Jim Johns' Peoples Temple Church

"The largest mass suicide in the modern history" This is what is known to be the tragic end of a new religion that arised in Indiana, US in the 1970s. I watched a documentary on this in my religious studies class. This whole movie was shocking since a religious group, supposedly dedicated for the well being of people, ended up forcing the believers to inject poison into their children, wifes, and to themselves and resulted to 900 mass suicide. This new religious group, called People's Temple Church was led by a charismatic leader, Jim Johns, who aimed to make an utopia, with an ideal of interacial, socialistic community. They started off from simple church organization, but they later began a whole group inplantation to Guyana, where all the believers worked together to make a self-sufficient community there. But the group started to seem wrong as the leader Johns began to lose members. He started to force people not to leave and in the end, made his followers drink poison all at once saying "if we cannot live in peace, let us die in peace". This documentary made me really uncomfortable, because seeing a sane community eventually become an insane community was done in a process of people's mind being controlled. "Cult grounps" have always existed through out the history, but when religion is misused, this could cause a very serious problem. This is what I learned from watching this documentary.