User talk:68.213.255.27

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[edit] "Kabbalah cult cons"

Hi, I saw the link you posted at Talk:Kabbalah, and had a bit of a look at the article it linked to. In my opinion the article was very poorly researched and quite misleading. For instance it gives the example of Phiona Davis, a severely psychologically ill woman who killed two people and had been attending services at the Kabbalah Centre. It doesn't mention that she already showed signs of severe imbalance well before she first came to the Kabbalah Centre and had first fixated on church. How do we know it wasn't church that pushed her over the edge, or something even earlier in her life?

Secondly, the article is obviously written by someone who is either so unfamiliar with what Kabbalah actually is that they have missed any distinctions between the various schools of thought, or else they have deliberately blurred those distinctions to mislead. Everything it says about Kabbalah seems to be focussing on a couple of quite recently founded Kabbalah schools which are regarded by the majority of Kabbalists as untraditional and rather suspicious. I hear in Utah there are compounds where bigamy is practised and young girls are married to older men. Therefore, obviously Christianity is a dangerous brain-washing cult promoting vice, bigamy and statutory rape.

You saw what I did there? Making a minority representative of a larger group? Well, Kabbalah is a larger group than just the Kabbalah Centre. And even they're not what the article is painting them as. I think the main reason they are so disliked amongst other Kabbalists is because they charge such large "new-age" prices, and because they're trying to make a fad out of it, not because they're busy creating an army of schizophrenics. There's an aphorism amongst some Kabbalists: "When money comes in at the door, wisdom flies out through the window". Most Kabbalah teachers charge very little if anything for lessons, and schizophrenia is (I assure you) not a goal. Carl Heimbichner is not, as the article states, a Kabbalah teacher, but an anti-cult polemicist, and I note, a rather fanciful writer. For instance he has elsewhere claimed that the OTO represents the highest order which Freemasons can join: in fact, the OTO and Freemasonry are entirely separate institutions, and there is no significant cross-membership between the two. The OTO has its early history mixed up with a pseudo-Masonic order, but for the last hundred years at least they have been totally separate.

This article's research seems to be prompted by fear and prejudice (pre-judice, "judging in advance"), perhaps supplemented with a dose of "everyone else is damned" fundamentalism, and contains none of the necessary checks that the information is actually correct. This is the same kind of prejudiced writing that tried to convince Americans that Niggers were all randy violent savages who would rape the white women, or that communists were hiding under every bed, ready to slit capitalists' throats, or that a huge worldwide satanic conspiracy was systematically abducting, abusing and murdering little children. Before we get carried away with any of these stories, we should do just a little basic fact checking and see if they hold up. It took me all of three minutes.

Cheers, Fuzzypeg★ 23:44, 19 May 2008 (UTC)