Inside Manhattan’s secret ‘cult’

Former "Congregation for the Light" member Paul Arthur Miller said members of "the Light" couldn't have artwork or trinkets in their homes unless it contained an owl or a cross with an "X" on it. Photo: Helayne Seidman

It’s a secret society that claims its followers descended from a “master Aryan race” on Atlantis and that ­humans once lived on the moon.
Homosexuality is banned, corporal punishment encouraged and members atone for bad karma in past lives. Young women, denied higher education, are often married off to older men in the group, former members say.
Some male devotees have ­undergone weapons training to prepare for the end of the world, which is coming soon.
But this doomsday cult isn’t hidden away in some rural ­bunker — it operates out of a brownstone in Murray Hill.
Every Thursday evening, dozens of congregants line up on East 35th Street for the group’s weekly meeting. Their leader of the flock, Tom Baer, 73, preaches from the center of the room, reading from pieces of paper. Members don’t have religious texts to follow along and aren’t allowed to take notes.

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Congregation for the Light’s meeting place at 160 E. 35th St. in Murray HillPhoto: J.C. Rice

In official documents, the tax-exempt church is called Congregation for the Light. To members, it’s just “the Light.”
The group has about 200 members in New York, and there are congregations in Washington, DC, and Atlanta, Baer and ex-followers say.
“It’s the cult next door to every New Yorker, and no one even knows that it’s there,” said an ­exiled member.
The former worshiper, a Manhattan woman who spoke on the condition of ­anonymity because she fears retribution, joined the group in 2003 while dating a man who was raised in it.
“I totally wanted to know what was going on,” she said, adding that her boyfriend assured her it was “nothing creepy . . . just the basic tenets of all religions.”
The deeper she got, the more skeptical she became.
READ MORE: http://nypost.com/2014/11/02/the-secret-society-cult-that-operates-out-of-murray-hill/