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Up one level | To Tom Geller's writings | Home Religions, Non-Religions and Pseudo-Religions By Tom Geller In its primary task of defining reality, language has the power to create and destroy. What one country calls an "annexation" or "reclaiming" of land, others call an "invasion". Whereas outside journalists called the reaction to the Rodney King verdict a "riot," it was known as a "rebellion" in the poor, black neighborhoods where it occurred. And as winners write the history books, their phrase is what's recorded for posterity. Similarly, one person's religion is another person's cult, and subtle divisions within religions can make a big difference: remember, David Koresh's Branch Davidians evolved out of the mainstream Seventh-Day Adventist faith. Perhaps because it's often hard to agree on what a cult is, there are surprisingly few resources on the subject on the Internet. One place to start is the Observer's Web site at http://www.observer.co.uk/, which includes links to other resources (such as a guide to recognizing cult-like behavior at http://www.xs4all.nl/~fonss/cultcrit.txt), journalistic articles, and an "A-Z of cults" which gives histories on many of those prevalent in Great Britain today. The subtle subjectivity involved in separating cults from religions is evident in this list: it includes the Jesus Fellowship (which as also listed in the mainstream Christian Web list at http://saturn.colorado.edu:8080/Christian/Churches/larger.html) and Transcendental Meditation (which was practiced by millions of non-religious middle-class women in the early '70s -- including my mother). If you spend much time in the religion-centered newsgroups, you'll see accusations of cultism cropping up from time to time. (One popular quasi-religious group has been especially aggressive in countering such attacks, even slapping an anti-defamation lawsuit against one writer on the basis of his comments in a newsgroup.) If you're interested in the going-on of a particular cult, you may find their own newsgroup (if it exists) to be a meeting place for disgruntled ex-members. For general cult-related information, though, a good central place to go for cult-related discussion is the newsgroup alt.support.ex-cult, which gets several dozen postings per day. This page was last updated on Monday, February 09, 2004 at 3:07pm CST. All contents copyright 2005 by Tom Geller.