Overview
The Seventh Bolgia of The Inferno is the home to the Thieves, and features some of Dante's most memorable scenes. It is here where the incarcerated are not only harassed by snakes, but periodically metamorphize into them as well.
Comments
It continues to be a great irony that religious belief, which is proclaimed by many as absolutely prerequisite for moral behavior, so often fails to provide such a foundation. A recent example of senseless torture and killing of men, women, and children comes in the form of a literal inferno that was created a few years ago.
There once was a religious organization called The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. It was formed in the 1990s by former Catholic priests, including their leader, one Joseph Kibweteere. This movement was no friend of the Catholic Church, though, which was seen to be a worldly body, no longer part of God's plan. Moreover, because Kibweteere claimed to have overheard a conversation between Jesus and his mother, the Virgin Mary, they needed no direction from any earthly agency.
In the course of that all-important conversation that Kibweteere was somehow privileged to listen in on, Mary revealed that mankind was dangerously close to getting the axe. Because too many people in the world simply were not taking the Ten Commandments seriously enough.
The movement published their teachings and prophecies in something called "A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Time." In the tradition of mystical people everywhere, Kibweteere thought that the end of the world would come on a momentous date, like Dec 31, 1999. So he told his followers to rid themselves of their earthly possessions, and they did. They fully expected to be taken to a lovely afterlife as the select few, while the rest of humanity would be destroyed. They'd live in a paradise, something like a Garden of Eden, where they would not have to work.
One could hardly be blamed if they thought this sect was based in Oklahoma or Alabama. It was not. This organization was founded in Uganda in the 1990s.
This group, incidentally, bears more than a superficial resemblance to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Both have a special venom reserved for the Catholic Church. Both disdain the use of modern medical treatments, at least in certain cases. Both spoke often about end times and the destruction of the earth, in which all but the True Believers would perish.
They held celebrations for the week leading up to the day. When that day came but the world didn't end, Kibweteere simply revised the date to Dec 31, 2000. Then he revised it again to March 17, 2000.
Then, on that Big Day, hundreds of congregants, including families and children, came to the church. The group leaders secured them all inside by nailing all exits firmly shut, and then set the entire structure ablaze. Many of the bodies were so thoroughly destroyed that identification was impossible.
Other group members were strangled, poisoned, or cut up. Many were dumped into a pit latrine that was then covered with cement.
All told, the final body count was close to 1,000.
Many people have forgotten about this incident. It was overshadowed, in the US, at least, by the Heaven's Gate mass suicide that occurred in California in 2000. But it's another one of these interesting demonstrations that devout belief in all the dogma that Christianity would have us obey, lest we become murderous brutes, didn't prevent these murderers from doing their work.
