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35 Years Later, Jim Jones Cult Leaves Lessons for Believers
Charisma News ^ | 11-15-13 | A. James Rudin

Posted on 11/16/2013 10:29:11 AM PST by ReformationFan

It’s been 35 years since 918 people, including 257 children, died on Nov. 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple massacre in Jonestown. The mass murder inside the South American jungle commune in Guyana was engineered by Jim Jones, a murderous cult leader, and was the only time in American history a member of Congress, Leo Ryan, D-Calif., was killed in the line of official duty.

Most of the victims were forced to commit suicide by drinking a fatal cocktail of poisoned punch spiked with a Valium tranquilizer. In the days that followed the slaughter of the innocents, Jonestown became a widely reported global event whose media coverage rivaled that of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As a result of the massacre, “drinking the Kool-Aid” entered the popular lexicon to describe blind acceptance of a belief without critical analysis. Some of the Jonestown dead were not suicides; they were killed against their will, and the actual drink of death was, in fact, something called Flavor Aid.

The charismatic Jones, an ordained Indiana minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), established the “Peoples Temple” in San Francisco in 1956. His primary recruitment targets were the poor, mostly people of color, and idealists who sought an egalitarian community of economic justice and spiritual fulfillment.

Jones promised a utopian society that provided for the common welfare of its members. But like most cult leaders, he became a tyrannical leader, and he exercised that power in a dangerous megalomaniacal way.

In 1973, an increasingly paranoid Jones moved Temple members to Guyana and named the Peoples Temple compound in honor of himself. Once free of U.S. law, Jones became a brutal dictator in his isolated and heavily guarded compound, where he controlled his devotees’ lives.

(Excerpt) Read more at charismanews.com ...


TOPICS: History; Mainline Protestant; Moral Issues; Religion & Politics
KEYWORDS: 1978; anniversary; carterlegacy; commune; communism; communismkills; cult; cults; cultureofcorruption; deathpanels; democrat; democratscandals; disciplesofchrist; doomsdaycult; drinkthekoolaid; egalitarianism; gaystapotactics; guyana; guyanapunch; harveymilk; homosexualagenda; jimjones; jones; jonestown; lessons; liberal; liberalism; masssuicide; mentaldisorder; peoplestemple; sanfranpsycho; sanfransicko; socialism; suicide; utopian
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To: metmom

Amen. I completely agree with your statement.


21 posted on 11/16/2013 11:18:08 AM PST by ReformationFan
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To: ReformationFan

The music in this video is annoying, but it shows how the Jim Jones mass suicide was a Marxist/Lenninist revolutionary act:

http://www.trevorloudon.com/2010/10/jim-jones-the-peoples-temple-and-revolutionary-suicide/


22 posted on 11/16/2013 11:40:06 AM PST by ConjunctionJunction
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To: Vince Ferrer
stll crazy after all these years..he is


23 posted on 11/16/2013 11:43:25 AM PST by MeshugeMikey ( Visit http://icantenroll.com/ In Glitch We Trust....;o})
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To: reagandemocrat

I wonder if Jones like Milk ad perhaps obama liked young boys?


24 posted on 11/16/2013 11:45:08 AM PST by MeshugeMikey ( Visit http://icantenroll.com/ In Glitch We Trust....;o})
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To: ReformationFan
Harvey Milk's love letter to Jim Jones. Harvey just got a postage stamp, when will the Democrats see fit to honor Jim?


25 posted on 11/16/2013 11:45:53 AM PST by a fool in paradise (America 2013 - STUCK ON STUPID)
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To: MeshugeMikey

Jim Jones DID engage in butt sex with men.

He said it was “therapy”.

Here’s a long article on the guy who mixed up the punch.

http://www.houstonpress.com/2013-01-31/news/jonestown-medicine-man/full/


When Jim Jones met Larry Schacht, he pulled a neat trick: He healed Schacht’s body while simultaneously destroying his spirit.

Jones helped Schacht get clean and offered to pay for medical school. Then, according to an affidavit purportedly written by Schacht, Jones had sex with him. This was one of Jones’s customs, a way to exercise complete control over his followers. Jones described these coerced encounters as a personal sacrifice on his part, as if the sex was purely for the benefit of the follower.

As in the cases of other church members who signed affidavits, the one bearing Schacht’s name was likely heavily coached if not plain ghostwritten and is of dubious validity. Still, Schacht was willing to sign it, as it was intended to support Jones in his child-custody battle with two former church members.

It reads: “Jim Jones has always shown great love and concern for me. He permitted me to accept my bisexual nature by having sexual relations with me at my request before I went to medical school. He penetrated me in the anus.” This in turn gave Schacht the confidence he needed to become a doctor and “fulfill my goal to be of service to suffering humanity in the medical profession.” (How such an affidavit was supposed to help Jones’s court case is clearly beyond explanation.)


26 posted on 11/16/2013 11:51:19 AM PST by a fool in paradise (America 2013 - STUCK ON STUPID)
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To: mrsmith

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic that Obamacare may wake our muddled masses to their senses before it was too late, if is isn’t too late already..

The next 3 months will be the last stand.. I believe the 2nd shoe is about to drop, because I truly believe the rollout was a strategic move on the administration’s part to blunt the reality that has yet to come.. THE PRICE!


27 posted on 11/16/2013 11:53:31 AM PST by carlo3b (RUFFLE FEATHERS, and destroy their FEATHER NEST!)
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To: a fool in paradise

Don’t give ‘em any ideas. Chairman Maobama probably considers them both heroes of his.


28 posted on 11/16/2013 11:54:50 AM PST by ReformationFan
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To: ReformationFan

Not only was he a good Democrat and liberal, he was an opponent of capitalism and an advocate for communal living.


29 posted on 11/16/2013 12:07:59 PM PST by freerepublicchat
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To: ReformationFan
but it was not the last of cult mass murders. In the 1990s, numerous deaths and suicides occurred among David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas;

The author has his facts confused.

Waco was indeed a watershed:
When the President of the United States
burned a Christian church to the ground
with all the members inside.

shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
30 posted on 11/16/2013 12:08:05 PM PST by Uri’el-2012 (Psalm 119:174 I long for Your salvation, YHvH, Your teaching is my delight.)
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To: Finny

Powers Booth was amazing in that role. He was more like Jim Jones was than JJ himself! shivers


31 posted on 11/16/2013 12:16:53 PM PST by bonfire
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To: a fool in paradise; reagandemocrat

Thanks for the posts.

Revisionist history makes Milk a saint.

He got killed around the same time as the Guyana mass suicides. He and Moscone, I don’t remember which came first, Guyana or the Moscone, Milk killings.

It’s was a crazy time and it kick started Diane Feinstein’s career. She would be nothing if these things hadnt happened.


32 posted on 11/16/2013 12:19:30 PM PST by ifinnegan
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To: ReformationFan

Jim Jones was a lifelong, atheist Marxist, who cloaked it under the guise of religion to fool people.


33 posted on 11/16/2013 12:20:49 PM PST by dfwgator (Fire Muschamp.)
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To: reagandemocrat

Bet you a dollar Milk and Jones “got it on” a few times.


34 posted on 11/16/2013 12:21:44 PM PST by dfwgator (Fire Muschamp.)
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To: metmom

LIKE!


35 posted on 11/16/2013 12:46:45 PM PST by Former Fetus (Saved by grace through faith)
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To: Former Fetus

:)


36 posted on 11/16/2013 12:49:05 PM PST by metmom ( ...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith....)
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To: Grampa Dave

I’ve said since Clintoon, their guy could mow down a Girl Scout troop on the front steps of the Whitehut with a machinegun and there would be Kool-Aid drinkers like Juan Williams making excuses for them.


37 posted on 11/16/2013 1:42:20 PM PST by CodeToad (When ignorance rules a person's decision they are resorting to superstition.)
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To: Grampa Dave

I dated an Army journalist that was immediately sent there to photograph the carnage. She was a liberal the day before. Not now. She would see the dead in her sleep. She knew the danger of brainwashing first hand.


38 posted on 11/16/2013 1:45:01 PM PST by CodeToad (When ignorance rules a person's decision they are resorting to superstition.)
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To: ReformationFan
In the 1990s, numerous deaths and suicides occurred among David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas

Suicides? Really? I guess that's what they call it when the federal government drives tanks through your walls, shoots you, and/or incinerates you.

39 posted on 11/16/2013 1:50:01 PM PST by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
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To: dfwgator

Jones was exactly the same kind of “black liberation theology” fraud as Jeremiah Wright. If things had gone a bit differently, one of Jones’ disciples might have become POTUS.


40 posted on 11/16/2013 1:53:24 PM PST by Argus
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