Word: kingdom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young men. But shedding any signs of sexuality was integral to the cult, and six of the men, including Applewhite, went so far as to get castrated years ago, which may help explain the odd passivity or gentleness the victims exhibited. "In order to be a member of that Kingdom, one had to overcome his humanness, which included his sexuality," said a former cult member, Michael...
Cult members had worked as Web page designers prior to their death, but they focused their eyes on another world--a "level above human" attainable only by suicide. "The final act of metamorphosis or separation from the human kingdom is the 'disconnect' or separation from the human physical container or body," they wrote. "We will rendezvous in the 'clouds' (a giant mothership) for our briefing and journey to the Kingdom of the Literal Heavens." Members believed that the Hale-Bopp comet, which visited Earth last week for the first time in 2,400 years, was a "marker" that the mothership...
Jesus was hardly tentative about proclaiming the world to come. His first words as a preacher were, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." However, most of his famous metaphors for heaven (as the treasure hidden in a field or the pearl of great price) address humankind's ideal relationship to God's kingdom more than a specific paradise. Regarding heaven's actual "mysteries," he tells the Apostles that it is not given to most people to know them. An exception to this rule is his chilling parable of Lazarus and Dives: The rich master, consigned to hell...
From those visions and their successors in Christianity's first millennium, a colorful, sometimes contradictory mystical vocabulary of heaven emerged. It was a garden, a city, a kingdom, a temple or, less often, a nut, a womb, a navel. It featured buildings and streets of precious metals and jewels, doves, palm trees (first discerned by the church father Lactantius), singing stones (a late borrowing from Celtic myth), white clothing, milk, honey, wine, olive oil, harps, fountains and ladders. It also developed a set of intractable controversies...
...Late 20th century America had little patience for detailed, literal views of heaven. Two world wars and the prospect of nuclear disaster made the idea of a comfy, progressive afterlife seem suspect. Modernist attacks on God's place in this world made people allergic to bold predictions about his kingdom in the next...