Hey Jo :D
Well my honest reckoning is if they were sincere about following Chaitanya's Mission and had genuine claim to feign outrage against the principles of Gaudiya Vaishnavism being violated that they would not be turning people away as they do. I have heard no shortage of stories from former followers talking about the same thing happening all over.
The situation reminds me of stories I have heard about those who have been abused by some member of the clergy (or ISKCON) who went from believing that it was just one bad person and that those at the top surely would not condone it to finding out that if they pursued the ideal that the organisation did infact stand for good that they ended up bitterly disappointed. I honestly thought from the first blog that someone would come along and say hey ok maybe that is the case but we dont all stand for that and it wont happen again.
Noone knows what to do with Siddha and he has nothing to say - why should he? He has his money by now, has his wife and can live out the twilight of his years doing the occassional lecture.
If you look at their "official" site scienceofidentity.org then you will see who is Siddha states that he is the founder of the Identity Institute which has not functionally existed since 2000 and was delinquent on filing their taxes and involuntarily dissolved by the government.
[
hbe.ehawaii.gov]
This piece of information alone if anyone bothers to look based on SoIs own site puts doubt over credibility.
I have absolutely no clue why they want to recruit new people. I havent seen anything to sugguest that the success rate is very good though. Even from stories that go back to about 10 years ago here recruitment efforts were not doing well and those who were trying to organise them became discouraged. I am doubtful as to whether there would even be a website for ASM, new classes etc if they had not been centre of the controversy. The root cause as I am pretty sure Siddha would say :wink: