The authorship of these files on cults has his or her own motivations for providing them a

    [Fredric Rice, The Skeptic Tank:  The authorship of these files on
    cults has his or her own motivations for providing them and will
    contain his or her own bias.  What I find typical is that
    individuals and organizations which report on cults are usually
    themselves a competition cult yet like to think of themselves as
    "a religion, not a cult."  In actual fact, _ALL_ religions are
    cults by the primary, secondary, and terciary usage definition of
    the term.  Some of the information you find here is inaccurate and
    contains urban legend -- take what you find with a grain of salt.
    If you wish to acquire a copy of the Law Enforcement Guide on
    Occult Crime, contact myself at frice@stbbs.com or at The Skeptic
    Tank (818) 335-9601 and I'll forward the address and information
    you need.]

Branch Davidians

        [Fredric Rice: The text claims that the Davidians don't
        exist any more.  This is wrong.  The Branch Davidian
        Church still has many members across the United States
        and the membership _INCREASED_ after the BATf slaughter.
        Many files on The Skeptic Tank cover the Davidian's
        slaughter, including the official BATF report and a great
        many lunatic conspiracy theories by various groups.]

No longer in existence since Waco, the Branch Davidians were an
offshoot of the far larger and better established Seventh Day
Adventists. Like the SDA, Branch Davidians believed in an
imminent Second Coming but were badly weakened as an organisation
when this failed to happen as predicted in 1959. They were sued
by many of their own number who had bought land close to the
supposed site of the Visitation. (SDA had by that time overcome
the embarrassment of their own wrongly predicted apocalypse in
1843.)

David Koresh, né Vernon Howell, took over the leadership
of the Davidians in 1986 after ingeniously ousting leader George
 Roden. (Koresh challenged Roden as to who had the greater
divine power and persuaded him to exhume the body of a Davidian
to see whether he could bring it back to life. He then had Roden
arrested for 'corpse abuse'.) It has been suggested that Koresh
suffered from the delusional 'Jerusalem Syndrome' following a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1985, a year before he declared
himself the 'sinful Messiah'. Others believe his psychosis
began earlier than that - he was the illegitimate son of a
15-year-old mother and was later abused by a stepfather.

He was thrown out of the SDA in 1979 at the age of 19 for
being a troublemaker. Once in charge of the Davidians, he
began targeting Britain for recruitment with considerable
success: 33 of the 82 followers who died at Waco were British.
Koresh had also made recruitment trips to Australia and Israel
prior to the tragic 50-day siege in 1993.

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