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Hitch
Unless you were an outcast, "fortune babies" were pretty much a shoe-in for receiving omamori gohonzons. I think your critical analysis of the situation is spot-on SGBye. You had good timing. You were in total "rhythm." Your "fortune bank" was overflowing with omamori benefits. LUCKY YOU!!!

You are SOOOOOO fortunate! HOWABOUT ZATTO?!?!?! C-O-N-G-R-A-T-U-L-A-T-I-O-N-S!!! ;-)

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Hitch
Regarding studying, we were pushed all the time to study the gosho, independently, at study meetings and even officially take study department exams (and progressively move up to higher and higher levels of in-depth study). I remember it well, because I never wanted to, nor was I very interested in all the fairy tales, but I did, because I HAD to.

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Freeheartandmind
I remember back in my member days a situation where a YMD in my group applied contact paper to his gohonzon. He was always a little strange, smoked a lot of weed, but was dedicated to cousin rufus. He has a really wack explanation of how he was trying to transfer his life force to the gohonzon, or something like that. It became clear at that point that he had serious mental issues and fake buddhism only made it worse. Do you think this poor guy was given guidance to seek help from a qualified professional? Not a chance. The group was tasked with watching him more closely so he wouldn't do damage to his replacement gohonzon.

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The Anticult
Just to go back to this SGI "story" about giving SGI all of your emergency savings.
Its found at the links below.

Contribution and “Fighting Daimoku”
[www.gakkaionline.net]
[forum.culteducation.com]

That posted "story" is a persuasion process. Its not a true story, is a written story that is designed to persuade people and modify their behavior and beliefs. Its very obvious how they do it.
SGI is targeting those in very bad physical health, and who are out of work and short on money, with bad relationships.

SGI members who are desperate.

Then in the persuasion story, SGI targets your emergency savings, with a flippant comment. Then SGI tries to persuade you to raid your emergency fund.
QUOTE: [www.gakkaionline.net] "Later that afternoon, an experience arrived in my inbox from a Yahoo Group about contribution. It left me no room for excuses and taking a leap of faith, I went to the SGI-USA website and made a contribution using the “emergency fund.” It wasn’t what I really planned on contributing, but it was a lot more than I’d given so far."

Notice the tricky language, no excuses, faith, website promotion, and about giving A LOT MORE than you've given before, in a direct transfer from your bank accounts emergency fund.

Then SGI spreads their nonsense, lies and propaganda, that right after he gave SGI-USA ALL OF HIS MONEY, his "3 month fever" began to break. A 3 month fever? What a fraud.
He then says his relationships improved, got a new "car", and everything is wonderful because he gave SGI-USA all of his money.

This is such transparent manipulation its really pathetic.
What makes it even worse, is that SGI-USA is targeting SGI members who are DESPERATE.
Byron Katie also targets people who are desperate and in dire straits.
Why? Because desperate people do crazy things, like empty their bank accounts, if they have one.

So this SGi-USA tactic alone, actually proves that SGI is a cult. And not just a cult, but a destructive cult.
Any cult who will target their members who are sick, and broke, and then persuade them to hand their last dollars over to Ikeda SGI-USA who have billions, is a destructive cult. That is very extreme abuse for vulnerable people.

Then what happens when they spend all their money? Then they are much worse off, and SGI casts them aside and blames them for not chanting hard enough.

Any group should CARE for its members. And people should be encouraged to save money for a rainy day, and take care of themselves. SGI-USA has billions, and they never dip into their money, they lie and tell every country that they lose money, and that Japan supports them. That is a lie.
SGI has almost no expenses in each country, they pay no tax, its all pure profit.

And when SGI-USA target their own members who are sick, broke, and emotionally desperate, and then leads them by the nose to give SGI-USA their last dollars from their emergency bank account, that is a destructive cult which is severely exploiting their own members.
You would not treat your worse enemy that way.
Who would take the last money from someone who was broke, sick, without insurance, and emotionally desperate?
You would have to be a sociopath to do that.

Desperate people read things like that "story" written by SGI-USA, and some of them do as they are persuaded to.
If SGI was not a destructive cult, they would help their members, and remind people to always save as much money as possible just in case.
But no, SGI has to retrain people to do the exact opposite. They have to retrain their own SGI members to empty their bank accounts and give it to the multi-billionaire Ikeda so he can invest more billions in the stock market.

In terms of the exploitation and abuse of their own SGI members, SGI-USA is a cult, and not just a cult, but a destructive cult in many ways. In this case, its financially a very destructive cult, it can't get much worse than that.
SGI-USA is cleverly promising miracle health cures, if you give SGI-USA all of the money in your emergency bank account.

Just because a person has not been exploited to that extreme level by SGI yet themselves, its not as important as the fact that SGI-USA is trying to do this to people.
One can be assured there are even worse exploitations online from SGI-USA that have not been noticed yet. The worst are exploiting people's ill health for the benefit of SGI.

SGI-USA is a destructive cult, with extreme exploitation of their own members in many different ways.