Religion cults

Jenkins, Philip. 2000. Mystics and Messiahs Cults and New Religions in American History. Oxford Oxford University Press. 

The negative view of the mushrooms prevailed. Spanish mycophobia succeeded in stamping out the mushroom cult as a major force in Mexican culture. Only a handful of remote mountain tribes preserved the customs and rituals of what must once have been a splendid and powerful system of worship and magic. So complete was the neglect and ignorance in the Western world of this botanical aspect of Mexican religion, that in 1915 a reputable American botanist, William E. Safford, read a paper before a learned society claim-... 

Weston La Barre s The Peyote Cult—a book that became something of a bible among members of the Native American Church—was based on field work undertaken during the summers of 1935 and 1936. The Peyote Religion by J.S. Slotkin—the next major anthropological study—wasn t... 

A proposition belongs to science if we can say what kind of event we would accept as refutation (and this is easy in therapeutics). A proposition (or theory) that cannot clash with any possible or even conceivable event (evidence) is outside science, and this in general applies to cults everything is interpreted in terms of the theory of the cult the possibility that the basis of the cult is false is not entertained. This appears to be the case with medical cults, which join Freudianism, and indeed religions, as outside science (after Karl Popper). Willingness to follow where the evidence leads is a distinctive feature of conventional scientific medicine. 

Robert Gordon Wasson (1898-1986), scholar, world traveler and ethnomycologist who rediscovered the teonandcatl cult of the indigenous people of Mexico and brought the gifts of this ancient religion to the modern world. 

Compared to the time of Wasson and Heim s discovery, recent decades have brought significant changes to several regions of Mexico in terms of how local Indians relate to the psychotropic Psilocybe species. In many remote parts of the country, mushroom cults still exist in their specific contemporary forms which combine Christian views with elements from pagan and pre-Christian Nature religions. 

The Aum Shinrikyo is a cult centered in Japan. Their name is a combination of Aum which is a sacred Hindu syllable, and Shinri Kyo which means "supreme truth". It appears to be a syncretistic religion, founded in 1987, and com-... 

For several centuries, a peyote cult existed among the Aztecs in Mexico, which later spread to many Native North American tribes. By 1880, a religion that combined Christian beliefs with the Native American use of the peyote cactus had developed in southwestern United States, primarily among Native Americans. The followers of this religion believe that the cactus is divinely endowed to shape each person s hfe. Currently, the only people in the United States who are legally permitted to use peyote are members of the Native American Church—and then only in their rehgious rites. 

Culte is a complex word in French, and does noi necessarily have the negative connotations or the English word cult. It means religion, devoUoi ritual veneration, enthusiastic admiration, worship- PV. 

The most important aspects of our contemporary scientific worldview arose from religion, philosophy, art, and everyday social life. The aspiration of contemporary science to express everything in numbers came from music. The search for numerical harmony penetrated science in the form of a concept of music through the school of Pythagoras. Number plays in contemporary science the same mystic role as it played in antic religious cults. Scientific reason rests on its laurels when it finds numeric proportions. It is noteworthy that Vernadsky (1988, p. 54) remarks in this cormection that the. .mathematical constructions" are the jideal creations of our reason". Thus the wide-spread concepts of contemporary science such as atom, energy, force, and heredity penetrated science from the other forms of intellectual activity. 

For he not only argues the non-existence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, but claims that Christianity itself - as well as Judaism and other religions of the near and Middle East—are no more than hangovers from an ancient fertility cult. 

---