The name Jim Jones lives on in infamy in the Caribbean region for an extremely macabre reason. On November 18, 1978, 908 men, women, and children drank or were forced to drink a beverage that had been spiked with a lethal dose of cyanide. American and Caribbean people are still haunted by the memories of the lives of their loved ones being extinguished by such sinister forces and circumstances.

Kenyan families are still in mourning after the details of another religiously motivated suicide massacre became known in 2023. Paul Mackenzie, a Kenyan pastor, apparently told members of his sect that they must starve themselves to death to meet Jesus. Kenyan authorities, after being notified that something was amiss in the Shakahola Forest, began probing, only to discover the gristly details of shallow graves and emaciated bodies clinging slenderly to life.

In 1993, David Koresh (born Vernon Howell) and approximately 80 members of his Branch Davidian sect, exited this life in a blaze of agonising ‘glory’ as their Mount Carmel compound was breached and burnt by agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Explosives. Koresh was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist home but eventually gravitated to an extreme expression of Seventh-day Adventism known as the Branch Davidians.

Jones, Mackenzie, and Koresh shared in common a deep religious orientation that fortified them in their quest for salvation, even if that quest led to self-destruction or the destruction of their fellow sect members. Like Japanese kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers, who were willing to blow themselves up in pursuit of their objectives, these deeply religious or deeply disturbed men placed everything on the altar and were prepared to sacrifice themselves or their followers for the cause.

New atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dinesh, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are all convinced that there is something wrong in the body politic of organised religion. Dawkins goes straight for the jugular of religion by attacking the god concept as defined by the Abrahamic faiths. In The God Delusion Dawkins writes, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous proud, unjust, unforgiving and capricious.”

Hitchens sets out to prove that religion poisons everything it touches in his best-seller God is Not Great. Hitchens argues that organised religion is a violent, irrational, man-made construct that seeks to dumb-down humanity. Drawing examples from the major faith of the world, Hitchens presents a case for the deconstruction of organised religion and the elevation of enlightenment values, which he says are a more evolved source of morality.

The New Atheists provide a much-needed critique of our religious landscape at a time when religious functionaries are trying their best to reoccupy the corridors of political power. It is so ironic that at precisely the same time when organised religion is being rocked by so many sexual and financial scandals, men and women of the cloth are demanding a seat at the table of political power.

Perhaps even more worrisome is the extreme religious views held by many who have wormed their way into political and other high offices internationally. Case in point is US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is known for his embrace of Christian Nationalism. Hegseth’s dabbling with the Calvinist concept of spheres of influence and his flirting with the extreme views of Christian Reconstructionism makes him, in my opinion, as dangerous as Jones, Koresh, and Mackenzie.

Following Hegseth’s lead, a number of commanders in the US military have been feeding the narrative to their troops involved in attacking Iran, that President Donald Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and the return of Jesus to Earth.

On March 3, The Guardian carried a story claiming that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received more than 200 complaints from servicemen across all branches of the army. These complaints centre around military leadership using religious rhetoric rooted in the apocalyptic book of Revelation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is following suit by once again appealing to sinister passages found in the Torah, which were used as justification for the Jews in the Old Testament to commit ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Amalekites and the Canaanites. Prime Minister Netanyahu also appealed to the same demonic biblical reasoning at the height of what I consider to be his ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. A war of extermination against Iran, comparable to the genocidal wars waged by Joshua in the Bible, seems to have been the wet dream of Prime Minister Netanyahu for the last 40 years.

Zionists of the Jewish and Christian variety appeal to other sinister passages in the Torah to justify the land grabs or Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and the rest of the Levant. According to Genesis 15:18, the deity of the Jews is supposed to have given Abraham the title deed to all the land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. Zionists use this and other passages from the Torah to push the concept of Eretz Israel or the greater Israel. Notwithstanding the conditionality of the promise of this land to Jews in the Bible and the reinterpretation of the meaning of Israel in the New Testament, American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has gone full in on the greater Israel project.

Now that the coalition of Israel and the US has done the unthinkable and assassinated the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock Mosque may have been elevated on the to-do list of Jewish and Christian Zionists. The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which can best be described as an act of lunacy, may very well have placed a mark of death on every American and Israeli citizen in reach. One can only imagine how fanatical Catholics would become if Iran had bombed the Vatican and killed the pope and many of his cardinals.

It is unlikely that Iran can match the combined military might of the US, Israel, Britain, France, and the treacherous Gulf states. It is to the credit of the Iranians that, notwithstanding the odds arrayed against them, they have not backed down and clearly have no intention of surrendering until they have done some serious physical and economic damage to the white settler colonial State of Israel, the rogue terrorist state of the US, and the US minions in the Persian Gulf region who should be siding with Iran to rid the Middle East of both Christian and Jewish imperialists.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of At Hell’s Gate: The Catholic and Evangelical Takeover of America. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or rodneynimrod2@gmail.com.

Lenrod N Baraka