Sunday, October 2, 2011
week 4
In Mark Juergensmeyers book Terror In The Mind Of God he talks about a self proclaimed "religious leader" who leads a cult-like religious sect. When reading about this it made me think of the power of community. As we talked about before in class, community is one of the defining characteristics of a religion and works to add legitimacy in a set of beliefs. It acts as "strength in numbers" and enables one to find support in their feelings and acts by those who hold the same beliefs. However, it was interesting to see that this community feeling can be so strong in an unfounded "religion." All it took was a charismatic leader giving a group of people someone to look up to to transform them into a extremist cult. The feeling of community among this "religious group" was so strong that it gave them a feeling of authenticity on fabricated ideals. This is important to note because if the feeling of community is strong in an unfounded cult, it must be even stronger in a founded religion that has been around for thousands of years.
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Tay, you make a good point here: there are several key components to any successful cult or group, who wishes to actually make a splash in the world. Some groups have only a charismatic leader and others only have a strong community. Other groups only have a solid ideology that fits into religious or spiritual beliefs. But those groups who have all of these components have some seriously scary potential of cosmic proportion.
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