Heaven's Gate (Routledge New Religions) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Devil at Heaven’s Gate: Rethinking the Study of Religion in the Age of Cyberspace

Hugh B. Urban

Since this is the close of the Age, the battle in the Heavens with their servants on Earth will be the means of that closing and the spading under of the plants (including the humans) of this civilization. “Weeds” are now getting rid of weeds—from gang wars to nations involved in ethnic cleansing. This is simply a part of the natural recycling process which precedes a restoration period of the planet in preparation for another civilization’s beginning. (How and When Heaven’s Gate [the Door to the Next Level Above the Human] May Be Entered , I, 11) 1

Messianic hope was based on the reality of the Apocalypse. But this latter has no more reality than the original Big Bang. … Our Apocalypse is not real, it is virtual. And it’s not in the future, it is here and now. (Jean Baudrillard, “Hysteresis of the Millennium”) 2

Some eighteen years ago, the respected historian of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith, delivered an influential paper entitled “The Devil in Mr. Jones.” The subject of Smith’s paper was the profoundly disturbing mass suicide of some 914 members of the Peoples Temple, led by the Reverend James Warren Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. For his entrée into this troubling and perplexing phenomenon, Smith reminds us that the academic study of religions was born largely during the era of the European Enlightenment. As a product of the Enlightenment quest for rational understanding and humanistic tolerance, the study of religion has a fundamental duty to try to make some kind of coherent sense of even the most seemingly senseless of religious events:

Simply put, the academic study of religion is a child of the Enlightenment. … [R]eligion was domesticated; it was transformed from pathos to ethos. …

[R]eligion was brought within the realm of common sense. … Rediscovering the old tag “nothing human is foreign to me,” the Enlightenment impulse was one … which refused to leave any human datum including religion beyond the pale of understanding, beyond the realm of reason. As students of religion we have become stubbornly committed to making the attempt … at achieving intelligibility. We must accept the burden of the long hard road of understanding. To do less is to forfeit our license to practice in the academy. 3

Indeed, Smith even suggests that the Jonestown incident really poses the ultimate challenge to the historian of religions: precisely because of its seeming irrationality, incomprehensibility, and shocking enigma, it poses the greatest threat to an academic discipline that claims to make rational sense out of all religious phenomena: “One might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions, for if we continue to leave it un-understandable, we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.” 4

In this chapter, I will undertake the study of what seems, at first glance, to be a phenomenon very similar to that of the Jonestown suicides—namely, the now quite infamous case of the mass suicide of the “Heaven’s Gate” community in March of 1997.

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