When Empathy Awakens: Deconstructing From a High Control Group | Simone Eiman

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandom.org and with me I have my very special guest, Simone Ayman, former member of William Brandham's message call. Simone, it's good to have you and to talk through your experience in William Brandham's message. I understand that you were raised in it for a very long time and I'm interested to hear your story and maybe if you could just start by introducing yourself. Great, thanks for that introduction, John. It's lovely to be here. Yes, I'm all the way in South Africa, that's where I grew up

and I had a very young age in primary school. I think they call it junior school. My parents found the lineage and we started. I think I was about eight. My siblings were much younger than that and that has pretty much been our psychological formation and mental basis for our childhood. A very strict, very strict and I say that in bold and capital letters and I think anybody who or everybody who's in this religion can identify with that. So it's been a long journey for me to undo all that and do the programming and do the conditioning and it's taken me most of my life and that's why I wanted to share

my story with you because your podcast has been the catalyst for my letting go because since childhood I've been, I've always wondered and I've always had this feeling within, this is not right. If I am a creation of God, why is this man beating up on me? Why am I such bad thing or a bad person just because I'm a woman? I could never, never understand that and it just, I never got revelation and I never got, you know, filled with the Holy Spirit and all that kind of stuff, because they never got it.

So I eventually stumbled upon, I literally stumbled upon a podcast and thought, oh my God, all the stuff that I've been thinking and feeling here, they're talking about it now. Wow. And yeah, I thought, oh my word.

And I would always ask myself, what are they saying when they're preaching and they weren't saying anything? It was just loud voices and lots of prayer and all of that and don't get me wrong.

I'm not anti-religion or I'm not an atheist or anything like that, but the theatrics and the drama I just never got, it just didn't do me. So I want to acknowledge the work that you're doing with a very deep gratitude, that you do it in a very methodical manner and there's no malice and I appreciate that and thank you.

I want to publicly acknowledge that and thank you. Well thank you and thank you for joining to share your story. You know, for people like you and I, it's a little bit different than other people.

I do have emotions. I have very, very heightened emotions. However, when I was in the church setting, my emotions are the type of sympathy and empathy. That's my type of emotions. Whenever something happens, I cry like a baby if something happens that is very emotional.

And still today, as a grown adult, but in those settings, I never got into the hype. I never got into, like you said, the theatrics. I never really understood those types of emotions because my personality, it doesn't work with my personality and you mentioned before recording that you were a coach.

I sat down with a personality coach for one of my clients and they had this big contract that the client required personality tests because they would join people with compatible teams and this was a wonderful thing.

I mean, this is phenomenal what they were doing, but the personality coach actually called me aside and said, John, your empathy is so off the scale that you will literally kill yourself for another person.

You need to be careful of this. And I said, yes. And she went on to tell me different things about myself that I guess I knew, but I never really thought about them until she said this, but one of the things that she said, there is a category that people have in the old psychological days, they used to call this category religion and they can't call it this anymore because of all of the politics around that, but there is a...

category in which you believe something without having any evidence, and there are people that go into this, and it was categorized falsely as religion, they've recategorized it as basically logic, and my logic side is really high, my empathy is really high, but taking blind leaps of faith is not, and so, like you, I was in this world, what is this world?

How do people do this? But I'm very interested to hear your story, because the things that we were told in the United States about what happened in Africa, I'm learning from other people like you that it really doesn't match the story that we had here. William Branham goes to Africa, and we were told that all of these miraculous healings were undeniable, and then we come across this book, I think it's 1955 by Wayman Duane Miller, and he visited, he was right there in the front of the platform, and saw people that he knew, and went home

and watched the same people die, and so, this was a big deal back then, that information never made it to the States, so, had the revivalists been what they were advertised, you would expect all of Africa would be converted to this, why would you not? And yet, logically, my brain is, I did think about this in the message, my brain is thinking, wait a minute, if the miracles were as they described, and everybody could not deny them, this would be this massive movement that would overtake the whole continent, and yet it did not, so, and I'll let you talk in just a second, but I combined that thought recently with the

podcast I'm doing by Bob Scott, something that I'd never really thought about, in the developing nations, and even in South Africa during some of the early years, you could hold a revival, and you could invite everybody to come with free food, and you'd have people coming by the truckloads from miles and miles around, Bob said that he witnessed this, and so, what happens is you get these revivalists that go, and they take these pictures of 100,000 saved, and they're not telling you, it's more like 100,000 fed.

Yeah, I can't talk much to the doctrines and the intellectual side of things, because it never makes things to me, and I can't tell you, I never understood it, I never understood certain seed and fund, and I never did, and my dad used to be the, used to be the frontman former, oh my question, he never shut me down, he was very tolerant, and he always, and I think the questions I used to ask him, made him think.

And I mentioned earlier, I asked him, you know, if I was so useless as a woman, why did God give me a fully functioning brain? And he just said, they're looking at me. I think I was like 13 or 14 years old because you were always told, you must be quiet and you must be, you know, do this and don't do that.

Just sit and play piano when I ask you to and do what you must do and go and study and, you know, all of that. And I never understood that and he just said, looking at me and probably thought, you know, I hope he thought, well, she's got a point.

It was why, you know, why? And if, if my, my form, my female form was so wrong, why did I do I have this form? And why do they not take responsibility for their own thoughts and their own actions?

Why am I being held responsible for their thoughts and their actions and feelings? And that's just logical thinking. It wasn't being anything else, it was just logical thinking. So I was thinking earlier about, you know, just, just getting myself into the zone for our conversation around what was the environment like when I was growing up and it was like a policing environment, apart from, you know, the past is and the deconsent, all the officials in the church, the congregation themselves were like pseudo-policemen because they, you've been seen by someone doing something that you were not supposed to, you know,

you're going to hear about it tonight. Whether it was right or wrong and that's just living in that, yeah, it was so fear-driven. And one of the parts that really, that I struggled with to let go of was that fear, fear that, what if it is right, you know, there's this one story that they tell about, um, Brandon had spoken to someone and the lady said she wouldn't even feed this to her cow or something like that, there was a story like that, I don't know if it was manufactured by our leaders or if it's true, not at all, if that happened, if that happened to the

cow, then what can happen to be, you know, if I say anything wrong or dare, I go, you know, against this and I struggled with that for a long time. I mean, I'm my footies now and it's taken me, I left home when I was 21. So the first part of two decades plus I've been trying to release this and trying to shake finally reaching a point where I can say I don't follow that anymore because I don't believe that it's the truth. And I have a different relationship with God. I'm not religious, I don't follow institutionalized religion because I don't believe in it, it's

just a method to control people. But I am spiritual, you know, I do take care of my spirituality and compassion for others, you know, you talk about empathy. That was something that I never saw in the church, you know, compassion and empathy for others because it was them and us. And if I saw someone outside who outside of the circle who was struggling who needed something to eat who needed some money or I would give that to you. It's just humanity, it wasn't about religion. So that charity and that heart felt just basic human love. I didn't experience that

and it bothered me. So I can talk about this for hours, I can't talk about it now, I'm not afraid.

Well, and it's funny you're talking to you because it's like I'm talking to a mirror image of myself. What you're just described was your thought process. So whenever I was leaving the I went through several very severely traumatic events, the life-changing events that happened that really shook me. And it was very difficult. But I'm a songwriter, I'm a musician if you can't tell by my background. And I kept getting songs, song after song coming to me. I've mentioned this, I think before. But one of the themes that kept coming was why are we preaching to save the saved? Why are

we not preaching to save the lost? Because it was exactly like you described. It's always a preaching at. It's a preaching, you don't do this, you don't do this. And look at the outside world, they're doing this, we're different than them. It's us versus them. It wasn't a, I feel so sad and sorry for these people who are not going to make it to heaven with this. Let's try to help them, let's try to change them. And that thought just, it was killing me, it was burning me because, like I said, I'm filled with empathy and I'm sad for this, you know, the sense of the world,

like the Bible says to be. And I'm hearing sermons where, no, I have to be this rude and arrogant and, you know, judgmental person. And it really He was outside of my personality to be that.

And then after I left, it wasn't until early versions, I started the support groups and I'm working with people who have escaped and some of the females, everybody's talking with each other and they're talking about what they suffered through in the cult.

And some of the females, I was watching their conversations and they were saying, yeah, it was so hard for me. And they're explaining all the reasons why it's hard. And suddenly it hit me.

Not only was I arrogant and a jerk to the people who were outside of the message, we were arrogant and completely in the wrong to the females in the cult. And I felt guilty for this.

So this led me down a journey where I'm studying, I'm reading the Bible over and over and over to wash all this out of my head. And one passed through, what I did, I made these mental lists of things that I would pay attention to as I read from cover to cover.

One of the things was, okay, what are the women's role in the Bible? And I find great women like Deborah who led the whole nation well respected by Israel. And I'm thinking, how does that apply and fit with this thing that we call the message?

It just can't fit. And like you said, the version of God that they have versus the version we have now, I started studying the ancient cults and mythologies and how they worshipped. And I noticed it was always this God of fear and you may have to sacrifice your child.

You may have to give up everything that you had. You may die because of this God if you hate you. And that's the God we had. We had a God that hated us, not a God of love.

And as you're reading through the New Testament, it says, perfect love casts out all of this fear. Yet we were in a message that the perfect love caused more fear and we were told, quote unquote, perfect love.

So many of the things that you described like it, that was my journey almost exactly. And in sharing this and talking about it, it's been such a freeing and liberating process for me. And that is why I reached out to you to connect and talk about this and let others know that you have worth just because you are.

You have worth, regardless. Female, male, in between, whatever. You have worth just because you are. And that's something that I've had to embody for myself because it was taken away from me. It was coded out of my normal functioning.

And I have worth, regardless of my gender, I have a fully functioning brain that I can use and that I've been given and that thinks differently and that can do things. And everybody has that.

And there is love. after fear. But you have to be brave enough to hold the hand of those who are offering it to you to take that step if you can't do it on your own. And sometimes we sit in a corner and we think, oh, nobody understands. Nobody knows what I've gone through. They just won't get it. Oh, we get it. We get it. You know, and there are so many groups out there and so many people out there who are supporting. You know, I've followed several podcasters. The one, you know, quite a few, I can't predict it to the name. And it's not

just, you know, this cult that people are trapped in and that have such severe damage to their psyche and to themselves. But this has been, you know, put as it's the one true message.

And if you don't follow this, you know, you are eternally lost. And how families are broken because, you know, you are judging them because they are now in the message. And it happened in my heaven. We wouldn't see our cousins and aunts and uncles because they didn't believe it. And unlike, but we are family. Don't we just, you know, can't we just all get along? But as a child, you're not allowed to challenge. You know, I would challenge my dad when we were alone together. I was daddy's girl, as you could probably have made that, you know, gathered. So I would challenge him when we were alone, but I did not challenge

my mom or any of the other elders in the family or in the church. So, yeah, it is, and I see with my siblings, you know, the scars are still there. But it's not a journey that I can take for them. I can just hold it by hand for them to reach out if they need to.

It's difficult. And whenever I first started doing this, I don't know if you know this history or not, but I had a different YouTube site. And the YouTube site name matched my website. The cult attacked it and brought it down because they did not want all this information to be out. But as I was going through this journey and I'm, you know, reading the Bible, I'm trying to make sense of it. I was finding differences between what we were taught and what I was reading. And I would, you know, put these little 15 to 30 minute

clips of me talking about, I found this difference. This is interesting. And I was just putting these things out there. They weren't anything significant. It wasn't until I put out the information about Jim Jones and people's temple of the...

people's temple massacre, that's when they really got heavy, you know, attacking me. But as they're going through that journey, I lost a lot of those videos, so much of this doesn't exist. But it was funny because I'm going through that thought process thinking about, I'm just deeply troubled by how we treated women.

Myself included, we treated women horrifically and we treated people with black skin of different varieties of black skin, we treated them very poorly. And I'm feeling really guilty for this and I'm going through the Bible and reading.

And things were hitting me that, you know, we have the cult-loaded language, but we also have the cult's loaded and pre-programmed Bible verses. We would read this verse and you didn't even have to say all of the cult-loaded language.

You just said the verse name, book in name and, you know, verse number. And one of those verses said that, I will pour my spirit out on all flesh, your sons and daughters will see visions, you probably know the passage.

And I got to thinking, what would happen if a daughter were to have actually prophesied or said that she saw a vision in this movement? They would shut her down immediately. And that's what the Bible is saying is going to happen, right?

So I'm scratching my head thinking, how does that work? How does that matter? And then I got to thinking about the cult's hierarchy, the fiefold ministry hierarchy. There's all of the rank and fall members at this bottom tier.

And then you had the pastors who were like governors, they were more like policemen, like you said. They wanted to govern and make sure that you kept the standards of the cult. And at the very top of our cult was either, was a prophet who we kind of combined prophet and apostle in our, in the message cult.

But the funny part about that is, then I got to think about the fiefold ministry. If Ephesians is correct, and these are the five types of people that will be helping the church grow and learn more about Jesus, what happened to the five and why, why is it a hierarchy?

Why is it a tiered structure with authoritarian control? And then I'm studying Brannemism and how, you know, in the beginning he was kind of supportive of this. But then towards the end, can you imagine if some young man were to say, I have the gift of teaching, and I want to be a teacher in this movement.

No, you must listen to how the prophet taught. I want to be an evangelist and how I want to go to the, well, you need to go to the cult headquarters because they're going to instruct you of what the prophet taught.

So it's like they have no leading of the Holy Spirit. You have to go to the prophet as your Holy Spirit. So this led me down crazy path, but it got to the point where I was thinking, in essence, this movement had taken the role of the Holy Spirit that's in the Scriptures, and they apply that entire role to this dead guy from 1960.

five and how does that help me to have a dead holy spirit from 1965 you've just figured a memory for me earlier on in that segment where you spoke about you know pre-cognitive or prophesying or whatever when I was a child about a second or third year of school today it was about nine or ten eight or nine or somewhere around there I used to have dream now for an eight or nine year old child in this kind of religious environment you know I would dream things and it would happen and for an eight or nine year old back I would it started off with my

grandparents one of my grandparents I dream my granny and part and it hurt me because you know she was in the Mubia and we were in South Africa and it's so far and we only see her once a year so a few days later we got the news that my grandma had part and I didn't tell anybody about it I just kept quiet because I thought the fact that I dreamt it before means that I caused this

and I just kept mum I didn't say anything and then a while after same thing happened my father's brother and a few days later we got the news cousin came to town and I got really scared and then I I was and then it started being in my conscious state as well I would almost like see like little movie and I I didn't know what to do I was afraid I was I was so terrified I couldn't tell anybody because they're gonna blame me they're gonna say I'm causing these people to and these are my family and I shut it down somehow I shut it down I was able to shut it down and I

never you know had I would dream a lot but I would just ignore it and only now in my adult life that started coming up again where I'm very sensitive and I can pick up on people's emotions and I can I I'm dreaming again and it's not wrong it's not something that I'm you know cooking up at night and and and stuff like that I'm quite comfortable talking about it now because it's not manufactured it's something that that just happened but that fear you know from childhood I'm a girl now if if I had to come up with this and say oh well I'm sorry that that accident was

going to happen it like oh shush man what you know just touch you don't know anything. But I saw someone in we had gone out for a family picnic and I saw the accident and she died. That's scary stuff, you know, for a young child and with nobody to talk to.

I see a supervisor just walk in there. My dog is walking around. He hears my son who's out getting ready to mow the lawn. You and I are so much alike it's unbelievable and I want to I want to emphasize something you said because there's a aspect to what you said that I also experienced that people don't understand who don't have this type of thing. So I too, I've mentioned this briefly. I don't want to talk about it too much because in these types of movement people start worshipping you if they sense that you can have any kind of spiritual thing. I had

the same thing. I had dreams and I would watch things happen after my dreams. Not all of them, but sometimes. I think I have mentioned this. This is the only one that I have mentioned. I had this dream. We were sort of a strange from my grandfather, pastor of the Brenham Tabernacle, for years. And I had this dream about him. And as a child, I'm thinking, why am I having this dream?

This, I don't know, I really don't know my grandfather. We move kind of from coast to coast and I just hadn't seen him for a long time. But I had this dream and I walked into his house and I turned to the right and I walked into this room and I saw my grandfather watching television, which in the cult, if you know that the cult is different now, but if you know back then, this would be unbelievable. There's no way that the pastor of the Brenham Tabernacle is watching television. And he preached, he scolded people who did this every Sunday. It was like, like you

said, it was the fear, don't do this, don't do this, don't watch the television. That's a hell in a box. You know, he had all these terms. So as a child, I had this dream and I thought, well, that's kind of silly. And not much longer after that, my dad announces, we're going to go visit grandfather for the first time in a while. I go to his house. The first thing I did when they welcomed me, everybody else went to the kitchen to talk and I darted over to that room and what did I see? But a television, it wasn't like a television with antennas, but he had a VCR and movies galore.

I'm like, I'm looking around thinking, no, this can't be. This just can't be. And I later learned that William Brannum had not just one television in his house, but many televisions in his house.

His children had televisions. Pretty much everything that the Brannum family condemned, they were doing. They had swimming pool in their backyard. We were told, swimming, you can't have the swimming parties. And I have family...

like they'd attended his swimming parties. And so that was the first time I kind of experienced that, but I wanted to say all of that to say this. Number one, that doesn't make me special in any way.

Number two, the difference between what happens when people really have something like this and what you see with these stage acts, like William Brannum, it's always, I did this. I had this happen. Come follow me because I had this thing.

But when it happened to me, it was more like, this is very personal. This isn't for other people. I don't even think I told my parents. I think all of these years, the first time I mentioned that was probably a year ago on the podcast, I've kept it to myself because this is for me.

This is between God and me. If this is God speaking, which I, to this day, I don't know if that was God speaking to me or if it was this weird coincidence because what do I do with this information?

My grandpa has a television. But in either case, it was a personal thing. It wasn't so that people would come and follow me and worship me. So I kept it to myself. And years later, now that I'm going through all of these different ministries and watching, I'm reading through the Voice of Healing magazine, which is basically a generator of stage acts.

And they're all doing the same things that I did as a child who are saying that they are, but they're using it and saying, come follow me, I did this, I did this thing.

And it's so backwards from the way it is if it's real, it is backwards what they're doing. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Branham.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

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You know, to let you onto that about being real and authenticity, the other thing that really, really struck me as a young adult and as a child was the hypocrisy as well. And, you know, the leaders, the so-called leaders and the senior people in the book.

following all that in the religion around the country, you know, you have these celebrity creatures who visit and everybody attends because post so-and-so is preaching today. Same stuff, I never got it, you know, I would always make an excuse not to go to church because I never understood.

And my dad always just gave me that look and he was like, come on, you've got to go. But I don't feel well, like you were fine yesterday and anyway, I'd go and because I need a house and I need food to eat and, you know, someone to pay for my book.

So, you know, I'd hear about, we were much older now, I'd hear about, you know, oh, so the child's supposed to be decent with his daughter or with his, the child's supposed to child.

Not so what are they going to do about it, you know, what are the repercussions? Because that's wrong, that's what's been done to her. And it's just always spent under the carpet and my dad used to get very angry about it and he would, when you were much older, not being very young, but when you were older, you know, late teens early, you know, young adulthood, he would tell us and, and he, he was starting to get very, I could see him starting to pull away in, in the late years and he'd hear so and so did this, so and so, you know, that this, that this child was abused and that child

was abused. I know of very many, of a few people who were abused, who I only learned about later but didn't know at the time and so these are Christian men, why are they going, you know?

And if you think about how they've been programmed around women, a girl child or a female child means nothing because that's still a woman. And then I wonder, you know, what about your own children, how do you feel, do you think that's about your daughter?

You have three daughters, do you think that about your daughter? And those were really difficult conversations to have a loan in your head because it was wrong on every level, religious, ethically, morally, right across the board, it was just wrong, but nothing came of it.

In the sad part of it is the General population of the cult had no idea of many of these things, only those people who were directly connected to them, and I would watch as some of these people, they would get, quote, unquote, restored to their ministry, or however they called it.

So they continued, and their predators, they're still continuing as a predator. And the way that the message works, people, you know, William Brannem is dead. So they'll sit so long under one pastor, and they'll get tired of this because there's no pastor that can reconcile all of the different contradictions in doctrine.

And so they'll go, and there are one doctrinal path, and they'll try to be consistent with this. Well, some of the listeners will recognize, well, wait a minute, William Brannem said the total opposite of what he said, fully unaware that William Brannem said both things.

So the minister thinks he's preaching Brannemism, they think they're preaching against them, and then they migrate to another church. Well, some of the churches that they migrate to might have one of these predators.

I remember thinking not long before we started to leave, I started thinking about the way that they attacked the Catholic church. They really didn't attack it based off of doctrine or anything of substance.

They attacked it simply because they're covering up sex scandals. We would hear this often. Watch what the Catholic church does. Look at the skeletons in their closet. We would hear these sermons like this.

Well, I'm sitting there and I know some of the same things are happening in the cult that we were in. So I'm thinking, well, wait a minute, how is that right? How can we condemn them when we're doing the same exact thing?

And then it was interesting because I'll never forget after I left, I started paying a little bit closer attention to world politics and religion in general. And I started watching the Catholic church started reforming in many areas.

This was one of the areas that largely they started reforming. It still exists. It is a problem that will exist in any denomination of faith, message, Catholic or not. But they're trying, they're making an attempt to correct this.

And I'm watching the cult that we left. There is no attempt. They're not, they're not even acknowledging that it exists. And the problem is when you enable predators and you keep restoring them to their ministries and then they continue with their predatory nature, they're going to always have victims.

So after I went through all of this journey, I'm thinking, I'm so glad I pulled my children out of this. I'm not for just the sake of my children, but my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.

What if they were to accidentally migrate to one of these places? It's horrific. And you know, added to that, there's the, you know, in the society that I grew up in, there was this classism, except the right word to you.

And you had... the elite. You had the national elite and then you had the local elite and then you had the middle layer and then you had the not middle layer. And it wasn't a very overt thing.

It was very subtle, but I used to pick up on it. And my mom was a very compassionate human, very, very generous, spiritually, and she used to be that champion for the forgotten. Often, you know, we'd have to be instead of being out of our friends, on a Saturday, we'd have to be making grocery parcels because we need to take it to the sisters and to, you know, whomever. But there weren't active drives, charity drives for, you know, bring an extra ton of beans or an extra loaf of bread or for those who were struggling. If there was none of

that, it was individual who would do that. And I always just do wonder, look, you know, the churches, I used to attend a Catholic school because they had a music school. So I used to do piano and I used to attend the Catholic school and the charity drive there used to embarrass me because I called myself a Christian, but really used to do that. As a family, we would, you know, we would do that. I'm not saying that nobody in the church or in the community wasn't charitable, but it wasn't an active thing. And for me, if I ever played a food every night, I would like to

think about somebody else as well and shame I played a food with somebody else. Because there are those people inside you who don't have, you know, enough. And I wondered about that, you know, and people would be driving flashy cars and living in fancy houses and justifying why that was okay. But the charity wasn't there. Charity wasn't there. And like I said, I did this process of self-examination after leaving. I wanted to make myself better. I realized that I was in this thing that was making me worse. I wanted to be better. And we tried many different denominations

after leaving. I don't know that we'll ever settle on anything. I'm kind of like you. I'm more, it's more of a personal thing. It's not about an organization or anything like this. But one of the ones that we tried.

Simply because it was one that was so strongly condemned, was the Methodist church. If you know the history, the Methodists were strongly condemned because they were, quote, cold and formal. That was the cold and formal church, right?

So we went. And the first thing that hit me was they were so far less cold and formal than the message church was that we were in. The message church, you had to be rigid and structured and you couldn't, you go into the church service, it was like a bunch of robots, that's what it felt like.

And then I go to this place and they were respectful, yet they were not cold towards you. And they, anybody's welcome, you can come in. But here locally they support the homeless. There's a large homeless community in this area.

And that was one of the primary initiatives is to go help the homeless. And they would go try to get other churches to donate and help the people who have no food, who have no shelter.

And it's right here in the heart of this area, you can't get anybody who's in the message cult to acknowledge that this exists because they're in the cold and formal church. And then it really sunk in whenever we had this series of tornadoes that hit this area.

And it just tore through, say, my brother-in-law lost everything. They just happened to be hunkered down into the, I think the bathtub and the whole house was ripped around away from them as they're in the bathtub.

That's how bad this was. There were people who died. And the cult headquarters put out this statement, not a single believer was killed in this thing. And I'm reading this, while reading the news, wait a minute, there were Christians who were killed.

This hit, this hit the community. There were Christians who lost everything. And they did have an initiative to help and support. But it was centralized only to the people who believed in William Brannum.

If you believe Brannum, we'll help you rebuild your house. If you don't, we won't. That was basically what it was, and that really hit me hard because I recognized that when I was in it, my mindset was the same way, and I would have not seen any problem with this.

I would have thought that I was doing God a service, but in effect, I'm denying everything that Jesus said about how to treat people and how to treat others. And I realized that this is just, this is not me, I cannot be like this.

You know, they talk about the ABC, I don't know if it's the general thing, or if it was just, you know, they're like, on in our community, the ABC is a Christianity, what it is, that's ABC is Christianity, it's charity.

And it's just acknowledgment, or acknowledging another human being, without race, without religion, without dogma, anything. It's just, fellow human, brotherly love, they call it? And these are the basics that I used to question.

I never questioned the dogma or the beliefs and the doctrines and all, because I never understood it. It never made sense to me, so I never understood it, I never questioned it. But the basics are what I questioned.

And when I was about 19 or 20 years old, my father decided to leave and the father, the head of the house, and if the father says, we don't go, we don't go. So there was a thing between, I don't know what happened between them, him and the poster and the upper echelons of the management team.

There was lies about my sister and I, and I don't want to go into the details of it. And it was, that's the Lord, it was the truth, but it was said that it was true.

And that was the turning point for me that I'm done. If my dad picks me out of the house now, that's okay, I'm going to find a job or go somewhere or, you know, but I'm not going back because it's not true.

But my father decided that now he's also heading now. We don't know the full story. My father's now passed away a long time ago. My mom won't tell us. And it's okay, because I don't really need to know, but that was the turning point, you know.

And then I decided, well, I'm going to leave, because we lived in a small town in the northern part of Natal, which is near Durban, just to give you some context. If you know the South African geography, and I decided to be home, and I moved to Cape town, and I've been here for the past 35, 32, 33 years, and I've never regretted it.

But this is where I've been through my cleansing process, my deconditioning, and unprogramming process away from, because I didn't move from Newcastle to Cape Town to a message community. I didn't move to a message community.

And you know what I noticed when I caught you? was these non-missed people, so kind to me, they are so generous and it's through them that I made it, their support and we were taught that that would have your best interests apart. You can't trust them, you know, they're not people of the Lord and yet these non-people of the Lord that helped me, you know, get to, to even stand on my own feet. Because leaving home as a 21-year-old, I was still very naive, very immature because we had been raised in such a protected community. So I had to learn how to be an adult on my own, you know,

with all these worldly people and and I turned out all right, you know. Yeah, that feeling was overwhelming for me because I'll never forget we were in one of the churches that we attended, I won't give the names, but we were in a Sunday school and Sunday school for me growing up was, we're going to sit and listen to a man who's telling us stories of how blessed he was to be near the prophet during the days when the prophet was alive. That was Sunday school. You might hear a Bible verse, I think most of the cult churches did open with reading of the Psalms, they would read

a verse in the congregation and read it would do the sort of thing. But then the whole rest of Sunday school wasn't learning the Bible, it wasn't what is actually Sunday school, it was literally stories that and if you go to a church long enough, you hear the same stories like five times. I wanted to hear more. Well, we're attending this, we're attending this church and they're having Sunday school and I'll never forget it, it was like a classroom, they had this blurred up, this, it wasn't a chalkboard, it was one with the pens where you could write and they would say, now we're going

through this passage and this book from the Old Testament and now Egypt is right here and he would draw like a map and over here you have all he's describing all the nations and he's talking about these people believed and worshiped this pagan god and these people worshiped this other, I mean it was, it was making it come alive to me and I was sitting there just can complete all that how did I miss this growing up? All we heard were these stories of this dead guy and so I'm listening to this and towards the end they would always have somebody pray. Well, one time

they called on this lady to pray who just happened to be wearing shorts and I looked over at her and I'm out of this mindset, I no longer even have a problem with women wearing shorts at that point in time but when I saw it in a church setting I was like, oh my gosh, what do I do? Do I, do I listen? Do what's the protocol here? Because I was raised though.

right? And then she prayed this prayer. She started crying in the middle of it, praying for the sins of the city and how she wished that every single person could know the God that she knows and be saved. And how can we help these people? How can we reach them? What can we do? Show us the way to help more people? That was her prayer. And I felt so little in that moment. I'm trying not to get emotional now, but I realized what a big it I was, what a fool I was. My entire life 37 years

I was in this and I was so arrogant. I thought others were lesser than me. We were the elite, like you said. And here's a person who I'm taught to condemn and a church that I'm taught is cold and formal and I should condemn. And yet they're the opposite of cold and formal. These are really, really good people. What do I do with this information? Right? And we tried multiple churches. We tried, you know, still, like I said, I don't think we'll ever land anywhere, but we tried several after this and everyone that we tried. It was the same way. Not a single one was as cold

and formal as the cold we had left. So it is a life changing difference. And I'm so glad that you went through it. If you could go back in time and give some encouragement to your younger self who's struggling with this analytical mind like I had and all of these thoughts and what advice would you give yourself? What encouragement would you give yourself? Keep pushing through.

What you see is what you see and it's not wrong. Keep pushing through and listen to yourself. Listen. Because we all have that little voice within it and you can call it whatever you want to call it. The Holy Spirit or your whatever. Listen to it. Because I do believe that we go through our life journey for a reason. If my life journey had been cushy and soft and marshmallow and no issues, then I would not have been forged into who I am today. And none of us would be forged into who we are today because of what we've come through. And I see this pathway

as a forge. Because now I can sit and have a conversation with you with very little emotion in terms of anger or resentment or anything like that towards the people that I've been referring to that I've been talking about.

And it's about honoring the forge that has brought you to where you are today. And I believe that there's a reason why you and I are having this conversation today why you and I forget your colleague, Charles, yes, why you are doing the work that you are doing to bring to light what's been going on.

And you had to go through that in order to be able to bring this to light and to be able to understand when somebody has a conversation with you and say, I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'm going to lose my entire community.

I'm going to be afraid. I'm afraid I'm going to lose everything I know you find meaning.

You understand that because you've gone through that. There's homelessness. It was difficult and you know, at times it's still difficult. We recently lost my mother-in-law and when my family cut me off, my mother-in-law became my new mother.

So for the past, you know, since 2012, I have leaned very strongly. She was my support pillar. She too was able to escape the message and it's very difficult at times. But at the same time, in many ways, it's less difficult.

Even through all of the pain that we went through and all of the people cutting us off, what I tell people whenever they leave this is, yes, it's going to hurt. It's going to be the hardest thing that you've ever, ever done.

But if you work hard and build a new community of people, you'll find that there are people who will stick by you no matter what happens. You could do something that even offends them and they will still stick with you.

We never had this in the cult. And it was very evident by how quickly we were cut off. So it was difficult and I'm glad that you were able to come through. I'm glad that myself, my family, my children were able to escape this and learn how good life can be if you don't live, like I'm speaking on my behalf, not chairs, but if you don't live as an arrogant person, how good life can be, it's so much better.

So thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, it's really been lovely chatting to you. And I just want to say one thing though, don't beat yourself up about, you know, how you were programmed to be.

You had no control over that. You now have control over the choices that you make. And when people, when I'm coaching or when I speak to people and I talk to them about, or they talk to me about, well, how could you be so cruel and how could you give this?

And he did this and he did. look at it from a different perspective, look at it from the perspective, well he was taught to be that way, he was taught to be dominant, to be dominant, he was taught that he was to dominate and to be the head of the household. And what does that mean to you? And when you look at it from that perspective, you as much the man is as much a victim of the programming as weak of women from the receiving in thought, you know, you didn't know better. Now you do.

Now that you do know better, I might judge you if you do something different now.

Hopefully I won't be arrogant to you now. No, you're nothing, arrogance is not a word I would Well, thank you so much. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org. From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.