Doomsday Cult Leaders… strange individuals
Over the history of mankind there have been a generous assortment of ridiculous eccentric weird wacked out bizarre cult leaders who were all obviously a few fries short of a Happy Meal. But I’m not talking about just your run of the mill fanatical narcissistic bozo control freaks. I’m talking about nut jobs that in the end joined hands with their followers to do the hara-kiri boogie (suicide).
These guys all eventually become so spoiled and full of themselves that the current world just isn’t enough for them. So they dream of an end to their current world and taking things to the next level in a new and improved sparkling fantasy world. To that end, they all convince themselves and their worshippers that an apocalypse is coming.
Cult leaders attract and captivate followers because they are always good at one thing: massaging people’s psychological needs to make them feel good about themselves. This has the effect of getting followers to eventually make huge sacrifices for them including their money, their family ties, their bodies, and ultimately their lives.
Common attributes of doomsday cult leaders
Tends to recruit vulnerable people by making them feel good about themselves.
Separates people from their families out of the cult leader’s need to be the absolute and only center of everyone’s lives.
Takes their money and possessions.
Appears to perform miracles.
Convinces followers that he (the cult leader) is special or divine and that previous religious writings were about him.
Wants to control every detail of the follower’s lives.
Moves their followers around from place to place.
Eventually predicts there will be some dramatic war that wipes out everyone or the world will end someday and they will all go to a new fantasy world where the cult leader will rule on a grander scale. Their dysfunctionality ultimately escalates to the point where they command their followers to commit murder and/or suicide.
This is probably a pattern that has repeated itself since the dawn of civilization. Some of the latest and most well known of these wastes of space were Charlse Manson, Jim Jones, and David Koresh. All of these people had groups of mesmerized robots who either followed them to their graves or to jail.
Manson believed that the Beatles and the Bible were telling him that there would be a massive race war which would leave him in charge. He and some followers ultimately ended up serving life in prison for gruesome random murders committed in an attempt to get the race war started. His followers believed he was divine and performed miracles such as bringing a dead bird back to life or that he could see and hear what his followers were doing and saying when he wasn’t around them.
Jim Jones believed that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust and that he and his followers would go to the “next life” where he would continue reigning as their God. He ultimately committed suicide with hundreds of his followers.
David Koresh believed the Waco siege was the coming end of the world, predicted in the Book of Revelations. He committed suicide with his followers. His present day followers think he will return to the earth someday.
Jesus Christ separated his followers from their families. His “miracles” were probably faked or at least actions that were misunderstood or misremembered. Convinced his followers he was divine. Claimed that Moses had written about him (there is no mention of Jesus by any author of the old testament). Was a control freak.
Like Manson, Koresh, and Jones, Jesus dreamt of an end to the world, but also thought that before this end of the world he would be the one to fulfill scripture by leading a successful uprising against the Romans who were occupying Judeah at the time (what the “Messiah” was supposed to do, not hang on a cross). He also told his followers that in their lifetimes he would come “on clouds” (Daniel’s colorful reference to a coming King) and then the world would end.
(Mat 10:34-37)
(Mat 24:27-30)
Like Manson, Koresh, and Jones, eventually Jesus thought it was showtime and took steps to get the end of the world into gear.
To that end, Jesus took his followers to the big city (Jerusalem). He was careful to ride into Jerusalem on a colt as he knew Zechariah predicted the conquering Messiah would do before liberating the Judeans and dominating from “sea to sea.”
In Jerusalem Jesus entered the Temple, flew into a rage, and became violent. He began whipping people and animals and overturning merchant tables in what is known as the “temple incident”.
Other indications that Jesus may have attempted an uprising are that later Jesus tells his disciples to buy swords to fulfill a scripture about Jesus being “lawless.” When they came to arrest Jesus, one of his followers pulled out a sword which he used to wound one of the arresters. Dozens of years later, the gospel authors are careful to portray Jesus as being against this action.
After Jesus is arrested, he is pulled up in front of a crowd coincidently alongside another prisoner named Barabbas who is mentioned as having been imprisoned for being involved in a “murderous insurrection.” Although gospel authors are careful to insert other verses to contradict the idea that Jesus was involved in this failed insurrection, it’s possible that this was the real reason Jesus was arrested and crucified. Nobody wants to follow a failure.
The Romans mocked the idea of Jesus being a conquering/ruling Messiah by putting a “crown” of thorns on his head and putting a sign on the cross above Jesus’ head saying “Jesus, King of the Jews.” This was likely a warning to other ambitious would be Messiahs of the fate awaiting them if they cross the Romans as many, like Jesus, had risen up and tried long before and after Jesus.
When Jesus was arrested and executed instead of conquering the Romans and bringing the end of the world, this left his followers scratching their heads, so they later borrowed the idea of Jesus resurrecting from other older religions (the earliest known version of Mark, the first cannonized gospel written, doesn’t mention the resurrection). Later Paul rationalizes the crucifixion into a sacrifice to bring redemption for followers, an idea borrowed from the religion (Mithraism) of Paul’s home town of Tarsus. In Mithraism instead of a man savior, a bull is sacrificed and the bull’s blood drips on people to wash their sins away.
After the execution of Jesus, his followers kept the commune going and still believed Jesus was going to come back to end the world in their lifetimes which of course never happened either.
For further reading on this subject:
Sorry, Capella there is no proof that Jesus of the bible even existed. Check out “The Christ Conspiracy, The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by S. Archarya. Jesus is just a recycled myth of earlier Godmen born of virgins during the winter solstice, who perform miracles, are crucified and come back to life to ascend to heaven during the spring equinox.
Jesse,
You may very well be correct. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. I certainly agree that there was nothing new about the resurrection and redemption motifs. The reason I suspect that Jesus may have actually lived is that he was such a failure, and the resulting mythology that was made of this failure seems so contrived to me, although as you pointed out, it is heavily borrowed from earlier mythology.
I do believe that Josephus mentions Jesus but I also read that Jesus may have been added to Josephus’s writings by medeival monks in an attempt to legitimize his existance outside of the Gospels.
I personally believe he existed. but I don’t believe in his divinity. I concur with your views on the subject. He was trying to incite an insurrection by trying to fullfil the scriptures and it backfired on him.
It is also curios to take a few of Jesus’s sayings in historical context which paints a totally different picture of him. For example “Turn the other cheek” How do you strike an inferior subordinate? You back hand him. Now if you turn the other cheek you are saying in defiance that if you strike me again, strike me as an equal with the palm of your hand. You are forcing the issue and if a slave or socially inferior person were to do that in Jesus’s time it would have been immediatley understood by all involved and by all who witnessed it. Who were Jesus’s followers? Who were the demographics Jesus focussed on? The poor, the oppressed and the women who were also oppressed in the Middle Easter Patriarcal society as they still are today. The fact that Jesus HAD female followers was scandalous at the time. It was against the social norms and these are also the types of people the Apostles and Paul targeted in their preachings. This in my opinion is why Christianity took hold. Because it appealed to women. In history you will find the the first upper class converts to Christianity were women including Constantines mother who influenced him thus causing him to adopt it as the REligion of the Roman Empire. Of course it was just easier to adapt pagan dates and rituals to Christinaity rather than sudden change. That is the beauty of Christianites strategy. It wasn’t so different from the old beliefs. Samson was Hurcules, Jesus diod all the miricles that the pagan gods did. Even when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs they allowed them to keep their pagan rituals and symbols. The day of the dead and the aztec art are well integrated into the Mexican church. Christianity is the most successful spin doctor/marketing campeign in history. I find it amazing how anyone who has studied philosophy, history and science could still buy into it. It’s faith based totally on ignorance. And I agree with you. Christians are more ignorant about the Bible than athiest. Most athiest become athiest because they study it in unbiased and in depth along with other disciplines and realize it’s faliures and inconsistancies. The fundamentalist believers like to convince themselvels that we are the ignorant ones when it is they who will not consider or study anything that may contradict or cloud their beliefs and even if they do they still tend to put a spin on it in order for it to match their beliefs. Pseudo Science.
Thankyou Keith,good point that Christianity appealed to women;hence it spread quickly.(It still seems to appeal to women-women seem to be more drawn to jesus than men,and it is well known that modern hymns are very feminine(’jesus is my friend,I love him ‘type of thing.eg.’To get a touch from the lord is so real..’)Women also announced Jesus’s resurrection which made them pretty special.Or maybe they were introduced as a dramatic device to make the story seem more convincing.ie.stupid male disciples cowering away in hiding needing a whole heap of evidence for his rising like seeing his wounds and eating with him etc.It took the devoted women to convince them etc.
Whaddaya think??
Capella, I think if there was a man named Jesus who really lived, he was not as old as the myths and stories and siezed the opprotunity to claim he was the “one true son of God”. There were a lot of people claiming to be the son of God. Even Alexander the Great claimed he was the son of God. My point is that there were already a lot of godmen out there and that even if a man named Jesus, he was not the subject of the earlier stories and capitalized on the myths and superstitious nature of gullible anchient people who were no less gullible than modern people are.
Dazzler, I think that Christianity is more popular with men than women. Fundamentalist especially, treat women as inferior. The bible even says that women should be submissive to their men. My wife is most definately not submissive and I am not the type of man that must force his will on her. I think confidence is the key. A confident person will not look for someone else to validate them as a human being capable of making their own descisions, and an unconfidant man will try to force his will on his wife.
Jesse,you may be right about men loving fundamentalism.Its interesting that even by the 50’s AD women were being air-brushed out of the picture in Paul’s list of witnesses to the resurrection.(1 Cor.15)Then as we know Paul took a dim view of women in his other teachings.On the topic of Jesus and Son of God,it is doubtful that he ever claimed that for himself(son of man yes),and also ’son of god’ to the Jews probably just meant ‘beloved of God’ or ‘favoured one’-something like that.Again if you look at Paul’s references to Christ,he always puts him lower than God.It was only the writer of John’s gospel who elevated Christ to being equal with God(and his gospel was later than Paul and the other gospels.)
Dazzler, my point is that I really don’t think Christianity was popular with women at all. It was forced on them. In Christianity, Islam, and Judaism women are not treated as equals. Even in Greek mythology Pandora(a woman) unleashes evil into the world, just like Eve, who is blamed for Adam’s sin. It is a recurring theme in Mythology that a woman is responsible for bringing evil into the world.
Jesse,mmmm the tradition that women discovered the so-called resurrection seems to be quite early and authentic precisely because a woman’s testimony was worthless among Jews.They tried therefore to airbrush it out by bringing in men witnesses to the resurr.like Peter and John.Also as Keith(post 4) mentions above,Jesus went for the oppressed,outcasts,poor and women as his demographic to find followers.
And Luke 8:3 points out that wealthy women supported the Jesus movement.
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