The Gloriavale story

[Pluvia]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00284tm/escaping-utopia-series-1-episode-1

Gloriavale is an ultra-patriarchal Christian cult, founded in the 60s, that believes in the subservience of women. It's based on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Horrifying insight into a group in one of the most civilised countries in the world where women are denied access to the outside world, banned from showing any skin or talking to the opposite sex and are expected to produce ridiculous numbers of children.

Worth watching as an insight into New Zealand and a reminder that it's not only Islam that is used to control and abuse women.

Isn't NZ one of the countries that denies women exist as a sex class? Unsurprising that another misogynistic cult can thrive there. (Though I doubt that there are any male Gloriavale women! Misogyny knows what a woman is.

The GI madness has taken hold hard there, it's true. NZ likes to think of itself as the most progressive nation on earth and so it's vulnerable to woo.

Just started watching this - the level of fear that some of these people who have grown up in the cult feel is palpable.

Yes. I found it astonishing to realise how very easy it is to frighten people with threats of eternal damnation and never-ending burning in hell. It seemed positively medieval and gives a great insight into how religion held sway over so many generations. Very easy to imagine the witch-hunts and the fear of being cast out of the community. A reminder of how relatively easily people can be drawn into cults.

That cult is always on the news here. I can't remember if it was "Escaping Utopia" that I saw parts of last year or if it was another doctor, but it was an alarming and very sad watch.

Medieval Christianity was kinder than that. The belief in the mercy of Christ was a firm tenet of faith. It's Protestants who like Hell fire and the nut-jobs on either side of the Reformation.

Eh? The Inquisition? Not just in Spain and South America. Savanarola, the Cathars, the Hussites, the Beguines?

All those paintings in churches depicting Hell? Not a Protestant thing.

I offer Hieronymous Bosch as proof!
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/visio-tondali/ed19fa42-83e3-443b-96b1-04261634bb14

Now going to display woeful ignorance. Does Islam have the equivalent version of hell?

Sadly, yes, I know. Partly because of the Reformation but the crusade against the Cathars was as politically motivated as it was spiritual - which is an aspect of medieval life we tend to overlook. Actual, in your local church Christianity was more to do with the comfort of the living and the obligations people had for each other. No religion that I have ever come across is without sin and without misogyny - but Jesus called the Christ was not a misogynist and his ministry included many women - they were excluded by powerful men in the centuries afterwards.

Not to mention the selling of "pardons' making shedloads of money for the medieval church.

People so afraid of Purgatory - so not even actual Hell - that they would pay for pieces of paper that would supposedly shorten their time there.

And/or pay priests to pray for them or others so that they would supposedly get out of Purgatory quicker.

The equivalent in Islam is Jahannam.

And is it used in the same way — to frighten people into behaving? Is there a similar sort of what I think of as barter system as there is in some Christian churches? You may do bad things that the church disapproves of, but as long as you repent (in the Catholic Church you confess to the priest) and do something in atonement such as praying, you'll still go to heaven?

RawBloomers · Yesterday 18:46

The equivalent in Islam is Jahannam.

Another firey pit, ruled over by Shaitan. It's the Arabic version of the Hebrew Gehenna, which was freezing cold and absent hope.

I wonder how it morphed into an inferno, with humans being toasted on pitchforks?

John Money came from NZ too

https://reduxx.info/john-money-the-pervert-who-invented-gender/

No idea.