Word: sects
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most wicked men on the face of the earth since the days of Father Adam." Those words, spoken by polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, were recorded in a jailhouse phone conversation over year ago. On tape, he renounced his leadership of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, the breakaway Mormon sect whose latest run-in with the law saw hundreds of women and children rounded up by authorities in Eldorado, Texas...
Jeffs' "convulsive" condition, his taped "recantation" of his role as Prophet and a recent brief hospital stay away from jail prompted speculation about his control of the FLDS and over who might assume the leadership of the sect. Will it be a return to a more benign leadership, or could there be a battle that might turn bloody, as some splits in polygamist communities have proved in the past...
...book Escape (soon to be a movie featuring Gray's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl). One of her reasons for leaving was to prevent Jeffs from marrying her daughter - nine of Merrill Jessop's daughters are believed to be married to Jeffs, according to experts who study the sect. Other names bandied about as the potential next Prophet include Jeffs' brother Isaac and even another Jessop - William Roy Jessop. The Utah dossiers sent to Texas describe Willie Jessop as "the most serious threat affiliated with the FLDS," and someone who "reportedly has a passion for violence, weapons (legal and illegal...
...hundreds of "protector deities" that distinguish Tibetan Buddhism from more purely philosophical varieties. Historically, the god is associated with maintaining, sometimes violently, the purity of Dalai Lama's own lineage of teachers and gurus, called the Gelugpa. Indeed the high Lama himself prayed to Shugden for years; but the sect's purist and exclusionary emphases contradicted his own outreach to other Tibetan lineages, and in 1996 he began demanding that monastic abbots renounce the deity...
...long claimed to have been shunned and harassed. A 1998 Amnesty International report, however, said Shugdenpa complaints fell outside its purview of "grave violations of fundamental human rights," adding that "while recognizing that a spiritual debate can be contentious, [we] cannot become inolved in debate on spiritual issues." The sect suffered a public relations setback in 1997, when Indian police were quoted in the press saying that practitioners were suspects in the ritual slaughter of one of the Dalai Lama's close associates. (The suspects have never been tracked down or tried, however, and the Shugdenpas claim they were never...