OUR DAYS OF JUDGMENT

By Pico Iyer

One man's heartthrob is, notoriously, his neighbor's grimmest nightmare: What could he possibly see in her, we ask ourselves, watching the tawdrily dressed, flaky and obsequious woman on his arm (and unable, by definition, to see what he sees in her--and with her--when alone)? And one man's faith is no less impossible for a nonbeliever to fathom: in recent days, millions were celebrating the idea that a man actually rose from the dead, while another doubtless felt that he was committing a holy act that would gain him a place in heaven when he strapped a bomb to his body and entered a Tel Aviv restaurant. The leap of faith is--and has to be--a plunge into the unrational (which to skeptics seems "unreasonable"), and by its nature it is a move that leaves the rest of us behind. Every religion is a different language that, to those outside it, makes as little sense as Mandarin dialogue or Cyrillic characters do to me.

When we heard of the strange cyberdoctrines of the Heaven's Gate group last week, the easiest thing in the world to do was to mock them for their unapologetic embrace of UFOs, "Human Evolutionary Levels" and even a Star-Trekky Kingdom of Heaven--to mock them, in fact, for defying our belief as they embraced their own. Their very name, we could tell ourselves cosily (as we painted Easter eggs and watched outlandishly dressed icons waving golden, human-shaped statuettes), sounded like an X-Files version of a Californian health-food store. It mattered little that unlike the members of Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, say, or that Tel Aviv terrorist, they seemed to have kept mostly to themselves and been principally guilty of credulity and self-delusion.

Yet who is to determine when a "cult" becomes a religion, especially in a land where freedom of religion is sacrosanct? My Random House unabridged dictionary defines cult as "a particular system of religious worship" and then, seven lines later, as "a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox or extremist." A cult, in other words, is a religion and isn't one, depending on who's looking.

So what will our criteria be? Is a cult defined by the smallness of the congregation? Then what of those who follow Emerson or Whitman in observing a religion of one? Is it characterized by a lack of ancient scriptures? Then why does an Internet index call the old and established faith of Zoroastrianism a cult? Is it a function of a group's distance from orthodoxy? Then what of Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad--all of them heretics in their day?

"Every religion," as the great scholar of the world's belief systems, Huston Smith, points out, "mixes universal principles with local peculiarities," and the latter, he goes on, "are not easy for outsiders to comprehend." Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church was more often described as a "cult" before it took over 375 organizations (and Jim Jones' People's Temple is sometimes considered a church that devolved into a cult). As Scientologists do battle with the government in Germany, they could point out that religion apparently comes from the Latin religare, or "to bind"; cult comes from the Latin cultus, meaning "worship."

In the wake of last week's tragedy, some reflexively pointed their fingers at California, where belief is famously privatized, and reality, as in some dumbed-down version of Emerson, is often regarded as a vanity plate to be custom-made. In the privileged town of Santa Barbara, California, where I sit, the hills are alive with the sound of mantra--from John-Roger, the Texan guru of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, down the road; from the New Age preacher Marianne Williamson, closer to downtown; and even from the radio station on which I heard last week a minister speak rabidly of the Second Coming and Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

But to concentrate on spiritually orphaned, Internet-lonely California is to miss the point, when mass suicides confront us in Canada, in South Korea, even in placid Switzerland. And to focus too much on the millenarian climate is to ignore the fact that even in Shakespeare, comets mark "change of times and states" (as he writes in the first sentence of Henry VI, Part 1). When prodigies break out in the fourth act of a Shakespearean tragedy, it is a sign that the time is out of joint: some fundamental link between man and his environment, as intrinsic as the link between parent and child, is broken.

To look beyond the eccentricities of Marshall Applewhite's creed is not to condone their odd assumptions--any more than one condones by saying, "I don't know how she could marry that spacey pagan." It is simply to acknowledge ignorance. "There is no one alive today," Arnold Toynbee once said, "who knows enough to say with confidence whether one religion has been greater than all others." And though the Heaven's Gaters' doctrine may seem as weird to us as ours apparently seemed to them, the wider tragedy of the cruel suicides would be if our own faith prevented us from lavishing at least as much sympathy on the group as curiosity.