$7 Million in Bequests Reported

According to testimony by Cecil A. Roberts, Guyana’s assistant commissioner of crime, at a coroner’s inquest two weeks ago, letters from cult members bequeathing more than $7 million in People’s Temple assets to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were carried out of the Jonestown commune on Nov. 18 in a suitcase containing more than $600,000 in United States currency. The money was intended for the Soviet Embassy, the authorities in Guyana have said, but was abandoned by its couriers because of its weight. The money was later confiscated by the Guyanese police.

Behind the guise of religion, Mr. Jones apparently led his cult into a posture of radical Marxism, and at the time of the mass deaths, he was actively exploring the possibility of moving his commune to the Soviet Union.

On Dec. 18, the day after Mr. Roberts’s disclosure of the bequests, an employee of the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown told reporters that the Russians did not want the money. But until yesterday’s Associated Press dispatch, there had been no confirmation that the Embassy had ever received any People’s Temple funds.

The location and disposition of millions of dollars collected from members of Mr. Jones’s cult remained a puzzle for nearly a month after the bizarre death ritual.

Two South Africans who overstayed their British visas were jailed for life on Friday for the murders of two men strangled during a series of violent muggings.

Gabriel Bhengu, 27, and Jabu Mbowane, 26, will be deported after serving life sentences.

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A life sentence normally lasts around 15 years.

But what Raspail doesn’t say explicitly is that the beautiful oak door SHOULD burn. It needs to burn. Its beauty is idolatrous.

Why?

Examine the teleology of the door, why it was made beautifully. The door was made within the tradition of sacred syncretism, to unify the Universal divinity of God with the local spirit of the hearth.

But then the Frenchman stopped believing in God.

Then he stopped believing in the sacred hearth and family.

And now he just has an ornate door, sitting alone, unable to explain its beauty or purpose, trying to justify its existence to desperate people in a dying society.

In other words, it’s an idol to a dead god. And idols MUST BURN. No human can tolerate the existence of such manifest desecration and be fully alive spiritually. We want to destroy these false promises that can’t be made real.

The Frenchman doesn’t have the grit to destroy the false idols of the past. The migrants do. That might be the reason the Frenchman invited them in to his country to begin with.

All told, we looked at test and survey data from over 600,000 students. Our analysis found that philosophy majors scored higher than students in all other majors on standardized tests of verbal and logical reasoning, as well as on self-reports of good habits of mind, even after accounting for freshman-year differences. This suggests that their intellectual abilities and traits are due, in part, to what they learned in college.