21 July 2025
TikTok is an interesting social media platform. As a host of short videos that anyone can make these days pretty easily with just a mobile phone, an interface that makes it easy to scroll through hundreds of videos, and an algorithm that attempts to feed you content that will keep you engaged, many kids use Tik Tok as their main social media platform. The platform allows viewers to easily engage through not just their likes, but also through posting their own opinions in response videos.
21 July 2025
Thank you to everyone who filled in our recent survey about the possibility of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast hosts coming over to New Zealand next year, and whether this might have an effect on our conference plans for this year and next. We've been discussing your responses as a committee, and will be able to let everyone know fairly soon what our plans are.
29 October 2024
It has been a busy week for me, and today has been the first day I've been able to unwind and reflect on everything that has happened. It has been good, but it has been a week bookended by two conferences, a board meeting, and a UFO lecture where I've had to do a lot of code-switching from professional skeptic, to professional disabled/Autistic person, to skeptical UFO enthusiast, to midwifery PhD researcher and lecturer, and finally back to skeptic. I am unreserved in enjoying the DeCult conference, and am pretty happy that I got to see 95% of the talks I wanted to see.
30 September 2024
During our “very special” episode of the Yeah…Nah podcast with Anke Richter, Anke referred to an anti-cult organisation that was taken over by Scientology. The group she was referring to was the Citizen's Freedom Foundation / Cult Awareness Network (CAN), which was founded by Ted Patrick in 1978. Although he had no formal education or training, Patrick was a pioneer of deprogramming, which he developed in response to the expansion of various cults and religion movements throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Deprogramming was always controversial, but seen as a necessary evil by many parents who paid Patrick and others like him to return their (often adult) children to them. Methods employed by Patrick and others included abduction, sleep and food deprivation, emotional abuse, desecration of symbols of the detainee's faith, and sometimes physical violence.
25 September 2023
September has been an interesting month in ISTA land and its adjacent islands. Motivated by reports that the neo-tantric NGO was resuming activity in Israel and holding a workshop in an undisclosed location, the Israeli Centre for Cult Victims issued an official statement (available in Hebrew and English) on September 8th. The statement outlines, in explicit detail, the content of the first two levels of the ISTA programme and the multiple conduits for exploitative activity, in particular the lack of detailed information that students receive about the workshops (which was also indicated by Morgan Penn in the Sex.Life podcast). While it stops short of outright declaring ISTA a cult, the centre does state that it has taken an interest in ISTA activities and notes that in Israeli penal law, spiritual teachers are forbidden from having sexual relations with students.
24 April 2023
I'm still a member of the Eastern Lightning, aka the Church of Almighty God religion, along with Mark Honeychurch, and it has been a fascinating experience learning how this religion ticks. We discussed the group on a recent episode of the NZ Skeptics' “Yeah…Nah!” podcast, and I mentioned that I was unsure if they're actually a cult, but I felt that they checked many of the cult checkboxes. Others agreed that they crossed the threshold, and are probably a full-blown cult. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also calls them a cult. But are they?
6 March 2023
It's a bumper issue today, but I make no apologies for bringing you a ridiculously long email! If you're using a web based client like GMail, you may need to click the “View entire message” link or similar to read the whole newsletter this week, or click the “Read this in your browser” button at the top of the email to open the newsletter as a web page in your browser.
24 January 2023
I was listening to Steve Hassan speaking on a podcast recently, A Little Bit Culty - hosted by ex NXIVM cult members Sarah Edmondson and her husband Anthony Ames. Steve is well known by now for his BITE model of control in cults, and I've written about this model and its usefulness before.
25 October 2022
A notorious religious group from South Korea called Shincheonji (also known as Mount Zion) has apparently been actively recruiting in Auckland recently. Shincheonji has a long history in New Zealand, with underhanded recruiting techniques used to pull people into the cult group. Many years ago, the church in Wellington was using university students to lure people in. I also found a warning from a popular evangelical church here in Wellington from last year, letting people know that a group member had been attending church services and attempting to convince people to jump ship and join Shincheonji. Apparently this process can start as “an invite for coffee” followed by an invite to a Bible Study, from where attempts are made to convince the mark that Shincheonji is the one true religion.
28 March 2022
This week's newsletter seems to have ended up being mostly about acronyms. I've written about how to determine what is and isn't a cult, using the BITE model, drawing from a recent visit I received from a pair of Sister Missionaries. I also try to get to the nugget of truth at the centre of the NESARA conspiracy. Bronwyn takes a look at one of my favourite skeptical topics, MLMs - the scam I love to hate. She's even promising to write more about some of the MLMs we see in New Zealand, which I'm really looking forward to. Finally Bronwyn wonders whether Finland exists.
28 March 2022
Last week I had a couple of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Missionaries visit me. They called me a few days in advance to ask if it was okay to come round, and then I totally forgot about our meeting until I received a call saying they were having problems finding my house on the street.
30 November 2020
Tonight I'm off to a meeting of AMORC - the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis. It occurred to me the other day that there's an old idea which might be appropriate here. I'm sure many of you have heard of the guideline that the more a country's name stresses that it is democratic, the less likely it is to actually resemble a democracy. Take the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) or the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) as examples. I wonder whether the same rule might hold for cult groups. For example, the Order of Oriental Templars (OTO) is not related to either the Orient or Templars (it was invented in the 20th century by German occultists), The Church of Scientology is not really a church (it's just a tax dodge) and the Unification Church (Moonies) didn't unify the Christian church. So I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis is probably going to turn out to be neither Ancient nor Mystical.
1 May 1991
A strange phenomenon is again manifesting itself in the pastoral areas of our borough. October has once again brought appearances of what we Mt Eden Skeptics call "Crop Rectangles" — bare, rectangular patches of earth amongst the normally verdant parklands. They have no reasonable explanation, but they do have a common, peculiar feature, which leads us to believe that they are associated with some sort of meteorological cult.