I was recently at a happy hour, a questionably named activity to be sure, it was shortly after the whole Heaven’s Gate Cult Suicide thing. Not surprising eventually the subject came up. And of course the general prevalent attitude was “those idiots, we’re so much more superior for not being in a cult and killing our selves hahahahaha.” I’m not a supporter of cults and would never join one and I certainly don’t recommend them for spiritual enlightenment, but in the past I have done my research on the subject. You see all my life I’ve played role playing games and among the unfounded things heaped on the that group along with satan worship is the fact that we all belong to cults, so I’ve done my research for purely defensive reasons. To me it seemed clear why the Heaven’s Gate cult did what they did. The difference between these cult members and respected members of society isn’t great enough to make my happy hour companions comfortable. I started pointing out these point and the conversation was quickly changed from something interesting, but requiring thought to something innocuous and meaningless. I can’t find many interesting conversations anymore.

The whole cult phenomena, particularly the Heavens Gate cult, revolves around faith. Remember that this cult didn’t just appear the day before they killed themselves, this group has a 22 year history, a history based on the charismatic leadership of their leader, Applewhite. In the mind of cult members god spoke to Applewhite and Applewhite in turn instructed the cult about gods will. This is not so dissimilar to the method of Jesus Christ’s teachings, as the son of god he knew gods will and taught it to his followers.

Sometime in their history these cult members had attained real faith in Applewhite’s words and at the very crux of faith is the blind leap. The action that can not be supported by empirical evidence by rather by what has been drilled into them by church leaders. Foolish you say? Within a block of where you are currently sitting there is likely to be dozen people who emphatically believe that when they die they will go to heaven, or hell, or be reborn until they attain enlightenment. There are many others but the point is all religions are based upon this leap of faith, there is no evidence to support allegations of afterlife except the scriptures that define the religions themselves. But these scriptures can hardly be considered unbiased on the matter. Trusting the word of scripture to make an argument for afterlife is like giving up control of the language to your adversary in a debate. When all the terms are defined by your opponent you are bound to lose.

But once you’ve made the leap of faith that an afterlife exists what is the great distance from there to believe this afterlife isn’t some sort of static heaven or hell, but something a little more buddhist here your soul is immortal always being reincarnated in new worlds and lives. With a view like that is seems a simple matter to abandon your life when your personal god tells you it’s time to go to the next level of enlightenment. Obviously this only works in the case when real faith exists in your personal god.

Now that is material that could be made into an interesting discussion but it is to threatening to people’s own faith and beliefs. In the western culture we are unable to deal with any questioning of our faith and religion. In Japan most members of society are members of no fewer than four religious traditions, Buddhism, Shinto, Religious Taoism, and the intrinsic folklore, without conflict, but since Judeo-Christian religion is exclusionary, and since our culture is based upon it we can’t feel comfort when something different comes along. Instead we feel the need to protect our faith and change the subject when an honest discourse in non mainstream religion occurs not even condoning the religious just understanding on how they came to do what they did.