web metrics
From the Editorial of The Biblical Astronomer, Vol. 7, No. 80, p. 3, Spring 1997.

CULTS AND COMETS

As anyone who has studied the last two centuries of the history of science knows, science has progressively wandered from the truth of the Bible into the morass of humanistic myth. Is it any wonder, then, that the scientists in power at the end of this century should look for guidance to the mysticism of the Orient, and prove unable to tangle its superstitions from objective science? After all, Jesus said : "I am the way, the truth and the life." If science is a quest for truth, then true science must be a quest for Jesus or if Jesus be found of the scientist, for the promotion of truth; but today the role of science is to expunge all knowledge of God from the minds of men. So it should not come as any great surprise that at the end of the twentieth century, man finds himself God-forsaken.

About a month ago an event happened which follows precisely from the demise of the knowledge of God in science. I refer to the so-called "Heaven's Gate" affair in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in which 39 people committed suicide in circumstances reminiscent of the more than 900 suicides in Jonestown, Guyana in November of 1978 under the tutelage of the late and unlamented James Warren Jones. Both leaders were communistic sodomites who preyed on people's need for God while keeping them totally in the dark (occult) of the true knowledge of God, that is, true science. Both leaders, too, had Charistmatic backgrounds whose uncritical emphasis on the "gifts of the spirit" opens its practitioners to demonic possession.

Allow me to present some of the faulty "scientific reasoning" used by the Heaven's Gate group to illustrate the role which modern "science" (evolutionary superstition) plays in the minds of such groups; and to point out that we can expect more and more such acts of stupidity; and to show the role which comet Hale-Bopp played in the cult.

The history of the Heaven's Gate cult, how it was founded by Marshall Applewhite after a near-death experience in a hospital where he'd committed himself to be "cured" of his sodomite tendencies, and how they looked for an alien space craft, a "UFO," to come and rescue them from this life and to evolve them to a "higher form of life:" that history is well documented. The theme about aliens coming in a space ship, or having to commit suicide to reach the "higher plane" was nothing new nor original with the cult. In the late sixties and early seventies, for example, a San Francisco rock-and-roll band called the Jefferson Airplane sang of hijacking a starship (then expected about 1980) and riding it into the sun so that its human occupants would evolve into a "higher life form." The band was serious enough about that to change its name to "Jefferson Starship." Today, millions of Muslims under the leadership of Louis Farakhan look for their salvation to an alien "mothership" which will destroy the Caucasian race and turn the world into a Muslim utopia.

There were two factors which led to the Heaven's Gate cult's belief that their UFO was in the tail of Hale-Bopp. The first came from Courtney Brown, a professor at Amory University who claims to be a "scientific remote viewer." Remote viewers are used by the military (especially the Communist military) to look into buildings and locations where eye and spy cannot go. From Brown originate the "knowledge" of underground Martian cities, and the speculations of the "face" on Mars, not to mention the "ruined cities" on the moon. It was this same Brown who "scientifically remote-viewed" a UFO four times the size of the earth, packed with aliens, accompanying Hale-Bopp. Sound reasonable? Only if the aliens have a "cloaking" device, for the nucleus of the comet (the obscure part) is only about 20 miles in size and the rest of it, the coma, is transparent. The comet is less distant from us than Mars and so any ship four times the size of the earth should be visible to the naked eye, let alone by telescope.

Added to this myth was the second factor, a report by a Texas amateur astronomer, Chuck Shramek, who on November 14th took a picture of Hale-Bopp and recorded a "Saturn-like" object near the comet. Not finding it on his computerized star charts, that very night he announced on the Art Bell radio show that he'd found a new planet. In actuality he'd photographed a star. It turns out that in printing his computerized star chart, Shramek had configured his program in such a way that the star did not show up on the printout, even though it was in his computer. His report fueled Usenet speculations, spawned by Brown's remote viewing, that the comet is either itself a space ship or is followed by a space ship. And so it came to pass that the Heaven's Gate cult, seeing their hope confirmed by "science," and mindful of the example of its remote ancestor, that first fish which jumped out of the water onto land only to find its gills "scientifically" changed to nostrils; leaped to Courtney's spaceship, thus evolving en route into a higher form of life. Modern science? It's nothing but Oriental mysticism and the occult.


The Biblical Astronomer

4527 Wetzel Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44109
U.S.A.