I admit I watched PBS this evening and also admit the program on the destructive cult created by the tormented soul of a poor child from Indiana was pretty good. What surprises and impresses me is the way PBS accurately portrays the way the initial yearning to create the greater good decays into the need to control. Throughout history, nothing quite says earthly influence better than lots of dead followers scattered around the leader's corpse.
Jim Jones: "He preached a 'social gospel' of human freedom, equality, and love, which required helping the least and the lowliest of society's members. Later on, however, this gospel became explicitly socialistic, or communistic in Jones' own view, and the hypocrisy of white Christianity was ridiculed while 'apostolic socialism' was preached."
PBS American Experience: "I did allow Jones to think for me because I figured that he had the better plan," says former Peoples Temple member Hue Fortson, whose wife and infant son were among the more than 900 who died in Guyana after drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch. "I gave my rights up to him. As many others did."
Word to the wise – don’t give up your rights to people who declare they have a plan for a better world in which your individual rights are secondary to their greater good.
