can * her guru wants to get his hands on our property and savings * he wanted to have sex with me

Creation of the cult identity

* I don’t recognize my own bright, warm, loving son. * controlled my behavior, my thoughts and my emotions * a cult member is like an actor/ they actually come to believe the “role” is reality

If more than one of these characteristics sound familiar, there is a good chance that the group in question is a destructive cult. The chapters that follow will give you more specific criteria for evaluating the destructive potential of a group.

Is Mormonism a destructive cult? That’s a simple question with a complicated answer.

What to do if you meet an atheist:

Yep, I’m the one in the bathrobe. They must have had an amazing sketch artist to work from a photograph like that.

And I’m not sad all the time. Really. It’s just that, right as they knocked, I had been trying to put a contact lens in. The noise distracted me and I poked myself in the eye.

In a recent Slashdot discussion, the claim is made that a new brief in favor of summary judgment by the RIAA is trying to change the definition of copyright infringement. I disagree with this interpretation of the Brief, and believe that such a reading ignores the context of the RIAA’s claims.

I feel strange defending an association whom I abhor, but nevertheless, the following is my response.

I wonder how many of us actually read the brief all the way through? It’s clear from the context that “Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies” means it is the act of compressing into MP3 and placing in a Kazaa shared folder that is at issue, not the act of compressing the MP3 itself.

The RIAA makes no claim in the brief regarding the Defendant’s possession of MP3 files and pornography on his computer, other than the fact he created a shortcut to said items and admitted to their use constitutes knowledge of their existence which, along with their placement in a shared folder, constitutes willful infringement. There is only one question in the brief in favor of summary judgment related to this question:

2. Does the record in this case show that Defendant Howell possessed an “unlawful copy” of the Plaintiff’s copyrighted material, and that he actually disseminated that copy to the public?

According to the Plaintiff, it was the act of converting to MP3 and then placing the recording in a shared folder with the intent to distribute on a peer-to-peer network which was the infringing action… not converting to MP3 itself. The two actions together, they maintain, constitute the creation of an unlawful copy. The title of the article, “RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized”, is misleading.

I don’t see this brief as an attempted reversal, but as testing the waters to clarify exactly at what point copyright infringement occurs. In my opinion, the RIAA finally gets the definition right: if you copy the CD of my music that you purchased, you are not infringing. You can even make a copy to give to friends, and you are not infringing. If you make a copy so that they can make more copies, or perform it publicly or display it, you are infringing.

Disclaimer: I am both a supporter of peer-to-peer networking and an independent musician and author with numerous copyrighted works. I think the RIAA is evil, but that their direction is set by their members and that it is those producers who are accountable for their actions and should exert pressure on their lobbying organization to be socially responsible when performing necessary actions to enforce copyright.

Now I’ve seen one more thing on my life-long journey to see everything: The Fart Survey.

Some fun fart “facts”:

1. “80% of the men surveyed admit that they have blamed one of their farts on somebody else.”
2. “20% of the men surveyed have lit their own farts (another 15% tried but did not succeed).”
3. “47% of men surveyed admit that they have sniffed the chair/couch after farting in it.”

“I find it amusing that a language which produces sesquipedalian cannot manage a gender neutral third person singular pronoun.”

I read a short review of a product I’m considering — “You Need A Budget” — and the initial paragraph of the review really grabbed me.

I’ve decided there are three types of people out there:

1. One who needs a budget, otherwise they’ll spend whatever they can get their hands on, and then some,
2. One who does a pretty good job by themselves, stays out of debt, but could definitely benefit from a proper budget, or
3. One who is so anal about their money, that they don’t need a budget. They already scrutinize every purchase before they make it.

My epiphany was this: I’ve been a Type 1, trying to be a Type 3 and failing. After many years, I’ve finally arrived at a Type 2. The only debt we have is our home, but we still feel strapped for cash all the time. We’re considering buying some real estate in the near future for rental income, and I realized that we probably need to get a better handle on our finances so that emergencies or vacancies don’t catch us with our pants down.

I’m thinking of buying You Need A Budget, mainly because Quicken is far too anal for my purposes. I don’t want to track purchases to that level of detail. But I do want to be able to have a general outline of where things should go, a bit more than our current strategy of only four categories: bills, mortgage, savings, slush fund.

What’s your budgeting archetype?

Apparently Microsoft has submitted a request to have the One Laptop Per Child project modify their systems to run Windows XP. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the OLPC project, including some of the debate surrounding the environmental-friendliness of a project to get one laptop into the hands of every child on the planet, as well as usability concerns and the failure to meet the $100 price-point.

The main concerns of the OLPC were intense durability, resistance to dirt and water, high screen visibility outdoors, low power consumption with easy rechargeability in primitive conditions, and a large stable of educational software. They also have the ability to form ad-hoc networks amongst themselves if other OLPCs are nearby, with two little antennas and the bright green color giving the computer a very insect-like look. Right now, they are offering a promotion to US consumers: for $400, they’ll sell you an OLPC and send one to a third-world country on your behalf.

What’s interesting to me is this move by Microsoft to allow Windows XP to run on the laptop. I see it as a concession that their joint effort with Intel’s “Classmate” low-cost laptop has, if not failed, then run into hard times competing with the mind-share of the OLPC. They cite the “tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows” as reason for justifying putting Windows XP on the OLPC rather than the Free Linux operating system.

I own a Linux laptop which was built in 1998. It’s a little Sony Vaio. It has 192MB of RAM, a dinky little 12-inch screen, and a 366MHz Pentium III processor. It is currently running Gentoo Linux, and as long as I’m careful not to run more than a few applications at a time, it runs just fine. It’s a little bit slow loading the latest and greatest version of Firefox, but there is never any typing lag and until it got accidentally fried to where it’s no longer reliable, I used it all the time and was very productive with it, including using OpenOffice and email applications.

I tried installing Windows XP… and it simply doesn’t work. Just loading “notepad” took 30+ seconds in such a limited memory configuration. I had to take a coffee break if I wanted to load Microsoft Office. And I can plain forget about running the Microsoft Visual Studio (the development environment for MS applications)… it just hangs the box forever.

My thought is that, well, Kudos to Microsoft for wanting to get involved in bringing personal computing to the Third World, but how they are going to get such a bloated beast to run well in such a limited environment will be a challenge.

So my wife and I signed up for pre-paid legal services as part of our benefits package for next year. My question is, are any of us using such services, and have they been a benefit or just a drain on the pocketbook?

A few months ago we were playing a game with some friends, and the question came up, “What do you want your last words to be?”.

Mine: “Doh!” Christy’s: “I love you.” My friend Matt’s: “Hey, watch this!”

What’s yours?

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=2275142

Summary: Sugar House (a suburb of Salt Lake City) citizens speak out against “sexually-oriented business” moving into their neighborhood. The business in question: The Blue Boutique.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Blue Boutique is a costume, lingerie, and adult novelty shop. There are lots of different takes on the franchise, from those which focus almost exclusively on the costume aspect, to almost exclusively on the novelties aspect.

The way I see it, there are at least two separate questions:

1. Is the Blue Boutique a “sexually-oriented business”? I’ve shopped a few of these stores with my wife, and the strictly “adult” items are always in a clearly delineated, walled-off area of the store marked Adults Only, which is policed by store employees to ensure no minors get in. Up front, it is little more explicit than perhaps a Victoria’s Secret store. If I had a sliding scale with the grocery store that sells condoms on one end and a whorehouse on the other, BB is somewhere in the middle leaning toward the grocery-store end. Its license was also “retail accessory” in its previous location, not “sexually oriented business” like the magazine/DVD shops in Salt Lake. The BB doesn’t even sell videos of any sort.
2. Does a business of this nature damage children?

Regarding the second question, there’s a quote from the article that I want to call out:

Annelle Doxey said, “The window displays and products they offer will greatly increase the amount of exposure that our children will have to items and pictures of a sexual nature. Studies have shown that this kind of exposure will damage the natural development of a child’s personality.”

Obviously, a City Council meeting is hardly the place to be citing references, but I’d be interested in learning exactly what “studies” have shown that lingerie stores damage the “natural development of a child’s personality”. Kids are going to have sex whether we want them to or not. By the age of 19, even here in prim, proper Utah, there’s a 4 out of 5 chance that the child will have had anal, vaginal, or oral sex. When they have an interest in the topic, they are of an appropriate age to learn something about it.

On the other hand, I’m not comfortable with the idea of my teenage daughter bringing home a bondage kit and massive rubber dong to decorate her room. So I think there’s a sliding scale of appropriateness there, too.

While I understand the concern of these parents, why not let the business open, and then if the window displays are objectionable, report that infringement to the city council?