By Alain de Botton — 2012
The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.
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CLEAR ALL
Sherrie D’Souza was ostracised when she left the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith after four decades. She is now part of a group helping other ex-believers make sense of the “madness”.
“For your husband, your illness may have made him acutely aware of not just your mortality, but also his own.”
I do not deny that positive experiences occur in a cult context, but what is of interest for me is the interactional dynamic found in cults that brings moral human beings to occasionally engage in insidious or demeaning behaviors, or sometimes just the plain incomprehensible.