Thoroughly DeCulted

Mark Honeychurch - 29 October 2024

Last weekend I travelled down to Christchurch for the DeCult conference, and it was fascinating to hear so many personal stories about the many ways in which cults coerce and mistreat people, as well as some of the ideas people have about how we may be able to minimise the damage that cults are able to do. There were lots of brave people who, having gone through hell while members of these groups, still had the energy to stand up to them and fight once they realised the wrongs that had been done. I was able to say hello to quite a few survivors of different cults who I’ve met over my years as a skeptic in New Zealand, and also some of our NZ Skeptics members who had made the trip to the conference. And our chair, Bronwyn, gave a great talk about ISTA and Highden that I was able to hear. Although I was volunteering to help at the conference, and had been rostered to work in a different room while Bronwyn was speaking, I managed to organise someone to cover me and my daughter so that we could sit in and hear her telling everyone about just some of the weirdness around Highden and Bruce Lyon.

As I write this, at just after midnight, I’ve just walked in through the door after spending an evening at a ghost hunting event with Bronwyn and Tim, which I was going to write up for this week’s newsletter. However, the event was enough fun that Bronwyn and I have decided we’ll delay it a couple of weeks, so that we can talk about it at our live podcast recording during our Skeptics Conference in the middle of next month. In the meantime, I’ve written about straws making some big claims, and try to figure out where the truth may lie. However, before that, we have an article from Bronwyn about her experience at Decult, and her thoughts about a couple of ideas that were floated at the conference. Brad has written about a weird horse therapy, one that seems to be very nebulous - at least when it comes to talking about how the therapy might actually work. Committee member Hamish has written up a really handy guide about different octane fuels, and whether you may benefit from spending more money on a higher octane. And, finally, Katrina’s looked into some new technologies that might allow us all to become super heroes - although, as usual, there can be a bit of a gap between the hype and reality.