Date Posted: May 17, 2008 at 10:05 pm
by Isherwood
Quote:
Russian Doomsday cult leave cave
The last nine surviving members of a Russian doomsday cult have abandoned the cave they had been living in since October, the regional prosecutor's office said.
Russia's Interfax news agency quoted regional official Vladimir Provotorov as saying Friday's departure was preceded by the removal of two decomposing female corpses during the night.
Provotorov said: "The cult members themselves say that one of the women died from 'severe Lenten fasting', while the other died of an illness. This will all need to be sorted out."
The 35 members of a devout splinter group of the Russian Orthodox Church had holed themselves up in the cave in the Penza region of central Russia last year to await the end of the world.
Pavel Kuznetsov, their leader, predicted the apocalypse for April or May this year, but would not join them underground, saying God had different tasks for him.
He reportedly told followers that in the afterlife, they would be judging whether others deserved heaven or hell.
Followers were not allowed to watch television, listen to the radio or handle money, Russian media reported.
The elaborate structure included sleeping rooms, a makeshift kitchen and religious altars.
In March, 24 members left the cave after rainwater began to erode the earth in and around the gully where the sect followers had settled, forcing most of them to leave the hideout.
On hearing of their departure Kuznetsov attempted suicide and was later hospitalised.
Russian authorities had kept watch over the dugout since November, turning the nearby village of Nikolskoe into an operations centre.
Kuznetsov has been charged with setting up a religious organisation associated with violence.
Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate and now these whackos. After a while you'd think these religious cults would get tired of being wrong...and dead. But we have to give them credit for perseverance.
A Stargate? Cool. That's so much more potentially interesting than most of the other predictions. An alien invasion isn't necessarily a bad development. It could be a good thing for humanity.
Having said that I have to admit that I enjoy reading science fiction, especially hard sci-fi. I know that the odds favor the possibility that some sort of life exists elsewhere in the galaxy. There's only one good reason I can think of to not believe in alien life, and I agree with that reason.
There's no evidence of life existing anywhere else in the universe. There's evidence that suggests that's at least possible. But at this point in time there's nothing that positively supports the notion that life has ever existed anywhere but here on Earth. For that reason, I am free to conclude that it's equally possible for there to be no life anywhere but here. And I am quite comfortable thinking that. That life exists solely on this one planet accounts for all the evidence we have at the moment regarding life in the known universe, and adds a degree of importance to our lives. Instead of fretting about how "alone" that makes us in the universe, I prefer to focus on and emphasize the fact we have each other, we have us.
That's why it's so important to me to stand for peace and harmony, and end to the divisions between people. I would that every human could only perceive other humans as humans, that's all. We are all in this ride together. (We're all stearing but in billions of different directions.) We are yet too immature a species to have developed a strong inter-species bonding. We focus on the differences rather than the commonalities, to our general discredit.
Doomsday cults and those whose religion takes delight in focusing on the complete (and frequently prayed for soon) distruction of mankind are anti-humans. They dislike their own species. In fact they openly and brazenly declare themselves removed from the rest of humanity. They take egotistic pride, and joy born in ignorance, in the fact that they are not an animal. They have invented a new species based on philosophical beliefs. Homo sapian christianus, Homo sapian muslami, etc. Their philosophical beliefs are responsible, in part, for retarding the advancement of the human race simply because they're so widespread. Religions and superstitions are holdovers from our not-all-that-distant past, but they've become an albatross around the neck of humanity.
If non-believers can have titles like the believers have, Then I'd consider myself to be a prophet of atheism. I'm not militant, I don't usually harangue theists unless invited to do so, but I'd rather focus on the positive effects of ridding oneself from preconceived, mired-in-the-past attitudes. Like it or not, we're headed into the future. We will never in our lifetimes be able to return to the past, even the last minute. We are irrevocably advancing in time.
I'm also an advocate of basing one's beliefs as much as possible on what you do know to your personal degree of satisfaction to be reality. I advocate people accepting the future as inevitable and getting their brains wrapped around the idea that what's past is past and we need to be concerned and involved with our own species' future.
Otherwise all those dommsayers will get the satisfaction of having their potentially self-fulfilling prophesies come to pass, taking us all with them.
Last major doom date was May 15, next predicted one is some time in June when the Large Hadron Collider will open a stargate for aliens to invade Earth.
