March 26th: Today in 1997 the bodies of thirty-nine people who commited mass suicide as part of the Heaven’s Gate cult are found. Cults are a difficult thing for me to understand, I spend my life challenging assumptions and trying as much as possible to think for myself, yet some people are very willing to give away the responsibility for their thinking. It is hard to fathom what leads people so far away from the rational that the stories of the Heaven’s Gate cult make sense, yet for the Thirty-Nine and at least two more since then this seemed to be the path for them. Very, very sad.

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