Adolfo Constanzo and Voodoo Sacrifice Cult

 

At least 24 deaths were caused by Constanzo and his group. Voodoo is a fusion of ancient African religious beliefs and the religions brought by colonialism. It occurs in the Caribbean and Constanzo got his beliefs through his Cuban American family.

Constanzo, a Cuban-American bisexual cult leader ran a drug smuggling ring in Matamoros, Mexico. He and Sara Aldrete, his cult-priestess partner, were very successful in the drug trade because of their habit of ritually sacrificing their competition. Through sacrifice, Constanzo preached, they would be invisible to their enemies.

They decided that they needed to kill a gringo. They abducted Mark Kilroy, a college student on spring break, and killed him in their border ranch called Santa Elena. There his body was dismembered and his heart, genitals and spine were used to make a magic stew. The disappearance of Kilroy triggered an all out police search around the border. Authorities were alerted of the weird rituals practiced in Rancho Santa Elena. As the digging in the ranch began a large number of dismembered bodies started appearing and several members of the cult were arrested.

By the time the bodies in Matamoros were found Constanzo and Aldrete were hiding in an apartment in Mexico City. Police discovered their hideaway and surrounded the apartment. After a brief exchange of gunfire Constanzo ordered another cult member to kill him and his boyfriend. When police stormed into the apartment they found the embracing couple machine-gunned to death inside a closet. Sara Aldrete is now in jail in Mexico.

On the face of it, this voodoo cult may seem to be little more than a cover for the drug dealing, but this was much more than a commercial operation. We can see here all the characteristics of a charismatic, authoritarian leader achieving complete dominance over his followers by religious promises and threats. Whether it is Manson, Koresh, Jones or Constanzo the characteristics are the same. Joining a cult means losing your identity and sometimes your life.

Aum Shinrikyo and Shoko Ashahara Cult Mass Murder

Ashahara was yet another of the cult leaders who claimed that he communicated with God. In 1995 Ashahara sent some of his members to plant the deadly nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo underground train system. Fifteen people were killed and about a thousand injured. Ahsahara expressed his disappointment with the low death rate.

This was not the first murders by Aum Shinrikyo. They had earlier tried to kill the residents of an exclusive estate, including three judges, with sarin. At least five died and five hundred were injured. Before that they carried out many test attacks with biological and chemical weapons that they produced themselves in factories disguised as shrines.

Aum Shinrikyo is a syncretiesd cult with its teachings drawn from several of the world’s major religions plus the armageddon style final battle theories of Ashahara. According to him everybody would be destroyed except members of the cult, and Ashahara himself would then rule.

 Many Aum members were, and some still are, very intelligent and well qualified people. People duped into doing terrible things to themselves and others by religious cults are not stupid. They are people who succumb to charismatic manipulators. Ashahara is under sentence of death, but his followers could yet kill again.

A Woman Must Breast Feed a Male Colleague to Work With Him!

 The system of fatwa’s, or religious instructions, within Islam, reached a new height of absurdity when an Egyptian lecturer issued a fatwa suggesting that women employees could only work alone with an unrelated male colleague if they brest fed them at least five times. 

In May 2007 Dr. Izzat Atiyya, lecturer at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, issued a fatwa that suggested that male and female colleagues could use breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together. The fatwa said that if a woman fed a male colleague “directly from her breast” at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. “Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” he ruled. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed.”

Despite impeccable precedence for the ruling within Islamic law (as discussed above), the fatwa sparked outrage and embarrassment, with critics deriding the author on Egyptian television. The University later suspended the lecturer, who headed the university’s hadith department. The fatwa was widely publicized by Arabic-language satellite television channels and was discussed in the Egyptian parliament. After being threatened with disciplinary action by the University, Atiyya issued a retraction, saying the fatwa was “a bad interpretation of a particular case” during the time of Muhammad and that it was based on the opinions of only a minority of scholars. Egypt’s minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud Zaqzouq, has called for future fatwas to “be compatible with logic and human nature”.

Soldiers of Heaven Death Cult

 

An Iraqi based Shia Muslim group calling itself the Soldiers of Heaven has killed hundreds of people as well as suffering hundreds of losses of its own members attacking the Ashura gathering in Kerbala.

 

Many Muslims (mostly Shia) believe that the ‘hidden imam’ (Mahdi) will reappear and bring in a period of global justice before the end of the world and resurrection. The 12^th imam in the line of succession from Mohammed disappeared in the ninth century, but Mahdists believe he is still alive.

 

The Soldiers of Heaven are an armed extremist group who believe that they can hasten the reappearance of the hidden imam by destroying the mainstream Shia leadership and they seem to think that the fervour of Ashura is the right environment for them to operate.

 

President Ahmedinejad of Iran is a believer in the hidden imam although he has nothing to do with the Soldiers of Heaven. Like many messianic Christian cults, Mahdists believe that they are in the ‘end times’. Mahdists generally believe that the hidden imam and Jesus will together operate to create the conditions for the resurrection. Like Christian end timers, they welcome destruction and disorder because they see it as an indicator of the coming final conflict.

 

Since Mohammed, several people have claimed to be the Mahdi, just as many have claimed to be the second coming of Jesus. At least one claimed to be both the Mahdi and Jesus!

 

Almost all of the Soldiers of Heaven members are believed to be very poor, rural people, but when the cult’s compound in Najaf was raided a year ago, a swimming pool, beauty parlour and many luxuries being used by the leadership were found. Cult leading is pretty much the same in the Christian and Muslim worlds. The outcome can be death in both as well. The dreams of paradise will be unfulfilled.

 

 

The People’s Temple and the Jonestown Massacre

 

Jim Jones led the People’s Temple which was a Christian cult that also had socialist political objectives. Jones led a small group that started out as anti-communist, but then became left wing when it sensed that ability to tap into a leftist groundswell in California. It grew much larger when it managed to affiliate with a protestant group called The Disciples of Christ.

 

In the late 1970’s, Jones moved his followers to Guyana where he set up an agricultural commune called Jonestown. The People’s Temple members believed that they were going to create a paradise on earth, but the reality was poor food, hard work, sickness and torture in the form of Jones’ vicious system of discipline.

 

Congressman Ryan flew to Jonestown from the USA in 1978 to investigate complaints of abuse. After an unsatisfactory visit, Jones sent gunmen who shot Ryan and members of his party. Immediately after this, Jones initiated a mass murder and suicide event in which more than 900 People’s Temple members were killed.

 

In this group we see the typical ego centred, charismatic leader exerting absolute authority and the promises of paradise. In this there was to be a paradise on earth before the heavenly one and the religious imagery was merged with an extreme political ideology. There are similarities with the Heaven’s Gate cult which joined its religious mysticism with Ufology in order to tap into the popularity, at the time, of interest in extra terrestrial phenomena. Jones saw a popularity of communist ideology in California in the sixties and seventies and successfully tapped into that.

 

This was one of the worst examples of the dangers of following a persuasive, but deluded man to promises of paradise that end in misery.

Gilbert Deya Miracle Babies Fraud

 

Deya leads a Christian evangelical group called Gilbert Deya Ministries. Just another crank cult preying on the spiritually needy and bleeding them of their money and devotion except for the ‘miracle babies’.

 

In a cruel twist on all the other religious frauds running their own ego pumping organisations, Deya claims to be able to make infertile women pregnant through prayer. Deya is a Kenyan and all the women who are helped into pregnancy by him have to travel to Kenya where they are presented with their baby.

 

The problem, of course, is that the babies are not theirs. They are shown by DNA analysis to have no connection with the alleged mothers and Deya’s organisation is really stealing Kenyan babies in a cynical crime to convince his followers of his miraculous powers.

 

This is one of the worse examples of how far cult leaders will go to mislead and exploit their followers. The continued claims of miracles by mainstream religions (such as those in the Catholic church who are continuing to make saints on the basis of supposed miracles) allows the continuation of an environment in which the ludicrous, cruel and criminal actions of people like Deya can continue to attract gullible supporters.

Christian Brothers and Child Abuse

 

The Christian Brothers are a teaching order of the Catholic church which has run schools and orphanages since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

 

Many cases of sexual abuse of children in their care have been established against Christian Brothers in Britain, Ireland Canada and Australia. The requirement of celibacy and the repressive attitude to sex by the church will have undoubtedly contributed to the sexual misconduct by these priests.

 

What is less easy to explain and generally less well known is the extent of sadistic physical punishments of children in the care of these people. Before corporal punishment of children in schools became generally unacceptable, and illegal in many developed countries, the harshness of the Brothers was not the subject of too much focus and apologists for the order will say that they have to be judged by the norms of the times.

 

The truth is that the savagery of beatings by men of small children were sadism, sometimes with sexual content, and no amount of justification will alter that. There were also cases where children were taken from Britain to Australia to suffer at the hands of this order in their institutions. Some children alleged to be orphans did have parents and they were lied to about their parents. Apologies have been given for their failures by the Christian Brothers and the Australian Government. Little consolation for a ruined life.

 

What we should be asking is what is to stop members of this secretive organisation with such a horrific history from finding new ways to exploit and damage children out of sight of the scrutiny that we now hope to be in place?

 

There should be no place in education or child care for any organisation with such a background. Celibate priests and nuns still have the sexual drives that are generated by their hormones. If these drives do not come out in sexual abuse of children in their care, the frustrations caused by sexual repression may well manifest themselves in cruelty to those same children.

 

The church creates an unnatural environment in which misconduct is inevitable. It is the responsibility of society to ensure the educational and care establishments provide loving, supportive conditions in which children have the possibility of growing into balanced adults with an understanding of normal human relationships.

 

The stark truth is that those people who choose life in a celibate religious order are highly unlikely to be fit persons to have the care of children and allowing the Christian Brotherhood to run their own institutions is an invitation for abuse to continue.

David Koresh–Branch Davidians-76 Dead-Another False Prophet

 David Koresh was originally Vernon Wayne Howell and like Wayne Bent (Michael Travesser) he led a Seventh Day Adventist breakaway sect. Like many others he claimed to be the last prophet of God.

Also like Travesser, and many other cult leaders, Koresh was a sexual predator and child sex abuser. Koresh claimed that he could have any of the females in his compound as his own and he also claimed to have been anointed by God. All of these things echo claims by Travesser. The behaviour of Travesser in ‘dissolving’ the marriages of his followers, not only gave him the self justification to have sex with his daughter-in-law (contrary to Mosaic law in Leviticus), but also, like Koresh, undermined the traditional parent-child relationship and replaced it with a dependence upon a central figure, himself.

Koresh, like Travesser, progressively revealed what he claimed to be God’s plan. In both cases the plan provides for women followers to become wives of the leader and for female children to be socialised to desire to be chosen as a bride of the leader.

Just like the residents of Travesser’s Strong City, children and adults in the Waco compound explained clearly and repeatedly why they chose to remain of their own free will in the sect. The psychological domination by these cult leaders is complete.

In the case of Koresh at Waco 76 people lost their lives in a final confrontation with the FBI. Whoever caused that final loss of life, the deaths and the sex abuse were all the result of the manipulation by David Koresh and the neediness of those who fell into his control.

Heaven’s Gate Cult – Mass Suicide

The Heaven’s Gate Cult was a combination of authoritarian political and religious ideas and UFO believing crank science. The leaders, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, adopted various names as is typical of cults founded around the power and ego of the leaders.

 

This group was different from many others in that there is no indication of sexual abuse within it. Indeed, the group had a monastic type organisation and some of the male members underwent surgical castration to get closer to their imagined androgynous ‘other level’ beings.

 

In 1997, 39 members of the cult committed suicide to leave their human body ‘vehicles’ and go to the other level with the assistance of the Hale Bopp comet. Two other members who were away from the centre carried out copy cat suicide later. Like David Berg, leader of the Children of God, who believed the comet Kohoutek would herald an apocalypse, and the biblical astrologers who saw the coming of the Messiah in a bright star, religious delusion looks to the sky to reinforce the claims of its leaders.

 

In this case, and in many others, the outcome was the tragic deaths of those drawn into the fantasy.

Sexual Abuse of Children by Catholic Priests

Around 4,400 Catholic priests in the USA have been accused of sexually abusing children and there have been thousands of other cases throughout the world. Enough of these cases have been proved to demonstrate that child sex abuse was endemic in the Catholic Church, its schools and other institutions for many decades and most probably for centuries. Most of the cases involve priests and male children although female children and nuns have also been involved.

 

For years the church avoided reporting cases of abuse to the police and known offenders have routinely been moved around rather than taking positive action to stop their crimes or acting to support victims.

 

We are entitled to think that the church was more interested in protecting its own institutions than caring about the damage it was doing. We should also ask whether an organisation that enforces the unnatural state of celibacy on its staff and maintains continuing secrecy, can ever eradicate sexual misconduct from its ranks. I do not believe so.