Word: jonestown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...group of people are going to choose to die together, it is best to have a master plan: proper burial outfits, packed suitcases, lists, farewell videotapes, even recipes for death. The ghastly jumble of bodies piled upon bodies discovered in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 may have provided a stark lesson in how not to do it. That mass suicide was a disorderly, ungracious way to meet your maker, a study not in serenity but in chaos...
...computer projects discussed the imminent coming of the Hale-Bopp comet with them. "They didn't know, but they felt it could be something other than a comet--that maybe it was a spaceship coming to collect them," the acquaintance says. He says he even joked with them about Jonestown once, but got little reaction. This man last heard from the group just a few weeks ago; they wanted help setting up some new domain names on the Internet. "They talked about the future a lot," he says. "That's what's confusing." He, too, received a postmortem videotape...
...shame based," and when Michael wanted to leave, he was told he was free to go. As TIME reported in August 1979, the group encamped in the Wyoming Rockies, moving to a ranch in northern Texas when it snowed. Paul Groll, who was a member, scoffed at comparisons with Jonestown, telling TIME in 1979, "Anyone can walk away. We just have to turn from a caterpillar into a butterfly, and then we'll be ready to leave...
...bulk food and computer hardware, at least forty modern-day monks designed and built web sites for businesses on the outside, including the San Diego Polo Club, a movie company, and a British maker of airline parts. On Wednesday, in three neatly planned shifts, they died. The world saw Jonestown, felt Waco, and cried cult. And this time, a cult for the information age. These days, the stereotype of the computer nerd has grown a bit stale. But it is precisely that stereotype--young, intelligent, socially inept--which stencils nicely onto the classic profile of a cult victim. Yet these...
Religious leader Shoko Asahara, who is being sought for questioning in connection with the subway attack, could strike one as such a figure. Of course, the Japanese are hardly the only people to produce mimics of God or apocalyptic cults. Think of Jonestown or Waco. But what is distinctive about postwar Japan is the number of people pretending to be God. The country is riddled with cults and so-called new religions...