Certainly none that will do it against an adult person’s will. That door briefly opened after Patty Hurst, but was quickly filled by ex-military types (asking why they were ex is important) doing kidnapping for hire, holding them prisoner until they seemed to concede.
Those were very useful idiots for the cult groups, who got them shut down hard as well used as a tool to also take down information groups like the Cult Awareness Network.
These days, if they agree, they can talk with a councilor who will try to open up their thinking, but that lightbulb has to want to change.
Yeah, that’s the whole catch. If you support “cult deprogramming” as a solution to this type of thing, by rule, you also support gay conversion therapy. There’s no real other way to do it than psychological torture.
“The theory that an individual or a group of individuals are exposing the Deep State , including Hillary Clinton and her baby eating ways, through the image board 8chan, which also has a lot of child porn on it.” Damn.
“Hell” as we know it wasn’t part of Christianity until pretty recently either. It’s a New Testament concept at best (no mention of it before then), but early on only referred to a quiet place or the grave (depending on context and whether people were translating from the Greek or Hebrew). Catholicism started to ramp up the idea of “worthy souls” and “unworthy souls” but mostly that was all “fixable” with rites and confessions and such.
This current popular idea of damnation as a zero sum game where you have to score Magic God Points or burn alive forever is a pretty modern thing coming from Evangelicalism. Once again, people think this stuff is “ancient and unchanging” but popular Christianity has changed a lot even just in the last couple hundred years. They continue to gamify it ever further, now portraying Satan and God as opponents in some cosmic chess game, trying to steal souls for their hockey teams. It’s all stupid and all quite modern.
All this seems like another version of the pre-millennialist branch of evangelical Christianity. For anyone not familiar with this form of Christianity, it basically comes down to believing we live in the time before the End Times and that Jesus will soon come to usher in those End Times. The Q anon connection comes down to how much of the Q story centers around the “soon something will happen to transform the nation” part. So this stuff honestly scares me. It’s this kind of stuff that could lead to some horrible things. The Comet Ping Pong pizza incident is just a tiny sliver of that.
You are absolutely right, but with a major reversal that I find extra terrifying.
In most traditional end times Evangelical beliefs the faithful get raptured up to heaven then the wicked are punished afterwards. And you have people doing stuff like supporting unsupportable actions by Israel and trying to breed red cows in order to hurry things along.
With QANON there isn’t a rapture, instead there’s a mass execution of all enemies of the believers. It is an inherently more dangerous and fascist belief.
