Flor Edwards wuchs in der Sekte 'The Children of God' auf. Ihre gesamte Kindheit kannte sie nur, was man ihr in der Sekte beibrachte, und lebte jeden Tag in dem Glauben, im Alter von 12 Jahren sterben zu müssen.
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00:00Where would we be without love?
00:04How many children do you have Fiona?
00:05The apocalypse was going to happen when the world was going to burn up into oblivion
00:09and only people who were saved would go up to heaven
00:12and everyone else would either stay in purgatory or go to hell.
00:15So it was our job to offer every single person on earth salvation.
00:20Love is going to conquer the world.
00:22I have seven.
00:23Seven children.
00:25Love is going to conquer the world.
00:27Nobody joins a cult.
00:28Nobody wakes up in the morning and says,
00:30you know what, I'm going to join this cult.
00:32No one even knew it was a cult until way later.
00:34Conquer the world.
00:36I believe it.
00:37I believe it.
00:38I believe it.
00:38I believe it.
00:39Love is going to conquer the world.
00:41My name is Flora Edwards and I grew up in the apocalyptic cult known as the Children of God.
01:01The Children of God was a group that started on the shores of Huntington Beach.
01:05I always say it had very humble beginnings.
01:10Father David was the leader.
01:12He was the son of an evangelist preacher.
01:16And he came out to California and wanted to give the young people something to live for.
01:21And it just was a bunch of young people during the 1960s trying to get off of drugs and as they put it high on Jesus.
01:29I always point out the three main teachings of the Children of God.
01:32One, it was apocalyptic.
01:34So they believed that the world was going to end.
01:37The date for the end was 1993.
01:39The second one was that he believed that the West was evil.
01:44And the third belief, he sort of wanted to adopt this new belief system that sex was a part of God's love.
01:50So he had some very controversial beliefs around sex and the body.
01:54People always want to know how did it turn from something that was good and innocent to something that was actually quite dark.
02:14My answer to that is the adults had to find a way to control the children because we weren't there on our own free will.
02:21They were raising us to basically save the world.
02:24There were a lot of reports of incest within the group or encouraging children to have sex with other children.
02:42There were incidents where even within Father David's own family, incest, he had this conflict between his commitment to serve God and his sexual desire.
02:54He had drinking problems, he was a sex addict, narcissist, just all the different things that come with the cult leader.
03:03He was also very charismatic, he was also very intelligent, very brilliant.
03:07He would not have been able to gather such a large group of people if he didn't have some sort of enticing quality to him.
03:15Please can I be a member of your club?
03:17Leaving the cult was very difficult because we had been completely cut off from the world.
03:22My parents had no education, no money.
03:25Everyone inside was terrified to leave.
03:27It's like they stay and have this community of people or they leave and die, basically.
03:33And a lot of them actually, they ended up committing suicide when they left.
03:42I did realize that there was tremendous beauty in my childhood.
03:46People always want like a sad sob story.
03:48There was awful things that went on, but this was my story to tell.
03:54There was awful things that went on, but this was my story to tell.