A vegetarian death cult?

Another example of how *anyone* can get sucked into a cult.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309

LaSota is known for wearing dark robes and describing herself as Sith, a reference to the evil figures in the “Star Wars” franchise. People who know LaSota's small group of associates describe them as smart, techie vegans, many of them transgender women, who share an obsession with the dangers of artificial intelligence. They have been dubbed by LaSota's critics as “Zizians.”

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LaSota believed that humans have two minds, a left and right hemisphere, and each hemisphere can be good or evil, according to posts on her blog. Eventually, LaSota came to believe that only very few people — she among them — are double good.

“Suppose that you’re young and naive and someone convinces you that you’re really two people and one is good and one is sinister,” Salamon said. “Also that the world depends on you doing good stuff. That’s a pretty powerful setup for manipulation.”

On her blog, LaSota wrote that each hemisphere can have separate values and even genders, and they “often desire to kill each other.”

“Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate,” LaSota wrote.

LaSota also described being targeted by police for her Sith-inspired garb.

“Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith,” LaSota wrote on her blog. “(As a Sith, I’m religiously required to do whatever I want, and for now that so happens to include wearing black robes).”

So many cults, so little time!

The old "I’m religiously required to do whatever I want" is getting old for me. It usually actually means everyone else should follow what they want too.

There is a major subset of veganism who are very misanthropic. None of this surprises me.

They're the ones who murdered a Border Patrol officer in Vermont.

Never kill something you're not going to eat.

Where is the carnivore cult ?

What, you've never heard of the Church of Bacon?

https://unitedchurchofbacon.org/

meanwhile, in SLC, there's a Deafening Silence from FB & 12;

How, I ask, do these folks sleep at all?

Their focus on 'building the Kingdom' precludes attention to real people, real situations, and real problems.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/21/2025 01:47PM by GNPE.

anybody Wrote:
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> A vegetarian death cult?
>
> Another example of how *anyone* can get sucked
> into a cult.

Anyone? Um, no, some of us have reasoning skills.

I wore the jeebus jammies.

Don't seem so surprised. Universities have always been major recruiting grounds for cults. The idea that "educated people" are less vulnerable is trash. They're more susceptible. University students are often lonely and isolated, looking for new ideas to reshape their lives and/or are already emulating authority figures to build their future. They are perfect bait for a cult.

C.S. Lewis was an academic and had witnessed his contemporaries fall for many cultish beliefs and systems. He nails it in this quote in one of his novels:

"Why, you fool, it's the educated readers who can be gulled. [Conned] All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything."

So an Oxford don writes a piece of fiction calling well educated people gullible. . .

Who knows? Maybe he meant it as fiction. Maybe the gullible one is he who doesn’t know the difference.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So an Oxford don writes a piece of fiction calling
> well educated people gullible. . .

:)

> Who knows? Maybe he meant it as fiction. Maybe
> the gullible one is he who doesn’t know the
> difference.

I can say this... Our local university is the Mormon missionaries' happy hunting ground. Most of the converts they get tend there to be depressed and lonesome Chinese students. The American students tend to get sucked into eastern religions, health/philosophy cults, MLMs etc.

Three observations.

First, college students are not necessarily geniuses. We all know that.

Second, college students are not especially "educated" either. The reason they are in college is, or should be, to become educated.

Third, college students usually *are* disproportionately "depressed and lonesome" and that is perhaps the real reason they--Chinese or Western--are more susceptible to cults.

If Gen Z is more susceptible to depression and loneliness, isn't that partly because of the world the Boomers left them?

Do you think that Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Shane Frederick, and the other cognitive scientists would have found the following assertions "intelligent" or even intelligible?

> The ATP oxidative reduction cycle that
> powers cells also serves as an information
> interface to this timeless domain to guide
> cellular mitosis.

> Any drug or technology that works at the mitochondrial level is > dependent on faith and belief for its effectiveness.

I think I know what Forest Gump would have observed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2025 05:16PM by Lot's Wife.

They have to read it with their spiritual eyes.

The real question is whether science should address spiritual topics. The highest rate of atheism in scientists is among biologists, yet mitochondria are the closest life form to God in the human body. So a proposed mechanism by which the body integrates with its non-physical dimensions won't get far if those dimensions are not believed to exist.

". . . mitochondria are the closest life form to God in the human body. . ."

That presumes two things: that God exists that mitochondria are in some way related to the supernatural. You add a third presumption when you suggest that the body has "non-physical dimensions." None of those is logically or empirically demonstrated.

Only if people accept your three presumptions do they end up with your dilemma about science addressing spiritual questions. To the rest of us the problem is precisely the opposite: why are you injecting spiritualism into empirical science?

>>The real question is whether science should address spiritual topics. The highest rate of atheism in scientists is among biologists, yet mitochondria are the closest life form to God in the human body. So a proposed mechanism by which the body integrates with its non-physical dimensions won't get far if those dimensions are not believed to exist.


Wait until you hear what can happen with uranium and plutonium!

The Krebs cycle (generating ATP from glucose) is the closest "life form" to God in our bodies?
I can hardly wait to hear how ATP fuels consciousness in a non-physical dimension. I suspect a lot of non scientists especially want biochemistry to do some heavy lifting for their spiritual needs. They can knock themselves out and come back when they have more than talk.

I suppose you are mostly just using sciency talk to explain energy generation, but it sounds like pseudo science salad, IMO. How you want to define God, and how you would know is a whole different diversion.

I think people who are insistent upon believing in the supernatural want to find some corner of science that supports their views. This is true even of those believers who claim that the supernatural is not amenable to scientific analysis.

Their position is thus an argument in the alternative: "science proves the existence of God. And if it doesn't, well, God transcends the mundane so it was silly (of you) ever to suggest science was relevant."

The science of cellular biology and genetics is arcane, at least to this category of believer, so they think that's where the "interface" with the supernatural must be hidden.

"I can hardly wait to hear how ATP fuels consciousness in a non-physical dimension"

Since you are asking, it has to do with electrical differentials across membranes formed by chiral molecules. These impart a spin bias to the ionic electron flow which produces a torsion field. These spin fields combine in a coherent way, like laser light, because they vibrate in time rather than space. They follow waveguides, forming the chassic Qi flow mapped by acupuncturists. So we really are beings of light.

I'm surely missing some important steps, especially connecting oxidative reduction and torsion coherence, but that's the gist. It does not explain mitochondrial consciousness, but then if it's an antenna it's picking up you. You are conscious. So the Eastern notion that "You are God" is essentially correct. This ATP Qi business produces a non-local field across time and space that Mormons call the Holy Ghost, but it's really a collective consciousness. The Native American view that "We are all connected" is rather astounding in that regard. It's not just a myth or sentiment, but an actual thing.

As much as I despise the church, it has a certain logic to it. Money diggers understand the human relationship to money. If you understand it, you don't need the church because you don't need someone to sell you what is already yours.

Just my two cents, or whatever since pennies are being discontinued.

That sounds like more word salad for basic biochemistry and physics with some pseudoscience Qi dressing for flavor.

I think I get the sentiment, though.

> That sounds like more word salad for basic
> biochemistry and physics with some pseudoscience
> Qi dressing for flavor.

That's the thing. People add "ancient Chinese secret sauce" to modern food and pretend the result is delicious.

We've seen that with the old Taoist concepts of Qi, Wuwei, Yin and Yang, which make perfect sense until one realizes that the Taoists were opposed to all education and especially scientific education and hence that those Chinese concepts fundamentally contradict cellular biology and genetics.

The same is true here as well. Qi is a concept with many meanings and hence no solid definition. The Taoists thought of it as the virtue that characterizes those who do not study anything, Confucians thought it was harmony with society, the Moists thought it was the smell of a rotting body. You can't really define the term unless you specify a particular philosophical tradition and even a specific philosopher.

So what does Qi mean to modern Westerners? Whatever modern Westerners want it to mean. It's like--well, it is--the God of the Gaps. It's the bridge between science and my preferred religion/ideology; and as science advances, Qi shrinks in size to fit the remaining gap and keep my preferred worldview viable.

That tracks.

It's definitely a God of the Gaps gimmick. It's weird how all my science textbooks forgot to mention the secret sauce! ;-/ The results are the same with or without it.

You are correct in some ways. A person who is away from home for the first time without the authority of their parents to make decisions for them is certainly susceptible to cults and anybody claiming to have authority to replace the authority they've lost. Somehow, however, most students, no matter their creed or color, make it through college and onward with their lives without much trouble.

Where I would differ with you is saying that college students are more gullible than others; all of us are gullible but in different ways. A college student, for example, might fall for ideas that sound good in theory but don't work in practice. A non-college worker, on the other hand, because he doesn't believe that what the newspapers and radio say is true, can also be persuaded to join a cult if the cult leader appeals to the values he holds to be dear. People (like me) who believe that life is about learning new things can be persuaded to join a cult if what we are being offered sounds intriguing and worth investigating.

Keep in mind that flying above all of this is the fact that we humans are social animals and that we need both the approval and support of others in furtherance of our own goals and ideas. That very human need plays directly into a cult leader's hands, regardless of whether one is educated or not. Therefore, the best advice I can give before joining any group is to do the research. What does the group leader actually believe. Has the group ever gotten in legal trouble, and, if so, why. How are ex-group members treated by group members once they leave. It used to be hard to do this research, but currently in the United States, that research is now much easier, thanks to the Internet and its various search engines.

I guess it depends how (in)famous the cult is. Scientology has a low pick up rate due to a lot of bad publicity. Zizians are not well known and they have managed to tap into a lot of modern day trends.

There are a lot of problems in colleges today. Debt is a major issue and can follow someone right through life. Mental health troubles are off the charts on campuses. A lot of drug and drink problems too. Many students have social problems and may end up isolated or excluded.

There is another obvious similarity with college. You can sit around for hours taking lectures from a cult. There is a kind of an authority figure/source you learn from much like at school. Usually textbooks of some kind. Many older people have moved on from that, and if they can't get it down in five minutes they won't listen. They often have a job and a family and are leas likely to commit to this kind of stuff.

> People (like me) who believe that life is about learning new things can be persuaded to join a cult if what we are being offered sounds intriguing and worth investigating.

True. Or if it sounds like a solution to whatever difficulties you're having.

We talk a lot about cults isolating people. We don't talk so much about them picking up people who are already isolated.

If you join a cult, you get an instant social circle of people who will spend time with you. You may also meet physically attractive people (the Mormon missionaries tap into this — flirt to convert they call it.)

> Therefore, the best advice I can give before joining any group is to do the research. What does the group leader actually believe. Has the group ever gotten in legal trouble, and, if so, why. How are ex-group members treated by group members once they leave. It used to be hard to do this research, but currently in the United States, that research is now much easier, thanks to the Internet and its various search engines.

Depends on the group. Some have barely any online presence and many keep changing their name to leave trouble behind.