His philosophy was encapsulated in "The Law of Love" written in March 1974. The copy exhibited to the Plaintiff's affidavit contains a singularly disgusting picture. I find it blasphemous. In the background was Christ crucified, "God's lamb." Lying in similar cruciform position on her back was a naked lady with a large nail driven into her vagina ("Your lamb?"). The captions were, "Can a couch be your cross? Are you willing to be nailed? The law of love!" A similar picture appeared some 4 years later in the letter "You are the Love of God", written to encourage Flirty Fishing, with this passage:-
"Every one of you girls who spreads out your arms and your legs on the bed for those men are just like Jesus, exactly like Jesus."
"The Law of Love" is another letter on "All things" He wrote in March 1974:-
"We are the last church! We are God's last church, the last step in God's progress towards total freedom for his church and the last chance to prove that the ultimate church can be trusted with total freedom in this last generation".
To understand that one has to remember that Berg is the End Time prophet who will lead his people into the millennium where they will enjoy a thousand years of sexual freedom. Then followed an important passage:-
"This last generation of the church will probably have as much trouble in handling such freedom as did its first generation. It's like giving a growing child a little more liberty at each new stage of development, a little more complicated and possibly even more dangerous toy" (his emphasis but also mine!) "ushering in a new stage of growth and responsibility to see if he can be trusted with it. If he uses it wisely, he will be given more. If he plays with it foolishly and dangerously it may be taken away from him.... Can you handle this new toy safely so as to bring joy and pleasure to yourself and others around you without endangering anyone or harming anyone or infringing on anyone else's freedoms and others rights? Can you be trusted with it, or will you abuse it and use your liberty as licence to do wrongfully and lustfully instead of rightfully and lovingly? Will you use it to heal and help or harm and hinder? The answer is up to you. Are you so ruled by His love that he can liberate you from the rules or do you have to be kept under the law of works because you cannot be trusted with the liberty of his grace? The answer is up to you."
He went on to draw a crucial distinction between lust and love:-
"Lust is merely to gratify your own selfish appetite, like eating a meal. You may need it, but if you are stealing it from someone else and taking the food out of their mouth to stuff your own, this is selfish lust, not love! But if you are taking the food out of your own mouth and giving your own meal to satisfy and feed another who is hungry and starving for love and needs it desperately and might not survive without it, then this is real love.... Can you handle it? Are you revolutionary enough? We shall see!"
We shall indeed!
On July 29th 1977 The Children of God published the letter "God's Only Law is Love! - What the Bible says about true free love!" (his double emphasis.)
"All things are lawful for me including our sexual freedom, as long as it is done in the unselfish, sacrificial love of God. No, we do not have to keep the Ten Commandments! For us they are no more! for us they are gone forever! Thank God! We now only live to keep God's law of love, his only law - love! For the laws of Moses are no more to the believer in Jesus! We now only have the law of Jesus, God's only law, his love! - a stronger law than Moses' is! Therefore whatsoever you do in the unselfish sacrificial love of Jesus is right and lawful! Whatever you do in love is the law - and that's all, that's it! God's only law is love! We are totally utterly free of the old mosaic law, thank God! we are delivered from the old mosaic law and are no longer bound by it - we are free! Now all things are lawful to us in love, praise God! As long as it's done in love it keeps God's only law of love!"
It is difficult to reconcile this freedom with The Family's attempt to answer "Interviu's 202 Lies about the Children of God" written on 12th June 1977, i.e. six weeks before this letter explained to his disciples what the bible said about true free love. There the answer was given:-
"Lie number 19, they say "we enjoy free love": we have condemned "free love" in any of our homes or colonies and have forbidden any kind of what is normally known as free love among certain communities, meaning total promiscuity, in which we do not believe."
No doubt the pedant within World Services would contend that The Family do not believe in "total promiscuity" because it would no doubt be defined by The Family as sexual activity born of lust. But The Family do believe in sexual activity freely enjoyed by consenting parties who can convince themselves that they are each sacrificing the sanctity of their body in order "lovingly" to satisfy a need of the other. In its way this is an example of dissembling the truth - deceiving yet true.
On 20th May 1980 Father David wrote "The Devil Hates Sex! - but God Loves It!" The Family were coy about producing this letter. It came very late in the day and was produced from the archive of Dr Melton. One can understand the reticence. There are passages on incest and "child sex". Mo's theology is that God made Adam and Eve male and female, not the devil.
"God blessed them and said, be fruitful and multiply!" - in other words, "go to it, start fucking! right out here in the open, in public, in the garden, on the grass!" I suppose some narrow-minded blue-nosed church people would say, "Oh yes, but that's before sin entered in. That's before they discovered sex and how wicked it was! - and after all, that was also really in private because there wasn't anyone else around yet!" Boy oh boy oh boy! that makes me so mad. The thing that makes me mad is that man has allowed the devil to deceive him like that and has been such a stupid idiot as to believe the devil's lies that sex is evil and sex is the worst sin of all and must be the most prohibited. The devil would certainly like to prohibit it completely if he could, and he has restricted it so that things have not moved as fast as they should have..... The only way to get free of (the devil) and his lies and his prohibitions and guilt complexes about sex is to get rid of his lies and his lying propaganda, his anti-sex propaganda, and believe the Lord and his word and his creation and God's love and his freedom! - that there is nothing in the world at all wrong with sex as long as it's practised in love, whatever it is or whoever it's with, no matter who or what age or what relative or what manner (my emphasis) - and you don't hardly dare even say these words in private. If the law ever got a hold of this, they would try to string me up! They would probably lynch me before I got to the jail! When Paul said "All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient" (1 COR 6: 12), he was as good as saying, "I can indulge in any kind of sex I want to, but I've got to watch out for the system because its against the law!" (Maria: At least not let'm find out if you do it!)... We are free in privacy, and that's about all, and we mightn't be free if they discovered what we do in private!... There are no relationship restrictions or age limitations in his law of love.... If you hate sex you are one of the devil's crowd! If you think it's evil, then God and love are evil, for he created it! Come on, let's love and enjoy it like God does! he loves it.!"
I have added that the emphasis in these passages. They need to be emphasised. The meaning is perfectly plain. Berg advocates the enjoyment of this new freedom to engage in sexual activity with whomsoever one desires regardless of the age of that person or the closeness of the relationship to that person subject only to such restraint as is encapsulated in the admonition that the activity must be engaged in love and that is to say "without endangering anyone, or harming anyone, or infringing on anyone else's freedoms and other's rights", quoting from the original Law of Love.
