Twenty-five years ago, a U.S. congressman and four others were assassinated at a jungle airstrip in Guyana, followed by the murders and mass suicides of more than 900 members of Peoples Temple.

Even today, people are trying to understand the reasons behind the Jonestown apocalypse. Many blame cult leader Jim Jones for being mad or evil, says UC Davis sociologist John Hall, who studies religious violence.

"Although the internal dynamics in Peoples Temple and Jim Jones are not to be discounted," Hall says, "the murders and mass suicide were the projects of an ever-escalating struggle between the leadership of Peoples Temple and their opponents, a group of concerned relatives."

Hall, author of "Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History," says Peoples Temple "attracted people of good will from all walks of life who consolidated a critical understanding of modern society and put prodigious energies toward building what they hoped would be a better world."

Lessons from the Jonestown tragedy can be applied to today's political/religious struggles, Hall says. Since 9/11, in the conflict between factions from the Muslim and the Western worlds, both sides have labeled the other as "evil."

"It escalates -- or becomes defused -- on the basis of moves taken on two sides of the apocalyptic divide," Hall says. "To vanquish evil can become a crusade that begets evil."

To learn more about the 25th anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, go to http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/.