From: "Kevin Carson" <kevin_carson-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: yippi yi eh (god is with us)
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 19:14:13 +0000


>From: "Dave Coull" <coull-AT-onetel.net.uk>

>Anyway, returning to the original point, from
>a Christian fundamentalist point of view of
>course the Second Coming  _could_  have happened
>in the year 2000, but there was no particular reason
>to expect it to happen then than in any other year.
>As for suicide cults, it is okay for a Christian
>to be martyred in fighting the good fight,
>but suicide as such is always a mortal sin.
>So Kevin expecting that "just about every
>imaginable kind of millenarian suicide cult"
>would "come out of the woodwork in the last
>week of December 1999" was based on confusing
>Christian fundamentalism with other forms
>of religious fundamentalism, as well as on
>misunderstanding the obviously random nature
>of the anniversary in question.

The suicide taboo might have put a stop to some of it, but wasn't Jim Jones 
a professed Chrisitan fundamentalist?   Quite a few subsets of protestant 
fundies don't believe you can fall from grace ("once saved, always saved"), 
so it might not be an effective deterrent for them.

But I admit I was using the term "suicide cult" loosely.   What I had in 
mind, as much as suicide per se, was groups who believed the apocalypse was 
at hand taking violent action of any sort--including "self defense" against 
a hostile world, as they perceived it.

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