370- Living in a religious cult 5 : Education Edition

When I started my first entry in this series, I hadn't anticipated I'd be at part 5 (nor that I'd alternate the words Living, and Growing), but since I believe in the importance of telling the trauma story, and to raise awareness about the damaging aspects of growing up, or living, in a religious cult, I hereby combine this with another subject I'm passionate about : Education. 


Indeed, education is prime. It helps in quests for understanding, and fulfills curiosity's needs to know and unravel mysteries. But, what happens when a person, such as myself, lives in a religious cult, subjected to depersonalization and indoctrination ? The short answer is that there is an attempt on curiosity's life and all well-wishes to leave one's own little box of religious dirt are attempts to abort the quest, by simply prohibiting embarking unto its quest.  

The long answer is that despite my father's numerous stifling attacks, he couldn't kill my thirst for knowledge, nor to quench my curiosity about the world - even though he kept giving me his pseudo-spiritual answers. But, the answer is actually much longer. Maybe I'll need more than one entry for it. So, I'll try to be concise, as much as possible.

What you need to know about my father is that in his megalomania, he wanted to force the belief system he'd invented, or rather pieced, from all previous faiths. To this end, just like other cults, he limited my access to any external information which he thought would jeopardize his hold on me :

• Indoctrination by making me get up before dawn, having a cold shower and praying his name as well as other "prophets who came before" ; alone, and later with the other "disciples" 
• expanding this indoctrination by giving me religious books ; 
• by throwing away any other book he thought would create curiosity in me ; 
• by choosing the least dangerous (to his needs) schools to send me to (also pretending that he was respecting the laws about sending his children to school) 
• By taking me out of that school as soon as he could 
• By making me cut ties with classmates after having sent me to preach to them 
• By forbidding me to listen to music, reading other books (out of school & his religiously chosen ones), playing games,  
• By conditioning my actions (everything was timed and I had to be home by a certain hour after school or errands, or be punished - see below ; first with rewards, then all taken away, at the same time as my tasks and religious duties grew) 
• Punishing any act, or word or assumed thought that he decided were against his authority (real or of his invention of the moment) : beatings, being locked up in the WC ; withholding meals 
• Repeatedly telling me that I was good for nothing, that I'd never amount to anything, that I had only one set of goals in life:  to please him, to please god (= him, in the other sphere of existence) ; to pray, to preach, to avoid sin and temptation 

By all these, his goal was to totally break me. To make me a non-person ; this is part of depersonalization in a religious cult. Taking away anything external which may cause the disciple/follower have doubts, and forcing down anything he chose for me, down my brain - repetition used to enforce fear and to better control the robotized non-person. 

All religions, small and big, organized officially or not, known or not, cult or not, attempt to circumvent human's natural need to improve themselves through curiosity and learning new wisdom and insights. Indeed, closing avenues of independent and critical thought - by instilling fear and promising divine punishment and hellish scenarios, the person is required to follow only the guidelines given by faith and religious doctrines - often mascaraing this manipulation through warnings that anything outside is a sin and a menace to our soul and spiritual well-being... but, in truth, this isn't caring about you, not really... it's a concern of losing any grip on you and your actions! 

Thus, narrowing and limiting compreand intelligent pursuits is a way to better control a disciple, by keeping as ignorant as possible - about any topic the particular cult or religion decides, and this can vary. 

Most often, religious doctrines try to vilify science - one, a few, or all sciences. Why ? because science disproves faith and myths. 
Most often, too, cults tend to isolate you from anything which may cause doubts and change to another faith, and the ultimate "fear" of quitting all beliefs and becoming, I'll dare saying it, a secular, humanist, atheist. Since my father's cult mixes several religions, he chose my schools based on one of the religions included in his salad. (if he knew that I am now his atheist antithesis, he'd be furious)

The education I received severely undermined my intellectual growth. I hadn't properly studied my mother tongue, nor the one I had to learn in the new country he'd brought me to. The only language I more or less mastered is the one I'm typing with now : English, because it's the one that I practiced the most - though I self-taught by watching Star Trek and reading subtitles, until I grasped it enough. Then, when he knew this, he made me read even more of his religious propaganda, in the form of "lessons" he'd given to his followers... 

The only subjects I was taught in the mostly-religious school I was in were maths, geography and history (both of these in a very limited and centered way) and starting in 4th grade (UK: year 5) the school added English as a foreign language, but I was already ahead of all my classmates at that point. After a difficult start with my new country's language, I became quite proficient in maths, finishing all year's exercice books in the first few months and then, skipping ahead... in 6th grade (UK : year 7) I was reading and following math of 2 years ahead of me, even some basic trigonometry. 

Back then, I excelled in the maths proposed to me and expanded on it, in my own time. I was far ahead of all my classmates, that I eventually helped them, or was utterly bored before that opportunity arose. 

To anticipate your question as to why I had so few subjects at school, my answer is the following: 

My mostly-religious school's program included prayer (8:15 AM, just after arrival) ; followed by several religious studies from 9AM to 1PM, with 2X10 minute recesses at 10 and noon.
After half an hour's lunch break, we had non-religious topics, alternating from Sunday to Thursday, having one or two subjects per afternoon, each lesson being 45 minutes long. 

On Friday, we were released at noon. 

Thus, every week I had 

• Personal, and then also communal cult's prayer, daily, early in the morning (duration  increased over the years, from 30 minutes to 1h30 PER DAY) ; 
• School prayer 15 minutes
• 4h10 of religious studies X 5 (Sunday to Thursday) + 3h10 on Friday (total 24 hours!)
• 1h30X 5 non religious studies (same as above) (total 7h30) 
• Homework (no clue how long I'd have to pass, probably 1 hour for non-religious and 2 for religious matters, per evening. Total again 5 & 10 respecively) 
• More religious studies and prayers once back home, too. 
• on Friday & Saturday, extra everything religious and since part of cult's salad included Judaism, Friday evening and all of Saturday till after sun down were non-working, Holly days ( = Sacred). No work ? more prayers and religious 'lessons'. Thus, 26 or so hours of continuous faith-based activities. 

Outside of my Cinderella duties, I was giving, roughly, 60 hours of my week to religious activities, prayers and studies. Only 12& half or so for non-religious topics. 

The school I was last in ended at the end of 8th grade (UK year 9). Afterwards, the normal student would either go to high school, or, in most cases due to this mostly religious school's nature, one would go to a fully religious school, but for me, this was the end of my scholarly journey. I didn't wish to try this fuller religious school and my father wanted me to take more spiritual responsibilities in the cult  (not that he'd ever admitted that it was a cult!) and thus, barred me from going to a normal high school and uni like his own parents wished me to pursue. They had planed to pay my tuition and help me find and stick to a career path, but it didn't happen. My father bullied them out these plans, so he could continue to mold me and his plans were to take more active role in preaching his 'good word'. 

All these long years in the cult, I hated feeling the bars my mind was imprisoned into. I wanted to break free, to learn all I could about any other subject. This is how I self-taught, by reading forbidden books in book stores and libraries, on any spare time that I'd take on account of my numerous slavery-errands, accepting beatings and other punishments, just so I could widen my horizons. Despite all my father's effort to break and mold me to his image, I was too far of an underground rebel, breaking chains and bars of my caged-up brain, learning from non-fiction books and escaping into fictional one's universes, away from the torments and terrors he'd inflicted upon my person. I was free, within the prison that was this cult I'd been born into. 

However, despite my own efforts to gather knowledge, I severely lacked in many topics - not only intellectual ones, but also social graces and other emotional growth-type ones. I knew this upon my return to my natal country, having to re-learn French, with which I still struggle to this day as it's a very complicated complex language ; I had to learn many other matters, from widening the narrow geography and history with which I'd been left, to add whole new worlds of topics, retaining only a portion because my traumas (and the drugs my father forced on me) affected my capacity to study and memorize. This has been even harder in the past few years, due to several factors which cause me concentration and memory to falter. 

To this day, I still see many holes in my mind, gaps of knowledge I should have been taught and should have been encouraged and nurtured ; a gap between my and other people's, not in a comparative self-diminishing but an actual difference, which have cost me many misunderstandings and slow returns to life. There are very basic things which I never learnt, or did, but late in life - from intellectual to daily tasks to others. But the list of my shortened knowledge is far too big to try containing in a single blog post. Suffice to say, it's staggering. 

Because of all this, my education lacked. My nurture was non-existent. All was about religious dogma, doctrine, rules and principles. Education in a religious cult can be far too damaging for a person, as not only did I lack understanding of the world but also had to close gaps as an adult, of things which I should have learnt when I was a teen. It's such a waste of time and potentials - here, it also cost all kinds of possible career choices, when they would've been possible. 

Education in a religious cult is biased and inadequate ; it closes doors to the external world, erecting an invisible yet how tangible a wall between the world and the person - in this case, me. It makes it tougher for me to recover, rebuild, and to palliate paucity of expertise. Religion, especially in such a hermetic box, is poison to the mind, to curiosity, to opinion and abilities. 
This kind of poison should be considered child abuse and child rights violation. It's a form of trauma, just the same as many other patterns. 

This wraps my topic for the moment, and what do you know ? I managed to hold in together in one entry ! (albeit a 2048 words long one).