In the last twenty years there has been about twenty million people have in one way or another been involved in a cult. Cults are groups organized around Christian religious beliefs, Hindu and Eastern religion, witchcraft or Satanism, Zen, flying saucers, politics or self-improvement. Cults are usually held together by a charismatic leader who mobilizes their loyalty around some new religious cause typically a cause that is at odds with that of more conventional religious institutions. New religious groups that have not yet been widely accepted- whether benign or dangerous could be considered a cult.
In modern days the word cult is taken much more lightly. Some cults recruit in deceptive ways, they lure students with promises of parties" popularity, and once they have the people at there location they attempt to convert the recruited people. Traditional religious groups do not have use misleading tactics. Cults become more appealing to people that want to belong to something almost like a family. Cults do have something to do with the calendar year, because at the end of every century cult form to pronounce the end of the world.
Everyone pretty much knows about the Heaven's Gate Cult that committed mass suicide in their rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego in March of 1997. Thirty-nine members twenty women eighteen men that were a range of ages and the cult leader were all found dead. They believed that a spaceship was traveling behind the Hail Bopp comet was come to pick them up after they got out of their bodies. They believed they were going to the next level because the world was going to end. Heaven's Gate member represented blacks, Latinos, and whites that all came from different parts of the country. .
The worst mass suicide on record was in November 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana. Nine hundred thirteen Americans died, all being members of the People's Temple perished.
