The Golden Calf

8. Attempts To Control Many Aspects of Adherents Lives:

I have already demonstrated how this business is designed to control the thinking and actions of its members. Another way this is done is through ‘counseling with up-line’. The up-line counselor, however, has an immediate monetary interest in his or her distributors purchasing lots of network products. Also, depending on his or her level in the business, he or she stands to gain financially from the purchase of tapes, books, and function tickets by the counselee and the people in their group. He or she has also been indoctrinated to believe that their business is the ‘greatest business in the world’ and the ‘only thing out there’, that its right to do it, and that ‘anyone can make it big’. Some of them even believe that anyone who does not ‘sell out’ to the business is either stupid or crazy. This means that up-line advice can be biased to say the least. Much harm has been done by up-line counseling.

Christians who are making life-changing decisions based on up-line counseling and know or strongly suspect that they are counseling with a non-Christian would do well to consider the following scriptural directive:

"Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers." (2 Cor. 6:14)

If you are being encouraged by an up-line counselor to transgress the laws of God, please consider Psalm 1: 1. "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers".

Intrusion into and control of adherents’ private lives in order to mislead and exploit them by leaders of pseudo-Christian cults is well known.