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Sparky
I agree..."Fat Jap" is very offensive and uncalled for. It doesn't help with the conversation going forward.
I think "Lying Body and Mind Rapist" is a better term.
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backnforth
While in the SGI-USA I became very good at ignoring my life. Sound familiar anyone? Get to the meeting, chant for the members, visit the members, chant for everyone and everything besides yourself. Chant while your so sleep deprived that the quality of daimoku is totally lost.
Since stepping back and opening my eyes to this personality cult called SGI, my chanting is so much more sincere - for myself and those that I love and care about.
My life is now taking a whole new direction and growing in ways I had stopped hoping for long ago. I was too busy living the way SGI wanted me to. Now I'm living true to me. I feel sad for those that threw away their personal practice once they needed to step away from SGI. The basics of chanting, gongyo and study are very worthwhile I feel.
Change can be hard, growth can include some pain, but life is great when you feel you are being true to yourself!!!!!
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The Anticult
When people are coming out of a cult, sometimes they need to blow off steam, or they type something while they are emotionally upset.
At the same time, there are massive facts in this forum, like the one's exposing the billion dollar investment funds of Soka U.
SGI, The richest cult in the world? over $1 BILLION in the USA
[forum.culteducation.com]
Often when people are in a cult, especially a type of New Age or so-called "buddhist" cult, they are in fact afraid of normal human emotions, like sometimes losing your cool a bit. Nothing wrong with it.
And sometimes people for their own reasons have to express deep emotion.
As well, usually people have been too passive/submissive when in a cult, and have suppressed their natural assertiveness. That can then come out in anger when they are getting out of the cult.
Almost every cult tries to demonize any type of normal human anger, usually as the guy running the cult wants to control people.
The short point is, anyone who was reading this thread, could see that a person was angry at being used, duped, deceived, manipulated, betrayed...by SGI for years.
People have a right to be angry at SGI.
Not condoning any words, but healthy anger towards the exploitative SGI-USA seems to be a healthy thing. Its the start of having some boundaries.
And the dirty and ugly trash that Ikeda has written and dictated about his 'enemies' is grotesque.
SGI has attacked websites, and gone after critics of SGI.
When people are coming out of SGI, sometimes they don't see SGI like they will later. At first, they might think SGI just made mistakes, and are bumbling fools. Only after much research do they see in fact SGI is run according to very careful planning, including how they use and then discard members.
So people should write what they really think, and not worry if its a bit much. These threads are not just a fact machine, its also self-deprogramming, and sometimes that can get emotionally heated.
People should feel free to express themselves honestly.
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BeingAdagio
I strongly disagree. Racist statements are never defensible, even with the knowledge that people trying to extricate themselves from cults are sometimes emotional or have felt suppressed. I just don't get the sense that anyone here was so broken by SGI that they stopped being able to tell basic right from wrong, or fair from unfair. If that seems a little too politically correct for anyone, so be it.
Labeling someone with an ugly racial slur brands the labeler, and his/her associates as far worse than the target of the slur. Many people instinctively want to defend the specific person being targeted (and rightly so) , even if they might otherwise have agreed with you. It's impossible to confine the hurtful effects of such remarks to one person. Racial epithets are felt, and understood as a personal slap in the face, by anyone who is a member of the race you are talking about -- not just by those who disagree with your position aside from the slur.
Yes, Ikeda has very profitably sold a lot of gullible, needy people on the idea that SGI's dumbed down version of Nichiren's Buddhism is under assault by "enemies." I just don't think his weight or especially his race, have anything to do with it. Cult behavior, and illicit enrichment from it, exist everywhere on the globe.