Word: waco
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David Koresh -- high school dropout, rock musician, polygamist preacher -- built his church on a simple message: "If the Bible is true, then I'm Christ." It was enough to draw more than a hundred people to join him at an armed fortress near Waco, Texas, to await the end of the world. The same message tempted Koresh to entertain a vision of martyrdom for himself. He would die in a battle against unbelievers, then be joined in heaven by the followers who chose to lay down their lives...
...Waco cult is the product of an apocalyptic theology, refined over decades by a succession of zealous but nonviolent splinter groups, that was seized at last by a charismatic and combustible leader. The son of a single mother, Koresh was born Vernon Howell in Houston in 1959. Growing up in the Dallas area, he was an indifferent student but an avid reader of the Bible who prayed for hours and memorized long passages of Scripture. He also played guitar -- not badly by some reports -- using rock music as well as his magnetic preaching to recruit followers. Some of the spartan...
...become obsessed with passages in the Book of Ezekiel in which an angel of God divides the faithful from the sinful before Jerusalem's fall to the Babylonians. Believing that passage to be a warning to Adventists, Houteff established a splinter congregation in 1935 on the outskirts of Waco, in the deeply religious prairie land of Texas...
When he died 20 years later, his widow Florence assumed leadership of the sect. She dissolved it after the failure of her prediction that the last days of creation would commence on April 22, 1959. But some members stayed on near Waco with Benjamin Roden, a preacher who styled himself as the literal successor to King David of Israel...
...feud between the two men reached another flashpoint soon after, when Roden disinterred the corpse of a female church member with the intention of bringing her back to life. Contending that Roden had violated the woman's body, Howell and a number of followers returned to the Waco compound to shoot it out with the Roden group...