The cult is believed to actually own the seven acres of land in Kenya known as Takatifu Gardens. This is apparently a farm in Bungoma. I'll call it the McKaytown Agricultural Project. Buildings on this land comprise a part of the group’s assets. Sources indicate that this property is vested under the names of the cult’s oldest members. In other words, Takatifu Gardens is the Jesus Christians; ostensibly a "permaculture experiment" and volunteer community, its real use as a JC front for recruiting and (surprise) as a means of cloaking themselves in Quakerly respectability. From the IC website (emphasis added by myself):


Land and Buildings
Other
(We are a Christian outreach community, and, as such, we feel that we need to be where the masses are. However, the Kenyan community is rural. It is able to reach via 4WD dozens of schools in that area of western Kenya.)
Area:
7.4 acres (3.0 hectares)
(We only own land in Kenya, which is being used as a permaculture experiment as well as accommodation for a team of volunteers who will undertake projects in the larger community, including an anti-litter campaign, and volunteer English teaching in 35 Quaker schools in the immediate vicinity.)
Land Owned By:
Other
(We do not own land (apart from the Kenya experiment (see above). We rent houses when members choose to stay in buildings. However, vehicles are registered in the names of long-standing members. The land in Kenya is presently in the name of two of our longest term members there, but it may be signed over to a committee in 2009, when we hope to move on to start another such community.)
Number of Residences:
3
(We rent a one-bedroom flat in Sydney, and own land and buildings in Kenya (Takatifu Gardens). The land includes nine separate bedrooms, several outdoor toilets, and a two-room mud hut with an adjoining kitchen. We have a large hall which is being used as a restaurant for the general public as well as a meeting room for ourselves.)
Cohousing:
No


So, Omondi, I'd encourage you to pay attention to the goings-on around there for the next several months, maybe try and do some volunteering with them. According to this, they're potentially giong to be pulling up stakes in Kenya and moving on sometime next year. So, I'll wager that that means that there'll be a lot of JCs traveling to and from Kenya between now and the beginning of '09. They'll probably be in meetings, organizing and preparing for the move. It looks like the Quakers over there are getting wise to them after all and the JCs are "moving on."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2008 03:21AM by zeuszor.

Dear Zeusor,

I and many others are again indebted to you, for the thoroughness of your research. Thank you for the details here....It is rather difficult for me to believe that David McKay would voluntarily "sign over" land to a committe EXTERNAL to the Jesuschristians and I would expect this to be no more than a fabrication to better "sell" the idea of the "God-fearing sincerity" of the JesusChristians to potential recruits.....the idea that they will "move on" (although perhaps should the intake of recruits slow or they be exposed as the frauds they are....) is also I think only mentioned as so much wool over ones eyes...

...and of course, the one-bedroom flat(?) they rent is a nicely renovated two-storey terrace in inner suburban Sydney provided by the NSW Housing Commission to the undeserving McKays, who illegally themselves took unemployment benefits during my "stretch" (and organized the serial fraud of the Australian Commonwealth, by "explaining" to us that only those with little faith would have any qualms about taking from "Ceasar" that which was rightfully Gods) ....Cherry at one point, only just returning to our home in Lewisham from India the VERY day, that an officer from Social Security came looking for her, after David had spent months illegally signing off her application for receipt of unemployment benefits, while she was not actually entitled to them whatsoever....and of course that same little Cherry now being the recipient of a invalid pension, having conspired to have herself whipped (thus materially contributing to her "medical condition" and who in my opinion should hence have her pension benefits withdrawn)....

Trusted "long standing members" of course, being those such as Roland and Sue who betrayed the other long standing members that they swore they "loved", in order to assist David help himself to the rental accommodation and $30,000 hard cash that Kevin, Craig and the community in Sydney once held....David is right that he CAN trust them....after all, isn't there a degree of honour between thieves!!

....funny how the little summary that David has provided fails to mention any of these details,.....but aside from all this...

Zeusor, I have been informed that the Jesuschristian entry no longer appears on www.gapyearworldwide.com. ...however I was also informed that they have endeavoured to pass themselves off on a number of other volunteer service sites. (Here is an example I believe... [www.lonelyplanet.com] ) Would you mind looking into this sometime and see what else you can come up with!

....but you know, we've got to think of all the suffering and anxiety our efforts are causing David,...after all, in Christian spirit we must acknowledge tht God himself still loves David (rather luckily....because no-one else could!) thus I've also finally thought of an alter ego (in the sense of a "soul mate") for David....someone whom David could turn to for advice and comfort, as he gets progressively exposed and universally hated, an individual who could provide some solace and comfort for the poor hounded man......a figure he could bare his soul to (and possibly at the same time "bare"...w-e-l-l..a "little more" so to speak!)... who could share his dismay as we progressively pester the noble JesusChristians with all the superflous details of their utterly pernicious dishonesty...

Tell me Zeusor....have you ever heard of someone called "Gary Glitter"????



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2008 04:04AM by Malcolm Wesley WREST.

Thank you, and no sweat sir. That info was not hard at all to find. Eazy-deezy. Google "Takatifu Gardens" and see what comes out. It's not like I am some master researcher or anything; the way I see it, I simply know how to use the Internet and have the time to do this. Also I have some contacts who send me information. Even that photo was (surprisingly enough) posted on some guy's blog about his trip to Africa. He says that he read about Takatifu through Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum. "Want to do something to help the hurting kids in Kenya? Then come join us at Takatifu Gardens."

[www.lonelyplanet.com]

This is what's up at gapyearworldwide now, replacing the JCs' blurb:

***Please note***- There are risks involved in "do it yourself volunteering" where by you apply to volunteer direct and miss out a sending company. Please research a company thoroughly prior to applying and get feedback from past volunteer participants.

One down, how many to go?

Better yet, Google the non-word "franandkim" and check that out too.

Gary Glitter? A flamboyant name, it sounds like it could be one of Al's pseudonyms. Or wasn't that one of David Bowie's stage names back in the '70s? No, that was Ziggy Stardust. Wait, wasn't GG the British singer who got busted in Laos or someplace a few years ago?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2008 04:35AM by zeuszor.

Hmmm, I'd never seen this before, and it had never come up when I'd used Google or Metacrawler to search the web. Lookie here, I just found it:

[takatifugardens.atspace.org]

[takatifugardens.atspace.org]

The above link was found here, at gapyear's volunteering discussion forum:

[boards.gapyear.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/22/2008 12:52AM by zeuszor.

Dear Zeusor,

Thank you for the links...are you able to provide any positive IDs here.....(the bearded gentleman is Fran?)....which "cheerful" face was responsible for "lovingly" whipping the Kenyan volunteer who dared help himself to a few texts for his family....( I wonder if any nature nature of Statute of Limitations apply in Kenya)...

If they DON'T actually prosletyize, it'd actually be nice to see this project to continue, (just as the work in India once from the committed individuals involved was very valuable, despite the sickened mind in the background, trying to make something out if all, gaining kudos and membership for his cult..... however once again, we assume if David order the "plug to be pulled" ....Robin and the merry band would dump everything and everybody in obediance to their guru.....

Quoting "Cherry"
See: [cust.idl.net.au]

Something similar happens when someone tries to force us to follow a rule about giving to everyone who asks or about not going to court against someone. What we need to look for is the truth that is being taught in those passages... truths about not being greedy... not truths about giving in to the selfish demands of a greedy world.

This may sound like I am watering down what we have said in the past. I don't believe I am doing that. Maybe people do have to start by just obeying Jesus in a legal way. I don't think it has done us harm to take that approach. But there comes a time where we move from obeying Jesus in a legal way to obeying him in a more spiritual way. Both are consistent. We don't, for the most part, stop acting the way we did when we obeyed him just because he spoke certain commands. But what we have is a little more confidence with regard to exceptional circumstances. Getting the spirit of what he said helps to fill in the gaps where we don't have rules to guide us. Rather than obeying the rules, we are obeying the spirit, obeying the gospel, obeying the truth, and obeying the revelation.



Yes "Cherry". You are correct. It does sound like you are watering down what you have said in the past.

It is interesting that there is now a difference between obeying the rules (i.e. teachings of Jesus, cornerstone, capstone, etc.) and obeying the "spirit", and that the immature start by "just" obeying Jesus in a "legal" way and that people like "Cherry" have moved beyond the "legal" adherance to the teachings of Jesus to being "spirit" led. This enables them to sue "sinners" for $5,000,000.00, whip each other, and talk of shooting people. At least they are finally coming out of the closet with their anti-Christ ideology.

Dear Apostate,


Well said and Hear, Hear!! I remember full well, how any particular individual and every church in general was utterly derided by David McKay (obviously now in UTTER hypocrisy) during my years(82 - 85), when they dared suggest that they need not "work for love" "forsake all" (or join the Jesuschristians in humble submission to some obnoxious old fool!).....because they were busy "obeying the spirit" of God in their current "calling" ....we were taught to sneer at whoever expressed such ideas, by someone who now routinely employs the very same justifications in an endeavour to mask his own disobediance!

To better quote and more accurately render "Cherry"s pompous bullshit, then......

Rather than obeying the rules, (the JeusChristians) are disobeying the spirit, disobeying the gospel, disobeying the truth and disobeying the relevation.



Like you, I have heard it suggested, that David was now reduced to pathetically using the pseudonym "Cherry" in order to disguise his own contributions to the JC site, and thus to somehow circumvent the ongoing criticism of him personally (the years as front man for the Children of God in Broken Hill, being quite prepared to subject his own children and wife to flirty fishing....the denigration of him on several occasions from his own mother (ARE YOU LISTENING, somewhere out there Robin??)...the whipping he approves of, the kidnapping of minors (Bobby Kelly)...and the grooming of minors (Joe Johnson).....the spiteful acts of revenge we see from him through vexatious legal action and the denigration of the family and friends of those he needs to keep entrapped within his empire.....etc etc ad nausea...)

The content, written and psychological style and unintended self references ("This may sound like I am watering down what we have said in the past"....being of course something that DAVID himself has personally said in the past) of the nominated passage clearly indicating that it is none other than more of the drivel coming though STRAIGHT from the "asses mouth"........

(.........well, you know Apostate, after all,.............you'd have to agree surely.............I mean all things considered.........
......he hardly looks like a horse now ....does he!!)



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/2008 09:36PM by Malcolm Wesley WREST.

Cherry wrote:

"David is not actively posting on the forum these days"

[welikejesus.com]

Let's take this apart word by word.

What exactly does "actively" mean?

What is YOUR definition of prevarication, Cherry, seeing as you used it so accusingly against someone recently?

Have any of you ever heard of the Asch Line Experiment, or of a man named Zablocki?

[www.simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk]

* 11 April 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* by Michael Bond

From issue 2599 of New Scientist magazine, 11 April 2007, page 42-45

As an iconic image of human rights abuse, it is hard to equal: a hooded man with electrodes attached to his fingers stands precariously on a small box. One slip and he risks a numbing electric shock. In April 2004 this picture and others showing American soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad cast a pall over the US military's conduct in Iraq that has never lifted. The electrode stunt was dreamed up by a group of US army reservists working as military policemen at the prison. Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick was one of them. It was not the only abuse he perpetrated at Abu Ghraib. Among other things, he admitted making three prisoners masturbate while his colleagues looked on, and thumping another so hard in the chest that he had to be resuscitated. Most people would label Frederick as morally corrupt, a classic "bad apple". The judge at his trial certainly did. He sentenced him to eight years in jail, handed down a dishonourable discharge, and removed his salary and pension. Frederick deserved severe punishment, the judge argued, because he was exercising free will when he committed the acts. But was he?

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo from Stanford University in California thinks not. He believes the judge was guilty of the "fundamental attribution error" - overestimating the effects of someone's temperament on their behaviour and underestimating the effects of the environment in which they were acting. Zimbardo was an expert witness on Frederick's defence team. He interviewed him at length before the trial and carried out extensive psychological tests. He found no hint of mental illness or sadistic tendencies in Frederick. "In many ways this soldier was an American icon: a good husband, father and worker, patriotic, religious, with many friends and a history of having lived a most normal, moral small town life," says Zimbardo. Then he went to Abu Ghraib and turned into a monster.

This may be an extreme case, but such transformations are surprisingly common. You find them in just about any environment in which an individual is subsumed into a group or is reacting to what others are doing: rioting mobs, football crowds, committees, social networks, even panels of judges. In such situations a group mentality can easily take over, leading people to act out of character or adopt extreme or risky positions. In an analysis that considered 25,000 social psychology studies, published a few months after the Abu Ghraib abuses emerged, Susan Fiske at Princeton University concluded that almost everyone is capable of torture and other evil acts if placed in the wrong social context (Science, vol 306, p 1482). "Our society tends to focus on individual psychology," says Zimbardo. "All our institutions - in war, law, religion, medicine - are based on this concept." Yet if we don't understand the power of group psychology we can never hope to combat evils such as torture, suicide bombings and genocide, or indeed avoid making bad decisions or committing despicable acts of our own.
“Almost everyone is capable of evil acts if placed in the wrong social context”

Zimbardo has famously shown how easy it is to turn peaceful people abusive and hostile. In an experiment at Stanford University in 1971, he recruited students to imitate prison guards and inmates. After six days the experiment had to be stopped because the guards - ordinary summer-school students selected for their healthy psychological state - had pushed many of the prisoners to the point of emotional breakdown. In a similar experiment published in 1974, Stanley Milgram from Yale University persuaded ordinary people to administer electric shocks to a "victim" sitting behind a screen. Without much trouble Milgram had all of them increasing the voltage until the victim was screaming (it was an act but they didn't know that). Two-thirds of them carried on until the victim was apparently unconscious.

"If you can diffuse responsibility so people don't feel accountable, they will probably do things they normally never would," says Zimbardo. Milgram did this by telling the participants that he was in charge, and that he himself would take responsibility for anything that happened. Zimbardo gave his "prison guards" all the symbols of power of real guards - uniforms, whistles, handcuffs, sunglasses - effectively giving the volunteers permission to behave like them. He also ensured that prisoners were known only by numbers, not by their names. Many studies have found such anonymity to be an effective tool for changing the way someone is treated, or how they treat others. You find the same effect outside the lab. In 1971, anthropologist John Watson from Harvard University found that tribal cultures renowned for their barbaric treatment of enemies usually wear masks or paint their faces when going into battle, while those who go to war unadorned tend to be far less brutal. Likewise, many commentators have observed that people perpetrating crimes such as torture and genocide often dehumanise their victims by thinking of them as animals. Following on from Milgram's experiment, Albert Bandura from Stanford University found that people would administer more severe electric shocks if he told them that the recipients (whom they could not see) seemed "like animals".
Personal allegiance

Groups can create environments that diminish individual responsibility, but they can also exert their hold in another way. "There is a significant difference between mob behaviour, in which anonymity and imitation are the important factors, and the direct influence of a group, which involves personal allegiance to leaders and comrades," says Ariel Merari, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel and an expert on Middle Eastern terrorism. Groups that recruit suicide bombers are among those that use the latter approach, building a sense of community and encouraging feelings of responsibility towards other group members: the "brotherhood mentality". Here, individuals take responsibility for their own actions within a culture where suicide bombing is seen as glorious. Then, by recording farewell messages to family and friends either on videotape or in writing, they make a commitment to their own martyrdom that they cannot renege on without losing face (New Scientist, 15 May 2004, p 34).

All of this is a long way from the situations that most of us face. Yet many of the decisions we make every day are heavily influenced by what others are doing. In a study published last year, for example, Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University in New York showed that the reason chart-topping pop songs are so much more popular than average is not because they are significantly better but because consumers are influenced by the buying habits of others (Science, vol 311, p 854). This is known as the social cascade effect, a phenomenon in which large numbers of people end up doing or thinking something on the basis of what others have done.

There are two mechanisms at work here, says Watts. "The first is social learning. The world is too complicated for each individual to solve problems on their own, so we rely on the information that is encoded in our social environment - we assume other people know things we don't." Then there is social coordination, where you want to do the same thing as other people not because you think it is better but because what matters is doing things together. "Liking the same song, movies, sports and books not only gives us something to talk about, but makes us feel like we're part of something larger than ourselves." As well as directing consumers' buying habits, these two forces can influence financial markets, protest movements, and even - through opinion polls - how we vote.

It is not surprising that people should be so susceptible to the dynamics of their social environment. After all, we evolved as social animals in environments where cooperation and group cohesion were key survival tools. Our reasons for being influenced by others are often valid, but if we are not careful this tendency can get us into trouble. In a classic study carried out in the 1950s, for example, social psychologist Solomon Asch revealed how the peer pressure associated with being part of a group can lead people to deny the evidence of their own senses. When asked simply to match the length of a line on a card with one of three reference lines, 70 per cent of his subjects ignored their own judgement and sided with the rest of their group who, unbeknown to them, had been primed to make a blatantly wrong choice.

When any group of like-minded people get together, the result can be equally alarming. One common effect is that the group ends up taking a more extreme position than the one its members started with - it becomes polarised. For example, a group of people who begin a discussion believing George Bush's policies on Iraq are merely ill-advised may finish convinced that his policies are insane. Cass Sunstein, professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago has identified two reasons. First, in like-minded groups you tend to hear only arguments that support your own viewpoint, which is bound to reinforce it. In addition, people are always comparing themselves with others and will shift their position so as not to appear out of line. The same kind of thinking is behind the phenomenon known as "risky shift" in which adolescents, already prone to risky behaviour, are even more inclined to throw caution to the wind when they are with their peers.

Polarisation is related to another form of group psychology known as groupthink, where members strive for cohesion at the expense of all else. Maintaining cohesion can give a group a sense of power and bolster the self-esteem of its members, but it can also lead them to make bad and dangerous decisions. "When group cohesion is based on congeniality, criticising ideas means attacking the source of group cohesion," says Clark McCauley, director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. As with social cascades and polarisation, problems often arise when people rely on what they think others know and fail to share useful information they might have. This mistake can be compounded by the influence of a manipulative leader. Groupthink has been blamed for the CIA's flawed plan to invade Cuba in 1961 - the infamous Bay of Pigs debacle - and also for NASA's failure in 2003 to recognise that the damage done to the wing of the space shuttle Columbia by a piece of foam during take-off was potentially fatal. Irving Janis, the psychologist who coined the term groupthink in 1972, believed no one was immune. "Probably every member of every policy-making group is susceptible," he wrote in a landmark paper.

Another situation in which we are all prone to assuming a strong group mentality is at times of crisis. This explains why support for national leaders increases in wartime - and why George Bush achieved almost unanimous backing for his "war on terror" after 9/11. It is understandable that people look to their own group when they feel threatened, but the result can be an escalation of tension. In a study published last year, for example, a team led by Tom Pyszczynski from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, found that Iranian college students who were prompted to think about their own death showed greater support for suicide attacks against the US than they would have otherwise (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 32, p 1).

Knowing what we do about group psychology, what are the lessons to be learned? For a start, we should discourage isolated cliques of like-minded people and encourage people with opposing views to speak out - and that applies whether you are trying to prevent terrorism or elect a new school head. The flip side of this is that we should recognise that extremist groups are usually remarkably homogenous in terms of the interests, political affiliations, age and socioeconomic status of their members. "If I were an intelligence agent trying to break a terrorist cell, if I caught one member I'd find out what food he eats and what clothing he wears," says Scott Atran at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The chances are his fellow terrorists would have very similar preferences. Accordingly, Atran and forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman are building a database of members of jihadi terrorist networks in Europe and Asia, recording information such as family background and friends.

Another lesson is that the wider social environment influences the decisions made by groups. Pyszczynski found that he could change the attitudes of his Iranian students by convincing them that public opinion in their country was opposed to suicide attacks. What's more, in similar studies with US students he first increased their appetite for conflict with Arabs by getting them to think of their own death, and then found he could reduce it simply by showing them photos of family life from many different cultures or reminding them of their own group values, such as compassion, and of what they have in common with others. "This is particularly encouraging as it shows a way of reversing a process that otherwise can increase public support for terrorism," he says.

The behaviour of football hooligans can also be influenced by their social environment, according to Clifford Stott, a social psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK. Working as a consultant to the police for the European championships in Portugal in 2004, he found that the aggressiveness of football crowds is heavily influenced by how the police treat them. Although violence has been part of the group identity of a significant section of England fans, low-profile policing at certain matches during Euro2004 encouraged them to adopt an uncharacteristically orderly attitude which they then maintained through self-policing (European Journal of Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.338).

The idea of group psychology is rather unsettling. We like to think that we are in control of our own decisions and behaviour, not at the mercy of our social environment. It is also deeply disturbing to contemplate that any of us might have done what Frederick and the other Abu Ghraib reservists did. Yet Zimbardo also points to a positive side. His latest research looks at what makes a hero, and he has found that our universal capacity to perform evil acts under the influence of the group is matched by a universal capacity to resist peer pressure and do the right thing. "There is nothing special in the backgrounds of heroes - they choose to act on the moment. There are no predictive psychological factors," says Zimbardo. Ordinary heroes, like ordinary monsters, are everywhere.

Joseph Darby is a perfect example. He was an army reservist in the same company as Frederick, and the person responsible for stopping the torture and human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. Darby passed a CD of the photographs to his superior officer. He did this despite the severe potential costs to himself and his family, who are now in hiding for fear of retaliation from members of his unit. Zimbardo looked into Darby's background. "Ordinary," he says. "He never did anything like it before."