stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

424 STRIPPING THE GURUS
[J. Gordon] Melton said, “This wasn’t a cult. This was a respectable,
mainline Christian group” (Hassan, 2000).
When you are dealing with people—however warm-hearted,
kind and considerate they may be in their private lives—with such
professional views of reality as to insist that even Jonestown was
not a “cult” ... oy vey.
Nor is there, unfortunately, any comfort to be taken in the
relative absence of geographic isolation in North America or the
like, as compared to Jones’ Guyana. That is so, in spite of the
claims of long-time “cult” observers such as the late Louis Jolyon
West. For, in the immediate aftermath of the Jonestown suicides,
Dr. West opined:
This wouldn’t have happened in California. But they lived in
total alienation from the rest of the world in a jungle situation
in a hostile country (in Cialdini, 2001).
In the years since Jonestown, however, the tragedies involving
both David Koresh (in Waco, Texas) and the Heaven’s Gate cult
(San Diego) have occurred. Indeed, the latter 1997 suicides were
enacted even more willingly than those of Jim Jones’ followers had
been. For, no gun-barrel threats of force at all were required on the
part of the leaders of that UFO-related cult. Rather, the suicides
were simply part of their members’ sincere efforts to get to the
“Next Level” of conscious evolution, in actions which fully “made
sense” within the believed theology of that organization. That is,
the Heaven’s Gate followers simply did what they took to be necessary
to ensure their own salvation—albeit after many years of
waiting.
So, how badly do you want the form of salvation called “enlightenment”?
Are you willing to do whatever it takes—to “face the
heat” of Truth, regardless of how bad it may get? To have the crap
beaten out of you? To have your ass roasted? To eat barbiturates in
applesauce?
[T]he line that separates religious enthusiasm from [socalled]
cult zombiehood is narrower than we commonly pretend
... our own beliefs (or the beliefs of our friends) in angels,
UFOs, ESP, Kennedy assassination conspiracies, you
name it, differ from the elaborate sci-fi ideologies of groups
like Heaven’s Gate in degree, not in kind (Futrelle, 1997).