Criticism of The Term
Some researchers have criticized the usage of the term "destructive cult", writing that it is used to describe groups which are not necessarily harmful in nature to themselves or others. In his book Understanding New Religious Movements, John A. Saliba writes that the term is overgeneralized and equated with the deaths of members of Peoples Temple at Jonestown. Saliba sees this as the "paradigm of a destructive cult," where those that use the term are implying that other new religious movements will have similar outcomes to those of the Peoples Temple at Jonestown.
Writing in the book Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field, contributor Julius H. Rubin complains that the term has been used to discredit certain groups in the court of public opinion. In his work Cults in Context author Lorne L. Dawson writes that though the Unification Church "has not been shown to be violent or volatile," it has been described as a destructive cult by "anticult crusaders."
In 2002, the German government was held by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court to have defamed the Osho movement by referring to it, among other things, as a "destructive cult". The court decided that "destructive cult" and other expressions employed by the government to describe the group had no factual basis to justify their use.
Read more about this topic: Destructive Cult
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism and/or term:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
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