Posted by:
Googler
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Date: May 07, 2011 03:07AM
wittyname Wrote:
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>
> Btw, there was an old cult out of Gainesville, I
> forgot the name, but river phoenix's family and
> rose mcgowan's family were part of it. The
> children? Children of god? I don't remember now,
> but they used to have a bunch of guides about
> including jesus in sex, like what sorts of things
> to call out to jesus (literally, not just the
> commonplace "oh god") in the throes of passion. I
> don't know if the pamphlets are online, after a
> major scandal they tried to make themselves seem
> normal. Might still be on rickross.com
"Children of God". There's a good book about them called Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin. I have a copy on Kindle. Their story is really messed up, actually way more messed up than Mormonism. They have their own equivalent to this site, for ex-members, www.xfamily.org, with a pretty thorough wiki and an active forum.
I'll try to summarize the story. Started by a guy named David Berg, whose parents were both traveling evangelical Christian preachers. He goes into the same trade, with mixed success. In 1968, around the age of 50, he was in Huntington Beach, CA, where his mother had called him out to the area to preach to the hippie kids. His mother dies that year and he starts the Children of God cult, now calling himself Moses Berg and preaching end-times revelations.
Basically he was so shamed about sex and masturbation as a small child, that he was all sexually repressed, and when his mother died, he just went 180 degrees the other way and decided free love and no rules at all. And then proceeded to engage in his taste for pedophilia with young girls, including incest with his own granddaughters.
In 1975, Berg and his flock were on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands of Spain (they travel all around the globe in the course of the book) practicing "flirty fishing", where the female members would seduce the wealthy looking guys, preaching free love and Jesus in exchange for donations, essentially "holy prostitution." As part of this, Berg's second wife Karen Zerby (27 years younger than Berg) has a child with a hotel employee named Carlos, and Karen and Berg proceed to raise the child as their own, naming him Ricky Rodriguez, but also referring to him as "Davidito" in Berg's messianic prophecies.
They completely screw up Ricky's childhood by treating him like he's literally the messiah, and raise him in this hyper-sexual environment where he is basically molested by these two nurses, and his own mother, as well. Berg apparently had no interest in little boys, so Ricky was spared abuse from him, at least. What's more messed up, the cult documents and takes a whole bunch of photographs of the happenings and creates this 762-page childcare book called "The Story of Davidito" including photographs of the child molestation, which they send around to all the various satellite branches. The photos were heavily censored in subsequent versions of the book.
Ricky grows up to be extremely emotionally disturbed and breaks free of the cult with his then-girlfriend who was also raised into the Children of God, but wasn't witness to the pedophilia stuff that was apparently mostly confined to a core group of adults surrounding Berg and Zerby. Apparently the majority of the members throughout the world didn't take the story of Davidito into practice and molest their own kids, but I'm sure some of them did.
Anyway, Ricky formulates a plan to murder his mother, who becomes the head of the cult, renamed "The Family International", but she's very secretive and won't see him right away. He ends up meeting one of the nurses who raised him, and screwed with his head, and he ends up murdering her, and then fleeing, and eventually killing himself on his way to California. So, yeah, pretty messed up. And Karen Zerby is still in charge, along with one of the other core leaders, "Peter Amsterdam", running this secretive Christian group whose members probably don't know any of the sick story behind the founder.