This week's latest cult suicides reminded me of the saw: "Everybody's crazy but me and thee; and I'm not too sure about thee." When one watches 38 followers parade behind a person with obvious poached-egg megolamania, the nagging question is: Why are some people so gullible? The answer may lie in the loss of truth in western civilization. When the idea of truth disappears, practical disasters appear.

Sometimes our world does seem to be a crazy place--especially when every mother's worst fear is seen across screens featuring lifeless sons and daughters draped in the same black shrouds. How crazy can geniuses get to think that by suicide they could rendezvous with an undetected UFO that might trail behind the Hale-Bopp comet! This was not religious zeal at work, but the absence of religious certainty. Even the highest tech web designers realized the vacuum in life if there is no "out there", no beyond. As E. J. Dionne insightfully noted,

"this is what happens when the old faith decays and is replaced by a makeshift foolishness, preached by human beings who pretend to be gods. . . . These events, however unhinged, are so rooted in the contemporary . . . The most advanced forms of modernity join forces with darker impulses that go back to the caves. . . . The rationalism we associate with the modern world is far from triumphant because modernity has created its own discontents."

The fatal problem with this cult, however, was that while recognizing this modern transcendence-vacuum, they floated into another one. While these gifted young computer hacks created virtual reality on the Web, they could not create transcendent reality-no matter how modern the tools.

A step back from the tragedy makes it clear that for 38 highly skilled people to follow the maniacal Marshall Applewhite with no better evidence or authority than he had is little more than insanity-not religion. When many people learn of this, and the absurd claims of Heaven's Gate, they can hardly say anything but: Its a crazy world. One wonders what happened to good old fashioned skepticism when these scenes are flashed on the news on Good Friday.

Why would anyone believe Applewhite? Maybe the only explanation is that credence to these claims could only occur in the absence of truth where people resort to creating their own 'realities'. The real problem is, however: often those mental realities don't match physical realities. Again, Dionne commented:

"Our faith in the technical inspires us to give up our freedom. Here, the Heaven's Gate people were as modern as could be, coming up with astonishingly creative, if twisted, technical and scientific explanations for the human condition. They pretended to be able to explain the mysteries of life with the answers provided by fake science."

To top it off, one mom from California was interviewed. She was asked what she thought of her son's belief following his suicide. Her answer was that he would continue to live, she hoped he was really happy now, and who could judge someone else's religion? Where in the world could a mom express that, instead of anger at the deception, sadness at her loss, or guilt over her inability to prevent? Only in California . . . or else in a land that had fallen so far from its own religious moorings as to be open to UFO salvation.

As others have noted, if we don't stand for something we will fall for everything. Other than, "everybody's crazy but me and thee; and I'm not too sure about thee" about the best sense I can make of this tragedy is to view it against the backdrop of the fatal gullibility which arises when there is no religious certainty.

Instead of passing through heaven's gate, these people picked a hellish portal. Mark it down because we may see more in the near future: When people forsake the true God, they create false gods. Maybe that's behind what Solomon said long ago:

"They who hate [God] love death." (Prov. 8:36)

The other scary thing about the Heaven's Gate cult-suicide is that it is a recurrence of a much earlier cult. Seeking to leave their "cocoons" and pursue "higher truth" was actually a reiteration of a first century cult that denied the external, diminished the body, and decreased the need for structure. The Gnostics were those who sought the spiritual and denied the physical. One result is that each cultist-apart from physical restraints-creates his own reality.

Gnosticism, named after the early gnostikoi ("knowing ones"), manifests itself in a variety of ways, but consistently attempts to elevate the higher realm of spirit while denigrating the worldly or physical. The gnostic calls devotees to be more infatuated with heavenly ideals than concerned with earthly or physical realities. Admittedly, most believers could benefit from a little more exhortation to be more spiritual; there is no objection to that. However, the gnostic pushes that dynamic to an extreme resulting in the distortion of nearly every other biblical virtue. Gnosticism, at its simplest, rejects the physical and extols the spiritual; it despises the external and lauds the invisible. It is a reality-denying faith that is totalitarian.

Eric Voegelin was particularly perceptive to note some of the tendencies of gnosticism. He went so far as to claim that

"Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western society,"

Once a cult has this momentum of gnosticism, said Voegelin

"it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it up by persuasion. . . . They are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled. . . . Show them convincingly that they are talking nonsense, and you will hear, 'Christ's own apostle was accounted mad.' . . . In brief: the attitude is psychologically iron-clad and beyond shaking by argument."

The gnostic, according to Voegelin, is led to a militaristic confrontation with existing powers, invariably applying passages from the Revelation to himself with his adversaries viewed as apocalyptic agents of the anti-Christ. The gnostic secret about eschatological outcomes grants superiority to the illuminati, while those not in the clique are sub-spiritual.

Watch those end-time cults. Nearly every one, from Jim Jones' group to the Branch Davidians to Heaven's Gate had a strong belief that they knew the end-time secrets of how the world would end.

Centuries earlier, Richard Hooker described some of his contemporaries as gnostics because they appealed to

"special illumination of the Holy Ghost, whereby they discern those things in the word, which others reading yet discern them not."

"prefer each other's company to that of the rest of the world; they will voluntarily accept counsel and direction from the indoctrinators, they will neglect their own affairs and devote excessive time to service of the cause, and they will extend generous material aid to the leaders of the movement."

Heresies exhibit decipherable continuity. Some are more persistent than others, and the recurring heresies are as comprehensive as they are old. As the Second Law of Solomon applied to theological error (the first being that "There is nothing new under the sun."), it might be correct to say There are no new heresies under the sun; only recycled ones. Or perhaps old errors never pass away; they only reappear in new garb. The transformational heresies recur and re-form like mutant strains of ebola. The antidote to such reappearances will frequently be an acquaintance with previous vaccines.