One of the things that happens as you get older is you get a lot more life experience under your belt (not to mention some excess poundage). For one thing you start seeing cycles. For many younger people, this is the first time they’ve seen relatively hard times. For those of us who are a bit older, we’ve seen it before. The pendulum swings back and forth, between good times and hard times.
One of the things that happens all the time, but especially in hard times, is that people make radically life-changing decisions without asking the right questions first. The problem is that there are always people out there who want to influence others. It may be because they like to have control over others, it may be because they think they will have a better life, it may be for financial enrichment, or it may be any combination of those things. Most of these folks are as subtle as a brick through a window, but occasionally you will run across the person who is utterly charming and thoroughly convincing. You like that person – maybe you wish, in some way, that you were that person – and so you do what they ask of you without asking the right questions first.
Unfortunately, many of us have been conditioned to not investigate things as well as we should. We remember sayings like “never look a gift horse in the mouth” and “opportunity only knocks once.” If we looked at those sayings critically, their absurdity would be obvious – if someone is giving you a horse because they know it’s got serious medical problems, wouldn’t you want to know that before you accept it as a gift? And why should opportunity only knock once? For the most part we make our own opportunities, and most of the “opportunities” offered to us out of the blue are really opportunities for someone else to dig into our wallets, or get their hooks in our soul.
The worst offenders in this regard are multi-level marketers, and people who come to you in the name of some religion or religious institution. These people find it especially easy to win converts in hard times, because people are looking for any way out of their present situation. Many young people are quite naive about such things (they are rarely a matter of dinner table conversation in most homes) and therefore when someone comes to them with the offer to change their life forever, and that person appears to be offering love and goodness and (maybe) financial security, the young man or woman has not been conditioned to ask the critical questions they ought to be asking at such times. So with that in mind, I’d like to offer a few.
The first thing you should ask, when someone comes to you, is how long they’ve been involved with the company or religion (or whatever) they are promoting. There is such a thing as “new convert’s enthusiasm” – it’s almost like a type of high. These folks will come to you and you know there is something different about them and you want it, but what you may not realize – and what they themselves may not realize – is that it’s only a temporary state. Nobody lives in that state of bliss forever. The other thing is that if they’ve only been involved for a month or a year, how can they assure you that their path is the one you should follow for the rest of your life? The answer is, they can’t.
The second thing that you should ask for is proof of outlandish claims. If the person states that you can make huge sums of money, ask to see their recent check stubs. Look at the house they live in, the car they are driving, the clothes they are wearing. Maybe they will say that they don’t believe in buying consumer goods, and that’s fine – ask to see their bank statement showing recent deposits. They don’t want to provide you with that? They say you’re trying to invade their privacy? Hey, they are the ones trying to convince YOU of something that might be a blatant lie… you are within your rights to demand proof! But even if they should prove exceptional income (and you are somehow convinced their proof is authentic, and not a Photoshopped document), you should ask yourself how they made that money. Was it by inducing people like you to pay signup fees, or to buy books and DVD’s, or to attend seminars, conventions, or retreats? Was it by requiring tithes and offerings from followers? (By the way – if anyone tells you that you are required to tithe 10% of your income to a church or other religious organization, ask them to show you in the Bible, but don’t let them pull individual scriptures out of context and string them together. When they read you a passage, find out who did the tithing, who they tithed to, what they were tithing from [do you have spoils of war lying around?], what was the circumstances around the tithe [was it a totally voluntary, one-time thing?], and what the tithe was used for. Also, unless you think we are still under Old Testament law, you might want to get suspicious if they have to dig into the Old Testament for their proofs. The point is, you really have to torture the Bible beyond recognition to come up with any “proof” that Christians are required to give 10% of their income to any present-day religious institution. And if you don’t understand why I’m even bringing this up, consider that a regular tithe and/or additional offerings may be demanded of you if you join any religious organization – of course you are almost never told that by the person who is initially trying to bring you in).
And if they make claims of healing, you want to see the medical report from a licensed physician. Of course they can’t or won’t produce that, but the point is that you’re in essence being asked to make a life changing decision on the basis of what is often a story that’s been handed down. However, I will also note this: A healing, in and of itself, is not proof of much for a couple of reasons. First, any experienced physician will tell you that every now and then, people do have spontaneous remissions from various conditions. It’s rare but it happens. People often attribute it to prayer, but there is a logical fallacy in their assumption. You can make the case that prayer works (and a few scientists have attempted to do so, with varying degrees of success) but that in and of itself does not lend credibility to the religion practiced by those that pray. There is evidence that it doesn’t matter what you believe, particularly, as long as you believe in something – and that regardless of your particular beliefs, prayer can work. Some believers would say that it’s the intent (or “faith”) that matters, not the person’s particular belief structure (and some of the things Jesus said might tend to support this). So if, for example, you are a Christian and you are sick and a Pagan offers to pray for you, you might not want to dismiss their offer – if their faith/intent is strong enough, it may help! But even if you are healed, that doesn’t obligate you to subscribe to their beliefs, and it might not be a good idea – everyone has their own path to walk.
The third question is, “Do you really love me?” – and a related question (lifting a title from an old Shirelles song here): “Will you still love me tomorrow?” This is probably the strangest part about all of this. Many times young people will be approached by someone whom they barely know (if not a total stranger altogether), who appears to have their best interest at heart, or in the case of a religious follower, someone who says they love them and only want to make sure that after they die they are “saved.” The problem here is that it’s conditional love. They are, in this case, casting their bread upon the waters. They are hoping to get someone who is able to increase their own income, or to join them in their beliefs. Some of these guys will act like the brother or sister you never had, or wish you had… but what if it turns out you’re not so great at promoting their MLM? Or what if you are the sort of person that actually reads the literature and/or religious books and starts seeing the inconsistencies and problems? What if you start asking why the leadership does things a certain way, or teaches a certain method or doctrine? In other words, what if you choose to continue to use the mind that you were given, instead of just turning it over to someone else to program for you? If you choose to let someone else program your thinking, you may wake up in ten or twenty years and discover that you don’t at all like the person you’ve become – and by that point you’ll be well aware that all that supposed “love” was conditional on you keeping the faith, or selling the product, or performing in whatever way you were expected to perform.
I will just point out that many religious people (especially those of the “fundamentalist” persuasion) are more known by who they hate than who they love. Some believers can be particularly obnoxious toward those who do not share their beliefs – if they are like that when you join, how do you think they will feel about you if for some reason, someday, you can’t go along with their way of thinking anymore? The sad thing is that sometimes people will give up relationships with other family members because of church teachings, only to find in the end that it was their family that really loved and cared about them, but they gave the best years of their life to following people who only offered conditional love.
One of the biggest regrets someone can have is to realize, late in life, that they brought their children up in a church that teaches hate and intolerance – and perhaps just as bad, discouraged anything that might be fun or educational unless the church was behind it (something to think about: Money spent on entertainment is money that doesn’t go into an offering plate. Preachers are well aware of that fact). You see kids that are bright and inquisitive turn into kids that are fearful, and sometimes not very tolerant of others (that’s assuming they don’t completely rebel, and want nothing to do with their parents or the church after they come of age).
The fourth question is: Okay, so you have your success stories, but what about the “failures”? How many people who join this MLM are still in the business after a year or two? What percentage achieves the lofty possibilities of six digit income? How many of this who pray for healing are actually fully healed, and don’t go back into remission after a few months? What percentage of people who join your organization are still here after ten or twenty years? And don’t overlook the obvious – Google the organization and read what others have had to say about them. Read up on the pitfalls of multi-level marketing, or the dangers of controlling religions (if you can find a copy of the book “Twisted Scriptures”, it will explain how churches abuse their followers – and it’s a lot more common than you might think. By the way, I don’t make anything off that link, it was just one I found using Google. Try your local library first).
The fifth question is, “Why are you so worried about ME?” Usually, when you start asking the types of questions I have mentioned here, you’ll be told “Don’t worry about that stuff now. Just try it, you have nothing to lose.” This is called, “Setting the hook.” The problem is that when these organizations get new people in, they typically have ways of trying to brainwash you into their way of thinking. The initial contact is when you should worry about “that stuff”, because at that point you’re still likely thinking as a rational person would. I know that it’s a strong temptation, particularly if people are making a pretense of love or concern toward you, to think that for some reason that defies logic, these people (who usually are total strangers, or mere acquaintances at best) suddenly truly have your best interest at heart. But the corollary question is, “What’s in it for YOU?” In other words, why is that person trying so hard to rope you in? Do they think you will be a source of income for them? Do they think they will get more gold stars in their crown in heaven for bringing you in? Are many people leaving their organization, and they are in desperate need of replacements? Or, perhaps, does the church or organization have a dark side, and you are being targeted by a sexual predator?
The sixth question you should ask is, “What if I don’t believe exactly what you believe?” Assuming you are a thinking person, will your divergent views be welcome during discussions, or you will you be told to sit down and shut up, and to submit to authority? Speaking of authority, if they ever try to pull that card, you should ask “Whose authority?” There are preachers and other religious leaders that seriously believe that if you don’t give them all the honor, respect, and deference that you might give to the Almighty, then you are an accursed person doing “the devil’s work” and will go straight to hell. Many religious groups try to discourage you from reading newspapers, magazines, web sites, or watching “secular” TV – in short, reading or viewing anything that’s not church approved. Multi-level marketers will do the same thing – tell you to read only books and watch only DVD’s offered by your “upline.” It’s always either an issue of control or money – they either want to shape your thinking in their own way, or they don’t want you spending money elsewhere that you could be spending with them. Often it’s a combination of both, such as in churches that have their own bookstores.
The seventh question you should ask is this: “If, after a year or two, someone feels that your organization isn’t the right ‘fit’ for them, do you encourage them to try something else? Would they still be welcome to come visit people in your group?” This is where you will often see a lot of squirming and stuttering. The fact is that once you leave most of these organizations, they really don’t want to have anything to do with you – at worst they will have considered you to have gone over to the dark side and will actively “shun” you, at best you will be a threat because you may have found something better than their way, and might convince some of their people to go with you. You might be thinking, “Well, what else would you expect?” but the point is that this proves they really don’t have YOUR best interests at heart – whatever the reason may be for trying to bring you in, it’s primarily to benefit them in some way, not you. When you leave, you are no longer an asset, you are a liability. You are certainly no longer the beloved prospective newcomer that you might be today.
Finally, a bonus question specifically for proponents of the Christian religion: “What if I want to live a little without submitting to all the rules and regulations you folks will try to put me under? Can I take my time and think about this?” More than likely, if you ask this, they will switch into the “hard sell” mode, because they know that the longer a person thinks about it without the benefit of church brainwashing, the less likely they are to join the flock. So they will try to convince you to make a decision TODAY. After all, you might get hit by a bus while crossing the street.
The problem with that is that it’s fear-based religion – you join because you are afraid of dying and going to “Hell” in an “unsaved” condition. But there are a couple fallacies at work here. The first is the idea that at the moment of death, your opportunity to “accept Jesus” is gone forever. In fact there is nothing in the Bible to support that idea, and there have been reports from people who’ve had Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) who found themselves in a “hellish” realm after death, called out to Jesus (or in some cases another religious personage), and were lifted out of that realm. You may say, well, why should I believe the NDE reports? But then I would say, why should you believe the teachings of a book that may have undergone significant changes and revisions (we really can’t be sure), and that omitted many other writings that gave information about Jesus that the church might not want you to know? I’m willing to give at least some weight to contemporaneous reports from people who seem to have had a genuine spiritual experience. But, more to the point, there simply is no passage in the Bible that indicates that the moment of death is the final moment in which one could be “saved.”
Then there is the matter of Hell. What most English-speaking believers don’t realize is that there were three different words in the original languages that were all translated as “Hell” in the King James Version. If you ever wonder why some churches use the KJV to the exclusion of any other version, I think this is a big part of it – they know that by confusing what the original scriptures really had to say about Hell, they could scare the crap out of people. Without going all theological on you, I’ll just point out that the “Dante’s Inferno” version of Hell, with the fire and brimstone and all, is ONLY for the devil and the fallen angels, if the Bible is translated in a non-confusing manner. Humans don’t go there. This doesn’t mean that humans can’t wind up in some definitely unpleasant places in the afterlife (even some NDE reports confirm that) but the real question is, does anyone stay in such places for all eternity? There is a growing body of both ancient writings (books omitted from the scriptures) and more contemporaneous indications that such is not the case. Again, this isn’t a theological blog, and I’m not going to try to promote any particular belief (nor denigrate any, except the ones that preach hate and intolerance), but my only point here is that some religious types use fear of hell as a motivator to get people into their clutches. My fear is that in many such cases, the real demons may be inside the walls of the church, where adults and children are taught who to hate, and whom and what to avoid, while sucking the joy of living right out of them.
I will speak from personal experience here only to make this point: I attended fundamentalist, supposedly Bible-believing churches for about two decades during the prime of my life. I could not possibly regret it more. I especially regret that I exposed my children to their beliefs. Although for the most part my kids seem to have shaken it off, I can’t help feeling that some of it may have stuck with them and now inhibits their ability to enjoy life to the fullest. But the entire time I attend those churches, I lived in fear – fear of death and not being found “worthy” of making it Heaven, fear for those I knew who had died “unsaved” and were (so the church would have me believe) burning in eternal torment, and fear that using the intelligence God had given me would cause me to lose my faith. One day, probably while having some sort of mid-life crisis, I prayed that I wanted to know the truth about Christianity and the Church – and it was right after that I started being led to books (like the aforementioned “Twisted Scriptures”) and web sites that showed me that a lot of what the churches teach is, in fact, very questionable. But then a strange thing happened – I lost the fear I’d had most of my life. After reading about NDE’s, I no longer feared death. After seeing some of the contradictions in the Bible and the way the churches have twisted the verses of the Bible to their own ends, I no longer feared that anything they taught would have any real bearing on what happened to me after this life. Instead, I found that love is the most important thing – and to the extent that the churches teach people to not love a particular group of people (or just give “lip service” to that love, but not really mean it), they are the ones doing “the devil’s work.”
Now, if you are a fundamentalist Christian and have read this far, you may be tempted to leave a comment saying that I am going to Hell, or some such thing. It happens every time anyone says anything negative about the way some churches teach and preach their version of Christianity. But before you do, think about this: I have not said one negative thing about Jesus. And, I’m not just targeting Christianity here, it just happens to be the religion I’m most familiar with. I’m talking about ANY religion and ANY organization that tries to suck young people in under questionable pretenses, then proceeds to drain them of their income, and maybe their free will and ability to think coherently – not to mention their sense of wonder and joy of living, after the initial “thrill is gone” (good grief, now I’m quoting B.B. King!).
For those that may think this post is off-topic, deal with it. It’s my blog and I don’t have that many places I can say the things that I sometimes think need to be said, even if unpopular among a certain crowd. If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for sticking with it – I know I can be a bit overly-verbose at times, and I apologize that I’m not a better (or at least a more concise) writer.
Related:
Multilevel Marketing Is Bad (The Consumerist)
Strategies: Is multi-level marketing a good choice for you? (USA Today)
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