Officials in the South American nation of Guyana are building a colonial church -- replacing the one destroyed by fire six years ago -- on the same site that had served as a base for US cult leader Jim Jones in the mid-1970s, according to the Worldwide Religious News website.
Construction of the new Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown -- the capital of Guyana -- began on February 18, 2011, church spokesman Ramsal Alli said.
The $450,000 church will be built in concrete -- the previous one was wooden -- and is designed to hold 500 parishioners.
On November 18, 1978, Jones led more than 900 cult members -- mostly Americans -- into a jungle clearing, where they drank cyanide-laced grape-flavored punch, while others were shot by guards loyal to Jones.
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This feels very strange.
ReplyDeleteThat tragedy is such a mystery. Were the people who committed suicide victims of a grand delusion or were they martyrs?
How will they be judged by God? since we cannot judge them.
I suppose in antiquity the Church used to build Christian places of worship on the site of old pagan temples. I suppose this is no different.
Romanos, I can remember when Jim Jones and his hundreds of cult members drank the cyanide-laced punch in 1978. They drank it willingly, knowing they were going to die. I believe that dying this way was part of the accepted "philosophy" for members of this cult.
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