Dark Bilious Vapors

Who are these kind of lost souls and "mental sheep" who could join some erstwhile prophet on a bizarre mission for GOD?

The LA Times tell this strange tale of woe, false prophesy, sex, murder and suicide in this piece called: GROWING UP IN A CULT:
A Young 'Prophet' Cannot Defeat the Demons of His Past. Here are snippets of the full story:

"..Before driving across the desert and killing himself, Ricky Rodriguez, 29, had killed Angela Smith, 51. The two had known each other. Smith may have helped to raise Rodriguez.

The names didn't mean much to most people. But the news was cataclysmic within the secretive religious society to which both had once belonged.

For more than three decades, the Children of God, now called The Family, had been a world unto itself. In that world, Rodriguez had been royalty.

He was the son of the group's self-proclaimed prophet and prophetess, who led a fervent flock scattered in communes around the globe. When he was 2, they declared him a prophet too, announcing to followers that the boy would one day "deliver them out of great sorrow and bondage."...

More than four years before his death, Rodriguez left the group's tight confines, venturing out into the world with little knowledge of how it worked. Almost all he'd learned in life had come from one man, David Berg, who founded the group and kept its members isolated, indoctrinated with his views....

"Uncle Dave," as Berg started calling himself, invited his followers to join a "revolution for Jesus." Berg told his converts to shed past lives, including their names, and offer up their assets to the cause. They would warn those in the "System" that the apocalypse was coming.

Group members fanned out across the country, gathering on Capitol Hill, and in Times Square to mourn the approaching death of America. They wore red sackcloth robes and yokes, smeared ashes across their foreheads and ominously shook long wooden rods.

The more converts he collected, the stranger Berg's message became. Claiming that God now spoke to him directly, he declared himself "God's Endtime Prophet." God had ordered him, he said, to leave his longtime wife for his girlfriend, a pretty convert from Tucson in her early 20s. Karen Zerby, Berg explained, represented the new and pure "infant church."

Now calling himself Moses — or Mo — after the biblical prophet, Berg told his followers that he would no longer live among them. He would cloister himself and dedicate his life to prophecy. He broke the news in a 1970 letter, which he called "I Gotta Split!" It was among the first of nearly 3,000 "Mo letters" he would mail out to his flock in the coming years.

Berg's departure was well timed. By 1971, a group of parents had organized against the Children of God, which they were calling a cult.
As the anti-cult activists began "deprogramming" efforts, as they pushed for media coverage and government crackdowns, Berg left for London and soon urged his followers to spread their "colonies" across Europe.

And the changes in the group were more than geographic. Berg began preaching a new and potentially lucrative gospel of sex, which was proving an excellent way to recruit converts — and their cash. He urged his female followers to employ "flirty fishing," to troll for lonely men. He likened it to what Jesus did when he called on his disciples to be "fishers of men."

Zerby, by then also known as Maria, was among the first flirty fishers. In a 1974 "Mo letter," Berg told his flock about his prayer for her new endeavor. "Help her Oh God to catch men! Help her to catch men, be bold unashamed and brazen, to use anything she has Oh God to catch men for thee!... Oh God, help her, Oh Jesus to be willing to be the bait!"....

Ricky Rodriguez was born on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Jan. 25, 1975. His mother, Berg's consort Karen Zerby, had become pregnant by a Tenerife hotel waiter named Carlos, whom she landed by "flirty fishing."

Berg and Zerby originally named the baby David Moses Zerby after themselves. But they openly celebrated his origins.

"Their life was love, and all because Daddy loved Mommy and shared Mommy to love another," read one update about the happy event.

And why not share?

Sexual "sharing" was at the center of Berg's ministry by that time. Nowhere was it practiced more fervently than at Berg's house. People had sex in front of Rodriguez. The nannies had sex with their boyfriends. Berg had sex with anyone he fancied. Everyone had sex at an orgy that Berg organized. At the time, the boy was 3. He wandered from group to group, taking it in.

Rodriguez — nicknamed Davidito ("little David") — was raised by a bevy of young group members, who served as his nannies. They didn't just change his diapers. They lay naked in bed with the naked child, fondling him and urging him to fondle them.

His main nanny, Sara, described these acts in regular reports to the group's followers, who by then numbered several thousand, in more than 100 communes across the globe. Later the updates were compiled in a book called "The Story of Davidito," which, with its leather-like brown cover and title stamped in gold, looked for all the world like a Bible.

It became, in fact, the group's bible of child rearing..."

Karen on 03.13.05 @ 05:40 AM CST