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At what point does a religion turn cult? And at what point does the cult threaten civilization? I am not certain of the answer to either question, but I am certain that Islam hjas, in the last 12 years forfieted its right to exist!
Forum posts
19 June 2004, 02:58
q&A time boys and girls
Quotation:
"...if you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps ’the’ religion;
and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect;
but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult." Leo Pfeffer. A humorous quotation, but one that is uncomfortably close to reality.
Meanings of the Word CULT
There is no generally accepted, single, current definition for the word "cult," or for many other religious terms. This leads to confusion over the meanings of certain religious terms, such as Christian, cult hell, heaven, occult, Paganism, salvation, Witch, Witchcraft, Unitarian, Universalist, Voodoo, etc. A reader must often look at the context in which the word is used in order to guess at the intent of the writer.
In the newsgroup alt.usage.english, terms like this one are often called "skunk words." They have varied meanings to different people. In fact, they have so many meanings that they often cause misunderstandings wherever they are used. Unfortunately, most people do not know this, and naturally assume that the meaning that they have been taught is the universal definition of the term.
We have seen "cult" used to refer to Evangelical denominations, the Roman Catholic Church, Unification Church, Church of Scientology, United Church of Christ, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wiccans, other Neopagans and many other faith groups. The term is essentially meaningless.
Other than for the CIA media to fuck with your mind.
Now you wanna talk religious tortures? How about the Catholic Crusades and the Inquisitions?
The Inquistion - emergence of a new religion
Four Centuries of Horror,
From 1330 Through its peak about 1600, to its ending in the Eighteenth Century. It was not until 1736...It is the history of civilization or rather Un-civilization, and all the books in the world would never be enough to convey the total picture. Intolerance began in the Twelfth Century, promoted by both Church and State. Trials for heretical Sorcery occurred at Carcassonne in 1330 and 1335 74 people accused, and regularly thereafter. By 1350, the inquistion had burned 600 persons as heretics for practicing the new sorcery. Inquisitors were the first to write on witchcraft, The Malleus Maleficarum, printed about 1486...monks who sentenced 300 persons to death as witches.
"...Torture was officially sanctioned in 1257 and remained a legal recourse of the church for five and a half centuries until it was abolished by Pope Pius VII in 1816.
"The victims in those five and a half centuries were literally countless. Official burnings were only a beginning. There were also the disrupted, starving families, ; unrecorded suicides; unreported lynchings; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who dies unnoticed in the papal crusades against heretical groups....
" The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586, the entire female population of two villages was wiped out by the inquisitors, except for only two women left alive.(1) Two other villageswere destroyed completely and erased from the map.(2) hundred and thirty-three persons were burned in a single day at Quedlinburg in 1589, out of a town of 12000. Henri Boguet said Germany in 1590 was "almost entirely occupied with building fires (for witches) and Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account. Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound."(3)
A trial judge in Germany, repulsed by a woman to whom he made improper advances, in revenge seizes her sister, accuses her of witchcraft, cruelly tortures her, and burns her alive the same day.
A distinguished professor of law at the University of Toulouse advocates the suspension rules in witch trials, because "not one out of a million witches would be accused or punished, if regular legal procedure were followed."
A bishop in Germany burns a miniumum of 900 men and women, including many respected and wealthy citizens, as witches, and confiscates their estates and properties for his own enjoyment.
A Protestant minister in Scotland refuses Christian burial to a woman crushed to death by a mob because she had been accused as a witch by a 16 year old lad.
A famous French magistrate regrets that, instead of burning young children accused of witchcraft, he had merely sentenced them to be flogged while they watched their parents burn as witches.’
1592, a Catholic Priest exclaims "O Christian religion, how long shalt thou be vexed with this direst of superstitions? O Christian commonwealth, how long in thee shall the life of the innocent be imperilled?"
At Salem two young men are trussed at their neck and heels until the blood drips from their noses, to force a statement used to convict those accused.
A woman in Scotland is burned as a witch for stroking a cat at an open window at the same time the house holder finds his brew of beer turning sour.
A woman in Scotland is convicted as a witch for curing unhealthy children by washing them.
A poor immigrant in Boston, speaking only Irish and saying her simple prayers in Latin, is hanged as a witch because she could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer in English.
Or how about modern day american tortures:
Torture: As American as Apple Pie
Original location: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05082004.html
Torture’s back in the news, courtesy of those lurid pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they torture their Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison run by the US military outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes electrodes and naked bodies piled in a simulated orgy to tickle America’s moral nerve ends. Kids maimed by cluster bombs just don’t do it any more. But torture’s nothing new. One of the darkest threads in postwar US imperial history has been the CIA’s involvement with torture, as instructor, practitioner or contractor. Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The CIA’s official line is that torture is wrong and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been appallingly effective.
Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped and killed by Uruguay’s Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras’s film State of Siege. In the late 1960s Mitrione worked for the US Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon) related in his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them. In Uruguay, according to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione helped “professionalize” torture as a routine measure and advised on psychological techniques such as playing tapes of women and children screaming that the prisoner’s family was being tortured.
In the months after the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, “truth drugs” were hailed by some columnists such as Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner’s research into “truth serums” at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional statements about their own psychological makeup.
As part of its larger MK-ULTRA project the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation techniques. Cameron once locked up a woman in a small white box for thirty-five days, deprived of light, smell and sound. The CIA doctors were amazed at this dose, knowing that their own experiments with a sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions in less than forty hours. Start torturing, and it’s easy to get carried away.
Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after 9/11/01 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one another. They didn’t. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned.
In recent years the United States has been charged by the UN and also by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with tolerating torture in US prisons, by methods ranging from solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day confinement in concrete boxes for years on end, to activating 50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory belt worn by prisoners. Many of the Military Police guards now under investigation for abuse of Iraqis earned their stripes working as guards in federal and state prisons, where official abuse is a daily occurence. Indeed, Charles Granier, one of the abusers at Abu Ghraib and the lover of Linndie England the ‘Trailer Park Torturer’, worked as a guard at Pennsylvania’s notorious Greene Correctional Unit and has since gone back to work there.
And as a practical matter torture is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms of U.S. law enforcement, with Abner Louima, sodomized by a cop using a stick one notorious recent example. The most infamous disclosure of consistent torture by a police department in recent years concerned cops in Chicago in the mid-70s through early 80s who used electroshock, oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado and beatings of the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims black or brown. A prisoner in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison was thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks from stun guns.
Many states have so-called “secure housing units” where prisoners are kept in solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of them going mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced U.S. police forces for “a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to torture.”
In 2000 the UN delivered a severe public rebuke to the United States for its record on preventing torture and degrading punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts highlighted what it said were Washington’s breaches of the agreement ratified by the United States in 1994. The UN Committee Against Torture, which monitors international compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture, has called for the abolition of electric-shock stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint chairs on prisoners, as well as an end to holding children in adult jails.
It also said female detainees are “very often held in humiliating and degrading circumstances” and expressed concern over alleged cases of sexual assault by police and prison officers. The panel criticized the excessively harsh regime in maximum security prisons, the use of chain gangs in which prisoners perform manual labor while shackled together, and the number of cases of police brutality against racial minorities.
So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the U.S. prison system, there are estimates that twice as many men as women are raped in the U.S. each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April of 2001 cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based on a survey of inmates in seven men’s prison facilities in four states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facilities.
A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are the authors of the recently released Imperial Crusades: Iran, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.