$t3b0.5>The last few weeks in Uganda horror has been around every corner - here a church with the charred remains of twisted faith and there a mass grave piled with the rotting bodies of strangled innocence. Once counted, no less than 924 dead members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments - an apocalyptic cult which predicted the end of the world in the year 2000 - were found. This makes the Ugandan cult massacre the largest in modern history, eclipsing the slaughter of 913 led by Jim Jones in Guyana.

While all the answers may never be exhumed from the graves ­ or told by those burned alive ­ investigation into the deaths has begun to reveal mass murder, not mass suicide. Among the strongest evidence to support this contention are those bodies found underneath a freshly laid floor of concrete that had been mutilated with machete gashes and strangulation wounds. Apparently, some followers of the movement did not want to die.

Police forensic workers, though hampered by a lack of resources, discovered that the doors of the church had been nailed shut. More evidence has come by way of former cult members who left the group after its leader, Credonia Mwerinde, falsely predicted the end of the world Dec. 31, 1999. It appears, however, instead of waiting for the world to end, Mwerinde and other cult leaders decided to precipitate the end themselves.

If you've only read this far into the headlines, you may have heard the story but you've certainly missed the message. After all, the grotesque nature of the Ugandan crimes should come to no surprise to those who see cult leaders for who they are: spiritual bartenders who mix their own sinister motives with the purity of faith and offer their fantastic concoction to any who will drink.

In Uganda, a country who survived the brutality of Idi Amin and whose current plagues include poverty and AIDS, many were willing to hop onto the stool and ask for this illusion of relief.

In the United States, we are no strangers to such practices. One of the nation's fastest growing entities among the White Supremacy movement is the World Church of the Creator - with 50,000 members worldwide and 10 chapters in the state of California alone.

The "church," which fuses racist teachings with religious belief to create what is called "Creativity", signifying the creative power of the white race, is a prime example of wielding religious power for personal gain.

Famed white supremacist Matthew Hale leads the Illinois' chapter and is thought to be at least partly responsible for inspiring one of its members, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, to embark on a deadly shooting rampage that killed two and wounded several others.

Hale, like Mwerinde, has a large audience to entice ­ made up on the one hand by largely young, jaded teens who find it quite easy to shift the blame of personal problems on the shoulders of minorities and ethnic groups and on the other by those who, for one reason or another, are emotionally vulnerable and open to new ideas, no matter how repugnant.

For the World Church of the Creator, the issue is race. For Heaven's Gate, the issue was UFOs. For the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, the issue was a year 2000 apocalypse. By themselves, the issues remain relatively unattractive, but add the power of faith and suddenly fringe beliefs, for some, have an air of legitimacy.

The twisting is subtle. In the Bible, Jesus says, "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." But with a little cultish tweaking, it can be read, "Go and sell all you have and give the money to me," an idea that Scientologists have been successfully plugging for years.

It is this process of twisting established faith for one's own end that makes the acts of cult leaders truly heinous crimes. They stand as not only an offense against the physical body but also as an offense against personal faith, by transforming faith into a tool rather than allowing it to stand on its own. Cults are not faith; they are the perversion of faith.

Moreover, those who lead them are not "pastors" or "spiritual leaders," they are charlatans, con men whose agency of deception is an affront to what I and countless others hold dear, our faith.

With the tragedies of Uganda in mind, avoiding such people seems critical. Jesus said it best himself: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves."