The next part of the article is called “The Mystical Sixties”. Because of the many movements in the late sixties, one for example is the Vietnam War movement, helped bring about a boom of cult religions. Finke and Stark’s argument is that there are not an unusual number of cults and that the Indian influence has no major matter over cultural matters. From using many references including a table they show numbers of cults formed from the fifties till the late eighties. Also they show in the table, percentages of those cults that are of Ea

What I think the conclusion is and what it might be could be two different things, so I will explain my stance real fast. What I think they are trying to say is that the stigmas and cost of an individual church might kick out most of the people because they do not want to reform to those rules and costs. So, what I am taking this as is that the people reformed to the sects do not mind doing this and therefore get more numbers then the mainline churches. To tell you the truth I do not think this is the case, for one I study history and I need solid evidence to be able to believe something. Also, since I am not the religious type I do not see how anyone can go to church and pay someone to tell them what they think about religion, seems worthless; but that is just me. My experience with churches though is that if someone believes in that church they will pay whatever and live accordingly to whatever that preacher says, as do my parents and relatives. I do not know how they do it because it seems like it runs their lives.

“The Eastern Aspect” is the section talked about next. I think in this section they use too much citations and references and can easily confuse a reader. They quote a bit from Cox, which at the end of his citations I think is a weak argument which we talked about in class. “In conclusion, Cox noted a great irony, that though many critics charge…who are clear-headed enough to be ‘open to other life-patterns.’” I think in this statement it is a poor result because he talks about brainwashing which can have alternate meanings and I think can not be taken all too serious. In summary of this section they again go to table 1 on page 355, and reflect on the percentages of Eastern influence of cult formations. One thing that I think was very clever by Finke and Stark was that they brought up the immigration laws that kept out most Asians therefore Eastern religious teachers. Then in 1965 it was dropped and big influencers of Eastern religions were let into the country. What Finke and Stark say in this section that clarifies their argument, I think is that it took only a relatively a small number of American converts to Hinduism to generate some Hindu-based cult movements ; which if you think about it, it is not an explosion it is a normal thing to do when something new like that comes into to an area.

The strengths and weaknesses I tried to describe with the summary of this article. The strengths of this article is the rese

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