The Holy Bible instructs us to be watchful and wary because false messiahs exist in the world and we need to know the truth about these people for they can easily lead even the elect (children of God) away from His flock, like lambs attacked by wolves. These false messiahs don't need to use truth or even logic to “enlighten” people, they simply use their limitless charm.
Charles Manson is one of these false messiahs. Using nothing but charm and hallucinogenic drugs, he was able to control the minds of dozens of followers throughout the late 1960's. He had them convinced that he was Jesus Christ, and that his will was divine. The women were led to believe that they ranked below dogs in the hierarchy of the “family” and they were all right with that, because Charlie said it was so.
If Charley felt like it, he could simply kill someone without a second thought, and his followers would casually dispose of the remains, laughing and smiling, talking about releasing that person to the “one”, or the “oneness” of the universe. More often than not however, Charlie told someone else to do his dirty work for him, and they would comply in a heartbeat. This is because he had them all convinced that there really is no such thing as death, it is merely an illusion.
The danger of this kind of cult is that the truth vanishes into the debris of years of brainwashing, making it difficult, if not impossible for the members to think for themselves, or to distinguish truth from fantasy, fact from fiction. Their reality becomes what the false messiah makes it, putting his followers at his complete mercy.
It happened with Charles Manson, it happened with Jim Jones, and David Koresh. Whenever people place their trust, worship, and spiritual faith in another human being, calamity is almost always the result. People tend to be somewhat egocentric to begin with, and these religious leaders seem to be even more so to the point where they actually believe in their own divinity and immortality.
Whatever Manson did, his followers did also. When he carved an X in his forehead and proclaimed that he had “x-ed himself from this world”, his followers did the same, taking knives and razor blades and carving large X's into their own foreheads. Later, when he changed that X into a Swastika, the family did the same without question and with few exceptions.
Jesus warned against people following false messiahs, by stating that we should test the spirits that we encounter. Those who deny Christ are the anti-Christ and should be avoided. The reason for this is only common sense, because he that is in the world is weaker than He that is Christ. Any spirit denying the divinity of Jesus, is of the devil, the arch-enemy of God.
Cults tend to distinguish themselves from other religions by their socialistic nature. The members give up their lives, their properties, and their families and give everything they own to the religious cult to which they belong. They also tend to lose their identities in the process, becoming whoever the cult leader says they are. This happened with Charles Manson's followers, when they allowed him to give them new names when they came to be a part of his “family”.
These people are usually taught some extremely far-fetched “gospel” created in the twisted mind of the cult's leader, and they believe every word of it to be true. It is difficult to get these people away from their new-found faith because they firmly believe that everything they are being taught is absolute truth, and proof is never a requirement for that truth. It could be argued that virtually every religion in the world works along the same principle of “faith” in teaching, but with a cult these teachings are usually destructive in some way.
Mass hysteria, mass hypnotism, mass drug addictions, all of these things abound in a cultic environment, as well as sexually uninhibited behaviors, usually resulting in orgies and group rapes. Virtually nothing good can come out of these cults simply because of their extremism. The world really needs to know that religious faith and cultism are two completely different things, and should not be associated one with the other.
In short, Manson family values are not what God intended for His children, and it is not in our best interest to get involved with cults and cultists. Hence, the warning He gave us to test all the spirits to see if they are of God or not. Evil is not just a fantasy from 2,000 years ago. It exists today in very real forms, a fact which should not be overlooked or simply forgotten. If you think that the Charles Manson situation was an isolated incident that could never be repeated….think again. This sort of thing happens all the time…perhaps even next door to you.
