Um, you've managed to completely miss the point.  Where did I ever say a cult is as harmless as a computer or a ... toaster...?

If you'd bothered to read the post properly you'd have clocked what I was getting at.

People mess themselves up with drugs.  With gambling.  With alcohol.  They can even do it  with internet addiction if it causes them to neglect relationships, work etc.  In all those cases, the victim has no one to blame but themselves.  You can't really say "the drugs made me do it", or "the betting shop lured me in and then kept me there for years and years."  It's their own propensity, and it's their own propensity they have to deal with when sorting themselves out.

But with cults it seems to be another story, and the victim's propensity all of a sudden has nothing to do with it, and it's all the guru's fault.

Drugs have dangers.  Gambling has dangers.  All the above have dangers, including gurus.  You can get suckered by all of them and mess up your life as a result.

All I'm trying to say here is that surely a part of the healing process should include an attempt to understand why we did what we did; why we "snapped" when we did,  why we stayed as long as we did, and why we allowed belief in a semi-incoherent "guru" to mess up a good chunk of our lives.

These angry reactions to an attempt to understand what part we had in all this rather than simply cast blame could be seen as somewhat telling.

Livia

Livia