Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God

In My Humble Opinion
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So I’ve been on a cult kick lately and stumbled upon the HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (TV Mini Series 2023) - IMDb

It’s about the “Love Has Won” cult (see Love Has Won - Wikipedia), where a McDonalds manager named Amy Carlson became Jesus and Joan of Arc and Cleopatra, part of a pantheon that also includes fellow “Galactics” Robin Williams, Donald Trump, John Lennon, St. Germain, The Crocodile Hunter, Princess Leia, and I think Spock:

(I can’t even make this stuff up)

They spent some time in Mt. Shasta, CA (where I once lived, apparently just barely missing them by a few years). All in all, it didn’t seem like the worst cult to be in… they collectively owned a big, beautiful cabin, smoked lots of weed, had lots of gorgeous (if slightly deranged) members, partied and danced a lot, led online guided meditation and detox sessions and sold drop-shipped wellness products.

The overall focus of the cult was in spreading love and kindness and miracles (and colloidal silver and the occasional accidental pregnancy) while waiting for eventual divine ascension via a “cloud ship” (their term for particularly fluffy and pretty white clouds that looked like spaceships). It was unfiltered hippie-dippiedom mixed with a (un)healthy lack of skepticism and an utter suspension of any and all sorts of disbelief… but, you know, as far as cults go, at least it was one of the less doomsday-murdery ones. They didn’t have some apocalyptic agenda, weren’t hell-bent on world domination, mostly just invited other lost souls to join their happy-go-lucky high-as-a-kite alternate divine dimension.

All I’m saying is… sure beats working at McDonald’s…

Their founder-prophet-galactic did eventually “ascend” (read: die horribly from alcohol and colloidal silver poisoning). The documentary starts off with a scene of her discolored corpse wrapped in a REI sleeping bag, surrounded by Christmas lights in her bedroom turned makeshift shrine, all while everyone lived “normally” there waiting for her to wake back up…

The documentary mini-series is well worth a watch, and has numerous interviews with the cult members. Kinda a fascinating group, and I’m surprised they’re not more well-known or discussed.

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It was part and parcel of that long forgotten epoch of madness often referred to as The Pandemic. Podcasters were all over this story but it literally had no legs after 2021.

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Didn’t she also have cancer, which she “treated” with colloidal silver?

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We watched this a few months ago, so my memory might be fuzzy. When her body was found by the authorities, weren’t her eyeballs shrunken or missing. She had essentially become a mummy, so perhaps that helped with the smell of decay. She certainly was an interesting color of blue.

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Oh, really? I don’t remember the eyes much, but yes, her corpse was quite discolored (blue from the overdose of colloidal silver, I think — you could see her getting bluer and bluer as it progressed).

I was more taken back that she was wrapped up in a REI sleeping bag… it’s just such a nonchalant, ordinary thing to be juxtaposed next to this mummified cult leader. That was an overall source of disquiet for me, seeing these otherwise normal-seeming people drink the same whiskeys, pull up a playlist, livestream themselves… all perfectly regular activities, and then suddenly talk about their god’s cloudship ascension. Makes me wonder if it’s really that easy for anyone to slip into a cult given the right circumstances.

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I found a satisfying answer to this question when I tried to define the difference between a cult and a religion.

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Yes…? Don’t leave us hanging :slight_smile:

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Sorry. If it’s hard to define that difference, and huge swaths of humanity have subscribed to one religion or another through the ages. . . then the answer is yes. It really is easy for anyone to slip into a cult/religion given the right circumstances.

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No crap, look at the MAGA cult.

Lots of people I thought were perfectly normal a few years ago fell right into that crevasse.

I cannot be around them.

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Ah, gotcha. I thought you were going to make a joke at first.

But yeah, that’s a good point. Their Mother God honestly didn’t even seem that bad compared to some other ones. Less vengeful, definitely, if a tad prone to over-partying.

I had never considered joining a cult before, but watching this, I almost half-asked myself, “huh, I wonder if I could pretend to believe just to go hang out with them by the lake…” It didn’t seem like such a terrible life, except for having to shill shitty wellness products to make ends meet. Everybody else in the cult aside from the “god” figures actually seemed quite happy and healthy, though of course that was also part of their on-stream persona.

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Someone tried to remake the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover?

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As blue as this guy?

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Maybe not Na’vi Blue, but over a few years’ time, she went from:

To:

A combination of severe anorexia, alcoholism, malnutrition, and colloidal silver poisoning. It was pretty sad; her family kept trying to intervene and get her help, but the other cult members stopped her from going to the hospital (supposedly following her own wishes), and the saner Father Gods she partnered with soon became replaced by wackier true believer Father Gods that fed further into her delusions.

Her followers did not seem to quite partake to the same level, and did not have such extreme changes to their physical appearance.

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So in the picture in the OP, everyone I recognize is dead except Donald Trump. Was there any reason for him being included pre-mortem?

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Wishful thinking? :laughing:

I was surprised to see him included there — this cult started right before/during that era when the new-agey alt-health movement merged with (what was at the time) the “alt”-right. He doesn’t have a whole lot in common with anyone else in the pantheon, I think. Probably most of them would be insulted by his inclusion and cast try to cast him off Olympus…

The documentary didn’t really get into their politics much. I think one of the cult members described themselves as something like a “hippie redneck”. Mt. Shasta, when I lived there, was quite a purple town… a mix of values-based democrats and lifestyle-based conservatives (of various stripes), plus an extreme dose of spiritual woo and too many crystal shops. It’s very much the kind of place that would breed a pantheon like that.