Religious faith or delusion?

Read this in the morning news...

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/sect-holes-up-in-cave-to-await-doomsday/20071115174909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

MOSCOW (Nov. 15) - At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said Thursday.

So here we have a group of people who have decided that the world is coming to an end (next May - just in case you want to make any plans, lol), and plan to wait it out in a cave. The article doesn't specify why they chose to do this, so I can only assume they are either hoping to be spared, or ghoulishly planning to watch it all unfold before their own turn comes (maybe they think it will take a while for "God" to find them in that cave?). What makes this really sick is that they have at least 4 children with them.

Even more disturbing is that the article goes on to claim that the leader of this little troupe is a known schizophrenic who had taken to sleeping in a coffin for months before the authorities could get hold of him and get him treatment. The police have since brought the man back to his group to try and persuade them to leave the cave, but they refused.

I don't understand this kind of behavior at all. For one thing, even if I knew for sure that the world was coming to an end, the last thing I would want to do is spend the end of my life holed up in a dark, dank, smelly cave with a bunch of lunatics. I'd be out doing all the things I wanted to but thought I had more time for, just like people do when they find out they've got late-stage cancer or other terminal diseases. I'd go on a cross-country trek just to see it all before it's gone. I'd visit every one of my relatives (even those I haven't seen in 30 years or more) just to tell them I love them. I'd advise others to live every day like it was their last - just in case.

That is the way that reasonable people behave when faced with the prospect that their own lives are coming to an end. But once you put religion into the mix, reason seems to disappear like mist on a sunny morning.

That may sound strange coming from someone who is an ordained minister, but my "religion" is Humanism, which is a system of beliefs based on reason, logic, scientific knowledge, and the strong conviction that humanity can solve it's own problems. We do not attempt to answer the question of whether or not a "god" exists, first because there is not enough evidence to support or deny such a being's existence, and second because it's not relevant to our daily lives. What IS relevant is how we choose to live, how we treat our fellow humans, and what we can do to make our world a better place.

And as a Humanist, I can assure you that the world will not be coming to an end next spring, nor any time in our lifetimes. At some point, millions or even billions of years from now, our sun will die, and it will take life on Earth with it. But that's so far in the future that we cannot even predict if humanity will still exist at that time (extinction can happen to ANY species, including homo-sapiens). In fact, it is far more likely that humanity will die off by our own hands - through nuclear or biological attacks, destruction of the ozone layer, global climate change, or the continued wasting of our natural resources - than through any natural or supernatural event.

I hope the Russian police find a way to get those folks out of that cave safely, especially the children. It's even remotely possible that the children will leave on their own (as kids sometimes have more common sense than the adults they are entrusted to). But if that doesn't happen, then one has to wonder what they will do when June comes around and the world is still here. Will they realize they were wrong and come out of that cave? Will they accept that they were misled by a man who was mentally ill and stop treating his delusions as "revelations" from their higher power?

Or will they do as so many similar cults have done before and claim there was a miscalculation - or worse, take their own lives to avoid facing reality?

For the children's sake, I hope someone in that group will come to their senses.

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