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The Basics
Elgin L. Hushbeck, Jr.
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All of this changed on November 18, 1978, when United States Congressman Leo Ryan and four others were murdered while investigating reports of abuse at Jonestown, the People’s Temple commune in Guyana. When Guyanese troops arrived at Jonestown the next day, they made a grisly discovery – the bodies of 913 people, over 200 of which were children. Most had died from drinking cyanide-laced punch. Jim Jones had been shot through the head, apparently by one of his inner circle.
Those who followed Jim Jones to their deaths in the jungles of Guyana may have been sincere, but their sincerity did not protect them from being wrong about their faith and their leader. Nor were they the only ones who may have been sincere, but wrong. In the middle of the 1990s a total of seventy-four members of The Order of the Solar Temple died in several mass suicides that ended with buildings being set on fire by remote control devices. On March 26, 1997, Marshall Applewhite, convinced thirty-eight of his follower to join him in getting their money together, packing their suitcases, and cleansing their body by drinking citrus juices. The males were castrated; everyone put on new, identical, Nike sneakers and then they committed suicide. All this so they could go to a spaceship that was supposed to be hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet.2 These people were certainly sincere – sincere enough to commit suicide for their beliefs – but sincerity is not enough.
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