BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
THE GREATEST loss for a human person is to have little or no self-awareness and live as an unthinking and uneducated human.
Why would thousands of people believe and blindly follow without thinking a charlatan, a cult leader or a suspected drug trafficker and leave their jobs and homes and bring their children to an enclave in the remote mountains to be enslaved, raped and sexually assaulted and abused?
Is it because the educational standards are so low where nine-year old grade school students cannot understand what they read? They apparently have nothing to read but only what they see on a mobile phone.
According to Sen. Risa Hontiveros, a cult with thousands of members led by a well-armed doomsday preacher, is entrenched in a well-guarded enclave in Surigao with about 3,5000 adults and 1,580 children, many of whom have been raped, violently assaulted and sexually abused.
Some of the children escaped and are in government care but no legal or police action has been reported to rescue more children and arrest the accused based on the testimony of at least eight children.
Preaching an imminent end in the world in the mountains, the leader began the cult in 2017 and expanded its membership by brainwashing thousands of people into supporting and following him by frightening stories of the end of the world, creating a kind of “mass hysteria.”
Government employees and teachers abandoned their jobs and took their children to his cult headquarters in the mountains and forced them to work as slaves. He persuaded them into surrendering their will and money and to obey him blindly as would a tyrannical wayward politician.
Several children have escaped and reported their harrowing accounts of many rapes and sexual assaults.
“This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult. This cult is armed and dangerous,” Senator Hontiveros said in her speech.
According to direct and firsthand testimonies, the cult leader would engage in acts of sexual abuse and violence against minors, including ordering girl children to sleep with him, the senator alleged.
The police and military have so far not moved to rescue the children and confront the cult leader.
Observers cannot point to poverty to be the cause of this uneducated mind and heart control of thousands by a cult leader.
The middle and upper class of society are also part of their own cults. Why would young, intelligent college students mindlessly subject and surrender themselves freely to the power, control and domination of fraternity leaders to be bullied, insulted, humiliated, beaten with wooden paddles (some have been murdered) and the abuse covered up?
The students’ lives are taken over by the fraternity and they are forbidden to quit or leave. That would be disloyalty and they would be ostracized for the rest of their lives and punished. They are falsely persuaded that membership is necessary for their future careers since fraternities are powerful organizations in society. (To be continued)/PN
