Faith as a Deadly Disease (p31)

(Setting:  Satan explains to Freeman, the protagonist, why faith makes his job easier, and he shares an example of how faith leads to the demise of uncritical thinkers.)

"The Jonestown comedy was one of my easiest victories", continued Lucifer salaciously. "All I had to do was corrupt the soul of one lunatic. A surprising number of other humans willingly sacrificed their sanity and morality to follow this self-proclaimed god to oblivion. They worshipped him with the best of intentions via a wonderful evil called faith. Even as Jones’ henchmen rolled a hundred-pound drum of potassium cyanide into their encampment, his followers still believed that his philosophy of self-sacrificial socialism was a good-intentioned end. They still believed when he instructed them to squirt a deadly mix of purple Kool-Aid and poison into the mouths of their helpless offspring. While parents were murdering their children, their mad spiritual leader shouted a quote from St. Paul into a microphone. 'Children, obey your parents in all things', he told them, 'for this is pleasing unto the Lord.'

"After much faith and good intentions, they were all dead. In their last seconds of existence, they discovered the root of my power over them. Unthinking faith is the deadliest disease a human can ever be infected with. When chaos erupted during the poisoning, Jones lied to them again. 'Stop these hysterics!’ he bellowed into a scepter-like microphone. 'This is not the way for good socialists to die.' What an absurd, wonderful lie! This was the ideal way for socialists to die. Suicide is the ultimate form of faithful self-sacrifice. Jones called them insane for attempting to flee the encampment as death mushroomed all around. This was another brilliant lie. They were insane the moment they joined his Peoples Temple. That was the well-intentioned spiritual beginning of their eventual suicides."