“You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate”
As a professional in the organization Training In Power: A Spiritual Journey of Service, you are ethically obliged to take seriously the matters brought forward by members and ex- members alike. In your professional life these obligations extend into legal as well as ethical areas. If you promote the training organization as an educational body and certified discipline yet fail to add the fact that it is a church, a belief system a religious practice, you are not fulfilling your professional requirements minimally.
If you do not let the public, education body, potential student know the risks of this training and the current scrutiny it is under by ex members, you run the risk of misrepresentation. If you advertise the training as a mental health organization, you had better have the legal papers to back such claims. If you are unwilling to discuss the issues brought forward and outright disregard your peers, who are professionals like you in the Social, Educational, Professional and Health fields, then you are not only showing a lack of professionalism, you are also promoting ignorance and blind submission to an ideology, one that is above and beyond current professional decorum, and is culpable.
To dismiss or disregard stories of abuse and slander as well as severe mental cruelty among other things, or to be unwilling to even read these honest writings of your peers shows a lack of professionalism and outright censorship.
If you were to disregard evidence in this way in your professional lives there would likely be serious consequences for such negligence. Emotionally based belief systems that will not allow questioning or opposition undermines the very fibers of the institutions you work for and study at. This blind negligence further undermines democracy, freedom of speech, and critical analysis, all of which are constitutionally intertwined with your professional status. Opposition is welcome discourse in most educational and professional institutions. You may as well throw your professional credentials out the window when you throw out logical debate.
If under pressure your reaction is to repress rather than open discourse, this fits the scathing, if realistic, definition of ideology in John Ralston Saul’s book The Doubters Companion, A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense –
“Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power….Which is ideology (as opposed to fiction)? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.”
(Name withheld by request)