Inside a Cult: A Sobering Documentary.
April 24th, 2008
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I thought it was worth mentioning a television program which I recently saw, which ran on the National Geographic Channel. The documentary “Inside a Cult” ran last night. It was a look in the inner circle of a cult of Michael Travesser. Travesser is a self-proclaimed prophet and savior who is the head of a splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Although I have seen images and read accounts of cults before, including Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown and The Branch Dividians, I found this rare look inside a functioning cult, complete with a scruffy old leader, who claims to be the second coming of Jesus especially disturbing and sobering.
The documentary featured accounts from young people, who were especially reeled in. A young boy of 15 spoke of how there’s no point in going to school because the end is near. It also spoke with some young girls in their teens who had been devoted to Travesser for years. Many have apparently had sexual contact with Travesser. Of course, this is not uncommon in such cults but the statements made by them and by Travesser were extremely disturbing. He stated he did not want to have all the sexual contact he did but that “God had ordered it” and being the son of god, he was obligated. Others stated they found it a “strange request of god,” but could not question the authority of the higher power.
Several of the young people in the cult had been dragged away by their parents or relatives, but returned, having run away or even staged hunger strikes to force their return. The cult currently has a compound of members, both young and old. The devotion is amazing, especially considering that Travesser had predicted that October 31, 2007 would be the time of reckoning when a great change would occur to him and the people of his cult. Presumably this would be the end of times or the beginning of his transfiguration or something equally dramatic. When nothing happened on that day Travesser declared that his prophecy had been fulfilled and the great change had happened to him, and the group bought into it without question.
The reporter who did the interviews attempted to ask the kind of logical questions to the followers, especially the young ones, which you would expect. The questions of “How do you know if this is the only life you have experienced?” was answered with the characteristic answers that it is better than the corrupt outside world. Another question was “How do you respond to those who say he has brainwashed you” was answered with extreme laughter and the answer that “I have been brainwashed! He has washed all the impure thoughts and beliefs from my mind!”
If you get the National Geographic Channel it will run again on May 7. It may run at some other date on Non-US versions of the National Geographic Channel. It may also be avaliable as “On Demand” content on certain cable television systems. I’d highly recommend it.
The official blog of the cult with some commentary by those involved (who obviously disagree with how the program came across) can be found here.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Paranormal, media, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:31 am
DV82XL said:
This assumes that systems of ethics morality are absolute across cultures and times. Which we have evidence they’re not.
I don’t take a stand on whether the Bible is true or the biblical God exists or not; but I’m not convinced by yr argument against it.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:40 am
“This assumes that systems of ethics morality are absolute across cultures and times. Which we have evidence they’re not.”
I would contend, at least at a deep level that moral laws are shared across all cultures. The idea of the Natural Law tradition is very old and well developed, the antics of Margaret Mead and others not withstanding.
The differences in moral laws across cultures are typically superfical in my opinion.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Jason Rennie said:
What absolute garbage.
There have been countless debates on this forum which have gone into considerable technical and/or intellectual depth. Your shabby attempt to blame the forum for not making any headway promoting your position is frankly laughable.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:47 am
KNB said:
You don’t have to assume complete identicality of the cultural expression of ethical systems to recognise that there is an underlying sense of injustice whenever anyone anywhere is injured without cause, robbed, raped or murdered.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:53 am
“What absolute garbage.”
Believe what ever you want. Your opinion of me doesn’t matter to me.
“Your shabby attempt to blame the forum for not making any headway promoting your position is frankly laughable.”
I wouldn’t expect to make any headway talking to you. These sorts of forums inevitably generate more heat than light and I don’t see much value to doing that.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Jason Rennie said:
There is plenty of light here for those with eyes to see.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:10 am
There is plenty of noise as well. Which is why I don’t see a lot of point to trying to have a civil discussion.
Nothing of depth anyway.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Jason Rennie said:
Check out some of the technical debates on the subject of power generation here to find out just how far off base you really are with your ‘nothing of depth’ assertion.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:18 am
I’m sure you have can have a very in depth technical discussion like that.
The same is not true for trying to have a civil religious disucssion. The tone of the comments are not those of people given to rational considered discourse on the topic.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:22 am
The tone is usually set by religious fanatics such as ‘Devoted’.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Don’t forget your co-religionists like DV82XL
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Jason said:
Eh? DV82XL has always asserted that he’s an athiest, and as such is not religious at all.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Yes exactly.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Oh. I see. You think I’m an athiest.
I can see why you would think that… I’m usually to be found on the opposing side of any debate with Christian Fundamentalists, Christofascists and young earth creationists… but I’m not an athiest.
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April 28th, 2008 at 7:56 am
KNB said:
No it does not. There is no cultural relativity involved here. As I have pointed out I selected my initial argument with care to avoid this issue. An all-loving god would not permit his creations to doubt that love from lack of evidence, to do so places this deity on a lower lever of ethical development than his creations, who recognize this behavior as wrong. Appeals to ignorance of god’s will are fallacious attempts to put lipstick on a pig. You are left with one of two conclusions: the Christian concept of god is in error, or god doesn’t exist.
Jason said:
No mention of the Schism because it was not necessary to establish the fact that indeed Rome moved to arrogate central authority to itself. At any rate Great Schism was a consequence of this, and happened long after in 1054.
Quite frankly you haven’t displayed any real knowledge of Christian theology or the history of the early church. You’re a huge fraud you know, although I suspect that your biggest victim is yourself; very few people can study these things in depth anymore and not come away with massive doubt. How did you think I cam to reject this nonsense for the rubbish it is? Real understanding of theology and the historic context in which it developed leads one to the inevitable conclusion that these myths were a construct of man, to suit the ends of the few, and nothing more.
Now mount an argument; your sour little attacks on this forum and the people here leads me to wonder why you are still posting.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
DV82XL said:
I had to deal with real life over the weekend, but I see that this thread is still going, so I’ll weigh in again.
You state: “An all-loving god would not permit his creations to doubt that love from lack of evidence…”. From what do you base this assertion? Is it just your own personal belief, or do you base it on how YOU would behave if you were God? If the former, then please stop spouting off your personal belief’s as some kind of universal truth. If the latter, then please explain why your behavior is the standard to which God must be judged. Your argument is the same argument a child uses with their parent: If you love me, then you would buy me a car, let me stay up all night, take me to Disneyland, etc. It’s perfectly rational from the child’s perspective and he or she might recognize any other response as “wrong behavior” on the part of the parents. But that doesn’t mean the parents are unloving or working with “a lower level of ethical development” when the child doesn’t get what it wants.
I have no problem at all with anyone who doesn’t believe in God. I understand the need for evidence to make that kind of choice. I respect people’s personal beliefs. What I don’t respect, are people claiming to “prove” that God doesn’t exist (an impossible task), using arguments only a child would see as having merit.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Finrod said:
Sorry for the long delay.
I see where you’re coming from now. And yes, that is a problem and a concern that has crossed my mind, and let me take two approaches to answering this. First, theologians have been hammering out these issues for centuries, and using logic, have come up with systems that seem to answer all the questions. But, frankly, the “after the fact” rigorous use of logic to “prove” a religious system has always felt very contrived to me. If the message was always supposed to be the “good news” then I think it gets lost when every last bit of detail has to be mapped out.
And second, I find a few things encouraging about the Bible. In the Old Testament, there are references to people who were “of God” but who weren’t from Israel, so presumably, they are going to heaven. Then of course there’s all those people (Jews included) who died before Jesus. Were they all doomed to hell? I doubt it. I’ve heard some theological discussion about “looking forward to Jesus”, meaning that even though they didn’t know Jesus, they looked forward to a savior. So, if that’s an area that no one is quite sure how it all works, that tells me that our understanding is limited and we shouldn’t go too far out on a limb trying to deduce an answer.
The primary or essential truth that Christians hold about Jesus isn’t that he’s the gate keeper into heaven, it’s that he paid the admission price, and he paid it for everyone who’ll take it. So, what does that mean today for people who have never even heard of him? I don’t know. Some will claim that they’re going to hell and it will be a very well thought out theologically correct answer. But there’s enough noise in the system on this point that I’ll leave the business of final judgment to God and focus instead on what it means to live here on earth.
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April 28th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I don’t currently have time to give you the reply this warrents, Dave W. I’ll get to it after work.
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April 28th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
David W said:
See that’s the whole point about absolutes like omnipotent, omnipresent, and in this case omnibenevolent, they must be by definition perfect, and unchangeable or they lose there status as absolutes.
General Christian theology holds morally absolutist positions, regarding its system of morality as having been set by a deity.Therefore, they regard such a moral system as absolute, perfect, and unchangeable. In fact the concept of omnibenevolence in Christian theology stems from two basic ideas of God: that God is perfect and that God is morally good. Therefore, God must possess perfect goodness. Being perfectly good must entail being good in all ways at all times and towards all other beings.
(Now this is not my personal belief, this is a fundamental tenet which is held as a universal truth and is considered a fundamental axiom in theology and theodicy in every branch of Christianity with the exception of a few outright heresies.)
Thus the notion of god as omnibenevolent is only coherent and meaningful if standards of moral goodness are independent of god. Thus to say that God is perfectly good simply means that God is perfectly capable of doing what God is logically restricted in doing — a wholly uninteresting statement. Moreover, if standards of goodness are dependent upon God, then saying that God is good reduces to a tautology.
However we are now left with reconciling Christian moral absolutism, which is the belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, devoid of the context of the act and the fact that there exists a moral position that sees an act of god as immoral, that is failing the definition of morals which is that they are basic guidelines for behavior intended to reduce suffering.
So given the above we are forced into the conclusion that there are only one of two possibilities: The first one is is that christian epistemology of the ontology of god is self-contradictory and therefor metaphysically useless, or there is no god.
This conclusion has nothing to do with my point of view, and I might add there is nothing new about it, its been a sore point for centuries. It is broadly recognized among religious philosophers that the attempts to resolve it have been a failure, and ultimately all branches of the faith have had to deal with it by doctrinal fiat.
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April 28th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
David W said:
In other words, faith only exists if logic and reason are suspended. God apparently created a universe that runs by strict causality and interlocking and generally transparent laws but as to his own working, well that he made deliberately obscure.
Thomas Pane put this concept in perspective when he wrote: “This absurd and and frankly impious doctrine would never have been thought of had it not been for some stupid passages in the Bible, which priestcraft at first, and ignorance since, have imposed upon mankind as revelation. Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man.”
Now Paine was still a Christian and a Calvinist but even he understood that logic has to take precedence over doctrine and doctrine is a construction of the human mind.
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April 28th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
DV82XL said:
I actually agree with this. It’s not surprising to me that man-made definitions of God might have some flaws. I’ve always felt that between the two statements: “‘God is Love” and “God loves me” the first is the description of something I will never comprehend (and as you say, uninteresting), the second, because of it’s personal nature, I can.
DV82XL said:
When you say “Christian moral absolutism” I cringe, because while that has become a preoccupation throughout a good deal of Christianity, I don’t think it’s what Christ taught. He only gave us two rules to follow and they are very open ended. The whole point of the story of the Good Samaritan was to point out that rules are bad when they take precedence over the well-being of those around you.
DV82XL said:
I’m glad you clarified your original statement, changing “Everything you were ever told about god is a lie” to “christian epistemology of the ontology of god is self-contradictory and therefore metaphysically useless”. Your statement would very likely be true, either way, if the Christian faith were limited to the”epistemology of the ontology of god.” But there are other aspects of the faith that are experiential, and because of that it’s not necessary (yes, in my opinion) to presume the existence of God on an unassailable epistemology.
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April 28th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
DV82XL said:
And I would quite frankly like to see more of that myself. I wish all the “young earth” Christians would simply go find something useful to do.
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April 28th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
David W said:
Well I see those statements as equivalent, but if you like the more convoluted one, fine.
The problem is if religious truth is limited to that which can be experienced by the individual, it is of little value as a universal. That is, what is to separate the ravings of a lunatic from true revelation? What is to separate hallucination from religious experience? Because if they cannot be distinguished, they cannot be trusted to provide the guidance that it is claimed they do.
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April 28th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
” very few people can study these things in depth anymore and not come away with massive doubt. How did you think I cam to reject this nonsense for the rubbish it is?”
I disagree. I’ve looked closely at a lot of it and have not been given doubt as a result.
How do I think you came to reject it ? Don’t know, but I bet could guess your sources for study.
What exactly would you like me to mount an argument in defense of ?
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April 28th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Jason Rennie said:
No you haven’t looked closely at a lot of it. Not because you still have faith but because you have demonstrated a profound lack of knowledge on the subjects of Christian theology and church history. You can claim whatever you want, and you might even believe it, but it doesn’t show in your contributions.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:04 am
David W said:
Why is God leaving this issue in such ambiguity and doubt? Lets recall that the early church fathers came to the conclusion, based on what they’d worked out from Holy Writ, that their omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God countenanced infant damnation. Lest anyone be unfamiliar with this term, it refers to the condemning of all deceased unbaptised infants, including the unborn, to the agonies of Hell for all eternity.
Approximately a thousand years after the time of Christ, some daring theologian suggested that this might seem just a tad harsh, and may just possibly seem even a bit contradictory, what with God supposedly being so benevolent and all, if anyone were to give a bit of thought to it. The result of this reconsideration of celestial jurisprudence was the invention of Limbo. These days, only a few of the more extreme and doctrinaire sects support infant damnation. Most sects assert that such infants are saved, although there’s still some debate about exactly how this occurs, seeing as such infants are still considered depraved by nature through inherited Original Sin, so Jesus must be making some special arrangement for them, which causes all sorts of intellectual difficulties, apparently. Nor has anyone been able to successfully determine the cutoff age for eligibility for Hell. At forty-three, I assume I’m past using that as a credible excuse, so I’ll have to plead Invincible Ignorance, or some such.
As you might expect, the doctrine of infant damnation has caused quite a bit of anguish down the centuries. here is an excellent fictional account of what sort of situations can be expected from such a belief, especially in an age of high infant mortality.
http://liver-and-onions.blogspot.com/2007/12/from-infant-damnation-archieve.html
I defy anyone with one compassionate atom to their being to read that story without feeling white-hot fury toward the sadistic bastards who dreampt up and propagated this doctrine. If Hell exists, then may it be populated entirely by such theologians.
The doctrine of infant damnation is an extreme example of the problem you’re trying to adress with all that pleading about non-Israelite holy men, and the vague possibility that maybe God has made some kind of arrangement for the unevangelised masses. Maybe He has, and maybe He hasn’t. Who can tell? Scripture gives no firm answers.
And the cosmic monster said to be responsible for this state of affairs is held up as an example of absolute moral perfection. Complete insanity.
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April 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Finrod said:
I think you’ve demonstrated the tenacity of man to find reasons to hate. Given a doctrine of “love your neighbor” it’s not surprising (to me) that men will use reason to produce any number of ways to do anything BUT love your neighbor. People who go to far down this path of creating a system of knowledge when the point all along was for a system of caring, usually wind up missing the point. I agree that scripture doesn’t give firm answers in a lot of cases, and therefore the “cosmic monster” that created such things as the doctrine of infant damnation, was of course Man, not God.
I understand the irritation in the ambiguity, but why should we have a doctrine that’s completely unambiguous when life itself is ambiguous. I’ve spent time working as a state regulator, and one of the interesting bits of wisdom I learned there was that regulations are like a piece of cloth. The more regulations you add, the tighter the weave on the cloth, but you also create more holes. That’s why I keep going back to: Love God, love your neighbor. It’s simple, avoids the distractions and pitfalls of mental constructs, and puts the focus back on a personal level where it belongs.
We are told that the world will recognize us (Christians) by the love we have for one another. It really saddens me that it’s generally not the case today. In spite of a lot of charitable work that gets accomplished, we are probably known more for hate and dissension between ourselves and towards those who aren’t “with us”. And that’s a really big failure on our part.
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April 29th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
DV82XL said:
The only thing close to a universal that I try to hold is that I should love God, and love my neighbor. I will distinguish between hallucination and religious experience, depending on whether it is with or against those two things. It still requires a lot of personal discernment, so it’s messy and imperfect, but that’s pretty much how life works as far as I’m concerned.
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April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
David W said:
The thing is that you are still begging the question, as you haven’t provided any reasons why one should believe any of this is of divine origin. Beyond the fact that this smacks of moral relativism, casually asserting that doctrine that doesn’t meet cultural standards is the work of man, but all that is good is will of god is convenient, but it hardly offers any evidence that god is involved at all. The Golden Rule may be a reasonable framework for human ethics, but certainly its logic and utility stand on their own; it really doesn’t need a mythological origin to convince us of it correctness.
Idealist philosophies are three a penny, most of which if followed to the letter, would maximize happiness a stable society – the rub has always been that strict adherence to any set of rules is not easy, and the problem increases geometrically as the number of individuals expected to follow those rules increases arithmetically. Religions are just those systems that promise metaphysical rewards and punishments instead of temporal ones to enforce compliance.
David W said:
That type of sniff-test might work for you, but it is highly arbitrary and again only reinforces the notion that all religious ideas are internal constructs and have little value as generalities. It is also untrustworthy, since it is now without the external reference that a valid proof of the existence of god would provide. In the end you are left with a process that is equivalent to depending on the contents of your your nightly dreams for guidance in life.
You will excuse me if I still think objective thinking and logical reasoning are superior tools in this regard.
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April 29th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
DV82XL said:
I also think objective thinking and logical reasoning are great tools as well. I just don’t think they’re the only tools.
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April 29th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
David W said:
Because when you’re dealing with a matter as momentous as salvation or damnation, we really ought to expect God to issue firm guidance regarding it. For Him not to do so leaves Him in a reprehensible moral position.
David W said:
The following is one example of “Christian love”, as it is called.
If you will cast your mind back to the Eighties and early Nineties, you may recall something now known as the Satanic Panic, where a number of therapists, some with connections to the Christian community, promolgated the idea that there existed a network of murderous Satanist paedophiles preying on young children and using advanced brainwashing techniques to cover their traces, the evidence for which could be uncovered by using hypnosis to recover supressed memories. After a thorough FBI investigation, no trace of such a network has ever been found, and it’s pretty obvious in retrospect that the entire thing was a scam. A particularly viscious scam it was too, ending up with a lot of innocent people going to gaol (that’s jail to you Yanks) under a cloud of the worst kinds of accusations against their characters.
At the time, and occasionally since then, the general results of this witch-hunt have been pretty much the same. When presented with a seemingly plausible case for an immense evil, and pushed by authority figures into believing they’d been victims of it, the Christian targets of this movement ended up accusing the only people in their lives they really knew well: Other Christians (usually their parents). In this, the whole phenomenon recapitulated the evolution of the witch craze of the Early Modern period in Europe. If you invent an imaginary enemy for a relatively insular group and tell people the enemy is infiltrating society, said group will naturally turn on itself.
It seems that belief in the existence of absolute evil lends itself to this sort of thing.
All of this makes no sense from the viewpoint of individual morality, but becomes much more explicable if you consider it as a mechanism of cultural control.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
David W said:
That’s just so much rubbish masquerading as wisdom, and avoiding the issues I brought up in comment 78. What other tools are there? Some myth that isn’t even the product of your own imagination, but that of con-men that were out to bamboozle others into believing that they had a privileged hot-line to the will of the creator of everything?
Actually you have been ducking most of what I wrote since you returned to the thread, because your replies in comment 71 also managed to dodge the points of what I had wrote as well.
The fact remains that all of this (religion) is nothing more than an edifice built on a foundation of absolutely nothing but the arbitrary belief in an imaginary being. It really doesn’t matter how convoluted the attempt to rationalize away the fact that there is not one shred of evidence to support this entity’s existence, or make excuses for it not directly reveling itself; any honest evaluation of the facts at hand cannot help but come to the conclusion that the whole idea is patently false.
If you or anyone else wishes to delude yourselves with these beliefs, that is entirely your problem, but don’t expect the rest of us to cater to you in this regard or in any other way defer to these ideas. Also given that there is overwhelming evidence that adherence to these fantasies can and does lead to behavior that is violent and, as in the original post, outright criminal, expect opposition to grow. It is high time that this vestige of pre-enlightenment ignorance be put behind us for good.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Finrod said:
My experience is that unaccountable authority lends itself to this kind of thing, much more than any particular belief. Which is why I question over reliance on “systems of knowledge”. There are few people who will understand any philosophical or theological system with the depth that’s really necessary to be an equal among peers. So they rely on the expert authorities, whether that’s a pastor or a therapist or a rock star or a blogger. And even if the system of knowledge is perfect, those who implement it are not, and abuse follows.
Better to keep it simple.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
DV82XL said:
Blah, blah, blah. Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.
I’m not obliged to prove anything to you, and don’t think I’ve asked anyone to cater to me. In fact I think I’ve been pretty forthright in trying to find common ground. So stop getting your panties in a wad.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Christianity is all about unaccountable authority, and there’s no need to speculate on the state of affairs it leads to. The historical record is before us, and a dismal sight it is! Secular governance has been much more kindly towards humanity than any theocracy, or theocratically inclined authoritarian state.
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April 29th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
David W said:
You are UNABLE to prove anything to anyone. The evidence for the other side of the argument is overwhelming, and Christians always resort to some kind of special pleading to give the illusion of staying in the fight.
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April 29th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Finrod said:
Christianity as described in the Bible was about accountability to each other, all were considered brothers and sisters. Nobody was considered to be “more Christian” than anyone else. So, a theocracy (in my opinion) falls away from the original intent, and abuse ensues. And secular governance has absolutely no claim on being kindly towards humanity, witness Stalin, Mao, etc. In all cases it’s the unaccountable power that’s the problem.
Finrod said:
Let me be very clear on this point: I cannot prove the existence of God, either physically or rationally.
I never tried to prove anything to anyone, except for flaws in thinking that you can disprove the existence of God. I don’t expect you to believe that God exists, I didn’t ask you to believe that God exists, so what fight are you looking for?
You may think religion is the problem, but it’s really people who believe they are morally superior that push intolerance and become a threat to a free society.
Think about it.
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April 29th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Finrod said:
Or in David’s case an outright ad hominem attack. Don’t kid yourself – there is no common ground to be had here. You haven’t got a leg to stand on do you, except to fall back on your own personal delusions, which quite frankly are of no interest? You haven’t mounted any sort of structured argument and continue to fall back on rhetorical theatrics to hide the fact you have made no points at all. I don’t mind an active exchange of ideas, but this has become tiresome.
Good day
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April 30th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
David W said:
Indeed I should have been more specific. I was referring to the secular democratic nations which have arisen in western Europe and it’s colonies over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rather than the twentieth century dictatorships of central and eastern Europe and elsewhere, whose underlying characteristics share much in common with theocracies, right down to the demand for absolute faith in the system, unlimited power for the authorities, and some kind of utopian mythology concerning historical neccessity and a brilliant outcome at some unspecified futurity.
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May 1st, 2008 at 11:57 pm
“One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe”
- Thomas Pane
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