Although I started my studying with the Fundamentalist Mindset readings, my first reaction upon looking at the Heaven’s Gate website was that it was a complete eyesore and that difficult to understand because of reasons unrelated to content. The bright colored fonts were hard to read on a patterned background. Although the HTML and graphics were par for the course for late nineties web design, odd embellishments  do not enhance the credibility of the site’s creators. Yet it does remind me of something made by someone with as little attachment to earthly possessions as the mission statement claims. It is a recruitment tool, but there is something about this page that seeks to separate Heaven’s Gate from the masses that would criticize its workings and motives.

For those that are curious, results of the readability tests at http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php place the Heaven’s Gate website homepage http://www.heavensgate.com/index.html#keys somewhere between Time and the Wall Street Journal, at roughly the 6th grade level. Srrody’s Earth exit statement is considered by the program calculator to be simpler than the homepage, but Glonody’s is more complex. I think that this seems to confirm the idea that a fundimentalist ideal being ever present and also so abstract that only the “right people” can be smart enough to understand/believe it and that they feel themselves to be alien from the “they” by the nature of having greater understanding. Certain Apocalyptic ideas are, as the result of a paranoid makers’ insanity, an subconscious attempt to be distance oneself from a more mainstream other while forming a familiar supportive group.

I found Strozier’s discussion for a need for a religious conversion to apocalyptic imagery in Chapter 4 especially interesting. Conversion imagery is seen as a tool to unite the split self by offering something familiar and concrete.

I wonder how a graphic designer’s reprensentation (or an artistic outside observer like Dave Gibbons or Michal Tolkin) of apocalyptic fundamentalists’ mind relates to the media that they create themselves.