But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
The food habits of the different classes of Hindus have been as fixed and stratified as their cults. Just as Hindus can be classified on their basis of their cults, so also they can be classified on the basis of their habits of food.
Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.
It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
I'm all for 'tools,' not 'schools,' of therapy. To me, the schools of therapy compete much like religions, or even cults, all claiming to know the cause and to have the best method for treating people.
There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.
The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
