"I have deceived many people into joining the 'Almighty God' cult during the past 15 years. Now I realized I had harmed both others and myself!” said Chen Qiang, whose family lives in the mountainous area of northern Guangdong. "Today, I want to tell everyone about how the evil cult is deceiving people."
I was drawn into the “Almighty God” cult due to my superstition
I was originally a rural Christian. I went to church gatherings with my uncle at a very young age. However, being a very superstitious person, I was later drawn into the quagmire of the "Almighty God” cult. During the Spring Festival in 1999, two women who preached the "Almighty God" cult came to a family gathering point of our church. They said every day that a catastrophe was coming, and they talked about many miraculous phenomena. Gradually, all the Christian believers in our gathering point, including my uncle and me, were drawn into the “Almighty God” cult.
The “Almighty God" cult says in this book that those who believe in it must eat and drink its words as their food for three meals a day. That’s why the "Almighty God" cult describes its “teachings" as “God’s words for eating and drinking." At that time, the first thing I had to do every day when I got up was to read its "words" before eating breakfast and doing farm work. As soon as I got home at noon, I’d hold the "Almighty God" cult book in my hands, and so would I when I came back from farming in the evening. It seemed as if I couldn’t live without it, and it continued this way for six months.
I “lurked” in other churches to draw others into the “Almighty God” cult
Half a year after I became a follower of the “Almighty God” cult, I began to preach the "gospel" together with others, that’s to say I went to various underground churches by deceptive means, including “lurking” in the church services of legitimate Christian churches, to find out the situation there, so as to establish connections with people and draw them into the “Almighty God” cult.
Around 2000, when I began to pull people into the "Almighty God" cult, I visited a farming family in Huangcha Village, Qingyuan, and targeted the housewife of the family. In order to win her trust, I helped her husband feed pigs, sent her children to school, and put aside my own farm work to help her with her farm work in the busy farming season. While staying at her house, I got up at five o'clock every morning. After breakfast, I went to work in the fields until 11 or 12 o'clock and then went on to work from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. After I came back and finished my dinner, I helped her wash the clothes of her family. I did so for five or six days in a row.
My trick to deceive others into joining the “Almighty God” cult was seen through
In 2003, a 23-year-old young man, a believer in traditional Christianity from Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, went to visit his aunt, a follower of the "Almighty God" cult. After hearing about it, I pretended as one of his aunt’s relatives to lure him into the “Almighty God” cult.
It was a time when SARS was prevalent. After the young man came to Shitan village, we held him in quarantine by making up the false excuse that no one was allowed to leave the area for the time being because someone in the local area had got a fever and was suspected of having SARS. We planned to preach the teachings of the "Almighty God" cult to him in the following days. In order not to arouse his suspicion, we even asked two people posing as health station staff to disinfect his room three times a day to monitor him. At first, we intended to find a young girl to preach the “Almighty God” cult to him. However, we learned later that he was just an ordinary believer of the Christian church rather than an important figure, so we arranged for a woman about 50 years old from another province to do the job.
The woman first explained the Bible to the young man in the traditional way, but she didn't know much about the Bible, so her effort produced little effect on drawing the young man into the “Almighty God” cult. As the young man had been looking forward to going home soon to do reinforcement work for his family’s bananas in the fields before the typhoon came, he had no interest in listening to the woman preaching. Then, the woman used white phosphorus to write secretly such words as “Almighty God” and “God has come” on the wall of his room about ten minutes before he went to bed at night. When he went back to his bedroom and turned off the lights, those words would slowly appear, making him think that "God" had made its appearance in front of him
There was no reaction from the young man the first night when he saw those words. On the second night, the woman had her hands burned from the spontaneous combustion of white phosphorus while writing with it on the wall, but her injury was not very serious. By this time, suspicion began to emerge in the mind of the young. In the following morning, the young man made up his mind to leave. I pretended to accompany him to the station to see when there was a bus leaving for Guangzhou. When we went to a small shop on the way, two "Almighty God" cult believers posing as health workers were found sitting in front of the shop, but they didn’t wear the work clothes of health workers. The young man said to me, "It's fake news that there is SARS here. These two people are posing as health workers. I don't know why they keep me here like this. If they don't let me go, I'm going to call the police." Hearing what he said, I sent him to the bus station after lunch and let him go back home. So we failed to draw the young man into the “Almighty God” cult this time.
I destroyed family affection due to my obsession with the “Almighty God” cult
After I believed in the "Almighty God" cult, I became emotionally indifferent to the unbelievers in my family. Around 2008, when my father got a serious illness, my mother asked me to think of ways to transfer him to a large hospital in Guangzhou for treatment. I refused her request, as I believed that my father got such an illness only because he didn’t believe in “Almighty God” and thus failed to receive its protection.
I recalled that during the period I believed in the “Almighty God” cult, my father tried many times to stop me from believing in it. Sometimes, he even threatened to call the police to arrest me. Now he got ill. Wasn’t it a punishment by "Almighty God"? I even thought that my father, who didn’t believe in the "Almighty God" cult and discouraged me from believing in it, was Satan.
I was punished by law for engaging in illegal activities
Whenever the "Almighty God" cult said its work was coming to an end, I would work myself to the bone for it.
Around October 2012, the "Almighty God" cult deceived people by claiming that 2012 was the end of the world, and tried everywhere to draw people into becoming its followers. When I heard that there was a need to copy a lot of “anti-propaganda materials,” I immediately went out and spent more than 3,000 yuan buying a copy machine. With so many materials to copy, we used up almost ten boxes of paper and several boxes of powdered ink, and the copier broke down after less than a week. Then I spent several hundred yuan having it repaired. About a year later, the copier became almost useless. Afterward, I spent another eight thousand yuan buying a bigger copier.
From the time I bought the first copier in 2012 to the time I was arrested for violating the law, I spent at least 30,000 yuan on copiers, paper, and powdered ink within two years. Now I think it was not worth spending so much money on those things, as what I had done harmed both society and myself, bringing chaos to the country and pain to my family.
