Or Mecca

A lawyer representing some of the disaffected from a sect on the West Coast, whose current leader has pled guilty to unlawful touching and intimate advances and is now awaiting sentencing, is calling on Mr Luxon to take drastic action and shut the estimated NZ$50,000,000 outfit down, supposedly because two “Leaders” have been found guilty of intimacy crimes.

The founder, Australian Neville Cooper, started his personal “Christian” sect, named Gloriavale in acknowledgement of Cooper’s first wife, at “Springbank” near Cust on the Rangiora Oxford Road in 1969, around the same time as another bunch of God’s chosen ones began Camp David at nearby Waipara to prepare their followers to receive and protect Jesus upon his return to Earth.

My dear old Dad asked a simple question, why Waipara?

I became involved in that escapade when illegal arms were purloined by ex-NZ Service personal, by then members of Doctor Metcalf’s Full Gospel Mission, ostensibly to “protect Jesus from the hoards of Johnny-Come-Lately’s wanting to share in the wonderment.

I was the immediate Past Chairman of the Waipara School Committee and my successors asked If I would front the media as two of the staff of Waipara School were members of that sect, more commonly known locally as The God squad. A Mr Williams, who had come to us as “Infant Teacher” and who had persuaded fellow teacher Mr Lewis to become a member of the Metcalf sect.

A note of levity here: my dear old Aunt who lived in Taumarunui saw her Nephew on Black and White TV, wearing a dark Green crewneck sweater and a white T-shirt, and immediately became alarmed that I had become a padre.

Now there is a remarkable reluctance for anyone, media, politician or concerned citizen, to openly criticise Islam, and all saints suggest there is plenty to criticise in that outfit, founded by a paedophile who took a 9 year old girl as a wife. Yet these equally wacky sects seem to attract endless attacks from various self-appointed arbiters of Morality. Dear old Brian Henry just a latest.

I mean who amongst the modern liberal minded sees blindfolding and casting Homosexuals off the roof of a multi-story building as a valid response to their sexual proclivity?

Now the Cooperites who split from a Rangiora based “New LIfe Church” over a disagreement between Cooper and another spiritual leader, headed 10 Kms west to Springbank in 1969. They eventually outgrew that Cust site and around 1990 began a relocation to Lake Haupiri on the South Eastern edge of the Grey River Valley, in bushland near the edge of the Arthurs Pass National Park and the Lake Sumner Forest park.

Now don’t get me wrong , these religious fanatics with weird views on religion and social structures have absolutely zero attraction to me in any way, they are little different to Catholicism except “The Church of Rome” began a whole lot earlier, in fact even some 1400 years before the paedophile nomad started Islam, but has a recorded history greatly more oppressive and cruel than these sects. Just have a little look at, say the Spanish Inquisition? They do not appeal to me to any degree, having the converts handing their sovereign right of humanity to depraved leaders, clearly some of whom believe they are so special they embrace Orwell’s “some are more equal than others”.

Hence the resulting cases where at least two of the sect leaders, first Neville Cooper, aka Hopeful Christian, and now Howard Temple, have ended up convicted of some very basic and very sick unlawful activities.

It is rumoured Stephen Standfast will take the leadership role after Temple’s fate is decided at sentencing.

History is littered with horrendous examples where religious enthusiasm hands the cognitive abilities of adherents to depraved leaders. James “Jim” Jones who began in the US, then moved his outfit to Guianna in Northern South America, only to eventually find investigations and allegations getting too near, and threatening to disallow continuation, resorted to becoming involved in a violent end to the entire sect in a mayhem of murder and suicide that included US politicians trying to understand how radical things had become at “Jonestown”.

Now I am basically as confronted with religious extremes as any sane person, but if Mr Henry wishes to become the White Knight over a few hundred sect members, who surely must be reasonably content to hand over their existence to a coterie of suspects, illustrated by the simple fact that the numbers abandoning the outfit are so few in number, why does he not include Catholicism and Islam in his twenty first century “crusade”. God alone apparently knows of many recorded and documented acts of depravity far more lethal and damaging than anything Gloriavale has so far produced.

But then I struggle to truly understand how people hand pretty much all they have as individuals to the Mongrel Mob, Black Power, The Filthy few et al. Yet they do and it does not benefit society much in that “joining up” of dots of humanity.

On tour around three years ago, I spent a night at a Motor Camp on the shores of Lake Brunner at Moana, when a previous firestorm had erupted over Gloriavale and its establishment. Now as a normal average Whitish Female, the camp owner had no issues with what was going on at nearby Lake Haupiri, very much in the vein of live and let live, their choice. She did have some social contact with the sect in other ways and was very accepting and non judgemental about the numerically few members of the Gloriavale sect.

So Mr Henry, perhaps there are far greater dangers to a free and stable New Zealand from Jihadists and their useful idiots screeching “From the River to the Sea”, wearing tea towels indicating they fully support annihilation of every last Jew, and handing the Lands of Israel over to a bunch of terrorists that even every other Arab nation wants nothing to do with, than these poor buggers whose dress, and commitment seem to denote a subservience many will always wonder at?