Crazy for God

2 Peter 2;

2 Peter 2:1-3

Sooner or later we all get conned at least once.  Perhaps you’ve been bamboozled by a forgery or a bogus investment scheme.  Maybe you lost only your spare change; maybe it was your life savings.  Or perhaps it nearly cost you your sanity, as it did Christopher Edwards.  Listen to what he writes the forward to his book Crazy for God.

This book is about the rapid near-destruction of a human being—myself.  It is the story of the deceit, manipulation and terror which thousands of young Americans experience daily  at the hands of modern cults…

My story began innocently enough when I was lured into a “fun” weekend in June of 1975 on a farm owned by a front group for Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church…

…I was transformed from an intelligent, independent human being into a completely subservient disciple of my new Messiah—terrified of questioning, dependent on my leaders for my every move, ready and willing to die or even kill to restore the world under the absolute rule of Reverend Moon. 

… [In this book] I describe my losing battle to retain my mind and will in a world of structured madness.

Of all the cons we can fall prey to, one of the worst is being duped by a religious phony.  Swindlers of this kind deal in counterfeit truth—something that looks and sounds right by is actually contrary to fact, and imitation meant to deceive the unsuspecting.  These cons don’t happen just on farms, and they aren’t always done for the benefit of some leaders whose name you can’t pronounce.  No, every week, likes dressed up in their Sunday Best receive nodding approval in mainline churches everywhere.  Counterfeit truth is big business, and it’s still owned and operated by the same insidious proprietor who began it all years ago in a garden.

[Charles Swindoll, Conquering Through Conflict, W Publishing Group (1990), Paperback Bible Study, p. 28. / quoting: Christopher Edwards, Crazy for God (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), forward.]