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April 9, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Thin Line Between Church and Cult, by Don Lattin,

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April 9, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Thin Line Between Church and Cult, by Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer,

IT CAME UP, most recently, when thinking about the horror in Uganda. How do we get our minds around a mass murder and suicide involving a church called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God?

How do we reconcile the most famous of those commandments, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" with hundreds of hacked, strangled and charred bodies pulled from a torched church and unearthed from mass graves?

It's easy. We call the church a "cult." Everyone knows the difference between religions and cults. Religion/good. Cult/bad.

We do the same thing when confronted with Muslims who blow up office buildings, Christians who bomb abortion clinics, and Jews who massacre Muslims. They are not people of faith, we say, but "terrorists." We tell ourselves they are only acting "in the name of God," because everyone knows religion is really about love, compassion and salvation. Religion/good. Terror/bad.

Where do we get the idea that religion never endorses violence or terrorism?

Certainly not from the Hebrew Bible, which thunders: I will send my terror in front of you, and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come (Exodus 23:27).

In the New Testament, Jesus is often depicted as a pacifist, but he also says: Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).

Islam blesses jihad, or "holy war," assuring the faithful: Leave is given to those who fight because they have been wronged. Surely God is able to help them. (Koran 22:39).

We don't like to admit it, but violence is not a corruption of religion. It's a fundamental part of the belief system behind Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And that doesn't mean the three great faiths of Abraham have a monopoly on religious violence. Just witness those warring factions of Sikhs and Hindus in India, or the release of deadly nerve gas in the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese Buddhist sect.

"Violence is as religious as apple pie," says Mark Juergensmeyer, a sociology professor at University of California in Santa Barbara and author of an impressive new book, "Terror in the Mind of God -- The Global Rise of Religious Violence" (University of California Press, 2000).

As part of his research, Juergensmeyer interviewed religious militants like the Rev. Michael Bray, a Christian convicted of arson attacks against seven abortion clinics on the East Coast, and Mahmud Abouhalima, a Muslim imprisoned for his role in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Juergensmeyer also visited the Israeli gravesite of Baruch Goldstein, a Jew who gunned down dozens of Muslim worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Goldstein's grave has become a shrine for some members of the Jewish right wing, who view him as a hero and martyr.

Juergensmeyer sees a connection between that kind of religious violence -- attacks directed against those perceived as the enemies of God -- and the mass murder/suicides of Jonestown, Waco and Uganda.

Infamous religious groups like People's Temple, the San Francisco-based church, and Heaven's Gate, the Southern California UFO cult, ended their time on earth with a kind of "terrorist implosion," rather than external attacks on the infidel.

"But they are all acts of performance violence," Juergensmeyer says. "These are public events created not only to terminate individual lives, but to produce a catastrophic event. These are people wrapped up in an intense religious vision, a drama of transtemporal proportions. They have a sense that they're involved in a cosmic war." If you think these visions are the exclusive domain of "cultists" and "terrorists," think about this: Later this month, on April 20, Jews celebrate Passover, which commemorates the story in the Book of Exodus about how God passed over the Israelites when he unleashed a plague that killed all the other first-born children of Egypt.

The next day, on Good Friday, Christians gather in church to remember the day when Jesus of Nazareth had nails pounded through his hands and was strung up to die in a slow, tortuous execution.

It's easy to see the violence and terror in self-destructing, apocalyptic "cults" like the Ten Commandments church in Uganda, whose leaders predicted doomsday on Dec. 31, 1999. It's harder to see the violence and terror lurking behind our own spiritual symbols and religious holidays.

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on Jul 17, 13