A couple of years ago, I was visited by a pair of kind, young Mormon missionaries. We spent a good hour or more chatting about their faith. Of course, being in the middle of a pandemic, missionaries had been unable to do their usual overseas stint, so the lads I had been visited by had come from Hamilton - not the most exciting.
When I last wrote about Eastern Lightning, the strange Chinese cult I joined at the beginning of this year, I celebrated the fact that I had managed to get my hands on a couple of copies of one of their books. Little did I know how much trouble this would get me in!
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.
Matthew Mills believes that the Sandy Hook school massacre in the US didn't happen. Unfortunately he's taken his belief to an extreme, publicly harassing the sister of one of the victims, a school teacher called Victoria Soto. Victoria has been hailed as a hero for her efforts to protect the children under her care, and lost her life in the process. Matthew believes that Victoria never existed, and has been harassing her sister in an effort to get her to admit this.