Cults :Mood Set:

          The book in itself was a great informative, but usually informative books keep emotions neutral but not Ms.Karen Zeinert thought differently when she was writing the cults. As you may have already noticed that I felt many different emotions whilst reading the book. I will not list all emotions however I will list the dominant emotions that I had during course of reading the book. The emotions will be listed from least dominant to most dominant.

         The least dominant emotion I had felt throughout the book was confusion and aghast. The reason I felt confused was not because of any paragraph but at a thought that was provoked while reading. This thought stated that cults are very diverse in the sense that there are Utopian cults and on the other hand, Apocalyptic cults. This led to my feeling of aghast. What held me for aghast was the fact that the Utopian cults do something entirely different than the apocalyptic cults. If we had done a study on them where we create the same situation where the last one standing survives then the apocalyptic cults will probably kill when the Utopian cults think wisely to get out of the situation. These results had me in aghast as I imagined how the experiment might have gone.

        The second most dominant emotion I felt while reading was sadness and distraughtness. The feeling of sadness was provoked by some people's definition of them "Some conservatives and vocal Christian leaders insist that any religious group who aren't Christian are cults." According to this definition, Christianity is the only main religion in the middle and all other religions are based off Christianity, which isn't true. The part that had me distraught was when the book had mentioned about the position of cults in the society. "Because the word cults has such a negative image, social scientists prefer the terms new religion or alternative religion." However, the term cult is still used more widely than any of the other terms that may have a more positive image. The devastating truth is not the word for them, but it is the image associated with that word. The majority of people that use the word cults have a very negative image of them rather than a positive image. Although cults are just like any one of us who have a religion people who use the word "cults" usually think of these people as a mean or cruel religious group who lives underneath the shadows.

The most dominant feeling I had during the course of reading this book was paranoid and wiser. This was because the fact that there are many different types of cults. A wide range, and these people are so blended together with the rest of the citizens that we don't know what these people are capable of and because of the obvious manners barrier we can't go around asking wether who you are talking are from a cult or just one of the rather dominant religions. Now in the wide range you never know who belongs to a cult that belives on sacrifices or just on a normal cult that belives in normal practices like offering food to their god. I feel wiser because after reading this book I have realized that just beacause there are differnt beliefs of differnt people doesn't mean that they are wrong or that they are any more specail, god has given us different brains along with a different perspective so that if there are problems then we can solve it thorugh our perspective. So for one religion to be saying that the rest are wrong simply because of their beliefs then this world is not going to proceed anywhere. However, if we focus and work together and understand and give chances to other perspectives and let them take a crack at the problem that our perspective is unable to solve then our world will be from grade F to grade A+ in no time.

These are the emotions or feelings that were dominant while reading this book. It was a great non - fiction book and gave out a lot of information. This book was very different than other non - fictions as this book had the ability to connect with our brain and make us feel certain ways and according to me if a writer could do that through a non - fiction book then imagine what that writer is capable of thorugh a fiction book where there are no boundries to imagination.