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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.
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).
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 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 ...
Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life." [83] When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive valuing, or ultimate concern, then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g., those made by Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents. [84]
The far-reaching personality cult of his father has been weaponized by Bashar al-Assad as a pillar of his regime's legitimacy and also as a supplement to enhance his own personality cult. Bashar's cult downplayed religious elements for technocratic Arab socialist themes, with a constant militaristic emphasis on conspiratorial threats from ...
Cults order all aspects of life, influencing space and time. Despite its lack of dogma, the cult is the only source of meaning that allows it to be the measure of itself and thus resist the transformative effects of time. While traditional cults are limited to a specific place and time, the capitalist cult never stops, never interrupts, never ...