As we swing into spring, we are starting a new campaign. If you have been shunned by a religious group or new age cult or know someone who has, we invite you to show your support for victims worldwide by placing a sign in your window that says, END SHUNNING NOW!
This undertaking is geared at raising public awareness about the harm that is being inflicted on a massive scale by high-control groups that insist that others accept their teachings or face continual shunning.
The Public Spin
"People are free to leave anytime they want."
The Reality
People who leave are shunned by the group, completely cut off by former friends and family still in the group. This continues indefinitely. The only way to have it reversed is to return to the group and accept their teachings.
Why So Harmful?
These groups will claim they are in favor of religious freedom but the only religious freedom that is allowed is the group's freedom to teach their views. No one else is allowed to exercise freedom of conscience and belief.
Accountability
Groups that teach and enforce ostracism and shunning, that direct members to cut off and shun friends and family forevermore, need to be held to account for promoting harmful, psychologically-damaging teachings that inflict a lifetime of suffering on so many.
While freedom of religion should allow for personal conscience, it should never be used as a platform to promote perpetration of psychological/emotional abuse, never used as a means to coerce, punish and victimize others by destroying critically important relationships. This imposes a socially destructive viewpoint on members that they are expected to implement and it imposes a lifetime of suffering on victims. No group should have the right to do this.
Worldwide Movement to Bring an End to Shunning
This campaign is the start of a worldwide movement to:
- Raise public awareness.
- Alert lawmakers to the damage shunning causes.
- Bring about changes in laws.
- Ensure that groups that teach (in talks/printed materials) that members MUST shun someone else forever after, are penalized for encouraging/promoting abuse of others.
It takes only minutes to make and put a sign up in your window. Will you do so?
In the Bible, Christians were exhorted to forgive repeatedly, not shun perpetually.
Freedom of Religion Should Never Mean Freedom to Harm
Rights are relative... They have to be. Freedom to drive does not mean freedom to drive dangerously.
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