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The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions.
Cults, like sects, often integrate elements of existing religious theologies, but cults tend to create more esoteric theologies synthesized from many sources. [citation needed] According to Ronald L. Johnstone, cults tend to emphasize individual and individual peace. [32] Cults, like sects, can develop into denominations.
In their typology, a "cult movement" is an actual complete organization, differing from a "sect" in that it is not a splinter of a bigger religion, while "audience cults" are loosely organized, and propagated through media, and "client cults" offer services (i.e. psychic readings or meditation sessions).
In his book The Road to Total Freedom, the English sociologist Roy Wallis [8] describes that a sect is characterized by "epistemological authoritarianism": meaning it has an authoritative source for determining heresy. According to Wallis, sects claim to have unique and privileged access to truth or salvation, and their followers often view ...
While the word religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion used in religious studies courses defines it as [a] system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations ...
Pseudoreligion or pseudotheology is a pejorative term which is a combination of the Greek prefix "pseudo", meaning false, and "religion."The term is sometimes avoided in religious scholarship as it is seen as polemic, but it is used colloquially in multiple ways, and is generally used for a belief system, philosophy, or movement which is functionally similar to a religious movement, often ...
Durkheim (1858-1917) expanded on the concept of the totem, viewing religion as a collective societal force. For him, religious forces are essentially collective societal forces, embodied in the totem. The society imparts the totem with its power, meaning, and existence, which in turn gives the god or the religion its significance.
The second definition identified by Yoder was the view that folk religion represented the mixture of an official religion with forms of ethnic religion; this was employed to explain the place of folk religion in the syncretic belief systems of the Americas, where Christianity had blended with the religions of indigenous American and African ...