Word: minding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their nation had fallen, watched the Roman soldiers encircle them. The situation was hopeless, they decided; even if they fought off this wave of soldiers another would come, and then another--as many as it would take--until the siege snuffed out the defenders. With all this in mind, the defenders of the embattled mountaintop called Masada decided that the only logical course was suicide. They debated the issue, and soon the decision was made. Early the following morning, as the Roman troops started to climb the rocky path towards the fortress, the men inside held their wives and children...
Jones followed in the dubious tradition of megalomaniacal American religious leaders. The obvious parallel lies between Jones and his self-declared idol, Father Divine. Sun Myung Moon also comes to mind; but somehow the connection to more mainstream evangelists--the Billy Grahams and Oral Roberts of the world--does not seem so far off. We recoil from the terrible spectacle of California cults gone berserk, but manage to forget their antecedents, presumably because the more conventional, if hardly more genuine, religious-business organizations don't break the laws of propriety in such flamboyant ways...
LAST WEEK'S surrealistic nightmares from the jungles of Guyana have once again put the issue of religious cults squarely in the center of the American stage. In a way that the scattered rumors of mind control and depersonalization among Moonies and Hare Krishna devotees could not, Guyana deaths have focused U.S. public attention on the cults and on the question of what the cults are all about, why people join them, and what import this movement has for our society...
Recent books on the subject of religious cults have been extremely disappointing, for the most part ignoring the central experience of the newfound religious life of the devotees and instead concentrating on the incidental issues of mind-control, the megalomania of many cult leaders, the legal questions of parental responsibility and freedom of choice of the offspring involved. But it is the religious experiences at the heart of the cult movement that are precisely what must be confronted if we are to understand at all the wave of spiritualism that has surged through America during...
...Open Mind...