Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Cults are often depicted as organizations that exert control over their members, sometimes through manipulation (psychology), coercion, or psychological abuse. At the same time, the label "cult" has been used in popular culture and media as a sensationalized term, contributing to stigmatization and fear of these groups, sometimes based more on ...
A new religious movement (NRM) is a religious or spiritual group or community with practices of relatively modern [clarification needed] origins. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may exist on the fringes of a wider religion, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations.
The application of the labels "cults" or "sects" to (for example) religious movements in government documents usually signifies the popular and negative use of the term "cult" in English and a functionally similar use of words translated as "sect" in several European languages.
From the Manson Family to Jonestown, the most infamous cults in recent history have made headlines and lasting impacts around the world. R. Kelly allegations evoke memory of the most infamous ...
Dianetics was an immediate commercial success and sparked what Martin Gardner calls "a nationwide cult of incredible proportions". [119] Following the prosecution of Hubbard's foundation for teaching medicine without a license and Hubbard's loss of the rights to Dianetics, in 1953 Hubbard rebranded as Scientology, an explicitly religious movement.
The bulk of the human religious experience pre-dates written history, which is roughly 70,000 years old. [1] A lack of written records results in most of the knowledge of pre-historic religion being derived from archaeological records and other indirect sources, and from suppositions.
"Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults" (Max) In 1997, 39 members of Heaven’s Gate , a celibate religious sect, died in a mass ritual suicide timed to the approach of the Hale-Bopp Comet.
Occasionally, starving people have resorted to cannibalism for survival. Classical antiquity recorded numerous references to cannibalism during siege-related famines. More recent well-documented examples include the Essex sinking in 1820, the Donner Party in 1846 and 1847, and the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972.