Charles Manson Cult Research Paper

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I believe that a cult is considered a smaller scale social group that shares it religious believes or philosophical beliefs. In other words is a very unorthodox social group. One of the first cults to come to mind when I think of the word is the Charles Manson cult from the 1960s. Usually, when you think of cults the first thing that comes to mind is some form of inherently bad or evil cult. I believe this is mostly due to the way that the media has talked about cults in the past. Examples being the Manson Family or the Heaven's Gate group that was all over the news in 1997. The word cult seems to only focus on the bad or the absolute oddest groups of people. What about groups like Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses or even Scientology? These …show more content…

A religion is usually considered a general belief or a way of living that often relates to the spiritual. A cult is the same thing only, it is on a smaller scale in the number of followers. A cult can be something as simple as a small group of people who create a subgroup branching off from a religion, too an entirely new religion that has insane beliefs and laws. More often then not I believe that these cults are harmless in the real world. All the stuff that you hear about cults being evil is just the things that you see in movies with the occasional exception that pops up every once in a while. When these cults do pop up they often have their fifteen minutes of fame on the news and then end up fading back into obscurity. When it comes to whether I believe the government should start eliminating these cults or not; I think they have absolutely no right too. Literally, the first amendment states that we as American U.S. citizens have a freedom of religious belief. The Government trying to shut down and take away this right would literally be going against one of the main reasons why this country was founded in the first place. I think that only in certain cases, that if the followers of a cult seem to be dangerous to themselves or others is the government aloud to step in. Even then they still have no right to tell people what they can and can not believe in. So to answer the question, no, I

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