CULTS CONDEMNING CULTS.

When I was a high school student, handing out tracts on the street was a popular activity among religious practitioners. This was especially true of cults. Even when most pedestrians tossed aside the handbills, true believers persisted in importuning passers by with their messages. The litter from discarded paper became so serious that the City of Toronto banned tract missions.

In the autumn of 1974, the followers of a man calling himself Moses David fanned out onto the streets of Edmonton with tracts containing the sayings of their leader. Being targeted to teenagers, these mini epistles appealed to me.

From my upcoming How I Was Razed memoir, here is how I, who was also a member of an obscure cult, became acquainted with this equally obscure cult.

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This misplaced confidence caused me to defer unquestioningly to Brother H in all spiritual matters. "What are these Moses David people all about?" I asked him after supper one Wednesday in November. "Some guy on the street gave this Mo Letter to me but I don't understand it."

He examined the tract that I handed him, read it over, and came to a conclusion. "This is a cult. If this Moses David man was like either Moses or David, he would recognize that Jesus is God. I advise you to have nothing to do with these people."

As soon as Sister E drove me home after the meeting, I gathered up every Mo Letter I had collected. "It's too bad they're not of God," I said to myself. "I liked the comics." I sighed and tossed them into the garbage. After that evening, I refused to take the tracts that the Moses David followers offered. The fact that I myself was in a cult didn't occur to me.

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My previous memoirs, When a Man Loves a Rabbit (Learning and Living With Bunnies) and Deliverance From Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) are featured At my InScribe writers group page.