In the second, members are taught that The Heavenly Kingdom is not simply spiritual, but literal. The method of transportation to this Kingdom is a spacecraft. The first ritual is part of the initiation of a freemason - a widely respected international brotherhood that claims William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Charles Lindbergh and Peter Sellers as members to name just a few. The second is the philosophy of the notorious Heaven's Gate cult, which left 39 people dead after a mass suicide in California in 1997. He says it is essential to distinguish between good and bad cults.
Guys playing basketball, people in a chess club, is a cult.
They share a common purpose, a common language, a common metaphor. When you talk about a destructive cult, you're talking about a group of people who've been gathered together by some leader or leaders, and the purpose of the group is actually hidden from the members. But anti-cultists disagree, embracing theories on the use and power of brainwashing to control young converts to cults. Anti-cult campaigner Rick Ross says whatever the semantic argument, many cults are dangerous. He says people from both healthy and dysfunctional families, with and without psychological histories, the wealthy, poor and middle class are all susceptible to cults.