Doomsday Cults
While most small-scale , non - mainstream religions are harmless , certain condition do make them an easy breeding ground for destructive practice . The People ’s Temple commence as a kindly organization in the United States that consort a costless aesculapian clinic and drug rehabilitation program . But you probably know it as thedoomsday cultwhose Kool - economic aid deal suicide / execution took more than 900 lives inJonestown , Guyana , in 1978 . How can something that began with so much hope go so very haywire ? There ’s a slew of surmisal about what happened to the members of The People ’s Temple , but for the most part , what survive wrong is what expire wrong with most destructive cultus : the leaders .
It ’s really a two - part problem . First , many of these religions are found by a single person who retains a attitude of exclusive power within the organization , and power tend to corrupt even the most ethical among us . In the caseful of The People ’s Temple , there is evidence that its leader , Reverend James Warren Jones , was abusing prescription drug and becoming increasingly paranoid through the seventies . Next , because these groups mesh outside the mainstream , there is usually no one checking up on their operating procedures , so a corrupt or mentally unstable drawing card is loose to exploit his followers to his heart ’s content . In accession to thisauthoritarian leadership body structure , some principal characteristics of a destructive furore include :
For the difference of this article , when we advert to technique employed by " cults , " we ’re babble out about destructive cult , not the low religious groups that keep to themselves and do n’t injure anybody . In the following section , we ’ll analyze destructive cults more closely and find out how they function . Let ’s start with the leadership construction .
