Yesterday, Dearest and I were watching a documentary – The Case for Christ – and I just had this huge eye-rolling moment at the number of people on the street saying, “Jesus, so what?”, to which I had to hit pause and spew,
“Good grief! This peasant in the worst backwater in the entire Roman Empire walks around his teensy little country for three years, yapping about this and that, gathering some followers and pissing off the local Powers That Be so much they manipulate the Roman Procurator to put him to death. Then, when His followers insist He was risen from the dead, the Powers That Be make their cult illegal and torture and kill them. … Yet two THOUSAND years later, the whole world still remembers Jesus! Our calendar, most of our major holidays and a good deal of our best art, architecture and music are all based on His life and hundreds of millions of people in every single nation on Earth worship Him and follow His teachings. I mean … think about it. Who today even remembers Jim Jones?”
So imagine my surprise when I logged on to the internet and saw that today is the 35th anniversary of the Jonestown mass suicide! Weird, huh? For the many who do not remember Jim Jones … he was an American who founded a (not Christian) church in the mid-1950s. In 1973, he moved everyone to a commune in Guyana where “total economic and racial and social equality” would be enjoyed by all.
He was such a charismatic leader that he convinced nearly 1,000 people to cut off all ties at home, sign over all assets to the commune, and move to the middle of a jungle in South America to live out his dream. Five years later, he ordered them all to kill themselves and more than 900 of them not only voluntarily drank cyanide mixed into kool-aid, but also fed it to their children.
A 2006 documentary – American Experience: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple – tries to answer how one man could persuade more than 900 people to drink cyanide. I haven’t seen it … yet. It’s next up in my Netflix queue.
Sources:
polination.blog 
The phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” is a reference to Jonestown… don’t be fooled into following a charasmatic cult leader who leads you to death and destruction.
Five years ago, Michelle Malkin wrote this post:
What many people do know know is that “Liberation Theology” played a central role in Jonestown…
Indeed, it still shapes the world we live in today… our pResident is a 20+ year believer in “Liberation Theology”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7XMNEvDPUA
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