Psychology

""To the [New York Times] Editor: Re My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA (“The DNA Age” series, front page, Nov. 17, 2007): Wanting to know more about ourselves is both a strength and a hazard. The lure of genetic data can be compelling but misleading, for no list of tiny variants in one’s genetic code can reliably predict one’s future regarding cancer, heart attacks or diabetes, let alone I.Q., addiction or gullibility. Amy Harmon’s humorous account of her own genome search may still leave many readers willing to send off a little saliva — and a big check — to a genome company. Those companies are selling only a fragment of your identity. Knowing that you have this or that disease-associated SNP in your genes tells you very little or helps only with rare diseases. What causes the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) to be expressed, to spring into action or to remain dormant? Why can identical twins, with genomes alike down to the last SNP, develop different diseases? What if you smoke, toil for years in a high-stress job or live in a polluted neighborhood? Predispositions are just the beginning. Your future depends on much more than your genetic code. Ms. Harmon would have done better to spend her money on a good gym, and The Times would serve us better by emphasizing the limits of genetic knowledge."

"The keystone of the new social structure, the pivotal factor of advancing civilization, the guide of the new religion, is biology; for man is an animal, and his characteristics, his requirements, and his reactions can be recorded and studied quite as carefully and precisely as those of any other animal."

"I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools ... I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery.'"

"Every human mind you've ever looked at … is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions."

"I remembered the devotion of those belonging to the Manson 'Family' or the 'People's Temple' of Jim Jones or the Branch Davidian Sect or the 'Heaven's Gate' sect of Marshall Applewhite It wasn't how much the 'Heaven's Gate' believers believed that there was a spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, waiting to take them to paradise; only the actual existence of such a spaceship really mattered."

"As with its disciplinary practices and its round of daily life, the community of goods in the Peoples Temple at Jonestown emphasizes its similarities to otherworldly sects—both the contemporary ones labeled 'cults' by their detractors, and historical examples which are often revered in retrospect by contemporary religious culture."

"Like Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians approximated the 'apocalyptic sect' as an ideal type."

"Now I see there is a people risen that I cannot win with gifts or honours, offices or places; but all other sects and people I can."

"Every person who is not a fellow member, and every social, religious and political institution that lies outside the sect's domain, is portrayed as a representative of Satan's world. In our research, we found that Moonies and members of many Christian sects with similar religious and political doctrines often focus on such beliefs to the exclusion of all other thought."

"Jonestown was at heart a religious community, whether classified as a new religious movement, a cult, a sect, or a church."

"The Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Davidians, a religious sect that had split from the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 1930s."

"The vast majority of groups termed 'sects' by the Government are small organizations with fewer than 100 members. Among the larger groups is the Church of Scientology, with between 5,000 and 6,000 members, and the Unification Church, with approximately 700 adherents throughout the country. Other groups found in the country include Divine Light Mission, Eckankar, Hare Krishna, the Holosophic community, the Osho movement, Sahaja Yoga, Sai Baba, Sri Chinmoy, Transcendental Meditation, Landmark Education, the Center for Experimental Society Formation, Fiat Lux, Universal Life, and The Family."

"The Branch Davidians were a separatist, communal sect of the Seventh Day Adventists that had occupied several buildings and some acreage outside of Waco,Texas. David Koresh, the sect's leader, preached an apocalyptic message of a showdown with government forces."

"Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians both approximated the 'apocalyptic sect' as an ideal type. In such sects the end of the world is taken as a central tenet."

"The Heaven's Gate sect received national attention in the spring of 1997, when its thirty-nine members committed suicide in Southern California."

"Branch Davidians are a modern religious sect that claims to be an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The church renounced any connection with the sect in the 1930s."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"Despite being a relatively new organization, the Church of Scientology already has had to denounce splinter groups, including sects that claim to practice Dianetics complete with E-Meters independent of the Church."

"The Peoples Temple movement began in the 1950s as an independent Pentecostal congregation of white and black working-class families … Some argue it was initially a Christian sect that then became a new religious movement."

"To read the website of the Heaven's Gate sect is to enter a world of eternal promise. Among those who are going home for good, there is only 'joy', 'the rapture of the saved', the blissful prophecy of the 'Talmudic sages'."

"The Indiana Peoples Temple was essentially a sect, which was joined by new religious movement members in California, which then recruited black church members as it focused its ministry on the residents of urban California."

"There is an interesting class difference to be found among these apocalyptic sects. The victims at Waco were predominantly from the lower class, as was true of Jonestown. The Heaven's Gate believers, on the other hand, were on the whole from the middle class."

"Observers of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple noted that Jones' socialist sect did not lose non-profit status or receive reams of negative publicity until the massacre at Guyana occurred."

"There has been an enormous growth of the phenomenon known as Large Group Awareness Training represented by such companies as Landmark Forum."

"Werner Erhard, founder of 'Landmark Education's 'The Forum',' and 'est' seminars, which have about 2.4 million graduates, was influenced by Hinduism through Swami Muktananda, one of Erhard's principal gurus."

"Landmark evolved from an organisation called EST (Erhard Seminar Training), founded in the 1970s by former salesman Werner Erhard…In 1991, he sold his intellectual property to former EST employees, who founded the more mainstream Landmark Education."

"Besides the fact that he's my brother, the company considers Werner a friend."

"I'd like to experiment with advertising. We're coming out with an audiotape. We'll probably do a book."

"We've been accused of pressuring people in terms of our, quote, 'sales,' and we're out to avoid any of that."

"Werner made some very, very powerful enemies. They really got him."

"We're all over, as you can see. Next, we're thinking Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore. We're already in two cities in Japan. Japan is ridiculous!"

"In the United States, we have altered the public conversation about our work and our enterprise. For example, it is no longer possible for informed people or publications in the United States to pin pejorative labels on us."

"The majority of NRMs are, however, not indigenous to Europe. Several of the movements came from Asia, mainly India (; ; ; [later called ]; , ; ; ; and various practices associated with , , and other types of ), but also from Japan (; ; ; ; ); Korea (the ); and other parts of Asia ( from Vietnam; from Taiwan; from China). There are also groups from the Caribbean () and Africa ( and ; the ), most of these finding their home among the black populations residing in Europe. Another development has been the growth of a number of Islamic groups (; the ; ; )."

"While the contribution of traditional religions to earthquake relief is generally acknowledged, social prejudice makes it more difficult to recognize the good work of new religious movements."

"'New religious movement' is a maddeningly vague designation, of course, and definable in infinite ways... a helpful definition comes from the British sociologist George D. Chryssides. According to Chryssides, a new religious movement is one that is 'recent' (which for him means something from the nineteenth century or later), falls outside the 'mainstream', and primarily attracts converts from within the broader culture."

"China seems to have been very much similar to the West, both in the production of new religious movements and in attracting to them figures from the political left who were officially promoting the struggle against “superstition.” Reconstructions of “Chinese traditional culture” as “non-religious,” and of the rich Chinese religious pluralism as mere “folk religion” should be viewed as propaganda rather than history."

"Even, or especially, when it initially is successful, internal conflicts over basic goals and beliefs, leadership, and organizational forms commonly threaten the very existence of a new religious movement. These internal conflicts frequently result in schisms (organizational splinters) that severely weaken the new movement, resulting in a loss of basic resources and significant decline."

"In both countries, Taiwan and Poland, the newly established democratic systems resulted in the development of associations and other civic initiatives, but also in the emergence of new religious and spiritual groups. In both countries religious liberty was officially proclaimed in late 1980s. Yet, in Poland, the initial thaw and ease of registering new religious communities significantly slowed down over the years, and currently—for various reasons—registering a new group is more challenging than three decades ago. Previously, the political climate made similar activities difficult, various groups operated unregistered, and everything was monitored by the secret security services."

"These two opposing strategies of new religious movements for delivering compensators I will term 'compensation delivery systems' (CDS). The gradual CDS can best be described as religion as a multi-level marketing (MLM) tactic - a term I take from the business world."

"New religions are like weeds in our garden. Society’s gardeners will attempt to pull out weeds to make room for cultured plants and familiar religions. However, some weeds may be cherished flowers in other lands, and those deemed “invasive” might be edible or have healing properties."

"The largest group of New Religious Movements – both in numbers of individual groups within it and in the diffused range of its overall influence within modern British life – is that clustered around the richly varied collection of 'self-religions', psychotherapies and New Age mysticism and alternative spiritualities. This large group may be broadly divided into two sub-groups, each of which is simply a clustering of often quite diverse movements around a similar overall theme. The first group consists of the 'self-religions' and religiously 'flavoured' psycho-therapies which have increasingly fluorished in the last twenty or thirty years. The self-religions have been characterized as 'movements which exemplify the conjunction of the exploration of the self and the search for significance'."

"Many of the new religions attract individuals by the promise of peace of mind, spiritual well-being, gratifying experiences, and material success. In doing so they stress their concern for the individual and highlight one's personal worth and self-development."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"A second variety of new religion that began to flourish during the 1960s consisted of the various groups, techniques and spiritual disciplines which came to be known collectively as the 'human potential movement'. In some ways, the human potential movement was an offshoot of the encounter group movement which flourished on college campuses during the 1960s (Back, 1972) and of popular psychology which had blossomed in a good many minds since the heyday of Fulton Sheen and Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s."

"Perhaps one should start by asking 'what is a new religion?' I believe that too precise a definition is constraining and unnecessary for our present purposes; several of the movements about which we shall be talking are not obviously new or religions. … many associated with the New Age or the so-called Human Potential movement, who deny that they are in any way religious. These may, however, be included in so far as they help their followers to search for, discover and develop 'the god within' or to get in contact with cosmic forces, or explore 'the spiritual'; indeed, any movement that offers in some way to provide answers to some of the ultimate questions about 'meaning' and 'the purpose of life' that have traditionally been addressed by mainstream religions would be included in this broad understanding of the term 'NRM'.")"

"…new religious movements often grow not through dramatic revelations but through the quiet fatigue of every day."

"The Forum and/or est, whose origins are in the United States (Tipton 1982) holds to the belief that the self itself is powerful."

"I was 26 when I did the seminar, convinced the world was out to burn me at every turn. If it wasn't for that seminar, I wouldn't be a writer. They taught me to see how closed down I was, to face my fears."

"It's weird to think about how skeptical I was when I first went to the Forum. I brought a book with me in case I was bored. I immediately started railing against the leader about how they were just using me for my money. Then, when I was walking out, it struck me that I was 26 years old and I was never going to take another risk in my life. I was the one being an asshole! So I went back and said, 'Okay, I'd like to take a risk, where do I sign?' After that, I bought a word processor. That was my first step to being a writer."

"More direct evidence comes from a careful study of Large Group Awareness Training programs, variously known as Erhard Seminars Training (est), Lifespring, or simply the Forum. The basic procedure of these courses parallels the group training workshops … but the emphasis shifts from group effectiveness to personal development."