How very well written and what a wonderful summary.
I remember seeing a doco on TV that was heart-breaking. It was about some obscure sect that had isolated themselves in the desert to await the end of the world. Most of these types of religions tend to spin off from the Mormons or the JW or the Seventh Day, or they have been influenced by these religions.
Anyway, the old goat running this religion of a couple of dozen people was considered a prophet. His son and daughter-in-law was part of the group and a camera crew followed them for a week or so leading up to the end of the world.
The prophet was sleeping with whomever he liked because that old God was ordering him to do so, David Koresh style. One morning he informed his son that God had told him he had to sleep with his daughter-in-law. It was so wrong and the viewer was engaged so as to really feel the pain of the son. The son kept a brave face and said all the right things because who is going to challenge the prophet, but you could see the turmoil and misery he was going through.
After the business was done by the prophet they interviewed the son again and he somehow kept himself together and presented the set religious spiel, but in a candid moment the camera caught him sitting alone weeping softly. He was devastated and it brought tears to my eyes. How very stupid people are and never more so as they follow the insanity of false religion.
The big morning came and they all got up to face the end of the world. The prophet then declared that the world had ended and they all joined hands and sang and were happy except for those whose hearts had been broken, had no sense of justice and had placed the course of their lives in the hands of this psychotic old bastard who wouldn't know God if he tripped over him.
Now this is a tragic, more extreme example but the Jehovah Witness and others are in many ways exactly the same. The JW elders have failed over and over again with their predictions, the religion has split over the years but they just somehow scab over their failures because people are more needful than logical and they trap a new bunch of fools in their web each generation to perpetuate the madness of their religion with a happy smile and a tax deduction from all of us.
