Word: sect
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Indonesia's government is caught between its constitutional obligation to protect religious freedom, and the demands of hardline Muslim clerics for the banning of the Ahmadiyah sect. An alliance, including the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), demanded on Tuesday that the government outlaw the Ahmadiyahs, warning that any delay would result in conflict. While falling short of calling for attacks on the group's mosques or followers - many of whom are now in hiding - the clerics threatened to enlist the help of other Muslim countries to pressure Jakarta into issuing an official decree forbidding Ahmadiyah followers from calling themselves Muslims. "They...
Williams had driven 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to Eldorado, Texas, in the hope that a brief encounter with modernity would allow him--and others like him--to push it once more far from his life. He is a believer in an antique and renegade Mormon sect that has endeavored for more than a century to keep polygamy alive in North America. His three sons were among the 437 children removed in early April from the sect's ranch in Texas, and Williams was doing his part to get them back...
...other men of the sect tried to explain themselves to the 21st century, it was as if no common language existed. One man, who gave his name only as Rulon, declared, "We have broken no laws"--though the laws against having multiple wives are more than a century old. "I am a loving and honorable father," said Williams--though he has not seen his children in years, by order of the sect's leader, Warren Jeffs. Asked how he can revere Jeffs as a prophet even after the man drove him from his home, his family and the community...
...government calls it a matter of child welfare; the sect calls it religious persecution. Caught in the middle is Texas judge Barbara Walther, who was asked to weigh requests from the parents to hold twice-daily prayer meetings with the children and to reunite nursing mothers with the 77 kids who are under age 2. Prosecutors worried that the prayer meetings might be used to influence the children "in a way to impede the ongoing investigation," but Walther's suggestion that mainstream Mormons might serve as neutral monitors was turned down flat by the official church. Church spokesman Scott Trotter...
...heart of the identity problem are the group's commitment to "celestial marriage" - polygamy - and its custom of allowing first cousins to marry. "Your family tree shouldn't be a wreath," says Randy Mankin, editor of the El Dorado Success newspaper, which unearthed the sect's Utah roots four years ago, when its first members, posing as businessmen, arrived in Eldorado under the pretense of building a hunting and game preserve. But the legal notices published in Mankin's paper listing the custody suits brought by the state against the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ...