‘The truth is it is dark’ – Gloriavale workers begin Employment Court trial
A former Gloriavale member has told the Employment Court she would work until she fell asleep as a teenager in the closed Christian community.
The latest attempt to gain some type of accountability from the Glorivale cult is back in the news and I think it’s time to ask, why we tolerate Glorivale again?
As a liberal progressive democracy we all have to tolerate religion.
We never want a State to tell you what you can and can’t believe, the powers we would need to give the State to enable that level of coercion over the individual would immediately stop it being any type of State any of us would want to support.
You’d have stormtroopers smashing down temples, do we really want that?
If you want to believe in a magical invisible flying wizard for your day to day decisions, that’s your right, as insanely crazy as I think that is.
As good liberal progressive democrats, we have to tolerate freedom of religion because the alternative, a State that can compel you to believe only its truth, is vastly more damaging and dangerous.
And goodness don’t we tolerate religion here in NZ?
We tolerate that the churches don’t pay tax.
We tolerate Scientology – fucking Scientology!
We tolerate Bishop Brian Tamaki. Ugh.
If you as an adult want to believe this garbage, you are free to, just don’t expect me to have to play along with your fantasies.
What is most difficult however about tolerating these religious lunatics is when they stop educating their children so that they remain brainless worker drones for their magical invisible flying wizard.
The Glorivale cult purposely stops young women from learning and becoming educated so that they effectively remain in domestic servitude!
What parent could ever hold their head high knowing they have purposely kept their children blind and stupid to the wonders of this world?
And it is this tolerance of freedom of religion that obligates us to fully support all Glorivale survivors who manage to escape this cult with wrap around services and welfare benefits alongside constant outreach programs to ask if families wish to leave.
We tolerate these cultists because we tolerate religion, but by doing so we write off the children they purposely keep stupid. If anyone manages to escape, we have an obligation to support them because we so willingly turn a blind eye to their abuse in the name of tolerating their fucking religion!
We owe those who escape because we tolerate a system that abused them.
Look, I acknowledge the historic role Christianity had in building academia, the arts and the philosophical creation of the Western sense of the Individual, but we moved passed being scared by that which we couldn’t explain and removed the limitations of angry invisible gods who want to punish us for our lack of faith and weekly tithing to the Church.
In the West, we won’t be controlled by the dead ghosts of yesterdays gods any longer, you want to believe in that, knock yourself out, welcome to freedom of choice, but fuck right off if you want to start making rules for the rest of us.
I have no problem enjoying the beauty of religion, the art of religion, the passion of religion, but I also enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I’m not praying to Tony Stark for an Iron Man battle suit with a 12 inch cock!
And let’s be very very very very very clear. This isn’t just an anti-Christian position, I have this position against all religions. I tolerate them as well, but hold them at the same intellectual position I would frightened children explaining what lightening and thunder is.
This is why I will do everything in my power to be the first Kiwi to break any bullshit blasphemy law Labour try and force upon us as their Hate Speech response to the white supremacist terror attack in Christchurch, because while I tolerate religion, I sure as Christ won’t fear it when I criticise it or its stupid fucking beliefs.
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The same reason(s) “we” tolerate the Uighur ethnocide and foreign (non-citizen) voters.
“I will do everything in my power to be the first Kiwi to break any bullshit blasphemy law Labour try and force upon us”
OK Martyn, I’ll look forward to seeing your mockery of the religion that Jacinda wants to protect from ridicule. Because if Ardern and friends get another three years in office, you can bet that tougher “hate speech” laws will be close to the top of their “truly transformational” agenda.
buhahahahaha
Beautifully articulated MB.
Tautoko that!
Rua Kenana had built in the early 20th century a religious community in the heart of the Tuhoe nation smack bang in the bush by their sacred mountain ‘Maungapohatu’ He never got govt funding nor did the govt at the time have any interest in supporting his religious endeavours in fact he was classed as a traitor that supported ‘Germany’ because he told his people not to go to war!! Eventually he was arrested on trumped up charges raided, imprisoned some of his woman relatives raped by the NZ Police and one of his brothers murdered for defending themselves.
His motives for moving to isolation was the diseases Maori significantly were suffering from like tuberculosis, typhoid fever, dysentery, diarrhoea and respiratory diseases. One can concluded from excluding his community going to fight in another country had multiple explanations the immediate concern was catching diseases and bringing it back to his community that affected Maori severely. The others were the Invasion by colonial forces in the late 1800s that had profound effects on Tuhoe that reflected in their community today.
Gloriavale is a pakeha settlement unless someone can tell me otherwise? Now I understand the time difference but that like only 30 years when Gloriavale was founded from Rua Kenana (Ihiraira) religious community which was destroyed on bogus charges. They still get govt help, they have support from elite Pakeha and right-wing politics and are still revered by right-wing bloggers like Kiwiblog and the wider NZ pakeha community. Why the hypocrisy under a liberal democracy?
Perhaps we should have a Commissioner For Children. What’s not to like about that ?
Thankfully the victims in Gloriavale are waking up, trusting and acting on their own “inner voice” / intuitions when things just don’t gell. Thankfully there is welfare and wrap around support for them. Thankfully most of us weren’t born into cults. NZ doesn’t tolerate this imo. I think we collectively recognise, perhaps instinctfully rather than necessarily objectively, that we each have our own unique situations in our unique lives and that we are all entitled to learn at our own pace. Provided of course we don’t harm others. I think woke-dom is part of our collective social evolution. A step that allows us to “bring others along” into the wider discourse of what harms will we tolerate and determine where do we draw the line on that. Change is incremental and often slow, but lots happening the world over that cause us all to stop and think. There’s nothing quite like a pandemic, war, sovereign death, mass pain, shocking event etc that jolts large masses to reconsider what is important in life. For most it is people underpinned by love. But we each learn at our own pace in our own time. Stupid laws get rewritten or thrown out when they no longer serve. It will be the same with anti hate legislation once we’ve all witnessed and absorbed it. When we’ve all confirmed where to draw the line. Jmo
As a mostly conservative Christian I do support your view that the state has no role in forcing any sort of religion on the population & agree that the likes of Glorivale & Brian Tamaki etc are not a good example for anyone to follow.
While I have seen repeated use of your favorite description (magical invisible flying wizard) for believers you have a blind spot regarding whatever belief system you have. We all have the same evidence & while you appear to be content to believe that everything we see just happened over billions of years I stand on solid scientific evidence in my knowledge that life cannot happen by chance & the more sure word of prophecy that predicted events from approx 600 B.C. to what we will see in the final days of this Earth.
I accept that you have a right to your own beliefs & keep reading your articles because you have a good social conscience although your desire to denigrate anyone who has a different belief system seems a bit immature.
” the more sure word of prophecy ”
(sigh)
The current prophets are science fiction writers. We watch amazed as Elon Musk enacts technical prophecy and the US Supreme Court enacts Atwoods social prophecy.
That’s a stretch.
SF is simply fictional conjecture, makes no pretence at prophesy, only possibility.
Musk’s greatest skill is in raising venture capital.
Absolutely. Bang on. There is a saying I heard from a traditional Indian dancer- “where the hand goes, the eye follows; where the eye goes, the heart follows.”
and no, Richard Christie, Musk’s greatest skill is keeping his meat suit on.
The planet is over 4 billion years old Bonnie. No religion has ever grasped the reality of geological time.
I recommend you read Bill Bryson’s Short History of Everything to get a grip on reality.
All the real evidence suggests that it is you Shona that needs to get a grip on reality. Start with the Moon to Earth along with the Earth to the Sun distance increasing over time then try to wind that back 4 billion years. Check the sedimentation rates into the ocean along with mutation rates in DNA & they support a young Earth as well. For evolution to be science it must be observable.
But if it’s too slow to be observed, you can’t then say, it’s really happening, you just
can’t see it. That is not science. The total lack of transition fossils is a major problem for followers of Darwin. I can accept that you don’t want to believe in a creator God but insisting that the planet is over 4 billion years old because you don’t want to believe in God is not reliable evidence.
“Start with the Moon …”
Those intilligunt dezine PRATTS you posit are scientific garbage, soundly refuted thousand times.
“That is not science.”
Bonnie, you wouldn’t know what science is if it came and bit you on the arse.
When you can find someone to make a self-replicating single cell I will listen to you. The thing is I don’t personally know anyone who has changed from believing in creation to believing in evolution (although I am aware that they exist) but I know many people who have given up believing in evolution & now believe in creation because they were honest enough to examine all the evidence. If it makes you happy keep living in the dark & I will tell my teachers (if they are still alive, was 40+ years ago) that the A marks I received in school & university for science subjects must have been a mistake because a man who can’t spell says so.
“When you can find someone to make a self-replicating single cell I will listen to you.”
WTF are you talking about? who claims self replicating cells were first produced by humans?
Are you using that as an argument that life was magicked into existence my your invisible friend?
You really have more than a few screws loose.
“Start with the Moon to Earth along with the Earth to the Sun distance increasing over time then try to wind that back 4 billion years.”
I know, I know, Bonnie, just ask Eric:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IzTdKJ7FYE&list=PL82yk73N8eoVRrTiqLu4HQlLImsWujwiW&index=26
Those from Glorivale who have found courage to use the law to judge their predicament should be commended. They are highlighting what is happening there away from public scrutiny. Churches of religion have had their business ( finance) exempt from tax because in theory this money is mainly spent on maintenance and supporting the less fortunate. This arrangement seems ok because public contributions have already been taxed. But where do we draw the line. The situation may have changed, however many years ago the manager of a church owned farm nearby me, received the farmer of the year award for this area. As a local farmer myself struggling along at the time, my envy and annoyance popped out when I realised this church farm didn’t pay tax. It was a good sized farm so 40 or $50000 tax annually would normally be paid. My thoughts were of how I could improve my farm with that sort of money. This wasn’t already taxed public money, it was money from a church business. If Glorivale isn’t paying tax it should be. Glorivale runs a business to sustain itself and those that live there. No reason to be tax exempt. If the government is short of cash this is a good place to start.
Agreed all churches need to be taxed. Generous tax rebates and govt funding to those churches who make their audited accounts public and prove their charitable status. City Mission, Salvation Army spring to mind.
Tautoko your Korero bro these fucken Chruches religious nuts are sly over privileged pricks
For the same reason we tolerate the idea of gendered souls and the idea of being born in the wrong body. Cults are good money makers.
Yes indeed Bratwurst – the Social Justice Cult gets a lot more tolerance than it deserves.
The Gloriavale refugees dont actually give up Christianity they seem to be rejecting what they see as unchristian. Could you call it a line struggle? Anyway they seem to come out with a great work ethic!
The Education Department should be all over them enforcing the education curriculum is taught well.
?
Anyone remember Centrepoint?
Bert Potter, convicted kiddie f**cker and drug dealer (lsd?), Albany Auckland, disbanded late 80s I think. At its height around 200 people. Gloriavale and Destiny much the same beast imo. Corrupt cults because they are led by corrupt / wrong thinking leaders. Zilch value of enlightenment.
because we’re becoming little america and child molestation is a revered rightwing evangelical tradition
I wish there was someway to roll over nitwit oppressors like this.
That certainty is only allowed to uber-oppressors. Or a govt with a strong mandate.
What Stephen says. Absolutely. 100% …………..”and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Honestly, Martyn, the sight of those two stock agents dealing to that poor girl is more of a trigger than seeing Luxflakes in his swimmers. (and that’s saying something)
Our prime minister refuses to investigate the slave labour compound in the Hochsetter so what does that say? She won’t speak up for Assange either.
I pray for those poor, starving and sexually abused children.
I pray that the magical flying wizard will lay back in his lounger and just hand over the car keys.
Much like the actions of Family First at the referendum, it seems the govt doesnt want to touch religion with a barge pole. To do so could affect their voting bases.