Word: secte
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...marvelous, it can also be numbing. Communism and its concordant atheism remain the state religion. Indeed, Hu Jintao, a contender to succeed President Jiang, built his career partly on suppressing Tibetan Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama and, it is believed, supported the crackdown on Falun Gong, the mystic sect that claims millions of members in China. As a sign of his ascendancy, Hu, a civilian, was elevated last week to the vice chairmanship of the critical Central Military Commission...
...crackdown came after a secret three-month investigation of the sect by China's security services, during which agents infiltrated Falun Gong activities and clandestinely videotaped exercise sessions. The investigation was reportedly ordered by President Jiang Zemin himself after the silent demonstration by 10,000 members of Falun Gong on April 25 outside Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound where China's top leaders live. At that time the group said it was protesting magazine articles labeling it a superstitious cult, a charge that could have led to its being banned. Instead it wanted to be recognized as a legitimate religious group...
...Falun Dafa) has acquired 2 million adherents since it was founded in 1992; the group claims 100 million practitioners. Official paranoia about this invisible force reaches as high as President Jiang. The 72-year-old leader, not known for late-night Web surfing, has reportedly become obsessed with the sect and its ability to organize its activities in cyberspace. Apparently Jiang frequently brings up Falun Gong in conversations with high-level foreign visitors, and Western diplomatic sources say he was driven outside Zhongnanhai in a car with tinted windows to observe for himself the group's silent protest in April...
...chapel is owned by the Swedenborg School of Religion, a Newton-based seminary teaching the doctrines of a Christian sect. The congregation using the chapel is called the Church of the New Jerusalem...
Perhaps SINEAD O'CONNOR doesn't realize that rock 'n' roll, which she sings, is the devil's music, or that Roman Catholicism, in which she was recently ordained by a rebel sect, does not allow women in the clergy. Come to think of it, O'Connor doesn't seem to get this whole religion thing at all. Last week the woman who in 1992 tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live became the first female priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, a Roman Catholic splinter group. Days before the ordination in Lourdes, France, O'Connor...