The Daleks and Cybermen of Dr. Who and the Borg of Star Trek the Next Generation and its spinoffs give us an effective aphorism of religion -- and this applies beyond the confines of the church of gods. The root of the problem is the seeking of perfection without bounds and limits. Nothing but perfection matters: Not humanity, not individuality, not love or empathy and sometimes, not even money and greed. What matters is that damned perfection -- as defined by the collective.Anything different than the collective is to be absorbed. The perfection is to be acquired, all else is discarded.At the core of seeking perfection is evil. The end justifies the means. The collective is protected. Worse than that, it is unassailable because, after all, isn't seeking perfection the perfect goal? Methods don't matter. The individual doesn't matter. The higher concept of perfection is what matters. If you have to murder, maim, dismember, destroy in the name of perfection, it is but a small price to pay. The seeking of perfection becomes the perfect justification to insulate from any accountability.Thus we see the seeking of perfection of many groups that "suck", such as the Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Radical Moslems, the churches of God all together representing the ideal perfection and the seeking of perfection. The religions are self-righteous and their goals look to be unassailable, but the fruit of their doing is a lifestyle and lifetime of misery for the individual sucked into their eschatological black hole.In the end, they are all evil to one degree or another. It isn't that power corrupts, it is the flawed view of what perfection is and more importantly how to attain it.And in such a venue of the Church Corporate which has adopted the worst of the Corporate Model and implemented it badly, the seeking of perfection will destroy us all if it is not checked.Fortunately, the church of gods has embedded in it a self-destruct mechanism. The focused power has been dispersed through entropy, beginning with those who began to see that the collective was nowhere near the perfection it claimed to have. Affiliations won't help much when the entire collective is so flawed that it cannot survive intact.
---Douglas Becker discussing the unhealthy perfectionist attitudes in the XCGs and other cults
source Gavin Rumney's Ambassador Watch blog
