{"id":49801,"date":"2013-07-14T20:48:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T04:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49801"},"modified":"2013-07-14T20:54:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T04:54:18","slug":"the-moonies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49801","title":{"rendered":"The Moonies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was 12 years old and living at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley when the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jim_Jones\">Jim Jones murder\/suicide of over 900 people took place in Guyana<\/a>. The religion had been big in the San Francisco Bay Area and suddenly we Seventh-Day Adventists were talking about cults and whether or not we were one. <\/p>\n<p>There were many Moonies (members of the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unification_Church\">Unification Church<\/a>) near us and I heard that Moonies were a cult. They operated a golf course in <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pope_Valley,_California\">Pope Valley<\/a>, <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.yelp.com\/biz\/aetna-springs-golf-course-pope-valley\">Aetna Springs<\/a>. During summers in high school, my friends and I used it frequently. <\/p>\n<p>One Sabbath afternoon in eighth grade while I was living apart from my parents who were in Washington DC, I took a drive with the Muth family and we ran into this Moonie kid Mrs. Muth knew and I got all excited, thinking he&#8217;d have horns or be terribly deformed or something and I was stunned when Mrs. Muth talked to him like he was a normal human being. <\/p>\n<p>I never had any non-Adventist friends until my dad got kicked out of the Church&#8217;s ministry in September of 1980. I never knowingly met a Jew until arriving at UCLA in the fall of 1988. I didn&#8217;t grow up relating to the world at large. It seemed like a scary place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was 12 years old and living at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley when the Jim Jones murder\/suicide of over 900 people took place in Guyana. The religion had been big in the San Francisco Bay Area and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49801\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventist","category-personal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49801"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49806,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49801\/revisions\/49806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}