Talk:Atrocity story

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Can somebody please help me to understand the concept? Two examples

  1. Current devotees of Sathya Sai Baba may interpret the invitations by Sathya Sai Baba to give him a blow job as kundalini awakening. Of course, former followers see this as abuse of power, betrayal, and sexual abuse. Clearly the latter is sometimes presented by former devotees as violating public morality.
  2. Extremely anti-semitic Nazis saw the holocaust as getting ridding of a bad element within human society. Of course, most people see the holocaust of violating public morality

I read elsewhere that according to Bromley ex-devotees that are part of a countermovement do not tell the whole story, or not how they experienced it when they were still believers. I admit that this may be true sometimes because they consider the explanations that the movement gives or that they themselves gave as irrelevant or as not credible anymore and hence omit them.

To me it seems that violations of morality cannot be separetated from context and an interpretative framework which clearly tends to change significantly upon religious disaffiliation. Please correct me if I am wrong because I do not want to make the same mistake as Bromley and Shupe i.e. making sweeping generalizations and making a caricature of the motivations, and opinions of other people. Andries 06:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I can't correct you because I agree with you. In the case of something that truly is a "destructive cult" it is only the ex-members who tell the "whole story", while the group itself actively deceives the public about what actually goes on. The great example of this is the Church of Scientology. As just a few examples the public can only find out about these aspects of the COS from ex-members:
There are lots of other examples where the public can only find out what actually goes on in a group from ex-members. To address your example, the public would never find out about Sai Baba's sexual escapades from the group that he runs; only ex-members will report it.
As for "they consider the explanations that the movement gives or that they themselves gave as irrelevant or as not credible anymore and hence omit them". Actually they absolutely don't "omit them", they shout them to the world and declare that their former group is deceiving the public. And the abosolutey do reveal how they experienced the group when they were still believers[6], explaining their former experience as the result of deception and the use of unethical psychological influence techniques. Tanaats 17:10, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

See Talk:Controversies_about_Opus_Dei#Atrocity_stories_and_apostasy Andries (talk) 21:01, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Duhaime does not oppose the views of Bromley, so Duhaime's view is in the wrong section or the section title is wrong: Duhaime admits that apostates tell atrocity stories, but he disagrees with the sentiment voiced by some that they should be be dismissed only be because of this reason. Andries (talk) 21:31, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

I think the statement by Zablocki was off-topic here. Andries (talk) 21:39, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry Andries, but I am reverting your deletions. The material seems to be directly associated with the subject, so I see no reason for its deletion. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Can you please explain why you think that Zablocki is on-topic? Did he treat differing interpretations of the same events? Or did he check the factuality of events? If the latter is the case then I think that Zablock is off-topic because the term atrocity stories deals with the interpretations of events and their presenations. Not with questions whether events really took place. Andries (talk) 17:15, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
This link: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/faq-you/cult.apologists.txt fails WP:EL. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

The word "opposing" is incorrect, because no scholar holds the view that apostates are completely (un-)reliable. "Differing" is more correct. Andries (talk) 14:28, 20 January 2008 (UTC)