Richard Alpert is an ancient egyptian, the whole eyeliner thing is the first clue, egyptians wore distinctive coal around their eyes and being thousands of years old Alpert has kept up the tradition. The way i see it the ancient egyptains set sail looking for a new world or whatever and somehow in transit Richard dies, only to be resurrected on the island when the egyptians arrive there (like Christian and locke). Immediately everyone sees him as some kind of god hence his continuing authority over the others, this is further added to by the fact he cant age or die. So what do they do for their new god, they build him a temple but doing so has consequences a dark power is released from the island;the smoke monster which unleashes the sickness. The smoke monster has a dark effect on anyone not born on the island who enters the temple but its effect is more severe depending on the time spent on the island, ben had ! been on the island for years and so his time spent in the temple made him into a bad person but Rousseas team had been on the island for only a few hours/days so the sickness turned them homicidal maniacs. im not sure on the born on the island part it may just be that the others are immune from the ill effects of the temple, perhaps as they are Alperts people and the temple was built for him. I feel that the statue is obvious, it is obviously the ancient egyptian god taweret (wikipedia!!!) and i think it was built as a symbol of worship for the god of motherhood for what the ancient egyptians believed was an act of god (uber sperm count). The statue collapsed either due to the earthquake when locke turned the frozen donkey wheel or due to a tidal event which brought the black rock into the middle of the jungle Theory by Jonathan D
