Organized Religion and Cults

At the forefront of dealing with the emptiness people feel inside their soul, cults of various shapes and sizes spring up to try and take advantage of the needy. Such a phenomenon was readily observed by Fischer as a reaction to the lack of black denominations. Admittedly, for a while it seemed that his definition of “cult” was more of an alternate word for “religion”, but once he describes the conduct of some of these groups and the emotional manipulation they take part in, it seems to be a more conventional definition. It was especially interesting to see how cult membership seemed to overlap with regular church membership, thus making it a bigger issue than it appeared on the average census.  Despite all of this, his take on cults doesn’t seem particularly negative, but rather a simple matter of fact observation that their appeals to equality and poverty allow them to out-compete regular churches in many departments.  It just goes to show that the expression of spirituality will manifest one way or another.

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