The term cult describes a group of people who share a religious variation and are devoted greatly to an idea, movement or person. Cultism also describes religious movements that have a non-traditional flavor of an established or a new religious group altogether.
The Five Percenters considered themselves as suns while their girlfriends as earth. Here, they exhibited irrational thinking that can only be depicted by cultists. The Five Star movement was founded by Clarence 13X. He considered himself to be Allah. The five stars are considered cultic because it was a new group and its leader considered himself as Allah and the other Muslim groups considered him to be psychotic (Knight 6). He made many enemies from other sects and eventually he was killed. The Five Percenters are cultic because their movement was purely a different one from the others whereby new beliefs were instilled in the members. Most of the members were black and did not associate themselves with the Islamic religion (Knight 8). The movement can also be considered as a new religious movement in that it was different from movements prior and welcomed everyone to join.
The Nation of Islam was headed by W. D. Muhammad. His movement is considered a new religious movement in the USA because he shunned the earlier movement's beliefs on black separation. The movement also renamed itself to the World Community of Al-Islam and forged ties with other religious movements in the country.
The Nation of Islam is considered cultist. The movement is a black cultic group bearing no resemblance to the actual Islamic groups in the past. The movement teaches that black people should be considered gods (Mamiya 2). The group bears radical beliefs believing that Islam is for black people only. The group does not also believe in religious doctrines like praying and fasting but has other radical beliefs.
The people who died at Jones town were involved in mass-suicide murder. They were members of the American cult, Peoples Temple (Mills 38). The Temple members were subjected to harsh treatment whenever they questioned Jones, who was their leader authority. Many people in the temple were held against their will. Children were forcibly taken and injected poison while their parents lined up willingly to be injected. They killed their children then committed suicide. There are also those who drank poison being coerced into revolutionary suicide (Mills 34).
In my opinion, the people were murdered by their cult leader because they were forced into doing it thinking that the armed guards outside would shoot and kill them.
Works Cited
Mills, Edgar W. "Cult extremism: The reduction of normative dissonance."Violence and Religious Commitment. University Park (1982): 75-97.
Knight, Michael Muhammad. The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop and the Gods of New York. Oneworld Publications, 2013.
Mamiya, Lawrence H. "From Black Muslim to Bilalian: The evolution of a movement." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (1982): 138-152.
