The People’s Temple in Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, The Order of the Solar Temple. All cults that ended in tragic mass suicides. How could such lofty aspirations end so badly?

For today’s self-contained installment of The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the shadow side of the anxiety-relieving religious notion that death is just a doorway into a better place.

How do charismatic prophets indoctrinate believers into ending their lives, and often the lives of their children, in the name of spirituality?

Julian briefly examines each of these groups, along with Paul Nthenge Mackenzie’s Good News International Ministry—450 of whose followers starved themselves to death in a Kenyan forest in 2023. Then he transitions into exploring philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscience-based ways of understanding the elements that make these spiritualized perversions of our survival instincts possible.

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