Errant Belief #3: “Why Should I Do Anything? He Said He’s Happy!”

In 1997, Heaven’s Gate cult members took turns making videotaped farewell statements and explaining why they had chosen to leave their “vehicles” (a loaded language term for their bodies) behind and commit suicide. Each expressed happiness and insisted they were exercising their free will. They believed Earth would soon be destroyed by fire and saw themselves as merely “evacuating” to a spacecraft. You can view these statements in a video posted on YouTube. The members spoke openly, candidly, seemingly overjoyed. One said, reading from a prepared missive.

“Now the time has come for us to leave this world… by dropping these bodies, we will receive the inheritance we have been promised of internal life and a physical, next-level body to be in service to the chief of chiefs. It is my choice to lay down my borrowed physical body… my thoughts in these last hours are only of joy and wonder.”