A cult is "a religious organization that has little or nothing to do with conventional religious traditions and believes that society is degenerate and that the members of the organization must withdraw together from normal life and live apart in group quarters or a commune"(Curry 342). Cults usually develop around a particular charismatic leader. They are smaller than sects, less structured, and are not tied to established churches. Members of cults believe that each person must establish better relations with the spiritual. Cult members join for many different reasons.

People that join cults adhere together for a wide array of reasons. The r

The leader of the Heaven's Gate cult seemed eerily powerful. Marshall Applewhite, leader of the cult, lead 39 members in March of 1997 to commit suicide. They died in shifts, with some members helping others take a lethal cocktail of Phenobarbital and vodka before downing their own doses of the fatal mixture. Applewhite even went as far as to undergo voluntary castrations in the months leading up to the mass suicide. Members of the cult believed that Hale-Bopp, a comet, was a sign that they were to shed their containers and join a spacecraft traveling behind the comet that would take them to a higher plane of existence (CNN 1998). Another charismatic leader led many people, including children, to burn to death in 1993.

In late 1978, James Warren Jones led the largest group suicide of the century. Jones developed a belief called Translation in which he and his followers would all die together and would move to another planet for a life of bliss. Mass suicides were even practiced, where the followers pretended to drink poison and fall to the ground. The real thing happened in November of 1978. In Jonestown, Guyana, this doomsday cult of 638 adults and 276 children committed suicide, a group consensus by The People's Temple members. Some of them committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced kool-aid. Others died by injection or by being shot (Robinson 2000). This man,

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