I fell into an interesting hole in Bluesky: people who are aware the publishing gig is rigged. I’ll elaborate on my experiences and observations.

I wrote a book, Simon Peter, which is an atheist take on the life of Jesus as the leader of a death cult. I did a bunch of research into cult leaders and concluded along the way, yeah, this had legs. The life of Jesus – taken without the theological flourishes of the past couple of thousand years – follows the typical patterns of a death cult. A charismatic leader who vacillates about their divinity, but as his followers grow to believe it, he becomes bolder in expressing his godhead while preaching the end is near while antagonizing the government and forcing them into an apocalyptic showdown. It follows the same overall pattern as David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and countless others. While doing my investigation, I also found other parallels that historical death cult messiahs had with each other but missing from Christianity. Mainly that they were deeply disturbed people, usually suffering severe childhood abuse (often sexual in nature,) and that death cult messiahs almost always got around to sexually abusing their followers. I came to believe (and still do) that you can see hints of this in the official record of Christianity (which I believe has about as much credibility as the Scientology website about L. Ron Hubbard.) Specifically, the dismissal of marriage and the fixation on fallen women are extremely common in messianic death cults.

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