Rosemary's Litter

Adventists have been crying wolf for almost two centuries now. Their splinter of a splinter group, the Branch Davidians, apparently thought Jesus would need assault rifles to enrapture the world... or somesuch nonesuch.

Pentecostals worship the holy olive and the healing power of fondling. Their own splinter of a splinter group somehow mixed all of that with Communism and the sermonizing style of a thoroughly profiteering self-proclaimed Yahweh incarnate who thought hotels made better churches. Then they moved to South America. The good communistalistians of Jonestown seem to have held crossbows in equal esteem to rifles. Also, their version of communion wine had a real kick to it.

The Heaven's Gate cult was partly inspired by Theosophy (a.k.a "occult science" (a.k.a. unknown knowledge (a.k.a. huh?!?))) and partly by Biblical prophecy and partly by science fiction: a Texan couple proclaimed themselves the second coming of Jesus, and also his witnesses, and messengers of extraterrestrials, and also a descendant of Jesus... plus God the daddy-o, who just happened to currently be incarnated as a woman (who ended up dying of liver cancer (not that it stopped her followers))... and they had also both metamorphosed into post-human beings (though apparently not cancer-proof ones (not that it stopped their followers))... and also they would die and be resurrected... aboard a spaceship... so that everyone could witness the second coming (from Earth? aboard the spaceship?) and they registered a website (in eye-popping technicolor, as any self-respecting post-human metamorphosed extraterrestrial pre-re-incarnations of Jesus and Yahweh would, natch!) until in 1996 some three dozen of their followers finally rode a comet into the history books.

Jews for Jesus... no, fuck it, ain't touchin' that one. Can't have this post getting too crazy now.

Human irrationality can latch onto any number of inspirations: fiction novels by Robert Heinlein, Communism's Messianic promises of proletarian paradises, the American fetish for firearms, a laughable X-Men grade misinterpretation of mutation and evolution, take your pick. However, the most common thread by several orders of magnitude in every human society, across all social strata, the undisputed champion of insanity and especially mass insanity is religious faith. Every religion* will try to disown such tragicomic spin-offs of their creeds as mere accidents, focusing on their points of divergence as proof that outside influences had corrupted their faith's orthodoxy. While it can be fascinating to track the various spices by which the faithful of all faiths season their cretinism, nothing eclipses blind faith in the supernatural in explicitly trumpeting the virtue of irrationality for its own sake. Faith. The observation that such insanity spreads heterogenously from a central point, in each, every and all directions, renders that center no less central. How far would any of them get if the entire populace were not indoctrinated, from birth, into anti-rational belief in supernatural forces?




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* Remember these examples constitute an infinitesimal sample, albeit famous in the United States, of the hundreds of staggeringly crazy religious splinter groups from the past centuries across the world, across all faiths -- and that's not even scratching the core lunacy of mainstream communicable mental diseases.