Yes people need to get over it … but people ought to realize that you can’t pull that kind of shit with kids without tremendous suffering and pain.—and people have to work through it. A little understanding regarding these burnt children and their struggles in life is not totally unwarranted.

I can understand Trents problems with drugs alchohol etc. etc. Its an all too human reaction to an intolerable situation. An escape, which unfortunantly, leads to premature death.

It’s a lovely thing the way this organization has melted away — truth be told it was too stupid to survive. But it left a great deal of human wreakage in its wake. For those who survived, and many didn’t, it is important that they reclaim their humanity from the monsters who tried to steal it from them. They are puny monsters really, absolute fools, fiends and maniacs who deserve our laughter more than our hate– the sun is already hard at work dissolving the leperous mass and bleaching the bones of the dead. We are still tickled trout and fools of nature… but an occasional look at the face of heaven and earth lays all our petulance to rest … and the fathomless power and beauty of life in which by some miracle, we still have faith, has more power than than any puny monsters ever could.

My Dad, two of his brothers, my Grandfather, and three of my uncles were Ministers in WWCG cult. I was born in 66′ and my Dad and his brothers left in 77′ or there abouts, do to differance of opinion on basics that the church was teaching. I still have extended family involved.

The whole experiance has scared and shaped me. I went from a total rejection of God to becoming a believer again. With the caveat that it is a God of my understanding, not the God of my father.

I feel that there must be a whole lost generation that has been broken by the experiance of being raised within a cult. Now that I’m older I sit back and try to glean some meaning out of the whole experiance. I don’t hold my parents responsible, they were trying to do the best that they could at the time, with what they had, and that had to be some intense group think.

After we were out, I remember the whole Jim Jones thing, I was young but it scared the living hell out of me, it haunts me now. How close were we to that, or Pretoria, or the percieved second coming, just drink the Kool Aid. I’m just about to finish Jon Krakouer’s book, “Under the Banner of Heaven” and it is creepy because of the familarity of it all.

I’ve read about the Lost Boys of these Polygamous idiots and I think I’m a lost boy too. It really makes me sad and want to do something to help. To be indoctrinated and cut loose, to a world you have been taught to think of as evil is the cruelest, and itself most evil thing to be imagined.

Through all of my experiance I have come to distrust organized relegion just on general principle and have a problem with authority. That didn’t make life easy for me for a long time. I think age has mellowed me a bit, but I am fiercely independent and foster critical thinking in my kids. Life now for me is just trying to find some balance, spiritual, monetary, love, the Tao of being.

I’m a philosophy major in college. I guess my hangover to the whole experiance is that I’m still in the pursuit of truth, where ever I kind find it. I know for sure that if anyone on earth has got the hotline to God, run far and run fast.

I wish you peace, when I read your posting, it struck me. I had been to Squaw Valley several times for the Feast of Tabernacles. I remember listening to those boring sermons and looking around the skating ring. I wish there was another site that had some shared experiances of people like us, I would like to know more, fill in the gaps.