Nobody Ever Joins a Cult

Nobody ever joins a cult. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any cults, or that there aren’t any cultists. It just means that people believe that they are joining churches, hanging out with cool people, getting involved in worthy causes, attending lectures and participating in any number of innocuous activities, but they never wake up in the morning and, while choosing among their various hibiscus adorned shirts, type in on their Outlook calendar “join a cult”, or “get brainwashed”. Everybody wants to believe that they’re smart enough to avoid getting sucked into a harmful group, and nobody wants to admit that they’re actually in a harmful group until they leave. Either they look back, smack themselves on the forehead and realize that they have been duped, or rationalize that things changed after they got involved and that the group became a cult.

      Now ex-cultists are as easy-to-find as the hair on Danny Davito’s back. The internet and evangelical churches are full of people who used to be in cults. One might then surmise that the cult problem has been solved, everybody has been rescued from the cults and are safe behind their computer monitors or at the First Church of the Holy Baby Jesus in God in Christ the Lord Jehovah United Assemblies of Zion, Yukon Synod, Reformed Covenant of 1923®.

One of the problems with the issue of cults is that there is no universally accepted definition of “cult”. Obviously the people who are in cults don’t think that they’re cultists, but what about those who are vehemently against cults? Well, some folks, notably evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, define a cult as a group that claims to be Christian but doesn’t agree with them on the main doctrinal points of Christianity. Of course, exactly what the main doctrinal points are differs from denomination to denomination. (I’ll never forget the textbook that my kids used during their home schooling days. A section on the Catholic Church started with “A false religion…”) 

For example, Mormons are considered a cult by some, but obviously not in Utah. These folks, even though they can’t agree among themselves, see the holding of minority opinions as intolerable, reserving to themselves the privilege of deciding what is the correct interpretation of the Bible, because after all, some “good” Christian might get himself fooled by these heretics and put his soul in peril. Another camp among the anti-cultists is the secular cult awareness movement. These people see specific doctrines as irrelevant to whether a group is a cult; it’s the behavior that defines a cult. The secular cult awareness movement has kind of been invisible since the Cult Awareness Network (C.A.N.), was successfully sued by the Church of Scientology, which now effectively owns it. Are you confused yet? If so, you are in good company: 99.99% of America is as confused as you are, but most don’t think that they’re confused.

In December of 1977 I didn’t think I was joining a cult. I did, however, get invited to look at a Christmas card that my cousin had received from a co-worker. I don’t remember much about the card, but it was signed “God loves you and I do too”. That’s pretty dangerous stuff. I should have been tipped off right away that some serious evil was being perpetrated in tandem with Hallmark’s fourth quarter profit and loss statement. I should probably state at this point that we (we = me, my whole family and virtually everyone I knew) were Catholics. Not “we went to a Catholic Church”, or “we practiced the Catholic faith”, but that’s who we were, Catholicism in great part defined our identities, so anything that was not Catholic was bad. In light of this, my aunt took me aside to tell me that my cousin was attending a Bible study in the home of the card guy. I know; it just sends shivers of fear rippling up and down your spine to hear it, doesn’t it? Like I said, this was the day I didn’t join a cult. Anyway, my aunt told me about this Bible study and asked me to accompany my cousin to one of their meetings, “just to make sure she’s alright”, so I did my duty protecting my kin from the godless Protestants (surely it couldn’t be Catholics studying the bible) and attended one of the bible studies.

I should probably note at this point that I had long been dissatisfied with the spiritual answers that I had received in church. Although very devout as a youngster, it bothered me that there were competing versions of Christianity, all convinced that they were right. I visited several of the half dozen different churches that were in walking distance of my home, but the difference was among them was less than crystal clear. (Growing up in a Catholic family, attending Catholic school and not having many non-Catholics in the general neighborhood, I don’t think that I realized that there were so many Protestants out there. Martin Luther was portrayed a bad guy where I came from!) After being exposed to Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism in college, I became less and less convinced that there was any objective spiritual truth, let alone that I had been lucky enough to have won the celestial Powerball Jackpot by being born into it.

Tom & Joe, who ran the bible study in my neighborhood, rented a small duplex apartment, looked pretty ordinary, had ordinary furnishings in their home and had a record collection typical of most guys in their early twenties in 1978. They wore regular clothes without a hint of saffron, although Tom did favor sandals and played guitar, as well as sporting a full beard and little round glasses. If I had been looking to join a cult that day, I would have passed these guys by. These guys were vanilla pudding without the sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. That is until the Bibles came out. The participants in this particular bible study were fanatical about the bible, not in a wild-eyed, drooling, the-end-of-the-world-is-coming way, but with a calm intellectual confidence that they knew what they were talking about. Specific questions were referred to specific sections of the bible, contradictions were explained; esoteric truths were unveiled. This was different. Maybe there was an objective spiritual truth and unlikely as it seemed, maybe these guys had it.

In line with my plan to not join a cult, I continued to attend the Bible studies several times a month. Soon I started hearing about a class that they were offering that would lay out the basics to Bible study; the goal being that graduates of this class would be able to research and understand the Bible on their own, without needing Bible scholars or priests or gurus to tell you what it said. Now this was something that I was interested in. Everybody I knew claimed to believe in the Bible, but I didn’t know anybody who could read it and make any sense out of it. Sure, there are parts of the Bible that seemed to proceed in a linear fashion and tell stories that everyone seems to know, but not really know about, like Noah and Jesus and Adam & Eve, but there didn’t seem to be an easy look up system, an index where you could look up the answers to questions like “Is masturbation a sin?”, or “Will you go to Hell for smoking dope?” (Both were important questions to a nineteen-year old). But these people acted like you could get answers like that after taking this class. By this time I had noticed some differences between what I had learned in Church and what I was hearing at these Bible studies, small differences theologically, like how many people were crucified with Jesus and on what day he died, and big ones, like was Jesus Christ God or wasn't he? Or were the dead in some semi-alive state after death or consciously inhabiting heaven or hell? My parish priest was no help, pointing out that the Catholic Church had 2,000 years of history on its side, but providing real no reason other than longevity why I should stay away from this Bible study and stick with The Church. (I have since heard this argument from other Christians who point out that Christianity has survived while many of the pagan religions of biblical times have died out. When I point out that Buddhism and Hinduism are still around, the longevity argument is usually quickly abandoned as irrelevant.)

So I immediately went out and didn’t join a cult, but put down $100 and signed a green registration card for the Bible study class, which was called Power for Abundant Living.

Unknown to me at this time, there was living in Ohio a guy named Victor Wierwille, a former Evangelical & Reformed Church pastor who had in 1953 started teaching a class called Power for Abundant Living (PFAL). The class, initially titled Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, was about having God’s power in your life. He taught it to friends and relatives, to members of his church, and eventually started traveling around the country teaching it. In 1967 it was put on film. This was the class that I had signed up to take. At the time I didn’t know anything about Wierwille, PFAL, or for that matter, Ohio, (As a New Yorker I subscribed to the worldview illustrated in Steinberg’s New York, a New Yorker magazine cover which shows everything west of the Hudson River as uncharted wilderness) so I wasn’t too impressed with this skinny tie-wearing farm guy with the funny accent (That’s right, a New Yorker, complaining about a funny accent) and the cheap seventies rec-room paneled set with the picture of White Jesus with the long flowing hair and the faraway eyes.

PFAL was presented over the course of three weeks, with classes running from 7:00 – 10:00pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday. We started out with an orientation, which took place at Jerry McSherry’s house (his real name). We watched a video called Changed which consisted mostly of testimonials about how people’s lives changed after taking PFAL. At this time, some confusion that I had regarding who was teaching this class was cleared up. Jerry was what they called the class instructor. I was under the impression that “instructor” was more or less synonymous with “teacher” which is what they called Wierwille, but the “instructor” was just the guy who made sure that everything was in place, including finding volunteers to cue up the tapes, bring snacks, set up the chairs and make sure that there was plenty of coffee (I did mention that these classes went for three hours?). I had been under the impression that the class was being taught by Jerry Wierwille who moved from Ohio to Flushing Queens!

Now the teacher wasn’t even in the same room, or for that matter the same state as us. The class had been filmed in 1967. This facilitated distribution, since shipping videocassettes was easier than Wierwille driving all over the country personally; but we weren’t even going to get to watch a film, you needed 12 people to see PFAL on video, and we had only nine, so we listened for three hours to cassette tapes of a disembodied voice teaching the Bible every night, supplemented by slides of the charts that we would have seen in the video class.

Finally the class began. Sitting in metal folding chairs facing a wall where a teacher might have been standing if there was one physically in the room, were the nine students, none of whom were joining a cult. Besides me, there was my cousin Kathy, a year younger than me, who worked with Tom, one of the bible fellowship guys; Tina, a tiny, aspiring dancer; Bernie, who worked in the building trades; Kevin, a fellow Baruch College student; Herminia, an older Puerto Rican lady whose children had talked her into taking the class; a married couple whose names I can’t remember to save my life; and Jim, a tall, dark haired guy who dropped out before the class was over. I don’t know why the other eight people were sitting in those chairs, but I was one of those searchers who wanted to know what’s going on and why, and are willing to put some effort into finding out.

Like most people in the United States, Christianity was the default spirituality for me. I grew up hearing about the God of the bible, Jesus Christ, the saints and all that; it was the background noise of our culture. For most of my life it seemed like there was only two choices: believe in God (and by extension the Bible) or don’t; there was no “other” that you could latch on to, not legitimately anyway. From my narrow little world I couldn’t see the incredible array of choices that lay beyond the horizon. Until I went to college, the people that were different from me were the tiny number of Protestants, who as far as I could tell weren’t all that different than us, and Jews, who most Christians viewed as people who just didn’t keep up with the latest developments in the God business. Culturally I was conditioned to believe that practicing Christianity was essential to be a “good” person; exposure to various world religions in college introduced me to the concept that there were other choices, but viscerally I still felt that the biblical God was the God and that if I was going to live a good life, then his way was the way. (Many people practice some form of “Pascal’s Wager”, wherein you gamble that believing in God is relatively harmless if he doesn’t exist, but not believing can land you in Hell if he does. Of course the wager is a false dilemma and assumes that there only two choices, while there are many alternatives to being a believing Christian that don’t involve being an atheist.) Tom and Joe’s Bible study group with their PFAL class were the first people who offered to show me how and why the bible and the God described therein was the way.

The first several three-hour sessions of PFAL were variations on the theme of “The Bible is true”. There were segments (Each segment was 30 minutes, six segments made a ‘session’) on “The Integrity of The Word”, “The Greatest Secret in the World Today is that the Bible is the Revealed Word and Will of God”, “The Word of God is the Will of God”, “How We Got the Bible”. There were teachings on how the Bible was “god-breathed”, i.e. given by inspiration of God, that it interprets itself, not being of “private” interpretation, how “The Word” is faithful, how God gave us the Bible — on and on, hour after hour. Even though he wasn’t really presenting much new information in these first several sessions, Wierwille was establishing his bona fides as somebody who knew his way around a Bible, as a teacher who cared deeply about what was written in the pages of the Bible and whose greatest goal in life was to make the lessons of the Bible accessible to everyone, not just the seminary trained, or the great theologians. Wierwille, like all good salesmen, first got us to trust him. And trust him we did when he finally began unveiling the points where he disagreed with most other Christians.

Part of how Wierwille really cemented that nascent trust into place was by his teaching in session four, “How the Word Interprets Itself”. It was presented as a lesson on how to apply certain keys to researching and studying the bible. The keys were simple, even simplistic; they boiled down to “Read What’s Written”, and admonitions to understand the words in the way that the writers understood them, which wasn’t necessarily the way that the same words would be used in the present day. Wierwille starts this teaching off by reading various sections of scripture, sometimes pointing out how what is clearly written contradicts most of he called “denominational Christianity”. He starts out slowly, at first pointing out minor discrepancies, each time taking the students to the Bible itself, where it is as plain as the nose on your face that what most Christians believe is not what you can read for yourself in black and white. The whole time you are being convinced, little by little, that Wierwille knows what he is talking about and the churches do not. After all, you’re reading what is written, and what is written contradicts much of what you were taught back at your family’s church. The student is now convinced that Wierwille is trustworthy, that the churches are not, and that you too can be privy to the truth as it hasn’t been known since the First Century when the apostles of Jesus walked the earth clad in sandals, togas and truth.

As the class progresses the stakes get higher and the doctrines deviate from orthodox Christianity further and further as Wierwille dazzles the students with his knowledge of the Bible. (This is not to suggest that there is some insidious brainwashing going on, many people get uncomfortable with what is being taught and walk out before the class ends. However, in my experience, very few people were able to challenge what was being taught in any meaningful way — it was just different than what they were used to.) 

What the student almost invariably failed to realize is that Wierwille is no longer simply reading what is written, but reading into what is written. He is bolstering his case for novel interpretations not with what is plainly written, but with recourse to translations of Greek and Hebrew words that appear in no lexicon, to documents that no one but he has seen, to texts that he says must exist, (One of Wierwille’s signature moves was to present an interpretation that was not supported by any scripture in any existing text. He then, despite talking incessantly about how any doctrine must be backed up by scripture, decides that there must be a lost manuscript out there somewhere that backs up his position.) but that no one has ever found, in short he is doing what he has accused every other church of doing, putting forth his own interpretation of the bible, but he is doing it while convincing the student thoroughly that he is simply reading what is written.

The details of what these deviations are is irrelevant, after all, disagreements among Christians goes back to five minutes after the apostles lost sight of the bottom of Jesus’ sandals, but this class was billed as a way to avoid the common trap of having to rely on someone else for your knowledge of God, to let the Bible interpret itself, to understand it using easy to understand “keys”, but it was really just another man’s interpretation.

The biggest pitfall in Wierwille’s teaching was that, since the Bible was self-interpreting, then anyone, utilizing the research keys taught in PFAL, would naturally come to the same conclusion as he had since the Bible wasn’t subject to “private interpretation”; and since Wierwille had utilized those keys and had come to certain conclusions, and since Wierwille, by the time of the filming of PFAL, had been teaching those keys for 14 years and had been intensely studying for another 11 years before that, if you came to a different conclusion than Wierwille did, you were wrong. While on the one hand Wierwille taught that we were all to read the Bible ourselves and convince ourselves of what it said, as a practical matter it was what Wierwille said that was treated as the final word. If you disagreed you either weren’t properly applying the keys, or you just needed to wait until you one day understood it. (He called this “holding questions in abeyance”) This would have been bad enough if one’s connection to Wierwille ended after sitting through PFAL, if PFAL was merely a tool used by Bible study groups to help their participants along, if people were still able to study and come to their own conclusions, but what you were being recruited into by taking PFAL was an organization, worldwide in scope, with groups of local Bible studies being just the tip of the iceberg. Clusters of these Bible study groups were organized into local branches, which in turn answered to a state organization usually led by a graduate of a centralized leadership training program. People in this organization from all over the country and world gathered together once a year to hear Wierwille teach live, they sent their people out on one-year missionary program, they joined the leadership training program, and it was all based on the words of one man.

I guess I was wrong, I did join a cult.

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Live music, there’s nothing like it! Music itself makes life a bit more pleasant, but live music is the habanero sauce on the red beans & rice of life. Early on, music was a relatively minor part of my life, Dad liked Dixieland Jazz and Mom liked Engelbert Humperdinck and I just listened to whatever came on the AM radio. Even as a high school freshman I was a bit behind the music curve, out of my depth while my fellow students discussed ‘The Who’, ‘The Guess Who’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’. Eventually I started listening to albums by the top groups of the time: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer and others when during my junior year I fell in with a crowd that included some musicians, one of whom hosted Friday night beer drinking and music parties where I experienced the broad spectrum of rock music and lost my virginity.

One advantage of growing up in New York is the presence of Madison Square Garden, a destination for every arena-rock band. Another is the ubiquitous public transportation. It’s difficult to get too far away from public transportation in New York City. There are the subway and city busses and the Long Island Railroad, as well as several private bus lines, like the Jamaica Bus Company. Most people were within a reasonable distance from a bus or train. which abets concert going by teenagers. Rosedale, my home neighborhood, like many other neighborhoods in the borough of Queens, boasted a Long Island Railroad (LIRR or simply "the railroad") station. Not to be confused with the subway, the LIRR was a bit more of an upscale railroad and was the commuting choice for many city workers who lived past the borders of New York City. Unlike the subway, where you used tokens to gain admittance to the platform, you either bought a ticket in advance or paid your fare while on the train, but you didn’t have to pay a fare just to get on the platform. This made the LIRR Rosedale station the cool hangout for bored pre-teens in the neighborhood. My buddies and I would walk up the concrete steps leading to the platform and watch the trains come and go. We also discovered a cave-like chamber underneath the platform that we turned into a clubhouse. As we got older (I almost said “matured” — but I’m still waiting for that to happen) the proximity of the station to the home of my buddy Alex, the unofficial jumping off point for our forays into the world of live music, made it an ideal mode of transportation from residential southeast Queens to the exciting world of “Da City”: Manhattan.

Back before there was Ozzfest, before chickens and bats lived in fear of having their heads bitten off, before Ozzie’s reality show, there was Black Sabbath. (One of the great ironies of life is that although Ozzie was fired from Black Sabbath, he went on to great mainstream fame, even among those who don’t know or like his music, while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone outside of Sabbath fans who know the names of the other three original members of the band.) Then, like now, Black Sabbath didn’t get much radio airplay, but there was a vast underground of Sabbath fans out there, my friends and I among them. Periodically Black Sabbath would appear live in concert at Madison Square Garden and early in our senior year in high school we’d gotten tickets to see our heroes. This show was to be the first concert of any kind that I would attend, and if I remember correctly, the tickets were $15 for seats in about the twentieth row. This was the most that I ever paid for a ticket in those days, but it was also the closest to the stage that I ever sat. A typical ticket, either in the nosebleed section, or even behind the stage, cost eight or ten dollars. The evening began with our gang of guys gathering at Alex’s house, from whence we walked the quarter mile to the LIRR station. At the foot of the stairs, next to the taxi stand, was an important stop on our journey: the liquor store.

Back in those days, when the memory of the 60’s was still fresh and disco began to raise its glittery head, the drinking age in most places was only eighteen. Even when we were as young as sixteen years old we still managed to walk into liquor stores and delis and buy our beer. This was due partly to the rather lax enforcement of the laws against selling to minors. In fact, for a time, while it was illegal for a minor to possess alcohol, there were no legal penalties for selling it to them, a little loophole in the law (long since closed) that left little incentive to pass up sales to the little tykes. The other factor was that prior to 1980 New York State drivers licenses did not have the operator’s picture on them. Not only that, but they were not laminated, were printed on cheap pasteboard and could be altered with ridiculous ease, facilitating I.D. swaps by those over eighteen to their under-eighteen buddies.

So here we are at the foot of  the LIRR stairs liquor store trying to decide who looks old enough to go in and buy. Usually it came down to either me or John M, (known for some unfathomable reason as “LaRuc”), mainly because we both sported long, bushy sideburns, giving the illusion that we were a few years older than we actually were. Normally, the boys and I were beer drinkers, Budweiser especially (We were serious about our Budweiser — we all could recite the slogan on the can that began with “This is the famous Budweiser beer…” ) which was usually was very effective at getting us drunk. But this was a special occasion, this was Black Sabbath! We were also going to be sneaking alcohol into Madison Square Garden, so a six-pack apiece wasn’t going to cut it, since MSG security didn’t allow you to bring alcohol into the venue and performed pat-downs to ensure compliance. For the occasion we had purchased what was then known as “wine sacks”, plastic bags covered in suede, made to sort of resemble a Middle Eastern goatskin, and purchased non-carbonated beverages such as Boone’s Farm wine and Tango (a pre-mixed screwdriver) so they wouldn’t expand and explode. The wine sacks had a cord attached which could be utilized to carry it over your shoulder; we slung them across our backs, concealing them under our shirts. Since we were also wearing jean jackets the sacks were well hidden. We had about twenty minutes before the train arrived so we invested in a few six packs to tide us over on the train station. A half hour train ride into Penn Station and we were in “The City”, ready to party. First on the agenda: a stop for dinner at “Burger & Brew” where we loaded up on burgers  and then headed over to The Garden.

Best seats I ever had for a concert, row 20 and here comes the opening act, a new band on the national scene called Aerosmith. We’ve finished our beer, are most of the way through our wine sacks, and did I mention the bag of weed that some guys who sat near us broke out? I can’t say that I remember too much about the concert, but I was having fun, and continued drinking and smoking throughout the intermission until…here they are…Black Sabbath! They started out with “Paranoid”, I remember that much; we were all standing on our chairs cheering for our heroes when the alcohol, the weed, the noise and other still unknown variables all came together resulting in severe dizziness and even more severe puking — all over the girl in front of me. The last thing that I remember before passing out was my buddies preventing her boyfriend from kicking my ass. Why we weren’t thrown out I’ll never know, but Alex, John, John, Anthony and Patrick carried me to the men’s room so that I could puke some more — and some more after that. After Patrick attempted to revive me by slapping me around they left me in the bathroom. I’ll never know why MSG security didn’t take me into custody, but I spent the rest of the concert there. So, after looking forward to this concert for weeks, I spent it in a toilet stall. Good friends that they were, the boys made sure that I got home, dragging me out of the bathroom, propping me up between two of them, getting me to the train and home to Rosedale.

Sometime the next morning, or more likely the next afternoon, I slowly awoke, inching back to the land of the living. When more or less fully awake, I noticed that my jean jacket, where I had secreted a  bag of weed, (now empty except for the aroma) was gone. Had my mom picked it up from the floor and taken it to the laundry? Had my NYPD cop dad found it? Was I in trouble? I was pretty sure that I was until my brother Mike stuck his smirking face into the bedroom, waving the little bag that he had taken out of my pocket.

In addition to the “big events” at Madison Square Garden and other big venues, there were also our regular weekend outings at area bars such as Speaks, (Formerly a disco until disco died a merciful death. Speaks still had a giant mirror ball on the ceiling.)  Hammerhead’s, Oak Beach Inn and Beggar’s Opera. Most of these places featured cover bands such as Rat Race Choir, Swift Kick, and the soon-to-be famous Twisted Sister. Oak Beach Inn, or OBI as it was affectionately known, was originally located on Oak Beach on Long Island’s South Shore and soon spawned satellite locations, OBI West, North and East. OBI West, in the Elmont neighborhood of Nassau County, right past the city limits of New York, went through numerous changes of ownership, from Oak Beach Inn West, to Hammerheads, to Popeye’s, but never changed the décor, so the name always had some kind of nautical theme! Just about every Saturday night, my friends and I would head out to one these bars to enjoy one of our favorite bands or to check out a new one. Alex, the unofficial leader of this particular pack, had a knack for picking good bands, and we usually deferred to his choices. The group of us: Alex, Anthony, John M (LaRuc), John H (Deadman) and I went to different schools and worked different jobs and each had our secondary circle of school and work friends with whom we shared our band selections; those friends in turn had their own circles to whom they passed on band recommendations, so that oftentimes a crowd at a Saturday night concert could in large part be traced back to Alex’s band choice. One particular evening when the band was on break one of us requested that the band play “Crossroads”, mainly because we were from Rosedale and the songs hook included the phrase “goin’ down to Rosedale…” The band didn’t want to play “Crossroads”, so Anthony suggested that when they took the stage they ask the audience how many had come to see them tonight at the recommendation of “The BudMen from Rosedale” (Yes that was what we called ourselves—we consumed a lot of Budweiser). About ¾ of the people there raised their hands. They played “Crossroads” (badly, but they played it).

The BudMen and I were mainly hard rock guys, but I started branching out to other forms of music in those days. Ray was a co-worker at the hardware store where I worked and would bring his electric guitar with him and play it on breaks. He introduced me to the world of Jazz Fusion with Heavy Weather, a Weather Report album; another work buddy started me listening to southern rock like The Outlaws and Lynyrd Skynyrd. My musical horizons were expanding and a few years later, when I moved to Nebraska, I was ready for KZUM Radio.

My first exposure to the world of non-profit community radio came on a Wednesday as I was trimming lettuce in the back room of the produce department of Food 4 Less. Spinning the radio dial (In those days before digital tuners, radios had a literal dial, which could be “spun” to change stations.) I came across the sounds of Jazz Fusion, and thinking that I had found a Jazz station I continued to listen, later finding out that KZUM played not only Jazz Fusion, but Blues, Folk, Reggae and other varieties of music that ordinarily weren’t played on the commercial stations. What I really fell in love with was the Blues. While working overnight delivering newspapers I began to listen to Jim Anderson’s “midnight-Thursday-‘til-whenever-Friday-morning” Blues show and realized that Blues was more than just pickin’ and frownin’ — but it was the source for much of the music that I listened to back in the seventies. When I heard “Travelling Riverside Blues”, “Crossroads Blues” and “One Way Out” and it wasn’t Led Zeppelin, Cream or The Allman Brothers I was hooked. Eventually, after changing jobs and not working overnights, I started hanging out down at the KZUM studios with Jim and his beer-drinking crew.

“Nothin’ But the Blues” was an open invitation Blues party that took place from midnight until at least 4:00AM every Thursday night into Friday morning. Bands from the nearby Zoo Bar would stop by after the bar closed, third shift workers would pop in after work and Blues lovers from all over Lincoln made a point of being in the KZUM studios when it was all happening. Jim, the programmer (what KZUM called the disc jockeys) had a huge collection of vinyl that he dragged down to the station for his two Blues shows, the other one being “Another Blue Monday” on Monday afternoons. Jim, who was fluent and literate in Russian, never seemed to have a paying job but always put his heart and soul into spinning Blues records as well as educating us all about the music and the musicians. One of the attractions of hanging out at the studio during Jim’s shifts was being entrusted with reading PSAs (Public Service Announcements) and SPAs (Station Promotional Announcements) over the air. For me this was a great thrill. Back in high school I was part of a group that put together a mock radio station for English class and had a hankering to be an “on-air personality” someday. This was my introduction to the big time. Eventually I not only read PSAs and SPAs, but learned how to operate the equipment. One Thursday night, seeing Jim passed out in his chair as a record spun to a close, I took over. Seeing how easy this was, I soon applied for my own show, Part Two of “Another Blue Monday” from 4–6PM on Mondays, which I soon renamed “Old, New, Borrowed and Blue”.

Building on my earlier fascination with the modern rock renderings of old blues songs, pairings of originals and cover versions became the foundation of my show, liberally mixed with music influenced by the Blues and contemporary Blues bands. After a few months I moved to Sunday nights at 10:00PM and called the show “Shades of Blue”. For several years I got to introduce bands at The Zoo Bar, and interview travelling Blues acts in the afternoons on the air.

Being a community, i.e. non-profit, radio station, we engaged in periodic fund-raising marathons, with minimal regular programming and a lot of on-air begging for money. Since my regular job was just a few blocks from the station and my home was a mere five minute’s drive from downtown, I participated on and off in the fundraising efforts during all hours of the day. One of the most interesting was with a high school senior by the name of Kyle Umland. (Kyle’s father wrote a book back in the seventies attempting to cash in on the “Ancient Astronauts” craze. The premise of his book was that the Mayans were space aliens. This is 100% true. It's called Mystery of the Ancients. A copy used to be in the downtown Lincoln library.

My first encounter was during my first shift for a Sunday night Blues show where I was to follow Kyle’s two-hour jazz program. Programmer etiquette dictated that you would end your show by playing a song long enough to let the person coming after you get into the studio, cue up his or her own first song so that there would be a smooth transition. If you wanted to say a last minute “goodbye” to your listeners you would allow the next programmer to set up and say your farewells from a secondary microphone while the new deejay presided from the main chair. On this particular night Kyle went right up to the last second, said his goodbyes and then got up and walked out of the studio, leaving the mike “live” and no music cued up! I raced in, threw a record on the turntable and ad-libbed my introductions. After I got everything going, I walked out into the common area where Kyle still hung around. At the time I wore my hair fairly long, had a thick beard and looked somewhat disreputable. I let Kyle know in no uncertain terms that if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, he could be assured that I would, with great pleasure, seriously injure him. A week later I came to the station straight from work. I wore a dress shirt and tie, had trimmed my beard and my long hair was smoothed down and tied back in a ponytail. Due to my very different appearance Kyle did not recognize me. While preparing for the deejay handoff, cuing up a final song and switching chairs, he told me about the “nut-job” who had threatened him the week before, expressing his relief that I had showed up instead!

After this encounter Kyle and I got along very well, subbing for each other on occasion and helping each other out during fundraisers. During one particular fundraiser, we were an hour into his show with absolutely no calls. Now, just like NPR, KZUM would interrupt regular programming to berate our listeners with pitches designed to make them feel guilty and send us money. On this Monday night, the approach was just not working, so Kyle had the brilliant idea to be proactive and call people at home and ask them for pledges, rather than wait for them to call us. This was the era just before cell phones had almost completely replaced land lines, so there were many prominent people listed in the local phone book. We called dozens of them and received pledges from about half, including a generous donation from then City Councilman Mike Johanns, later mayor of Lincoln, governor of Nebraska, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and U.S. Senator.

Another aspect of KZUM was its openness and the accessibility to the public, due largely to its volunteer nature. Fans of the various programs were always popping in to say hello and we often let some of these people make on-air announcements and help pick out records the way I got started. Most were not as wild and crazy as the aforementioned shows hosted by Jim Anderson, but there were some moments. It seems that no matter how minor a celebrity one is, no matter how small one’s fame is, there are always those who seek to latch on to it — and we got groupies. Usually these people were pretty harmless, like the guy who was incarcerated at the state prison who wrote me letters every week making song requests, or the woman from Eastern Europe who on my last night as a programmer gave me a painting as a thank you for years of enjoyable music. And then — there are the nut jobs.

Lorraine (not her real name) started out just calling in requests to a few (male) programmers. After a while, certain deejays could expect to hear from her every time they were on the air. Next she began flirting with us over the phone and began having long conversations that we could only end by pretending that the connection was cut. After a while Lorraine began coming up to the studios just before the building was locked down for the night and hanging around for hours.  She called a few of us at home, causing some problems with those of us who were married. She eventually gave up her infatuation with KZUM, but we were plagued for months with prank calls from other programmers requesting that we “play ‘Misty’ for them”.

Due to competing priorities I gave up programming at KZUM after seven or eight years. After my first wife and divorced I began to channel my love for music into spending more time at The Zoo Bar, and began photographing bands. Looking back at my early work I was pretty terrible, but as several characters in Monty Python's Life of Brian might say: "I got better!" I enjoyed meeting many of the bands and instituted the "Alley Shots" where I photographed bands in front of the mural of original Zoo Bar owner Larry Boehmer as well as the mural of bluesman Magic Slim before it was ruined by gentrification.

 Just before I retired in June of 2025 I noticed that KZUM was looking for participants in a "programmer academy", where people interested in programming a show were trained. I didn't think I would be available on the scheduled dates, but was recruited to fill an open air slot, and they made it work. Starting in September 2025 I was programming a Blues show. Shades of Blue lives again!

---

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part III (Prophecy...Or Is It?)

Recently a Jewish friend commented about Christians stealing her book. She was, of course, referring to the way the Tanakh (what Christians call the Old Testament) had been coopted by Christians and how sections were reinterpreted to fit with real or legendary aspects of Jesus' life. According to the writers of the Gospels, the Tanakh was full of prophecies, foretelling Jesus' ministry. 

An objective reading of the Tanakh will reveal the surprising fact that actual prophesy is pretty thin on the ground throughout. An apt example is Isaiah 7:14 (KJV) "Therefore the LORD himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel". Most Christians, or even non-Christians living in a majority-Christian culture, will recognize this verse as the supposed prophecy referenced in  Matthew 1:23 (KJV) — which an angel tells Joseph after he found out his wife-to-be was pregnant without his assistance: "Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, "God with us". There are a number of things wrong with this. Nobody, as far as The Bible records, ever called Jesus (or his name) Emmanuel. The second thing is that the word that is translated from the Hebrew as "virgin", almah, means "young woman". It could refer to a virgin, who were typically young women, but apparently no one in pre-Christian Judaism interpreted the word as virgin. Thirdly, if you read the context, it is referring, not to a future messiah, but to a contemporary event — the loss of "both their kings" (Isaiah 7:16) — referring to both Israel (the Northern kingdom) and Judah (the Southern kingdom). It's a prophecy to Ahaz, King of Judah, that both he and the King of Israel will be dead before the child Emmanuel is old enough to discern good from evil. Additional confusion arises due to the tendency of some of the Gospel writers to use the Septuagint Greek translation of the Tanakh, where Hebrew almah is translated into Greek as parthenos, which does mean "virgin. The Gospels are full of examples. 

One of the things about so-called prophecies is they're easy to fake. Look at the virgin birth prophecy that I unrolled in the previous paragraph. Nowhere else in the Gospels or anywhere else in the New Testament is Jesus' alleged virgin birth brought up. I'll be discussing the evolution of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as well as God The Son in a later installment, but as an agnostic I'm skeptical of any supernatural claims — virgin birth is one of those. It's easy to imagine a Gospel writer scouring the Septuagint looking for promising passages that can double as prophecies. "Ooh, look, this Greek Old Testament (and the Gospel writers were without a doubt Greek-speaking) mentions a virgin conceiving a child — claiming good ol' Jesus was born of a virgin ought to polish up his divine credentials!" Pile on references to Bethlehem in Micah and Egypt in Hosea and you have an unlikely tale of a pregnant woman hiking all the way to another district for a census because their distant ancestors came from there and fleeing to Egypt. A skeptic would wonder whether these stories in the Gospels actually happened, or they were put together in order to make these older passages seem like prophecies. 

As I said in Part Two, the Tanakh was written to and for a specific people, the Hebrews/Israelites/Judeans/Jews. Despite Jesus' Jewishness and Christianity originating in the capitol of Judea, Jerusalem, it very quickly became a separate religion with no real continuity with Judaism. The early Christians included the Tanakh as part of their scriptures to wash away the taint of newness that was problematic not only among the Jewish population, but among mainstream Roman society. The Torah and the rest of the Tanakh became, in Christian hands, starting with the writers of the New Testament, merely a run-up and prelude to what they considered the main event - Jesus' life.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part IV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part II (Inerrancy & Canon of Scripture)

Back when I was involved in a Christian-esque cult, we used to sign a green card when we registered for its foundational, introductory class. The card listed a number of supposed benefits of this class — one of them was "explains apparent Bible contradictions". We believed, as do most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, that the Bible is inerrant, i.e. it contained no errors, and therefore couldn't contain any contradictions. So what seemed like a contradiction was really our own lack of understanding or a mistranslation. Lack of understanding might include lack of knowledge of the customs of the Biblical era and milieu, it could be that the meaning of English words had changed since the Bible version that we were reading had been published, or we hadn't properly looked at the immediate and remote context. The cult that I was in had some interesting ways of harmonizing it all, sometimes bending the words into a metaphorical pretzel to get it all to fit, but if you are familiar with the evolution of the doctrine of the Trinity, it wasn't too unusual. If you are going to insist that the Bible is without error and internally consistent that's what you're going to have to do. There are parts that blatantly contradict each other. There are parts that seem to describe Jesus in one way and other sections paint him with an entirely different brush. To make it all fit, including the Old Testament, a lot of mental gymnastics will have to be involved. 

If you read the Bible, not as "a" book, but as a collection of books, which it undeniably is, then the need to explain away contradictions disappears. Or at least the need becomes less urgent. If it's a set of books about the same subject — God — even if you concede for the sake of argument that the God of the Bible exists, different people are going to have different opinions based on their experiences and mindsets. You would expect the different writers to emphasize different things, to interpret experiences differently. 

The Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament, can be divided or categorized in a number of ways. There's the Torah, i.e. the Law, the first five books; there's the prophets; and there's the other writings which include books of alleged history as well as "poetic" books like Psalms and Proverbs. Some books are subcategorized as books of history. The first five books are traditionally credited to Moses, Psalms to King David, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes & The Song of Solomon to King Solomon. The various books of the prophets usually are considered eponymous. Various others round out the team. 

The first book, is called Genesis ("beginning" in Greek) by Christians, or Bereshith in Hebrew (From the Hebrew phrase bereshith barah Elohim — "[in the] beginning created [by] God").  Although it is included as part of "The Law", it actually is comprised of a creation myth and a legendary account of the origins of the people of Israel. This is not unusual, most cultures have, or had, creation myths and legends about the foundation of their nations. Within Genesis you'll find many of what we think of as "Bible stories": Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah's Ark, Abraham almost sacrificing his son, Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt and finally Joseph and his family's sojourn in Egypt. It is self-evidently a book written to and for a specific tribal group, the Hebrews. Most of the Hebrew Bible does not read as universally applicable either. So how did it become part of the holy book of the Christians?

Things were a bit jumbled in Christianity's early days. Jesus, of course, was a Jew, descended from those Hebrews and Israelites who wrote the Bible. His followers were all Jews. After his death and alleged resurrection and ascension the first wave of followers were also Jews. They were all people who followed and revered the Torah. They were not out to start a new religion. Something that I will bring up as this series progresses is that when they followed Jesus, what he was preaching was that God would soon intervene in the world, overthrow the old order, and institute the Kingdom of God (or Heaven). This, boys and girls, was the end of the world! All the "love thy neighbor", all the "get rid of all your possessions and follow me" — all that stuff was in order to get yourself right to enter the new world ruled by God. But let me say it again, these early followers of Jesus were all still Jews and the Old Testament (which wasn't old to them) was still in force. This was one reason why, when Christianity moved beyond it's Jewish origins, that Christians retained the Old Testament as part of the holy book. 

During Christianity's early days there was a Roman cultural bias toward religions that were "ancient" and a suspicion, if not an outright prohibition, of new religious movements. As Christianity became less a Jewish sect and more a new religion, it got around this by claiming the Old Testament, which was undeniably ancient, as its own. Sections of it were reinterpreted as prophesies of the Messiah in ways that would have (and did) surprise Jews then and now. By piggybacking this new faith on the ancient religion of the Jews, even claiming via supposed prophecies that the the ancient religion of the Jews predicted Christianity, Christians could have the best of both worlds. 

After around fifteen to twenty years people started writing things down, mostly famously the man we know as the Apostle Paul. We'll revisit Paul later, but he was instrumental in spreading Christianity to non-Jews, and for writing some of Christianity's foundational documents. Most of the New Testament outside the Gospels is credited to the Apostle Paul. He wrote over a period of around twenty-five years. Others started to write things down as well, including the first of the canonical Gospels in around 70 BCE. Christian leaders in the Second Century began discussing which writings were legitimate and which ones weren't.  

Although Jesus in the Gospels quotes the Old Testament, and refers to "the scriptures", and his follower Paul does the same, some Christians noted that there was a stark difference in how God was portrayed between the Old and New Testaments, almost as if they weren't the same God. Some went beyond the "as if" and declared unambiguously that they weren't the same god. Marcion was the most well known and influential of these. He completely rejected the entire Old Testament as being about an evil God of this world, while Jesus represented the "true" God. He was the first to compile a "canon of scripture" which viewed Paul as the ultimate authority. His "New Testament" included the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, all heavily edited to remove theology that Marcion did not approve of. Although Marcionite Christianity was later condemned as a heresy, Marcionite Christian churches at one time outnumbered Orthodox/Catholic churches. Christianity could have very easily become a brand new thing, totally divorced from the culture and religion from which it sprang. Marcion's canon may have been the impetus spurring the creation of an official canon.

There's a verse in the Second Epistle to Timothy (which probably was not written by Paul) that states that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. The Old Testament, however, doesn't say that about itself. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part III

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part I

One of the criticisms of the Bible that is tossed about is that there's no proof that any of it happened, or that there's no contemporaneous confirmation of its contents. One of the most attention getting statements that I have read in recent years is there are indeed historical documents regarding the life of Jesus Christ — the four gospels. To those of us with a non-religious orientation that statement sounds ridiculous. Of course they're not historical documents, they're religious texts! The people who wrote them had an agenda! Yes, both of those statements are true, the gospels are religious texts and they were written by people with an agenda. We've all heard the saying "History is written by the victors", which is just a different way of saying that history is written by people with an agenda — always. 

Over the last few years I listened to a few history-themed podcasts — the history of Rome, of Byzantium, of the successive Persian Empires. In each of them I was struck by how often the only information that we have about an event was written decades or generations after the event took place. How there are often gaps in lists of rulers that can only be filled in by speculation. How the only contemporaneous documentation of an era has been long lost and all we have are fragments by historians quoting earlier historians. While there are exceptions, for the most part ancient historians were employed by their rulers to make them look good, or to make the ruler's opponents look bad. Or it was a citizen of the winning side wanting to paint his people in glory. Or maybe it was the losing side trying to depict their people as something other than abject losers. Yes. They had an agenda.  

The writers of the Gospels had an agenda too, which doesn't make them any better or worse than any other writings from that time period. The first of the surviving Gospels, "Mark" was most likely written around 70 C.E., i.e, around 40 years after Jesus' ministry. This gap in time is brought up a lot to disparage the authenticity of the Gospels, but it was not unusual, especially since it is likely Jesus' early followers were illiterate or at least not educated enough to put together a narrative like you see in any of the Gospels. It's also apparent that, since they believed that God would be imminently intervening in human events, there was no reason to write anything down for future generations that they didn't think would exist. So a written account during or immediately following Jesus' life would not be expected. The utter lack of any originals of the Gospels or even the epistles, or even any copies dating any earlier than hundreds of years after Jesus' life is also cited as problematic, yet you'd be hard pressed to find an original edition of any of the classical writings, or any writings that have as many extant manuscripts as does the Bible. (The number of manuscripts on the other hand doesn't prove anything other than people valued them enough to make lots of copies)

Historians will examine any historical document to determine, not only its authenticity, but to discover any biases that the author had; they also have a number of ways to test the reliability of the claims made in any history, any ancient biography. Unless one is of the opinion that The Bible is the "revealed Word of God", inspired by God Himself, it makes sense to subject The Bible to the same scrutiny that any other historical document would be. 

For most people, however, The Bible is an either-or proposition. Either it's God's Word delivered via prophets of God to His people, or it's a book of fables with no truth in it whatsoever. (Of course there are intermediate positions — some believers admit that some passages in The Bible may be metaphorical while some disbelievers accept that there's some decent morals and ethics in it.) 

In this series I take the position that there is good reason to accept that there was an historical Jesus that the New Testament was based upon, but that not only are there contradictions regarding him among the different books, but that Jesus wasn't who most people think he was. I'll be touching on the milieu in which Jesus lived, the Jewish scriptures that he was taught, contradictions between how the Gospels differ from the message of Paul in his epistles, how how it all morphed into "The Church". 

And off we go!

Go to Part II

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Conclusion

No one wakes up in the morning, and after a shower and that first cup of coffee, decides that they’re going to join a cult. No one approached by someone with an engaging smile and an encyclopedic knowledge of the bible thinks “Cool! A cult! Just what I’ve been looking for!” Yet, every day in America, people join up with ...cults. 

From "So, You Want to Join a Cult  Part I"

I have documented my time in a cult through 41 blog posts, with an additional 13 outlining cult tactics and strategies for recruiting, retaining and controlling people. If you have read through the series, one of the themes that you may have picked up on is how ordinary it all seemed, how banal. I wasn't holed up in a "compound", prohibited from leaving; there weren't any mass suicides; we weren't immediately identifiable by our bizarre clothing. We certainly didn't think we were in a cult when we were, in fact, in a cult.  No one who is in a cult thinks that they're in a cult. Most people believe that they would never be taken in by a cult, that they're too smart. They're wrong.

Part of why I wrote this series was to show how easily someone could get caught up in a cult. Cult members aren't stupid. Cult members aren't brainwashed. Cult members see something in the cult that appeals to them. They make a decision every day that what they are getting out of the cult is worth what they are giving to the cult. For many, it becomes the sunk cost fallacy, i.e. they feel that they can't leave after investing so much time and energy, for others, they're ashamed to admit that they were wrong. One way or another the goals and priorities of the cult become their goals and priorities. They refuse to consider evidence that they're wrong. Opposition to the cult is viewed as foolish, deranged, evil. 

Some of you who have stuck with me through this whole series have made the connection between what I experienced in a religious cult and the political cult that millions of Americans have embraced. People who looked down their noses at those poor, deluded, fools at Waco, or in Guyana, have walked open eyed into devotion to a man who stands for everything that they just a few years ago would have been against. They don't believe they're in a cult, but no one who is in a cult thinks they're in a cult. 

My years in the way have made me a skeptic. Not only of charismatic leaders and pat answers to complicated questions, but to anything or anyone who claims to have The Answers. I hope I have inspired some skepticism in a few of you. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part LIII - Stupid People Often Assume Everyone Is As Stupid As They Are

An aspect of cults that is at times overlooked is that there isn't always a clear dividing line between those who are fooled and those who are doing the fooling. Even at the very top levels, there's often some question whether the cult leaders believe their own press clippings. Was a con always being run, or did the leader little by little come to really believe they were the anointed one? 

In any cult, there has to be intermediaries between the top dog and the flock that is being fleeced. Between 1970-1980 the Way Corps program graduated hundreds of field leaders. I was never privy to the qualifications that were looked for in leadership, but like in the business world, I saw many "leaders" who exhibited no leadership qualities whatsoever. If I had to guess at the prerequisites for being given a leadership assignments, I'd say that loyalty to the organization and the top leader, including obedience, were the primary criteria. There were also exercises within the Corps training that served to weed people out. L.E.A.D. was one of them. 

The initials (if I remember correctly) stood for Leadership, Education, Adventure, Direction. The participants had to hitchhike in pairs from the Way Corps headquarters in Emporia, Kansas to Tinney, New Mexico with only ten dollars in their pockets and still have ten dollars when they arrived. Their time in Tinney involved a number of outdoors tasks and ended with hitchhiking back to Emporia. For some reason rappelling down a cliffside, surviving alone in the forest for 24 hours and thumbing rides were crucial skills needed to lead God's people. The other apparent stumbling block was money. There was tuition to be paid for the two years of training "in residence", i.e. at one of The Way's properties. In my observation every Way Corps rejectee of my acquaintance was sent home over money — or the lack thereof. 

For a "Biblical Research" organization, many leaders had an abysmal lack of understanding of the Biblical texts. I was aware of several who were functionally illiterate. With few exceptions their "teachings" in home fellowship meetings were nothing more than rehashing what they had heard promulgated from headquarters. Sometimes the Way middle managers, the Way Corps branch and limb coordinators, were dumber than the rank and file membership. They would deliver information that was so obvious as if it were secrets that only the elect could understand. I remember one year Fred, our local leader telling us all, with a look of utter seriousness on his face, that Christ wasn't Jesus' last name. I imagine that there were people in the world that thought that Christ was his family name; Jesus Christ, son of Joseph Christ and Mary Christ, but I felt insulted that he thought I need to be told that. Somebody higher up was dumb enough to believe that Christ was Jesus' last name, and the assumption was that everyone was dumb enough to think that. 

I remember sitting through a class at Way headquarters taught by Way President Craig Martindale. He went off on a long tangent about an Old Testament tribe called the Kenites. His rant assumed that, due to the similarity in the name to Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murdered his brother Abel, that their evil ways were due to their ancestry. I remember sitting their thinking that according to the Bible, Cain didn't have any descendants at that time — they all drowned in the flood. I looked up the names later and saw that although similar in English, they were not the same in Hebrew. Another teaching that I recall vividly was based on the teacher confusing the Greek word aleitheia (truth) with athleo (to contend or struggle), which was further confused by the insistence within Way leadership that athleo must imply an athletic allegory throughout the epistles. 

Cults are based on the assumption that knowledge derived from outside the cult is tainted. Only that which originates from within is legitimate. It doesn't matter whether or not the inner knowledge is fact-based or not. In fact, ignorance of what the experts are saying is required. My own exit from The Way began with my own questioning of what was being taught. Anyone who dares to point out errors is dangerous. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part LIV