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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > Satanism & demonology
When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group
committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and
fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as
brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals
that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices
of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased
so that we can better understand what was created - and destroyed -
at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews
with former group members, archival research, and diaries and
letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders
as educated political activists who were passionately committed to
achieving social justice through communal life. The book analyzes
the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds,
contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the
larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated
leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic
effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its
members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the
events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions,
such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and
misguided ends.
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