Where the Kool Aid originated

on the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown Mass Suicide, it is still one of the most fascinating religious cults to exist, not as simplistic as some have made it out to be. In a good article, the conservative online magazine Culture 11 deals with the positive and mainstream elements of the movement we forget as we think of the horrors of that day 30 years ago.

The money quote is this:

We flatter ourselves that since Jones's vision found a place for murder-suicide, the whole of it was outlandish. All too many ideas, including innocuous ones, can be mixed in a lethal ideological cocktail. Perhaps most of all, what the Jonestown massacre has to teach us today is the strange arbitrariness of ideological systems. 

link to article