Word: culted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suicide has united society in a brief moment of concern. What could have led people to leave their homes, jobs and families to live their lives in an isolated community, awaiting a "mothership"? What role did the Internet play in the growth of the cult? Who, if anyone, is to be held responsible for the loss of life...
...Boston Globe, meanwhile, offered justification for how people ended up as suicide victims, spotlighting personal problems that presumably might have led one to join a cult. About 45-year-old Alan Bowers, the Globe wrote, "Friends said he had never recovered from the pain of his wife's leaving him, or from his brother's death." Just below, a headline about a local member of the cult read "Mass. native joined cult after sad childhood"; the article painted her life as a virtual trail of tears, beginning with her father leaving the household when she was four...
...fact, in a section of their website titled "Our Position Against Suicide," the cult anticipates the popular reactyion to a mass suicide. It makes clear that for them, "suicide" would be staying on Earth when the chance for salvation had come...
...course, the easiest way to dismiss the Heaven's Gate cult is to write them off as brainwashed lunatics. But given the anecdotal evidence, it seems that many members of Heaven's Gate were not simply weak and deluded souls...
...from a prominent Connecticut family who often, openly discussed his membership in the cult with his family a "wounded, foolish follower"? Or the professor's son who told his mother he could not see himself fitting in with traditional society, and felt at home with Heaven's Gate? Or the mother from Cincinatti, who spotted Applewhite's writings on the Internet and felt compelled to leave her three boys and newborn twin girls to join the group? For their sake, if not for all 39 of the dead, we should stifle a bit of our condescension and maintain the humility...