What do loons get out of their looniness?

[elfs]

What's in it for him?
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Okay, by now, with the Easter season come and gone, most of you have heard the riff about the definition of Christianity:

A cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father will let you live forever if you pretend to eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that he put there a long time ago as punishment for all humanity because a rib-woman made from a dust-man was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magical tree.

As deliberately offensive as this accurate assesment may be worded, I have to wonder what believers like this guy get out of their lonely, abuse-filled ritual on public streetcorners. I mean, he just stands there once in a while, holding up this sign and waving at passersby. I mean, does he really think he's going to get anyone who's not already on board with his tribal message to sign up right there and then? I mean, come on: one out of every five self-identified Christian college-age kids thinks Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple in the Bible. What's the point?

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

One of the ways that cults do their culty thing is by isolating the noobs from the rest of society, so that the cult has complete control of what the noobs learn, and thus believe.

I have a theory that JWs and baptists do a sort of "soft isolation". If you make it a requirement to annoy everyone around you with your preaching, pretty soon the only friends you have are those that belong to the church. With any luck, you convert one or two people along the way, and that's the stated goal of all the preaching. You get brownie points from God for conversions, so there's a reward built into the system.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

To see the stereotypical cult practice in this regard, there are very good examples that are easily examined -- military boot camp. The things that cults do to bring a new acolyte into the cult are the same things that the military does to recruits -- they isolate them from family and friends, breaking them down as individuals to rebuild them with new bonds to each other as part of the military that will be necessary in order for them to function as a unit.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Yup!

[(Anonymous)]

That's certainly how orthodox Judaism works. The kosher law (kashrut laws, technically) make sure that the followers of this practice cannot eat with non-followers - it is entirely prohibited. Add to that the three daily prayer times (which really get in the way of, well, anything you might be doing) and the "modesty" rules governing clothing, and you get a wall that separates the orthodox Jews from the rest of humanity visually, externally, and emotionally-internally.

It's saddest when someone who used to live a regular lifestyle gets sucked in by the comfort of this regimented lifestyle. My father went that route, while I was a young girl, dragging my mother and their (four) children with them. Not one of the children maintained that insane lifestyle, though. Only the zealous convert remained in it.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Sorry, the above was me - I must have logged out without noticing.