The shared center — held across the tradition
Heaven is built here, by people, or it is not built.
The Temple's working doctrine in California was that religion is worth what it feeds and houses. It ran a free restaurant, a legal aid office, care homes and a fleet of buses that carried members to demonstrations and to the polls, and pointed at all of it as the argument.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Jones told members he was God in a body.
The claim arrived late and by degrees. In Indianapolis he was a preacher who healed; by the mid-1970s he was throwing a Bible on the floor in front of the congregation and asking why they needed it when he was standing there. Some members accepted it, some tolerated it as the price of the work, and some had already left.
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