What's Up?, Heaven's Gate

Hello, my phantom readers. What have I been up to? I've been doing lots of henna because it gives me happiness. The last several days I have been undertaking an informal study of cults, religions, religious clashes with the government and mass suicide.

Why? I don't know really. It's just something I find interesting. I was thinking about Waco, Texas and the Branch Davidians the other day and what a terrible tragedy that was. This lead to questions I had about the tragedy (I don't really know that much about what happened. However, I spent a couple of hours reading about the event and watching news clips on the internet.

Reading about the tragedy and trying to decipher and determine the U.S. Government's culpability and thinking about all those people who died, I began thinking about other large groups of people who died in modern history because of their religion.

I have read, watched video, searched the internet and studied about the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, Scientologists, the Unification Church (Moonies) and the Hare Krishna group. I will write separate entries about each, as I have time.

I studied about three hours about Heavens Gate and watched some clips on You tube. What what I have read and deciphered by theories implied is this:

a. God is a supreme being, all of earth acknowledges that. The Bible refers to God as the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End. Well, it makes you wonder how that can be? How can there be a supreme being, responsible for creating and ruling the earth and yet be the only one of his kind in existence? Yes, it's too much for our tiny human pea brains and maybe God doesn't want us wondering about His Origin.

b. But -- if there is a God and he is a Supreme Being, isn't it likely there are others? I mean, who or what made God? A supreme all knowing all seeing being doesn't just poof into existince without some cause one day, does he? Everything we know about science and physics tells us that for an existence or for an effect, there is also a cause. For every action there is an equal and opposite Reaction. So, for God to exist there must be other beings like him somewhere.

c. And if those beings aren't on this earth, then where are they? They must be in space somewhere, somewhere out there in that vast infinite unknown cosmos. They must be of an alien race, they must be aliens. It's a bad word to call God's family, I mean you don't really think of God as a shrunken little green thing with webbed fingers and a big head.

d. Okay, we've established that Heaven's Gate must have believed God was an alien. God told us that he made us in his image. He told us through the Christian Bible that he sent his son to earth to die for us on the cross so that we may live, so that we may have access to Heaven. In order for God to have put his son into Mary's body, he had to have incorporated his supreme DNA with Mary's earthly DNA. Is there any other way for Mary to have had God's son than for God to have had some part in it? How could Jesus be the son of God and Mary without God having anything to do with it? So, therefore, if Mary wasn't just a surrogate mother and Jesus was actually the child of both God and Mary, then Jesus was part a supreme being or partly alien.

e. We are told in Christianity that Jesus descended into Heaven and that he will come again, known as the Second Coming. If he comes from Heaven or the heavens and he has been with God and perhaps the other aliens, then how would he arrive?

f. When Jesus was born there was a star in the sky, according to the Bible, which signified his arrival. Some have theorized that the star was actually a comet because it was so bright.

g. The Heavens Gate people believed that Jesus would come again and that he would arrive through the Heavens, that they had to be free of their bodies, their Earthly containers to join him. Therefore, they believed that when the time was right, they had to free themselves from their bodies (yes, die, to join him).

h. When the Heavens Gate leader, Marshall Applewhite (known as Do) learned of the impending arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, he figured that it was a signal of the second coming. Therefore, the members prepared to free themselves from their earthly containers and join Jesus.

i. Around the time of the comet's arrival they committed suicide in three stages, first 15, second 15 and then 9. Thirty nine of them died. They were intelligent, accomplished people. The remainder of their theories are pretty wacko and I can't really make much sense of them. My own theory is that they were people, intelligent and good in general, who were misfits in one way or the other. They didn't quite know where they fit in society. They belonged to the island of misfit toys and perhaps their suicides were a way for them to escape to such a place.

I know that Marshall Applewhite was gay and that he was a practicing gay in his younger years when being gay wasn't cool. He struggled to throw off his gender preferences and to be a normal, regular, straight guy. I think that he was unable to do so and this made him feel bad about himself. He wanted to rise about the needs of his own human mind and body, his irregular sexual preferences. He and 8 other men of Heaven's Gate actually were castrated so that they did not succomb to the sexual needs of humanity. Marshall Applewhite believed that these aliens had transcended sexual needs. They were neither male or female, they were androgynous and did not require sex for pleasure or reproduction. I believe that this theory comforted Marshall Applewhite and made him feel better about being gay.

Perhaps other members of the group had similar experiences, feelings, ideals; things they wanted to cast off and transcend. Perhaps they beleived that by joining the aliens, they could rise about their own human awkwardness, geekiness, feeling of not belonging, their nonconformity and "finally belong".

I don't know. I can find out very little information about the individual Heaven's Gate members other than Applewhite (Do) and the female leader (Ti). I have seen video of some of the other members but there is very little personal information about them. It's all very intriguing though. Thirty Nine people died because they believed that their souls could somehow join the aliens traveling with Hale-Bopp. If you have additional information, or want to comment, please do so on the following comment line. I would love to hear from you.