greetings and salutations with the crazed and cowardly unabomber that really was and now in custody in the political and news media hawks back to their usual tough talk and pass the buck blame games where does that leave the rest of us hawk watchers well for starters that leaves us to pick up the pieces and try to sort out all of the crazy of this last week and we know and as we know this week gave us some very serious crazy and now the question is what drives all this crazy we are currently witnessing the word cult as many definitions and can conjure up many

different images for many different people the simplest definition of a cult is a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object but cult can also be defined as a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing this is considered the cult of personality that we give to our leaders our movie stars who are rock gods we worship their voices and their ideas every time we purchase one of their songs by a tickets to their movies or vote for them in our elections over the next few days and weeks pundits and talking heads will make grand statements and accusations about the model bomber suspect regarding his motives and reasonings and while many will blame donald trump and whatever else our cowardly bomber reid tweeted or posted about in his social media be if you will take a step back and ask the bigger question. aren't we all just

a bunch of cult members at the end of the day whether through religion politics or pop culture is not joining a political party nothing more than pledging your allegiance to its leaders to follow and do what they condition you to believe is the name of the game or guard list of the leaders last name is clinton schumer sanders mcconnell paul or even donald trump are we really as independent minded as we like to believe we are or are we really all of us just a tweet a facebook post a prayer a marriage or a vote away from going a little mad sometimes. well i think it's time we start practicing some independence and start watching the whole. world that we're going to watch from the harks our entire robot through and i'm to have a flawless reverend sun myung moon was born in what is now north korea in 1920 and

by 1954 he had founded what was to become the unification church after a 5 year sentence at a north korean labor camp he considered the cold war between communism and democracy to be the final conflict between good me evil in the 1960 s. he began to hold mass wedding ceremonies in which partners were matched by the church and by 982 he was holding mass wedding ceremonies for the arranged marriages in places like madison square garden but moon's church often called mooney is as their members wasn't just about forced arranged marriages it was also a lucrative business that used media to perpetuate the reverence extremist believes in 1902 the unit for the unification church in moon started the washington times newspaper and to this day it is a paper known for publishing extreme views related to things like white supremacy and climate change just to name a few but despite various scandals lawsuits and horror stories that have come from

those who have escaped the religion now characterized by many as a cult it wasn't it doesn't stop his sons from taking the church even further in march of this year the late reverend moon sons held a mass wedding at their rod of iron ministries church in pennsylvania in which they are fifteen's were a necessary part of the ceremony all the same rules the same control of thought body and soul earlier we sat down with lisa cohen author of the book to the moon and back about her experience growing up in the unification church and what her taught what it taught her about extremist cults like the unification church and can make even the most independent people lose themselves. so i want to start there just ask you how did you. know it's probably a complicated question but how did you become a ball in the unification church and how long were you. involved in the church or

to so the 1st part's not complicated i got involved when i was 10 years old in 1904 my mom my mom went to hear everyone speak in january of 174 and then in june in 1074 she went up to a workshop at belvedere a baritone one of their church places churches states and she went up and back and up and back and then took us up somewhere in july and we were in so i was in it 10 years old 174 the how long is a little bit more complicated because some people leave and they leave on a specific date and my brother like to say i just kind of drifted away and so somewhere between 17 to 2021 was when i was like less less less listless a member it was hard to leave i could imagine. what in the what's interesting is when you kind of think about being involved in a church that's so involved in the daily life or a cult or any kind of organization that is every day you think about it as being

very strict in a very strict upbringing but your experience is actually. it's a little different it's a little different i was impressed a polar opposite experience within being part of its church or the cult again i want to know you're looking at it i can use also was the polar opposite that you were living was so my pants split when i was young and we lived with my mom and she joined the church and we became members so that was the fanatical extreme religion on one side but through a process of what happened we end up living with my dad so we were members i was best friends with his kids were there whenever we could be involved in the church but on the weekdays i lived with my dad in the east village in new york city of my i describe it my friends describe it as sex drugs and squalor it was just he was a hippie it was crazy it was so we had we have both these really weird contrasting

worlds going on at the same time in our lives and my brother and i in our brains how did you handle that it was your i mean it's also we're also talking about you know you said 2117 to 20 more that's like the prime of figuring out who we are in life. to kind of. what did you 1st kind of get the daughter if you can member of this isn't quite right minded to kind of figure out a new path for me so i. believed with all my heart he was my right there he was my messiah. and i saw the church is true and my father's life is saved tannic an evil and so. on and that was it there was no question and you're taught you're taught not to question you're taught that if you ever questioning it's satan trying to win you back so as soon as you question you stop questioning because you know it's evil and it's a tannic so that went on for a very long time but kind of the the real starting of the breaking point the summer

between my junior and senior year of high school my dad sent me to music camp i'm convinced to keep me away from the church for a summer and i had friends who were gay and bisexual for the 1st time but i knew it from my life and my life and and my church is a huge sin it's evil and i so i wrote to my mom what i do and she's like they're evil stay away from them or convert and those are your choices and that was the 1st time it didn't they were wonderful and i love them and their friends and it didn't it didn't make sense in my brain and so i started to just wander and question and feel uncomfortable and so i went to my senior year of high school me to display a conscious decision to pull a little bit away from the church fearing that i had joined as a 10 year old as a child and so as a adult at 17 i was going to pull back and make an adult decision to go back in and i. became involved more involved with friends in high school and york city at stuyvesant and got closer and found more more of myself the more unconditional love

there and then made the huge mistake of having a boyfriend which is the other sin and know right and yeah and saw everybody freaked out and i i went to cornell i went to college and. decided to break up with him but didn't and it just kind of escalated from there i i when i left i firmly believed it was true i just didn't want to do it anymore which was what was hard. one of the things in your book and in speaking to people in various religions or cults that a band like the unification church in which you have these very strict rules about dating and who you could who you can talk to and who you can be friends with and who's good and who is who is evil there is an extremism and that yeah and that extremism i feel people say it's coming back like oh we have it now as if we have it but like i said i remember even as you know as a kid seeing the mass weddings on news and seeing things like this it doesn't seem

that far away as if it all sort of goes away extremism what is it about what was it for you you know the to believe what was so intoxicating about that the message from reverend. the reverend. and do you see that in that happening in a lot of religions or cults or political ideology or whatever it is what is that a toxic aisha so so 1st off will we when we join the church my mom joined it was a haven for us the funny things are these 2 contrasting worlds and in many ways the church was structure and safety and loving community so as a haven from the craziness beforehand and then in many ways having the outside world probably also help my brother and i leave because there was that outside sense but to directly answer your question so as as human beings we crave certainty

purpose and community and an organization like that gives you certainty purpose and community and so when you use it intoxicating i say there is nothing as intoxicating is knowing you have the truth it's this unbelievably powerful feeling you don't have monday morning blues saturday blues you don't wonder why am i here you know this is absolutely true and this is absolute god's will or the right thing or the right way and they're all wrong and this is saved and this is not and it's. it's like you don't have any other way and it does exist it exists a lot now there are a lot of extreme religions or a lot of political groups or a lot of terrorist groups and it's all that sense of if this is true then i will do anything i would i would do anything.

so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race. spear in dramatic development that only. exists i don't see how that strategy will be successful ready. to sit. seems wrong. just don't call. me. to shape out these days you can't get out of here and in the game equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart weak choose to look for common ground. thank. you.

but mr griffin finally escaped or of years in the amish community she had a 3rd grade education severe p.t.s.d. and a desire to save other people from the horrors she experienced in her book tears of a silent and honest true crime memoir of childhood sexual abuse brutal betrayal and ultimate survival she tells her story from the age of 6 she was forced into a religion and a lifestyle that saw her as less than human that punished her for her abuse or sins and her secrecy allows cruel physical psychological and sexual abuse to go unchecked and cloistered communities like the amish across the united states we started by asking mistake about how she 1st became a part of an amish community. well when i was about 6 years old my stepfather started having my family dress and live like the amish

so we started started down like a journey in that direction and by the time i was 10 years old we were fully dressing amish and amish clothes and. we started slowly like living the lifestyle we lived on a ranch when i was 11 and that's when my sister and i were sort of isolated on a mountain. and. yeah at that point that's when life got like really hard like my sister we're almost completely isolated we had very little contact with the outside world and my mother and stepfather were extremely abusive and when i was 19 i almost 19 i tried to run away off the mountain and. my stepfather was afraid that perhaps i would make it off the mountain one day go to the police so a few months later they took us to an amish community and i was integrated into the community i learned german in my sister and i both to be key. members of the church

. you know one of the things that you mentioned in your in reading your book. is that the abuse that happened to you was interest sexual or psychological. there was a lot of physical abuse in the name of religion and one thing that stuck out to me was was that sort of beating the devil out of someone wasn't just an expression where you were can you how how was the faith because i have known a number of of amish families i grew up around them and reading your story horrified me because i think we just start to realize how much we don't know is going on in these sort of communities how was faisal expressed with violence in the in the amish community you were involved in. so. most of the physical violence that i experienced was when i was a child with my mother and stepfather and they were not really amish they were just sort of mimicking the lifestyle. but. among the amish like

there is you know violence domestic violence you know child abuse those kinds of things. it's considered to be necessary in order to keep people in line like if there is not strong discipline in the double conservative take your souls so in order to keep you on the straight path then you need to keep everybody in line and if that requires force then you have to use force yeah some people do say it's beating the devil like for me in my case like i always heard it was beating the devil out of me basically. you know i want to ask you this too but it's sensible how common is. you know that we're talking about abuse in these communities how common is sexual abuse in amish communities and and how common is it that the victim is actually blamed for the abuse whether whether it's sexual or violent or

physical you know how common is the victim boy in these communities. pretty much in every case that i know of the victims blamed like in my community there was a 14 year old girl who was sexually abused and the rumor i mean this is adult men married fathers who are saying this that the reason she was sexually abused was because she was too friendly the guy that it was like in his fifty's in this girl was 14 and she was traumatized from what happened to her in the room or around the whole community like people would talk about it and everybody always said it was because she was too friendly i mean they couldn't say it was because the way she dressed you know some christians say you know if you dressed right or if you didn't go to par. if you were alone with men this wouldn't happen to you but in the amish you can't say that because everybody is dressed from head to foot so there has to be an excuse and it can't be that man's fault because usually it's considered that

the person who has the abuse to do sums for some reason somehow so it has to be the victim's fault and the only fault they could find was that she was a very friendly girl and they said that's why it happened to her bridgewater or just. awful. oh i'm one of the you know i we've talked a lot about lately on our show about cults about how you know people sort of being brainwashed or held in to be situations and you talk a little bit and you talk in your book about. about the bishop when you were sent to live with just the bishop and what happened there and i think your story is one that that actually shows that something happened to. but. can you tell a little bit about it just just a little bit about what happened and where are the gentleman who abused you and it up. my case i went to be

a maid for the bishop and his family the family that i was assigned to in the amish community was having some problems so the bishop said you know come live with us they had 7 children all under the age of 12 so i basically moved in with them to help out in the family and right from the beginning the bishops started molesting me. so it was about 6 months of that and i started to suspect that he was molesting his children and one morning he came into my room an attack to me and it was a pretty brutal attack and that's when i went to the police but he wasn't arrested at that time he wasn't charged with anything and he ended up excusing him to canada and 10 years later his 3 oldest daughters they asked a neighbor lady for help and he was finally arrested but by that time he had molested almost all of his children. so yeah so there's really i mean i commend you

and i just tell you how strong it is that you did that not for yourself but for somebody else and for you i mean and that being the point when you leave something like that how did it feel because the outside people don't leave these sort of cloistered environments whether it's amish mennonite or any number of people don't leave so how do they feel when you 1st left and. and what was that transistor what helped you during that transition. so for me like coming from the background that i came from you know you were taught that if you ever leave the amish you're going to hell that's what you're taught from you know if you're born into it you're taught that from basically when you're a baby so leaving is traumatic in itself because you're kind of scared you know am i going to hell am i doing the right thing and for me that turning point was me

realizing that basically everything i had been taught was a lie because you know they're telling me if i leave this church i'm going to hell but in this church they are committing all of these horrific crimes against humanity so i think that opened my eyes you know that day i went to the police and says something's not fitting together here there's something wrong with this picture and that's when it all kind of just came together for me that what i had been taught had been a lie basically and that gave me the strength to to leave you know i felt i couldn't stay in that culture i felt like i would be an accomplice to these crimes if i stayed so that's what finally. gave me the strength to leave i guess i didn't want to be a part of that and you know for full disclosure i'm still a christian so i believe my faith in god i hope to me through that transition time

but leaving the amish was 6 very scary i mean it was like being teleported from the 17th hundreds into the 2 thousands i mean i pretty much didn't know anything that was going on in the outside world so yeah i'm glad you said that because i didn't want to ask you about your faith was did you how was your faith tested your personal faith tested by learning or did you hold on to it was it hard to to walk out of that and still have your faith your religious faith. once you realize that people of faith to you and other people was that a hard transition or is that work for kept you going. i would say that's what kept me going i get so many people that ask me you know how can you still be a christian you know that doesn't make any sense you know christians are the ones that they did this to you i mean almost killed you basically i mean that these were

christians and i tell them no these people were not following jesus example just because they claim to be christians does not mean they were actually christians so for me i don't believe my faith was tested because. for some reason i've just had a strong faith since i was a small child and i believe god would get me out of that situation one day and i mean he did i believe he did. so i believe it made my faith stronger and that's why i'm here today. you know i want to i think it was did you think that your experience was indicative of the communities as a whole or do you think it was just you know kind of this one community that you were involved. and what can people do who find themselves in similar situations to you to kind of climb out of you know and find that help and find

a new way of life and find the freedom. that kind of appears. yes it is indicative of the whole amish religion basically because they all have the same underlying. beliefs and the belief is that. we are the amish and we do not. contact the outside world we do not turn a brother or a sister over to their outside the law those things have to be handled in the church and by the church and if you go to the outside law in some cases you can be shunned. sometimes you come across a piece of human ingenuity so cool that it makes you wonder why we can't fix all the rest of our problems in the world that same kind of brilliant creativity case in point the good folks at the european space agency who have been child on least

upon plato for the 1st time busy with moon well in actuality it's fake moon dust that basically works just like the real stuff but thankfully you don't have to go to the moon and back to get it anyway our friends at isa have used a 3 d. printer loaded up with fake moondust to print small screws gears bolts and even a fake coil a wire slightly scientists and researchers making stuff you could just as easily find in your junk drawer while because they're looking for a forward thinking solution to the costly and logistical problem of bringing supplies back and forth to a future moon base or colony in other words you don't have to bring the hardware store to the moon if you can utilize one of the biggest natural resources are there areas to human ingenuity and i'm looking forward to 3 d. printed supplies in my moon condo right is lead is not cool and then you see is that these little to you and i guess there are they have like the density of like a dinner plate like they're ceramic as opposed to like a metal yeah but they're very strong yes i mean susy ceramic and sometimes ceramics

they use on the bottom sides of shuttles these years and it was a ceramic but it was stronger than almost anyone they found is that they've also i guess back in august they've also been making bricks in the same process out of moon dust to wear that way then when you're up there you don't have to bring all this with you you can make it out of the resources that are there i definitely want my condo on the mon to be made out of them and bricks loom bricks the roofs are those are sort of a bit of a remember everyone in this world we're not told but we love them so i told the wall i love i am tired rolled with a downtown of the lalas he's been watching those talks that were great.

yes. certainly not saddam out as you. don't play your 18 with. enough money in the card other cannot be in your another 3 small. interest to the. booth north on board because to some small to do this with you this. was a frenzy. and if you see the needle in the he see the phone and he sees you join in if you don't believe you think this is the london london to do this then wonder

just to please super. cool to see. this your p.c. is. to go lets his own leisure he do it i.e. we should buy tommy i phone as my son. says it is and. it's a decision on. the table. from following you so your boss will. you. don't like i'll. do a little bit not all initial problem feel secure so should i just function.

i don't see many of. the operate. it was alarmists. needed to. be. there. before. the new don't. know not only on the young the young a young. it . sure was. a bit of that so it was me.