Word: kingdoms
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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...
...their acquaintances had checked out the Heaven's Gate Website, they might have been somewhat less nonchalant. Through the teachings of their charismatic leaders, Applewhite and Nettles, who claimed to be extraterrestrial representatives of the "Kingdom Level Above Human," the cult members believed their bodies were mere vessels. By renouncing sex, drugs, alcohol, their birth names and all relationships with family and friends, disciples could become ready to ascend to space, shedding their "containers," or bodies, and entering God's Kingdom. "If you cling to this life, will you not lose it?" Do asks in the Heaven's Gate manifesto...
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...
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...